Review: Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East

Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East by Gerard Russell

When ISIS swept into Iraq from Syria in the summer of 2014, driving a group of religionists known as the Yazidi onto Mount Sinjar, not only aid workers were sent scrambling. Journalists, too, were caught flatfooted. Who are the Yazidis? Aren’t they Muslims? What do they believe? Why does ISIS call them devil-worshippers? There are answers to these questions and many more like them in Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East by Gerard Russell, a scholar and former diplomat for both the U.K. and the U.N., fluent in Arabic and Farsi. Writing in an easy travelogue style, with descriptions of the land, the people he meets, their beliefs and practices, adorned with abundant historical quotations, he presents a Middle East that is surprisingly variegated not only in ethnicities but in religions as well. Behind the Muslim monolith that we tend to imagine lies a colourful, fascinating welter of minority religions with roots stretching back to Babylonian times and earlier.

Journalists found little to say about Yazidis because Yazidis themselves know little about their faith. Theirs is a mystery religion whose truths are revealed only to the clergy in secret meetings and ceremonies, while the laity is allowed to know only some customs and rituals. Why are Yazidi forbidden to eat lettuce? No one knows. Why are they forbidden to wear blue? It’s a mystery. The Yazidi may be an offshoot of the most famous of all ancient mystery cults, the cult of Mithras, wildly popular in the Roman army. It was near Yazidi territory that Roman soldiers first discovered the cult of Mithras while fighting the Persians, adopting it so passionately that in the western parts of the empire Mithraism resisted Christianity for several centuries. There are similarities between the Yazidi religion and the cult of Mithras: both pray three times a day with a girdle around the waist, both show a special reverence for the sun, and both include a key ceremony involving the sacrifice of bulls. And, what’s been passed down even to us today, is the custom of greeting someone with a handshake, a practice that  the Yazidis appear to have copied from the cult of Mithras.

ISIS is almost correct in accusing the Yazidi of devil worship. They do revere Azazael, one of the “emanations” of the supreme being, the greatest of all the angels who rebelled against God and was cast out of heaven, known to others as Satan (the Yazidi have a horror of pronouncing the name Satan). However, in Yazidi stories, Azazael repented, extinguished Hell with his tears and was restored to his preeminent place among the angels, turning their worship of “Satan” into the worship of the redeemed chief angel, a figure of goodness, not of evil. ISIS fails to appreciate this distinction. Azazael is represented in Yazidi iconography by the figure of the Peacock Angel. Why a peacock? That’s another mystery.

Russell devotes a chapter to each of six other religions. The Druze are the Mormons of Islam in that they accept a revelation different from that of mainstream Muslims. Like the Yazidi, they restrict knowledge of their religion to a priestly caste who devote themselves to lives of contemplation and poverty. The laity are known as “the ignorant ones.” The group nearest to extinction is the Samaritans with only 750 adherents. Calling themselves the true descendants of the ancient Israelites, more faithful and more pure than the most orthodox of Jews, they accept only the Pentateuch (or Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament), rejecting all scriptures, teachings and practices that came after 597 B.C. when the Jews were exiled to Babylon. Austerity is the watchword of Copts or Egyptian Christians, who fast 210 days of the year. Their religion has echoes of the Egypt of the pharaohs: even in their church in London they pray for the “rising of the water of the rivers,” follow a pharaonic calendar, and maintain that the psalms of David were written by the pharoah Akhenaten, father of Tutankhamun. Zoroastrians are well known,  in name if nothing else, because Zarathustra, their founder, is memorialized in the title of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and Richard Strauss’s tone poem, used in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Their branch in India, known as the Parsees, were often written about by the British in colonial times, who thought very highly of them. Founded about 1000 B.C. with a dualistic outlook that sees the world as a constant battleground between the forces of good and evil, Zoroastrianism appears to have influenced several later world religions. It teaches that the souls of those who choose to do good in life are rewarded with an eternal life in heaven, with hell awaiting the others. And their sacred book, the Avesta, prophesies a Messiah or redeemer who will lead the armies of good in their final battle, which will conclude with the end of the world and the resurrection of the dead. The Kalasha, the “last pagans of Pakistan,” all four thousand of whom live in three remote valleys in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, are given a chapter, as are the Mandaeans, who believe that their religion was passed down to them from the Garden of Eden as secret teachings whispered into the ear of Seth by his father, Adam. And there are digressions on other groups, such as Manichees, Alawites, Babis (later to become Baha’is), Kam, and Harranians.

All these minority religions of the Middle East have survived through many centuries largely by retreating to remote areas, such as mountain valleys or the vast marshlands of southern Iraq, where earlier governments had difficulty reaching them. Today, with better transportation  and communications and with the rise of extremist forms of Islam, they are under threat. It is quite possible that some, despite having maintained a continuous, living connection with the earliest periods of recorded history, will disappear within a few decades.

Review: Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World

Lee Kuan Yew: 

The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World

Graham Allison and Robert Blackwill

When Lee Kuan Yew died on March 21 of this year, accolades poured in from around the world and  focused mainly on his greatest achievement, the spectacular growth of Singapore. As Prime Minister from 1965 to 1990 he utterly transformed a tiny, poverty-stricken, Third World island nation of less than 2 million people, devoid of natural resources, lacking even a water supply, reeling from a series of economic shocks, its only major asset being a port for entrepôt trade. In 25 years he catapulted it into the front ranks of the First World. Today the IMF lists Singapore as third richest country in the world in terms of per capita GDP, after only Qatar and Luxembourg (Canada is no. 20). It has the tenth largest foreign reserves of $251B (Canada has $75B, holding down 27^th place, just behind the Philippines).

Less well known is the reputation of Lee Kuan Yew as one of the most brilliant strategic thinkers of our times, admired in the top echelons of government, academia and business. Margaret Thatcher expressed this elite view with characteristic force: “In office, I read and analyzed every speech of Lee’s. He had a way of penetrating the fog of propaganda and expressing with unique clarity the issues of our times and the way to tackle them. He was never wrong.”

Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World is an attempt to offer to U.S. decision makers a compact version of Lee’s analyses on the future of various subjects—China and India on the rise, the position of the U.S. in the 21^st century, Islamic extremism, national economic growth, geopolitics, globalization, and democracy. Consisting of brief extracts from Lee’s writings, speeches, and interviews, the book was compiled by two senior U.S. foreign policy academics who regularly serve in top government posts. It is published by MIT Press under the auspices of the Harvard Kennedy School. Anyone interested in public affairs will find it valuable. Lee’s comments on leadership are alone worth the price of the book.

Lee’s views on the future of China are especially prized, not only because of his acumen but also because he was in close and constant communication with Chinese leaders since the 1970s. In fact, China’s opening up and conversion to capitalism is often traced to Deng Xiaoping’s eye-opening first visit to Singapore in 1978. For Lee the rise of China is absolutely inevitable but also completely unprecedented, for while the world has seen new actors appear on the international stage before, it has never experienced a new player of China’s gargantuan size. He reminds us that memories of its former greatness are fundamental to its current resurgence and that it will insist on being accepted on its own terms, not as some  honorary member of the West. Its leaders calculate that three, four, maybe five decades will be required for its GDP to surpass that of the U.S; in the meantime it will avoid confrontations with the U.S. and be content to assert its power in the economic sphere rather than the military. By 2050, even with the world’s largest GNP, China will still remain behind the U.S. technologically and thus militarily, so it sees the 21^st century as a time of sharing power with America. Its day in the sun will come in the 22^nd century. While Lee is clear about the significant problems China must overcome, he judges that its chances of success are about four in five.

The U.S. presence in the Pacific is welcomed by Lee as a force to counterbalance China, so that all of East Asia is not absorbed wholesale into the Chinese economic behemoth. Unlike “declinists” who are pessimistic about the future of the U.S., he sees American innovation as so fundamental to its DNA that it can overcome major challenges by reinventing itself. In the area of the Indian Ocean he once hoped that India, “a nation of unfulfilled greatness,” would also moderate the influence of China, but when Nehru and Indira Gandhi failed to make the necessary changes to kickstart their economy, he decided India had taken a slower path to development. Infrastructure is poor, progress is forever impeded by bureaucracy, corruption, and a complex constitution, and meritocracy, a cardinal principle for Lee, is stymied by the feudal caste system. Nevertheless, India’s political system is more flexible than China’s, its private sector is stronger, and its population is more youthful—an asset, provided that the young are all well educated. India’s future importance is undeniable, he says, but present projections limit its potential to 60-70% of that of China.

The range of topics in the book is wide, and one always senses a powerful intellect at work, free from ideology or preconceptions, drilling down whenever possible to first principles. (It is impressive to watch that formidable mind in action, even in old age, in his speeches and interviews on YouTube.) If he reaches surprising conclusions, so be it. He once told a Chinese leader that China should make English its first language and Mandarin its second. It was hardly a practical suggestion, but it underscored his point that Chinese language and culture are barriers to the nation’s progress, first, by limiting its ability to attract foreign talent and, second, because the four thousand years of epigrams embedded in the language stifle creativity, suggesting that everything worth saying has been said before, and said better. In the West, he believes the welfare state has proven a failure, both economically, as evidenced by the enormous debts and deficits, and morally, by degrading the virtues of self-reliance and family responsibility. He questions the principle of one man, one vote, preferring to give two votes to people who are over forty with children on the grounds that their thinking is more long-term. He would give just one vote to people over sixty. On a trip to Australia, he warned that if the country did not open up and join the Asian renaissance, it would become “the white trash of Asia;” that bit of plain speaking sparked a national debate and resulted in an overhaul of government policy.

By focusing almost exclusively the fact that the Singapore miracle came at the cost of restrictions on personal freedoms, the Western media have disseminated a caricature of one of the most remarkable men of our time. Even if there were no Singapore, the ideas of Lee Kuan Yew would be well worth the time spent studying them. This is not a thick book, but it is dense with thought.