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Revival and Awakening
American Evangelical Missionaries in Iran and the Origins of Assyrian Nationalism
By Adam H. Becker The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-14545-7
CHAPTER 1
The Church of the East before the Modern Missionary Encounter: Historicizing Religion before "Religion"
Since ancient times the nation [melat] of the Syrians, who are called the Christians of Mar Thomas, have lived in India; they resided on the coast of the Sea of Malabar. Whether they are natives of India and came to believe in the preaching of Mar Thomas, or they went there from the land of Palestine and increased, this is not known because there are no histories. They themselves say that their church was there in the year 200 after Christ and that 1300 years after that time bishops were established by the patriarch of Antioch.
Some years ago I heard Priest John of Kosi, who read in an ancient book on the topic of these Syrians, say, "They were a part of our nation [melatan], to whom our bishops went and one of whose letters they read." In addition to these things he also said that the book that this report is written in is in Shirabad. After the death of Priest John I sought that book and here we will write some of that report so that you may read it and enthusiastically take as examples the patience, instruction, and fear of God that existed among your ancestors.
So writes Justin Perkins, the founder of the American "Mission to the Nestorians," in the December 1849 issue of the mission monthly,Rays of Light (Zahrire d-bahra). Perkins then provides the first part of his translation from Classical Syriac to Neo-Aramaic of a document describing events from almost 350 years earlier.
The document tells the following story: at the turn of the sixteenth century, the Christian church in India sent three men, one of whom died en route, to Mesopotamia to bring ordained clergy back to their own country with them. The Patriarch Shem'on V (1497–1502) ordained the two emissaries, George and Joseph, at his seat in Gazarta (Cizre, Jizre), a city on the Tigris, today in southeastern Turkey, not far from the point where Turkey, Syria, and Iraq meet. The two men then visited the monastery of Mar Awgen (Eugene), part of an almost one-thousand-year-old monastic center approximately one hundred kilometers to the west. There they met two monks named Joseph, whom the patriarch then ordained as Mar Thomas and Mar John. All four then traveled to India. John remained there, but Thomas returned to find that the patriarch had died and that Eliya V (1502–4) had succeeded him in office. Eliya ordained three more members of the Mar Awgen community at the nearby monastery of Mar John the Egyptian in the Tigris valley, not far from Gazarta. The newly ordained metropolitan of India, Yahballaha, and two new bishops, traveled with Thomas to India and sent back a letter, dated to 1504 and cosigned by John, reporting the events that transpired after their arrival.
The letter reached the patriarchal see after Eliya's death, when Shem'on VI (1504–38) had taken office. It describes their healthy and happy arrival in India, including the joyous welcome they received, as well as the great number of Christians they found there and the diverse geography of the community. It then provides an account of the arrival of European Christians (frangaye) in well-equipped ships and the animosities that spread against the foreigners, both among the infidels (kapore) and Muslims (lit. "Ishmaelites"). The Muslims claimed before one of the local kings in Calcutta that the European Christians wanted to wrest his kingdom from him in order to hand it over to their own king. Such claims were not wrong: these "Franks" were Vasco da Gama (d. 1524) and his crew, and the Portuguese were there to stay. According to the letter, battles were fought, which included attacks on the local Christian population by neighboring non-Christians, an all-too-common phenomenon in the history of the Christians of the Middle East and Asia after European power began to expand around the world. The strangers also established a trading colony in a neighboring kingdom on the Malabar coast. At the end of the letter, the authors describe a pleasant visit at this colony with their fellow Christians from the West and how "fear and distress [concerning the foreign Christians] fell upon all the idolaters and Ishmaelites who are in these lands."
As this story suggests, the Church of the East was a widely dispersed ecclesial community, a global congregation, long before the world was sliced up by national boundaries. At the same time that Columbus was "discovering" America in an attempt to reach India, East Syrians from a region currently in southeastern Turkey were traveling back and forth to India in order to minister to a church that had long been established there. The church had for centuries in fact sent out its apostles from its Mesopotamian center, which ran from what is now southern Iraq to southeastern Turkey. The movement of East Syrians across the continent of Asia, fostering their particular Christian culture and interacting openly and assuredly with a heterogeneous, premodern world, is repeatedly attested, whether in the church's spread through the Sasanian Empire in late antiquity, its continuing success in the Arab caliphate, its move into Central Asia and China, or its wide dispersal within the Mongol Empire. In the thirteenth century East Syrians made up the numerous Christians associated with the Mongol court, such as Sorghaghtani Bekhi, the mother of Kublai Khan (d. 1294), and Dokuz Khatun, the Christian wife of Hulagu (d. 1265), the sacker of Baghdad in 1258 (who happens to be buried on one of the islands of Lake Urmia, as Justin Perkins himself notes). At the time of Marco Polo, Rabban Barsauma (ca. 1220–94), born near Beijing of a Uighur family, traveled across Asia twice and eventually was sent at the suggestion of his student, who had become Patriarch Yahballaha III (1245–1317), to the pope to attempt to broker an alliance between the Franks and the Mongols (rabban, "our master," is a title of respect). As an old man in Baghdad, he composed a long account in Syriac of his itinerant life, a book that attests to the worldliness that existed in the Church of the East at the time when Western Christians' enthusiasm for crusading had only recently waned. However, over time the church contracted from within its widest limits, receiving a particular blow in the disarray caused by the violent campaigns of Tamerlane (1336–1405).
Although the nineteenth-century missionaries promoted the myth of a lost tribe of mountain Christians, they also brought with them an awareness of the global past of the Church of the East, a past that they themselves sought to invoke as part of their effort to spread the Gospel again across Asia. The links that Perkins wanted to recall by his translation of the sixteenth-century document had never been fully severed and were later to become stronger through the modern East Syrian diaspora. I emphasize this long-term relationship with the Indian community because, when approaching the East Syrians in the early nineteenth century, just before the arrival of the missionaries, it is easy to fall into the fallacy of treating them as a little tradition, a particularistic subcommunity living primarily in an obscure region, in contrast to the worldly Euro-Americans whose global vision corresponded with the lengths they had traveled to missionize these "oriental" Christians. This would be a mistake.
The Church of the East, at least on the elite and ecclesial level, was an institution that had long engaged in mobility far and wide. The world of the majority of the laity was small, consisting of village agricultural life or seminomadic pasturing in the mountains, but elites within the community had a long history of imagining the "Church of the East," as it was called, as a Christian city that extended east to India and deep into the formative era of Christian history. The patriarch, or Catholicos, as he was called, was based for centuries in Ctesiphon, the winter residence of the Shahs of Sasanian (pre-Islamic) Iran, and later in Baghdad. The church's institutions, such as monasteries and schools, were important cultural and economic centers, and the learned elites of the church played significant roles in the intellectual culture of Mesopotamia. The renown of the School of Nisibis (modern Nusaybin), the Church of the East's most important center of learning in the sixth and seventh centuries, reached Constantinople and early medieval Italy. Later, in the 'Abbasid period, East Syrians played an important role in the early translation movement, rendering Greek philosophical and medical literature into Arabic.
Elites in the church, with links both to the region in which they lived and to the broader ecclesial hierarchy—and imaginatively to heaven—were cosmopolitans with local attachments, or "local cosmopolitans," to borrow Engseng Ho's term for the Hadrami Yemeni diaspora. East Syrians, wherever they might be, were not a religious or ethnic minority in the modern sense of such terms, but members of a church they imagined to be linked to the biblical and apostolic past, whereas their Muslim neighbors considered them "people of the book" (ahl al-kitab) and therefore participants in sacred history.
This was a historically transregional and multiethnic ecclesial community with a long history of interacting with other religious and ethnic communities. This is especially important to emphasize because not long after the events described in the document published by Perkins, the Franks would cause havoc in the church both in the Middle East and in India. Only a few decades later, in 1553, the church in the Middle East would be split by a fracture that has remained to the present, when missionaries sent from Rome created a Catholic Uniate church (a secondary and ultimately more successful Uniate church was founded to the northwest in Diyarbakir in 1681). At the same time, the church in India was compelled by the Portuguese colonial power to take on the Latin rite, and Syriac manuscripts were burned in an attempt to eradicate the "heresy" of "Nestorianism" from the Indian Christian community. Long before the American missionaries arrived in the 1830s, members of the Church of the East had been traveling across the globe, and the church had already almost three centuries of experience with what many would understand to be the meddling of Western Christians.
The breadth of East Syrian history and the church's cosmopolitan past provide a broader framework upon which to fit the geographic, social, economic, linguistic, political, and cultural survey of East Syrian life presented in this chapter. My aim in the following is to set the stage for the arrival of American missionaries in the 1830s. Before examining the American mission, it is necessary that we acquire some sense of the complex social and religious world the "Nestorians" occupied, surrounded by and living among Muslim, Jewish, and other Christian communities. This mixed world entailed various forms of religious intermingling and shared practices that the missionaries frowned upon and attempted to eradicate. The diversity and heterogeneity that we find within the East Syrian community, a decentered and loosely connected ethnoreligious group living primarily in the region that is now divided among Iran, Turkey, and Iraq, will serve as a foil for the unified identity imagined after the emergence of Assyrian nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century.
Geography
The plain of Urmia lies west of Lake Urmia in what is now the province of West Azerbaijan in contemporary Iran. The lake, which runs approximately 140 kilometers north to south, is highly saline, thus resembling the Dead Sea: due to its inhospitable chemistry, it lacks any aquatic animal life except the tiny brine shrimp, which feed the storks, gulls, and pelicans that migrate along the lake's small craggy islands. The region west of the lake is divided by low mountains that press in close, through which there is a pass that leads to the Salmas plain on the northwest corner of the lake. Rivers run eastward into the lake from the mountains farther west, irrigating and forming alluvial valleys and plains in which villagers have practiced agriculture since antiquity. The elevated yet well-watered plain of Urmia, with its easy access to irrigation, is an oasis compared to the relatively dry climate of much of the rest of Iran and the Middle East as a whole.
The Nazlu and its tributaries flow toward the lake, rendering green the widest part of the plain, which bulges eastward into the lake, forming its narrowest central point (Today it is from this point that a bridge runs across the lake to its east bank). "This plain is almost perfectly level, extremely fertile, highly cultivated, amply irrigated by canals from several small rivers, and enlivened by almost countless gardens, vineyards, orchards and villages," Perkins wrote on his first visit there in 1834. In contrast to much of Iran, where along with small domestic gardens villagers would maintain larger tracts of agricultural land farther away from town centers, the plain of Urmia was noteworthy for its abundant gardens and groves.
Through the center of the plain there also flows the Shahar, or "City," River. It receives its name from the city it flows past, Urmia, from which the eponymous region and lake derive their name. Urmia as a local appellation is attested in cuneiform, but East Syrians later developed their own etymologies for the name, the most popular being "place of water," and another that links it to Ur of the Chaldees, the biblical homeland of the patriarch Abraham. A wide agricultural plain runs south and east of the city along the coast of the lake and is further watered by the Baranduz River to the south. On the southeast corner of the lake begins the Sulduz plain, an area that was occupied historically by Sunni Kurds, as opposed to the Shi'ite Azeri Turkish speakers of the Salmas and Urmia plains.
North from Salmas, beyond the lake, the next city is Khoy, after which the road splits, its prongs pointing to the two nearest political and cultural powers. To the east it leads to Tabriz, the renowned city of both ancient and modern Iranian history. A political, economic, and cultural center, Tabriz was the seat of the crown prince of the Qajar dynasty (1794–1925) (though the first Qajar ruler, Agha Muhammad Khan, was crowned in Urmia in 1795), and, as it was the capital of the most populous province of the country, it was also a transit center for goods coming from the Black Sea. It was in Tabriz in 1811 that Iran's first printing house was opened, and the city was later the focus of events in Iran's Constitutional Revolution (1905–11).
From Khoy the road also runs northward into Armenia and the Caucasus and beyond that to Russia. Tbilisi (Tiflis), Georgia, the Russian imperial center in the region in the nineteenth century, was increasingly the destination of Syrian Christians seeking work, and by 1900 a substantial community had settled there. From the north the Russian imperial presence could be felt in Urmia throughout the nineteenth century: the city was occupied by Russian troops in 1828 before the Treaty of Turkmenchai ended the hostilities of the last Russo-Persian War (1826–28) and much of what is now modern-day Armenia was ceded to Russia. The Russians occupied Urmia again in 1911 until the city changed hands back and forth during World War I, at which time much of the local Christian population was killed or fled. Heading west from Armenia, one could also take the road to Trebizond and then sail along the Black Sea coast to Constantinople and the world beyond. American missionaries traveled this route on their way to and from Urmia, passing on the south side of the massive dormant volcano of Mount Ararat (5,137 meters / 16,854 feet high), the reputed resting place of the biblical ark, and, according to Perkins, "an object of such impressive sublimity," which "rises from a majestic curve, in the great range, a sublime corner boundary of the three empires of Persia, Turkey, and Russia, and full worthy to be the bridge between the antediluvian and postdiluvian worlds."
On its west side, the Urmia plain becomes mountainous, with river valleys winding into the heights of Baradost and Tergawar, the regions that formed the porous boundary with the Ottoman Empire. Aside from the elevated river valley of Gawar, these heights continue to grow, until Hakkari and the wider mountainous region south and east of Lake Van. This elevated, often rough terrain, with numerous inhabitable valleys and wide pasturage, is the meeting point of the two extensive mountain ranges of the Middle East: the Zagros Mountains, which begin at the Straits of Hormuz at the bottom of the Persian Gulf and form the boundary to the Iranian plateau, and the Taurus Mountains, which latitudinally separate Turkey's Mediterranean coast from the Anatolian plateau.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Revival and Awakening by Adam H. Becker. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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