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.