Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms Read Free Page B

that still impresses modern readers.
    Conflict between Muslims and the followers of other faiths—Crusaders in the west, Mongol invaders in the east—further undermined tolerance, as Arabs looked for the enemy within. By the thirteenth century the fundamentalist cleric Ibn Taymiyyah was issuing every execration and encouragement to violence that he could against sects such as the Druze and Alawites. By this time, though, some of the Middle East’s minority religions had taken refuge in places where the authorities could not reach them, such as mountains and marshes. Central government did not become as strong in the Middle East as it did in Europe, and military force was usually deployed against rebels or outside conquests, not in suppressing religious divisions at home. It was not until the nineteenth century, for the most part, that these remote religious communities faced widespread interference from the state, and by the middle of that century the governments of the Middle East had begun to change their approach toward minorities and (sometimes under Western pressure, sometimes just inspired by progressive ideals) to offer them something like equality. The Ottoman Empire gradually granted its non-Muslim subjects near-equality in the nineteenth century. The fifty years from 1860 to 1910 revolutionized the status of the Copts in Egypt. The Iranian revolution of 1906 gave Zoroastrians a seat in the country’s parliament. All this proves that Muslims in the Middle East were perfectly capable of valuing diversity. In fact, it was sometimes the Europeans who did not. When asked by Lebanese Christians what his country might do to help them, the German kaiser replied: “You are three hundred thousand Christians among three hundred million Muslims. Why not turn Muslim?”
    So why today are the Middle East’s minorities on the retreat? Why are attacks on Christian churches in Egypt or Baghdad, or on Yazidis in northern Iraq, more common now than they have been for 150 years? (Not forgetting minorities within Islam—even the largest Islamic group, the Sunnis, can find themselves a minority under pressure in Iran and Iraq, while massacres of Shi’a Muslims are common in Pakistan.) There are several factors at play here.
    For one, the diversity of the Middle East is partly because its governments were too weak to impose their religion. Today governments have more power, and when they choose to evict a religious minority or impose orthodoxy they can do it more effectively than ever before. The Ottoman Empire was able to organize, between 1915 and 1917, the killing of more than a million of its Armenian subjects when it perceived that the Armenians were siding with Russia—“giving the death warrant,” as the American ambassador to the empire later wrote, “to an entire race.” Civil wars, too, can reach deep into the territory of a religious group that might only want to be neutral—as the Yazidis of northern Iraq found in 2007, when they became the victims of one of the world’s deadliest terrorist attacks. There are no safe places anymore.
    Religious groups in the Middle East have a high degree of internal cohesion. Marriage to an outsider is generally frowned on; people within the group may prefer to employ other members from the same group; converting to another religion is not an intellectual choice but a much more profound change, because it usually means leaving behind one’s community and joining a new one. Some religious groups (such as the Yazidis and Assyrians, for example) enjoyed a high degree of autonomy for many centuries, outside the reach of governments; a few still speak their own language. This internal cohesion means there is a tendency to hold such groups collectively liable for the actions of anyone who has their religion. Hence the past attacks on the Armenians and Jews, and the present ones on Shi’a and Christians. In itself, this is not new. In the complex and ever-shifting political landscape