鲍默《东方教会：亚述基督教图史》第十一章：考验与分裂的时期（中英文对照版）

The Period of Trials and Divisions XI

The hereditary succession of high Church offices, introduced around 1450, ensured for the short term the survival of a rudimentary Church hierarchy, but it led to an intellectual and spiritual impoverishment and contained the seeds of a number of divisions and opportunistic alliances with Rome. The hereditary handing on of offices neither guaranteed that the most capable and motivated were appointed as bishops nor provided ambitious clerics with prospects for advancing their careers. The structuring of the Nestorian community along lines of family and tribe ensured further grounds for conflict, since the claim of a particular family to a high Church office, and the power and relative prosperity it offered, eo ipso excluded other families from it, leading to dissatisfaction and envy. Church politics became ever less oriented towards religious principles and more towards the interests of families and clans. This unfortunate situation persisted for half a millennium and ended only in 1976 when an Episcopal synod elected Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV according to the East Syrian canons.

The first Chaldean Church

– a union with Rome

Because the Church of the East never achieved the status of a state Church and constituted a minority even in its homeland Mesopotamia, it was dependent on the goodwill of rulers of other faiths. With the establishment of diplomatic contact between the Mongols and Western Europe, the prospect was opened of gaining the Catholic Church and the Catholic kingdoms as allies. The first efforts, made by the patriarchs Sabrisho V in 1247 and Yahballaha III in 1302/1304, were unsuccessful, but on 7 July 1445 the East Syrian metropolitan see of Cyprus, under the leadership of Mar Timothy of Tarsus, split from the mother Church and entered into union with Rome at the Council of Florence. Pope Eugene IV gave these Nestorians of Cyprus who converted to the Catholic Church the name Chaldeans, a term still in use today. This first of many unions had already foundered by 1450, because of the opposition of the faithful to Latinization measures. [^1]

In the sixteenth century a political realignment took place in the Middle East, which further

The Church of St George in Famagusta, Cyprus, which once belonged to the Church of the East, was founded in 1359. In the interior room traces of the original mural painting have been preserved.

complicated the situation of the Church. After the devastations of Tamerlane, Iran and Mesopotamia collapsed into small principalities, until the two powers reconstituted themselves and clashed as they expanded. In the West the Ottomans reconstructed their empire, which had been destroyed by Tamerlane, and this rebuilding culminated in the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. In the East there emerged in 1501 the Iranian dynasty of the Safavids (until 1732), who elevated Shi’ite Islam to the state religion, while the Ottoman Empire was majority Sunni. The expansion of the two powers led first in 1508 to the conquest of Mesopotamia by the Safavids, but it fell in 1534 to the Ottomans, who ruled it, except for a brief interruption from 1623 to 1638, until the end of World War I. The new borders divided the territory of the Nestorian Church into two regions: the western dioceses, with Mosul, Kurdistan and Hakkari to Lake Van, fell in the Ottoman Empire, and the eastern diocese in Iran. These political borders hindered the contact of the patriarchs with the faithful of the other empire, if they did not prevent this outright, which led again to divisions. the majority of the faithful and the bishops remained loyal to Mar Shimun VIII; only in Amida (Diyarbaqir) and Mardin did John VIII find recognition, whereupon he appointed two metropolitans and three bishops. The Ottoman administration, however, recognized Shimun VIII as the only legitimate head of his millet, so they had John Sulaqa arrested and murdered in prison in 1555. But Sulaqa’s supporters were not intimidated and named Mar Abdisho IV (in office 1555–1570) as their new patriarch. Thus was the first schism sealed.

Patriarchs and anti-patriarchs

After the establishment of the Chaldean Church there followed until 1830 a convoluted succession of efforts at union and further splits, which had little to do with questions of faith but very much to do with power politics. Abdisho must have soon recognized that a Latinization of the liturgy was unfeasible, which is why the pope reluctantly agreed to the continued use of the Syrian rite. Shimun IX Dinkha (in office 1580–1600) returned to the system of hereditary succession and received papal recognition as the last patriarch of the so-called Sulaqa line. In order to avoid persecution by the Turkish authorities, he transferred the patriarchal see from Seert to Salmas, north of Urmiah. His successors Shimun X (in office 1600–1638) Shimun XI (in office 1638–1656) and Shimun XII (in office 1656– 1662) strived in vain for papal recognition, as the sincerity of their creed was questioned. Patriarch Shimun XIII (in office 1662–1700) transferred his see from Iranian Khosrow Abad back to the Ottoman Empire, to Kotchannes in the mountains of Hakkari, and dissolved the union with Rome in 1672. This first Chaldean union with Rome formally lasted 119 years, though in fact it was recognized for only about forty-seven years. The patriarch of the ‘mountain Nestorians’, with his

Upon the death of Patriarch Mar Shimun VII (in office 1538–1551) the system of hereditary succession proved to be disastrous. Since the bishops of Arbil, Urmiah and Salmas rejected as non-canonical the appointment of the late patriarch’s nephew as the new patriarch Mar Shimun VIII (in office 1551–1558), in 1552 they elected the abbot of the monastery of Rabban Hormizd, John Sulaqa, as a rival patriarch, who took the name John VIII.2 In order to prevent a foreseeable isolation, on 15 February 1553 John VIII Sulaqa accepted a Catholic creed before Pope Julius III, which acknowledged the primacy of the pope; he also suggested that Patriarch Mar Shimun VIII had died. Julius III then appointed him patriarch of the Chaldean Church on 28 April and conferred upon him the pallium, which marked Catholic and Uniate archbishops.3 But

The city of Hesno d-Kifo (Hasankeyf), on the Tigris River, was from c.1257 to 1552 the seat of a Nestorian diocese. Then the East Syrian clergy chose the party of the anti-patriarch John Sulaqa.69 synod of 1616 accompanied by two Jesuits. Although the bishops agreed with all the texts that led to union, they raised energetic protests against the reckless actions of the Jesuits in south-western India. This indicates that, despite its isolation, the Church was well informed about events in India. The irate Jesuits rejected the professions, whereupon Pope Paul V had a new creed delivered to the patriarch, who was willing to convert, for his signature. When the messenger returned to Rabban Hormizd in 1617, the patriarch had just died. The newly elected catholicos, Mar Elias VIII (in office 1617–1660), signed the papal creed, but he added that the names of Theodore of Mopsuestia and Nestorius could not be removed from the liturgical texts and his Church would continue to call Mary mother of Christ, not mother of God. Despite further contacts, the union did not come to pass under Mar Elias VIII.

The distancing of Rome beginning in 1662, and the termination of the union of 1672 by the Sulaqa line left the Chaldeans without a leader, which resulted in the establishment of a third patriarchate. Encouraged by the local Capuchin missionaries,5 in 1667/1668 Metropolitan Joseph of Amida left the Church of the East and professed Catholicism. After a trip to Rome Joseph received the papal pallium in 1681, thus establishing the second Chaldean patriarchate of Amida, which lasted until 1828. After Joseph I designated his successor Joseph II (in office 1696–1712) he stepped down, and died in 1707. In the late seventeenth century there were thus the two Nestorian patriarchates of Rabban Hormizd and Kotchannes, as well as the Chaldean patriarchate of Amida. At the time of Patriarch Joseph III (in office 1714–1757), Augustin Scandar collected East Syrian manuscripts in the region around Mosul and sent them to Rome to the Orientalist Joseph Simon Assemani (1687–1768), who included them in his monumental Bibliotheca Orientalis of 1728.6 Joseph IV Lazarus Hindi (in see in Kotchannes, where it remained until 1915, returned to the East Syrian tradition; today’s Assyrian Church of the East is its distant legal successor.4

From 1504 to 1804 the patriarchs from the Abuna family resided with few interruptions in the monastery of Rabban Hormizd or in neigh- bouring Alqosh, about forty kilometres north of Mosul. While Mar Shimun VIII’s successor Elias VI bar Giwargis (in office 1558–1591) held fast to Nestorianism, the next patriarch, Elias VII (in office 1591–1617), flirted with rapprochement with Rome. This was the time, however, when Rome began to distance itself from the Chaldean patriarchs. The patriarch sent his archimandrite Rabban Adam to Rome, and, after thorough examination, he returned to the East Syrian

office 1759–1781) was recognized by Rome as patriarch, but his nephew and successor Joseph V Augustin Hindi (†1828) was acknowledged only as admin-istrator, since the likewise Catholic archbishop of Mosul from the line of Rabban Hormizd and Alqosh, John Hormez (†1838), disputed his right to the title. With the death of the administrator Augustin Hindi, who usurped the patriarchal title Joseph V, the Chaldean patriarchate of Amida ceased to exist in 1828.

Despite the failures of the efforts at union made by the Nestorian patriarchate of Rabban Hormizd, Mar Elias IX (in office 1660–1700) made further unsuccessful attempts between 1666 and 1670, as well as from 1692 to 1694. This means that between 1666 and 1672 all three of the ‘Churches’ that grew out of the ancient Church of the East were either formally united with Rome or were involved in efforts towards union. Although Mar Elias X (in office 1700–1722) had little contact with Rome, Mar Elias XI (in office 1722–1778), who in 1743 had to endure the destruction of his monastery of Rabban Hormizd by the Iranian despot Nadir Shah, again took up discussions of union in 1751 and 1772. Since the ‘mountain Nestorian’ patriarch of Kotchannes, Shimun XV Michael Muktes (in office 1740–1780), also dealt with Rome around 1771 /1772, once again all three patriarchs had either a formal or a prospective relationship with Rome. These negotiations were not motivated by theological questions but primarily by the interests of the families affected. The same was true in the case of the efforts towards union made by the next and last patriarch of the Rabban Hormizd line, Mar Elias XII Ishoyahb (in office 1778–1804). Because his cousin John Hermez also sought patriarchal title, Mar Elias professed Catholicism in 1778, in order to gain papal recognition. At that time the signing of a Roman Catholic creed had nothing to do with theological questions but, rather, served only the politics of power and security in battles for succession. The Vatican was aware of this and more than once refused recognition for dubious statements of faith, in order not to become the instrument of any one faction. In any case, John Hermez had to content himself with papal recognition as archbishop of Mosul and administrator, of which he was stripped in 1818, and wait until 1830 for the title of patriarch.

Bishop’s grave in the Meskinta Cathedral, today Chaldean, in Mosul, northern Iraq. Between 1364 until about the middle of the fifteenth century the church, founded in 1199 or 1212, served as the patriarchal cathedral of the three patriarchs of the Church of the East who lived in Mosul.70

Despite its caution, the Vatican erred in recognizing Mar Elias XII Ishoyahb as patriarch in 1778, for only a few months later, in May 1779, Elias XII denounced the union with Rome, which had not yet been formally concluded, and returned to Nestorianism, presumably because he had been unable to unite the two other Church groups of Kotchannes and Amida under his leadership and with his line.7 Now four prelates – the two Uniate administrators of Amida and Mosul and the two non-Uniate, Nestorian patriarchs of Kotchannes and Alqosh – fought for predominance over the remaining dioceses and members of the one-time Church

of the East. Only death allowed the muddled situation to be somewhat clarified. Mar Elias XII died in 1804, bringing an end to the Nestorian patriarchate of Rabban Hormizd and Alqosh, and Joseph V Hindi of Amida died in 1828.8 After thorough examination, the pope appointed John VIII Hormez as patriarch for the Chaldean Catholic Church, with his see at Baghdad. [^9] The situation also became clearer on the Nestorian side. After a nephew of John VIII Hormez tried unsuccessfully in 1831 to be elected as an anti-patriarch under the name Elias XIV, the patriarchate of Kotchannes under Mar Shimun XVII Abraham (in office 1820–1861) remained more or less unchallenged. But the Nestorians soon became the prey of Roman Catholic, Chaldean, Anglican, Protestant and Russian missionaries, all of whom enjoyed more or less strong support from the Western great powers. To paraphrase Metropolitan Mar Aprem, the missionaries attacked the Syrian congregations like hungry wolves ‘in order to steal their sheep’. [^10] Neither the missionaries nor the Nestorians noticed that they were merely tiny, always dispensable figures on the chessboard of inter-national politics. The Church of the East owed its survival during this time to its deep roots among the faithful.

The surprising result of these complex unions and divisions consists in the fact that the Chaldean Catholic Church, led in 2005 by Patriarch Mar Emmanuel III Delly (in office since 2003), is the successor to the ancient catholicate of Seleucia- Ctesiphon, while the Assyrian Church of the East, led by Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV (in office since 1976), is descended from the formerly Catholic patriarchate of John Sulaqa. Put differently, the hierarchal line of the ancient Nestorian Church of the East has become Catholic, while the hierarchical line that was once united with Rome has returned to the East Syrian creed. [^11]

The tiny East Syrian Rabban Hormizd Chapel in Dasgir is located in the mountains west of Urmiah, Iran. In the Kurdish mountains the Nestorians intentionally built their chapels either very small or with tiny entrances in order to prevent the Kurds from misusing the churches as stalls for cattle.

The political situation in the

Ottoman Empire and the

Chaldean Catholic Church

until the twentieth century

In the nineteenth century the European great powers, France, Great Britain and Russia, compelled the Turkish sultans on the one hand to offer better protection to the Christians within the Ottoman Empire and, on the other, to allow greater latitude to missionaries. The same occurred in Iran, as the country, beginning in 1872, slowly diminished in status to become an English–Russian protectorate. Naturally the field of operation for the European and American missionaries was limited to other Christian groups, such as the Armenians and Nestorians; to work among the Muslims was strictly forbidden, and among the Jews they had no prospects for success.

Roman Catholic Church be accepted, leading to the introduction of personal confession, extreme unction and separate confirmation. Although men who were already married were permitted into the office of priest, remarriage following the death of a wife was forbidden. After John VIII’s death Rome appointed Nicholas I (†1855) as Chaldean patriarch, but he resigned in 1847 on account of disagreements with the Vatican. He was followed by Joseph VI Audo (in office 1848–1878), whose patriarchate was marked by endless struggles about the oriental character of his Church and its sovereignty. The conflict was sparked by the papal claim to be the sole authority in naming the Chaldean bishops. The conflict first flared up when Joseph Audo sent the patriarchal vicar Thomas Rokos to India in 1860 but had to recall him later under papal pressure. At the First Vatican Council in 1870 he fought against the dogma of papal infallibility and in 1874, with Bishop Elias Mellus, sent a high dignitary to India for the second time. When, shortly before his death, the authoritarian Pope Pius IX threatened him with excommunication, he gave in and summoned Elias Mellus to return.

Procession of Chaldean Christians from Alqosh, northern Iraq, 1998.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century in the Ottoman Empire, Sultan Abdul Hamid II (ruled 1876–1909) instituted a policy of pan- Islamism, in order to mobilize the Arab provinces and Islamic dignitaries against the expanding colonial powers. The Ottoman government chose the Armenians as scapegoats for the empire’s internal collapse – between 1894 and 1896 about 300,000 innocent Armenians were massacred. After the 1908 seizure of power by the Young Turks, who played the ultranationalist card, a holocaust took place during World War I among the Armenians and Nestorian Assyrians, with approximately 1.6 to 1.8 million victims. Both peoples lost 50 to 60 per cent of their members.

When John VIII Hormez was finally named Chaldean patriarch, he had to agree not to designate a relative as his successor. He was the last catholicos from the Abuna family, which supplied a total of 14 patriarchs. Further conditions included that the sacraments of the

see of Rabban Hormizd in 1832. He not only had the churches desecrated and monks massacred; he had also as many books as possible burnt.13

Joseph Audo also undertook important efforts to educate priests and the faithful, opening a publishing house in 1860 and a seminary in 1866.

Patriarch Emmanuel II Thomas (in office 1900–1947) launched major and also successful efforts to win Nestorians for his Church. In this regard the conversion of Bishop Abraham of Hakkari in 1902 was especially outstanding because he was a cousin of and the designated successor to the Nestorian patriarch Shimun XVIII (in office 1861–1903). Along with Abraham, another bishop and several tribes converted to the Chaldean Church.12 However, all changes of denomination made at that time were not theo- logically motivated; rather, Christians and clergy hoped that the European great powers, above all France, would intervene with Istanbul to keep the plundering and murderous Kurds in check.

The second social group was made up of the so-called mountain Nestorians, who lived from their herds of sheep and goats, as well as the meagre harvest from small mountain fields. Their character and lifestyle had been fully adapted to the harsh environment of the rugged mountains of Kurdistan – they were a freedom- loving and battle-ready people, who instilled fear even in the Kurdish arch-enemy. In 1839 the American Presbyterian missionary Grant described the mountain Nestorians as ‘the most independent people I ever saw, in every respect’. When Kurds from central Kurdistan, who had just plundered Rabban Hormizd, drew near, the Nestorians were said to have beheaded a half- dozen Kurds and displayed their heads on spikes on the bridge leading into their territory as a deterrent.14 Regarding those mountain Nestorians who lived in the heart of the Kurdish mountains, the British traveller Isabella Bishop, who visited them in 1890, reported: ‘They are practically unconquered by the Turks and unmolested by the Kurds; and maintain a fierce semi-independence under their maleks [lit. kings] and chiefs. They are wild and lawless mountaineers; brave, hardy and warlike, preserving their freedom by the sword; fierce, quarrelsome among themselves; and have little in common with the subject Syrians of the plains except their tenacious clinging to their ancient Church.’15 In this tribal society the patriarch brought together religious and worldly power. These were acknowledged by the tribal leaders because, to implement his decisions, he could apply the feared punishment of excommunication, even in civil matters, and this was equivalent to expulsion from society. Nevertheless, he could not prevent the mountain Nestorians, who fought bitterly with each other, from entering into disastrous alliances with Kurdish tribal leaders.16

Catholic, Russian Orthodox and Protestant missionaries

Since the Nestorians’ retreat from the cities of Mesopotamia in the fifteenth century, they had been divided into two social groups. One consisted of farmers living in the broad valleys near the mountains of Kurdistan, whether it be north of Mosul, south of the Turkish Lake Van or west of the Iranian Lake Urmiah. This small minority was oppressed again and again by the Muslims, especially the Kurds, in the form of special taxation, extortion, plunder and the abduction of young women. Their churches were also often the targets of destructive attacks. It was especially painful for the rural East Syrians that in the early nineteenth century they lost their two remaining great libraries. First, Catholic missionaries incited recent converts to Catholicism to throw the library of Mosul, made up of many thousands of manuscripts, into the River Tigris, after which the Kurdish leader Mohammed Pasha attacked the former patriarchal

Although Catholic missionaries had already long been active among the rural Nestorians, the West ‘discovered’ this small Christian community only beginning in 1820. First, the British archae- ologist and employee of the East India Company Claude Rich reported in 1820 of these Syrian Christians, who still used the language of Jesus, Aramaic or East Syriac. This last created a minor sensation: the Nestorians represented a living fossil, which it was necessary to study, to preserve and finally to convert. The first priest to come to the mountain Nestorians from the Anglo-Saxon regions was the British pastor Joseph Wolff in 1825. He took back to England a manuscript of the Peshitta, which he had published there and distributed in the region around Urmiah in 1827.17

Two years earlier Russian troops had advanced to Urmiah, which had inspired individual groups of Nestorians to choose the Russian Orthodox Church for the short term. In 1830, with the Presbyterians E. Smith and H. G. O. Dwight of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Americans for the first time appeared on the chessboard of the mission to the Nestorians.19 The promising report of Smith and Dwight led in 1833 to the sending of Justin Perkins, who arrived in Urmiah in 1834. In contrast to their American successors and the Catholic missionaries, Perkins and his superiors were at first sincerely well disposed towards the Nestorians. His orders read: ‘A primary object which you will have in view, will be to convince the people, that you come among them with no design to take away their religious privileges, not to subject them to any foreign ecclesiastical power. The only acknowledged head of the Church is Jesus Christ, and your only acknowledged standard in ecclesiastical matters is the New Testament. The Syrian Church acknowledges the same head and also the same standard, though it may be, with some additions. You will have, therefore, a broad common ground. But your main objective will be, to enable the Nestorian Church, through the grace of God, to exert a commanding influence in the spiritual regen- eration of Asia.’20 The Presbyterian missionaries were comfortable with the absence from the Nestorian churches of statues and images, with the cross without the crucified figure, and with the aversion to the pope, which is why they called the Nestorians the ‘Protestants of Asia’.21 Conversely, the Nestorians, who had never heard of the Reformation, indulged in the idea that the Protestants were the ‘Nestorians of the West’.22 This spiritual brotherhood developed not least because the early Presbyterian and Anglican priests who lived among the Nestorians mostly dispensed with attempts at conversion. They provided assistance in matters of education and

But contacts between the mountain Nestorians and Western missionaries developed into a double-edged sword for both sides. A new field of activity was opened for the missionaries, and the Nestorians hoped for political aid – the dream of the patriarchs at that time revolved around a future European protectorate that would guarantee the security of their people. On the other side, these intentions were a thorn in the side of the Kurds, which is why in 1829 they murdered the German C. Schultz on his return from a visit to the patriarch in Kotchannes.18 Worse yet, the numerically far superior Kurds avenged themselves on the mountain Nestorians on account of the purported internationalization of the ‘Christian question’ with increasing massacres, for which they received the support of the pan-Islamist and ultranationalist Turkish factions. Since a few East Syrian bishops expected political gain from a conversion to the Chaldean or Russian Orthodox Church, the Church of the East was further weakened by the missionary efforts of their potential allies. But in 1830 it looked at first as though the intervention of European powers could help the Nestorians, for the Ottoman government was compelled to stop the Kurdish attacks.

take up work among the mountain Nestorians of Hakkari. However, Grant was attacked in Mardin by angry Muslims and had to seek refuge in the nearby West Syrian monastery of Deir az-Zafaran. After a meeting with Patriarch Mar Shimun XVII Abraham, Grant returned to Urmiah, where he soon received support through the arrival of the missionaries

A. Hallady and W. Stocking in 1837, W. Jones in 1839, A. Wright in 1840 and finally E. Breath, who brought along a printing press.

The Mar Shalita basilica of Kotchannes in the Hakkari Mountains of Kurdistan, south- eastern Turkey. From 1662 to 1915 it served as the patriarchal see of the patriarchs of the so-called ‘Sulaqa line’ of the Church of the East. The only entrance was almost four metres above the ground and accessible only via a ladder that could be removed at any time. In troubled times, the fortified church served Christians as a place of refuge. Illustration by Isabella Bishop, 1890.

That such missionary attempts could also be politically explosive was tragically revealed in 1843. Grant’s activity irritated the Kurdish leader Badr Khan, who dreamt of an independent Kurdistan. Nevertheless, Grant won the friend- ship of Nurallah, a chieftain subordinate to Badr Khan, whom he cured of an illness. For both the patriarch, who hoped the American Grant would provide protection from the Kurdish threat, and Badr Khan, who viewed Grant’s efforts with suspicion, his missionary work had an eminently political dimension, which Grant himself did not want to admit. When, in the early summer of 1843, he set out to see the Kurdish leaders Badr Khan and Nurallah hundreds of Nestorians streamed to him and asked him to speak to his friend Nurallah on their behalf. He not only refused this request on the grounds of neutrality, he also observed with indifference the military preparations being made in the camp of the two Kurdish leaders for an invasion of the Nestorian regions. Instead of trying to mediate between Badr Khan and Patriarch Mar Shimun XVII with the help of his friend Nurallah, he concerned himself only with the assurance that the attacking Kurds would spare a schoolhouse he had built. health, in contrast to the Catholics, who applied great pressure and did not hesitate to attempt to bribe patriarchs and bishops with money.23 In a more amusing case, a Nestorian bishop and a Catholic bishop could not agree on theological questions, so they brought their argument before the chief mullah of Urmiah, who declared the Nestorian the victor – a process that recalls the old debates before the Mongol princes.24

In 1835 the Presbyterian physician and missionary Asahel Grant reached Urmiah. Together with his wife, he not only opened a school and a medical practice greatly valued by both Christians and Muslims, he also sought to prove that the Nestorians were the descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel.25 Four years later he was instructed by the Board of Missions to

When Grant had only just left the Kurdish camp the Kurds attacked the Nestorians in the plains first, in June, and then the mountain Nestorians, in July. ‘The massacre was the ugliest which the Nestorians of Kurdistan had experienced since the ravages of Timur Lang.’26

The Kurds murdered thousands of women and men, slicing off the ears of the dead and sending them to Badr Khan. Since young women were either sold as slaves or given as gifts to Muslim chieftains, many opted for suicide and threw themselves from bridges into the chasms below. At the same time, all the herds were stolen, churches razed, libraries destroyed and entire villages consumed by flames. In order to prevent the return of the fleeing Nestorians to their homeland, the Kurds also destroyed the irrigation canals and felled the fruit trees.27 The patriarch had to seek asylum in the British consulate in Mosul, and he thus escaped the fate of the West Syrian maphrian (archbishop), who was murdered by Badr Khan in Midyat. Three years later the Kurds attacked the mountain Nestorians of the Tyari tribe and systematically killed the priests, deacons and family leaders; not a single church remained standing. In total the Kurds massacred about 15,000 to 20,000 Nestorians. As far as Grant’s schoolhouse is concerned, they did in fact leave it undamaged, but they converted it into a fort. Grant himself died of typhus in Mosul in 1844, when he was caring for Nestorian refugees.28 After the third massacre of Christians, in 1846, the British government intervened with Istanbul. Kurdistan was placed under a Turkish pasha, and Badr Khan was sent into exile. Nevertheless, the Turkish authorities forbade the Nestorians from rebuilding their churches, in order to extort large bribes from them.29 Today we know that the Turkish government, which at that time held only loose authority over northern Mesopotamia, had incited the Kurds to massacre the Christians, so they could, in a second step, find a pretext to intervene militarily and destroy the Kurdish emirates.30

Priest of the Church of the East in northern Iraq, circa mid-1920s.

Not only did the new arrivals publish and distribute anti-Nestorian tracts; the originally open-minded Perkins also adopted a fanatical tone when he attacked the practice of fasting:

‘I do not know what more artful contrivance Satan could have invented, to substitute in the place of the pure religion of the gospel, than he has furnished with the fasts of these oriental churches.’31 The patriarch had the American school in Urmiah closed, whereupon most Presbyterians left the city and Mosul. Around 1870 they returned and began an aggressive campaign for conversion, which led to the establishment of an Assyrian Protestant Church.32 The missionary activities of other Protestant Churches later caused just as many divisions on the Nestorian side. Not for nothing had Mar Shimun XVII Abraham declared on his deathbed: ‘If you must change your religion, in order to guarantee the survival of our nation, convert to the Chaldeans, not the Protestants.’33

As a consequence of the lack of humanitarian help from Grant, relations deteriorated between the Nestorian clergy and the American Presbyterians, who for their part began harshly attacking the liturgical customs of the East Syrians.

The British did not stand idly by. In the years between 1835 and 1837 the British colonel Chesney led the Euphrates expedition, and upon his return told of ancient Christians in Kurdistan. This inspired the Royal Geographical Society and the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge to send the surgeon and geologist

W. Ainsworth to the patriarch in 1838. Together with his travel companion, the Chaldean Isa (Jesus) Rassam, who after the end of the expedition was appointed vice-consul in Mosul, Ainsworth met Patriarch Shimun XVII in 1840. It was on the occasion of this meeting that the patriarch became angry about the crucifix Isa Rassam had brought along. For Christ had suffered but once and died but once, and now he is resurrected and enthroned in glory. No true Christian could portray the suffering Christ, since the symbol of Christianity was the ‘empty’ cross of the resurrection. The patriarch threw the crucifix away. [^34]

From this reconnaissance there resulted at the end of 1842 the trip of George Percy Badger, who enjoyed the support of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London. At his meeting with the patriarch in 1843 Badger succeeding in persuading him that the Anglican Church harboured no intentions of conversion but wanted to help the Nestorians in the areas of education and health. [^35] The Anglican mission-aries held to this strategy. The fifth Anglican missionary campaign, concluded in 1885, formulated its goal thus: ‘The work of the mission is in the first place to train up a body of literate clergy; secondly to instruct the youth in both religious and secular knowledge; and thirdly to print the very early liturgies of the Assyrians. The mission in no way seeks to Anglicanise the Assyrians nor to condone their heresy or to minimize its importance.’36 Patriarch Mar Shimun XVIII Ruben (1861–1903) was nevertheless disappointed by the British, as Isabella Bishop reported: ‘The patriarch and his people hoped for a British protectorate as one result of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Mission, and they are bitterly disappointed that their condition is growing worse.’37 However, the British ambassador in Istanbul, Henry Layard (†1894), and the prime minister, Lord Salisbury (†1903), had already warned him that working closely with the Church of England could provoke further persecutions by the Turks and Kurds. [^38]

It was in the second half of the nineteenth century that Anglican and American missionaries as well as the archaeologist Austen A. Layard described to the broad public the members of the Church of the East as Assyrians. [^39] The missionary W. A. Wigram, active in the early twentieth century, titled his book The Assyrians and their Neighbours and defined the Nestorians as the true descendants of the Assyrians, whose

The patriarch of the Church of the East, Mar Shimun XVII (in office 1820–1861). Drawing by George Badger, c.1843.

The Assyrian Reformed Mar Thoma Church in Mushava, Urmiah, Iran, late nineteenth century. empire fell in 612BCE. But, as Isabella Bishop, Grant and other missionaries had noted, in the nineteenth century the Nestorians called themselves not ‘Assyrians’ but rather ‘Syrians’, ‘Nazarenes’ or simply ‘Christians’. None the less, there are numerous proofs that the missionaries and Layard were not the first to call the local people of the Adiabene – the heartland of ancient Assyria and later one of the cradles of the Church of the East – Assyrians even after the fall of the Assyrian Empire. However, the Church first took on its present official name, the Holy Apostolic and Catholic Assyrian Church of the East, only under Patriarch Mar Shimun XXI in 1975.40 minorities of Kurdistan but only in limiting the Russian sphere of influence, pushed the Nestorians directly into the arms of the tsar. On 26 April 1868 Patriarch Mar Shimun XVIII wrote to the Russian tsar: ‘For some time past you have known and heard of the state of the Nestorians, a nation of poor people, who live in the mountains of Kurdistan. The Kurds have forcibly taken possession of several of our churches and convents; they constantly abduct our virgins, brides and women, forcing them to turn Moslems. For twenty years and more the Turks have taken possession of the country, but they are worse than the Kurds. We beseech your Mightiness, for the sake of Jesus, His Baptism, and Cross, either free us from such a state or procure us a remedy.’41 This letter had no effect

The hesitant attitude of the British government, which was not interested in the Christian

The Mar Giwargis Church, which belongs to the Church of the East and is located near Ardishai Urmiah, Iran, was desecrated by vandals in 2001. at first, but, when in 1876 the tsar declared himself prepared to work with Great Britain to help the Nestorians, Britain refused. England had concluded a defensive military alliance with the Ottoman Empire against Russia and thus sacrificed the mountain Nestorians on the altar of the politics of the great powers. motivated ‘conversion’, the people hoped to be spared the fate suffered by the Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire during the first genocide carried out by the Turks and Kurds in 1894–1896. Paradoxically, the situation of the Armenians had then taken a turn for the worse, when the leading Western powers at the peace conference in Berlin compelled the Ottoman Turks to reform the administration of the eastern Anatolian provinces, where millions of Christians lived. After this Sultan Abdul Hamid II, as a first step, purposefully settled anti-Christian Kurds in the regions with Christian majorities.42 As a second step he armed them militarily in the name of pan-Islamism, and built them into an irregular parallel army, in order to exterminate the Armenians. The

After the 1883/1884 negotiations about union with the Russian Orthodox Church broke down, Bishop Yuhannan of Urmiah signed a corre- sponding union treaty in St Petersburg in 1898. He was followed by over 20,000 faithful, who renounced the ‘Nestorian heresy’, whereupon a second Assyrian Russian Orthodox bishop was appointed and the old Church of the Virgin Mary in Urmiah was remodelled in the typical Russian style. With the purely politically

same fate threatened the Nestorians. However, the Assyrians of Urmiah bound their fate to that of Russia or to Russia’s military fortunes. At the same time, the Turkish government met the Assyrians living in the Ottoman Empire with increased distrust; they fell under suspicion of being a fifth column of the tsar.

The union with Russia soon suffered its first setback when the Russian Orthodox aid waned as a result of the Russian defeat in the Russo–

Japanese War of 1904–1905 and the consequent internal unrest. At the same time more Protestant groups entered the region of Urmiah, such as the missionaries of the United Lutheran Church of America, the Methodists, the Northern and Southern Baptists, the American Dunkards, the English Congregationalists, the English Plymouth Brethren, the German Oriental Mission, the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of the Nestorian Church and the Swedish-American Augustana Synod.43 Added to these were the established missionaries of the Catholic Lazarists, the Carmelites, the Chaldeans, the Anglicans and the Russian Orthodox. Presumably nowhere else in the world did so many rival Christian groups romp about in such a small area as in Urmiah. This undignified ‘hunt for souls’ ruined the morale of the Christians of Urmiah, who now treated ‘religion like sport and trade’.44

Patriarch Mar Shimun XIX Benjamin (in office 1903–1918) decided in the spring of 1914 to convert with his people living in the Ottoman Empire to the Russian Orthodox Church.45 Because of World War I this step handed his people over to the blind hatred of the Turks and Kurds, instead of placing them under the protection of the ostensibly powerful tsar.

The Anglo-Russian convention of 1907, which regulated the zones of influence of the two great powers, gave the Nestorians a brief pause for breath. Taking advantage of the conditions in Iran, which resembled civil war, tsarist troops marched into Azerbaijan in 1909 and occupied Tabriz, Salmas and Urmiah. Now the Russian consul, based in Urmiah, governed the territory of the Nestorians and assured them of a security they had not enjoyed for a long time. The Russian Orthodox Assyrians hoped that Russia would finally annex Urmiah. In light of the positive developments in Urmiah and the increasingly anti-Christian policies of the Young Turks,

When, after much Turkish provocation, Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire on

1 November 1914, all the Christians in the Iranian region of Azerbaijan, who had enjoyed the protection of the Russian Cossacks since 1909, believed they were finally free of the Islamic yoke

The Thomas Christians of South India | 261

From 1915 to 1918, General Agha Petros (1880–1932), with a small Assyrian voluntary army, achieved several successes against the Turks, but failed in his attempt to establish an autonomous Assyrian region in Kurdistan. In 1923 the British-Iraqi authorities forced him into exile in France, where he died under unsolved circumstances in 1932. (Photo c.1914.)

Nestorian gravestone in the cemetery of Khosrow Abad near Delemon, Azerbaijan, Iran. and placed themselves on the side of the tsar. At the same time, the strongman in Istanbul, Enver Pasha (1881–1922), announced the jihad, the holy war against the Christians, on 4 November, which of course roused the Kurds to carry out new massacres. Since Azerbaijan, compared to the Caucasus, was for Russia only a secondary theatre of war, it evacuated Urmiah on 2 January and Salmas on 4 January 1915. Some 15,000 Assyro-Chaldeans 46 fled in the footsteps of the retreating Russian army to the north, where the majority died from the winter cold and hunger. But no sooner had the Cossacks left Urmiah than Turks and Kurds under the leadership of the Kurdish ruler Agha Simko (†1930) stormed the city and the surrounding villages, where they carried out a systematic hunt for Christians: men were murdered and women raped. The approximately 20,000 Assyro-Chaldeans who found refuge in the French and American missionary buildings had better luck. There began simultaneously in eastern Anatolia the total ethnic cleansing of Christians from Turkey, ordered by the Turkish interior minister Talat Pasha (1874–1921) on 24 April 1915, to which Armenians as well as Syrian Orthodox, Chaldeans and Nestorians fell victim; for about two million Christians this was the equivalent of a descent into hell.47 The massacres began in the cities of Amida (Diyarbakir), Mardin and Midyat, and then proceeded into Nisibis, Jazireh and Seert, where the famous Church historian and arch- bishop Addai Scher was murdered and the library, filled with ancient manuscripts, went up in

The patriarch of the Church of the East, Mar Shimun XIX (in office 1903–1918), along with all the Assyrians living in Hakkari, had to flee from Turkish–Kurdish troops to Urmiah in 1915.

Patriarch Mar Shimun XIX was murdered by the Kurdish leader Agha Simko on 16 March 1918 near this Chapel of Mar Jacub near Salmas, dating from the thirteenth century. flames. In the space of a few weeks the Turkish–

Kurdish gangs massacred tens of thousands of Christians – those who were able to flee to the mountains were murdered by bands of Kurds. in the summer of 1915 to flee and unite with the Assyrians of Urmiah. About 60,000 men, women and children left their homeland, which they would never see again. Arriving in Urmiah, the united Assyrians supplied the Russians with some 20,000 battle-tested soldiers under the leadership of General David, a brother of the patriarch, and General Agha Petros (1880–1932). In light of a few successes and the slow British advance on Baghdad, there arose the dream that united Anglo-Russian forces would liberate the Assyrian homeland, which is why the Assyrians, under Russian pressure, agreed to a tactical alliance with the Kurdish leader Agha Simko.

Since it was only a matter of a few weeks before the Turkish–Kurdish marauders would reach Hakkari, to which the Nestorians had retreated, Patriarch Mar Shimun XIX Benjamin accepted the alliance offer of Russia, which was carrying out a counter-offensive in the regions of Urmiah and Van. On 10 May 1915 he officially declared war on Turkey in the name of his nation.48 But the fortunes of war soon turned, as the Turks drove the Russians out of Van and waged fierce battles against the mountain Nestorians. In order to escape the imminent encirclement, the Assyrian leadership decided

But in March of 1917 revolution broke out in Russia, followed by the Bolshevik coup in October. The Russian Caucasus army collapsed into

chaos and its troops left Urmiah in October/ November 1917. Since the British were still 500 kilometres from Urmiah, the Assyrian fighters now stood alone against the Turkish army, who were burning to reconquer the region to avenge the attacks made on the local Muslims by the Russians. Worse yet, the Kurd Agha Simko decided in early 1918 to switch sides and lure the patriarch into a trap, so he invited him to a discussion at Salmas. Although Mar Shimun’s staff warned him against the meeting, he gave in to pressure from the British captain Gracey and went on 16 March to Agha Simko, who had him and his companions treacherously murdered.49 As successor to the murdered patriarch his younger brother was appointed, Mar Shimun XX Paulos (in office 1918–1920), who suffered from tuberculosis and thus could not assume his leadership duties. The Assyrian acts of vengeance against the Muslims were followed by Kurdish massacres of Christians.50

The genocide carried out against the Christians living in the Ottoman Empire anticipated the Holocaust of the Jews in Hitler’s Germany. The massacres by Turks and Kurds in 1894–1896 and 1915–1918 caused c.1.5 to 1.7 million Armenian deaths and 90,000 to 100,000 Assyrian deaths – the Armenians lost about 55 per cent of their people, the Assyrians 60 per cent to 65 per cent. Added to this were some 100,000 murdered Syrian Orthodox and just as many Chaldeans.52 While until 1915 about 150,000 Syrian Orthodox (Jacobites) lived in Tur Abdin in south-eastern Anatolia, which was ceded to Turkey in 1923, today there are fewer than 3000. Among the Assyrians the result was even more serious, as, with the violent deaths of a patriarch, a metro- politan, many bishops and nearly all priests, some 80 per cent to 85 per cent of the spiritual élite died – a wound that had still not healed fifty years later. Apart from isolated cases, in which Turkish and Kurdish individuals risked their lives to hide persecuted Christians in their homes, this genocide was a project planned by the Turkish government, from which the Muslim natives profited as the property of the murdered Christians was distributed among them free of charge. Although the Turkish Republic is the legitimate successor to the Ottoman Empire, it refuses to this day to acknowledge as such the genocide carried out against the Christians.

Although politically leaderless, the Assyrians, under the brilliant leadership of Agha Petros, mounted a fierce opposition against the Turkish army, as Great Britain held out the prospect of an autonomous territory at the war’s end.51 But when another encirclement threatened the Assyrians in late June 1918, they decided to break through to the British at Hamadan. Almost 100,000 people left for the south in July 1918, and of these about half reached Hamadan in western Iran, completely exhausted; the others were victims of Turkish or Persian attacks or of epidemics. The approximately 15,000 Christians who remained in Urmiah were murdered by Turkish–Kurdish gangs. Although the Ottoman Empire had capitulated in the interim, the British disarmed the fleeing Assyrians and led them on a forced march in the direction of Baghdad, where they were interned in refugee camps at Bakuba. With this the Assyrians lost their final opportunity to return to their now depopulated homeland of Hakkari.

While the uprooted Church of the East stood at the edge of an abyss, there emerged among the refugees for the first time a feeling of national identity, which allowed the interests of individual tribes to move somewhat to the background. Both traditional Nestorians and the reformed groups understood themselves as part of the Assyrian nation.53

Hopes betrayed

Middle East into zones of interest, tossed out all later promises even before the fact – none was fulfilled. Out of the moribund Ottoman Empire, Syria, Lebanon, south-eastern Anatolia and Mosul were to go to France, and Baghdad, southern Mesopotamia and the ports of Haifa and Akko to Great Britain. Between them was to be an Arab satellite state, divided into French and British zones of influence. Finally, Jerusalem was to be placed under international control.57

The situation of the Assyrian refugees was worsened by the death in 1920 of their gravely ill patriarch Mar Shimun XX and the subsequent internal debates. Without consulting Metropolitan Timothy, who was travelling from India, the late patriarch’s sister, Lady Surma d’Mar Shimun, had her twelve-year-old nephew consecrated as Patriarch Mar Shimun XXI Eshai (in office 1920–1975).54 Since many Assyrians would not acknowledge an under-age boy as spiritual and secular ruler, they split into two bitterly opposed camps: that of the patriarchal family, led by his aunt Surma and his father General David, and the opposition party, led by the war hero Agha Petros. All mediation attempts undertaken by Mar Timothy foundered on Surma’s intransigence.55 Despite the inner strife, the Assyrians harboured the dream of an independent state, or at least an autonomous region, as they had been promised by the British in 1917.

While the Arabs at least received the kingdoms of Mecca and Medina, Jordan and Iraq – although the last two were British protectorates – the Armenians, Kurds and Assyrians went away empty-handed; they were sacrificed for the sake of British interests on the altar of the oil discovered in southern Kurdistan.58 Then, in October 1920, the attempt undertaken by Agha Petros to establish by military means and with British support the seed of an autonomous Assyrian region in Kurdistan failed miserably, due to the lack of discipline among his troops.59 In the following months thousands of Assyrians began to trickle back into their villages in Hakkari and Urmiah. Since in the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923 Turkey had successfully fended off any Assyro- Chaldean autonomy, in 1924 the Assyrians and Chaldeans appealed to the League of Nations, which was working on drawing a definitive border between Turkey and Iraq. When a commission decided to visit Hakkari, which was again inhabited by Nestorians, Kamal Atatürk sent troops to create a fait accompli. They carried out a bloodbath and destroyed the only recently rebuilt Christian villages; the survivors fled back to Iraq.60 But it was not the Ottoman sultanate that performed this renewed ethnic cleansing; rather, it was the Turkish Republic. In December 1925 the League of Nations finally granted oil-rich northern Mesopotamia to the British protectorate of Iraq and the Hakkari mountains to Turkey; the Kurds and Assyrians were left with nothing. Immediately thereafter Turkey confirmed

At the end of the war Great Britain faced the impossible task, which it had brought upon itself, of fulfilling its many and often contra-dictory promises. First, the British had promised the Armenians, as well as the Kurds and Assyrians, their own states, although their respective territories included significant overlap. Second, Lawrence of Arabia had extended to the Hashemite leaders of the Arab revolt the prospect of an independent Arab state, which would encompass all Arab regions of the Ottoman Empire.56 This promise contradicted not only the obligations to the Kurds and Assyrians living in Mesopotamia but also the famous Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917, in which British Foreign Secretary Balfour promised to Baron de Rothschild to create a national homeland for the Jews in Palestine. But as early as May 1916 the secret agreement between the authorized representatives Sir Mark Sykes and Georges Picot, which divided the

that return of the Assyrian refugees was for- bidden and returning Assyrians would be harshly punished.61 of the country, since Assyrian refugees were already living there. The emigrating Assyrians were followed close on their heels by Iraqi government troops as far as the border. When the armed Assyrians returned from their nego- tiations with the French to the families they had left behind on the Iraqi side of the border, the Iraqi troops opened fire. Some Assyrians successfully fled to Syria; the others were taken prisoner and murdered. This border incident gave the Iraqi military the opportunity to distinguish themselves in the absence of King Faisal I (ruled 1921–1933), who was staying in Switzerland for health reasons, by solving ‘the Assyrian question’. Beginning on 7 August 1933 the Iraqi army, led by the Kurdish general Badr Sidqi, attacked 95 Assyrian villages and tent settlements, 65 of which they relentlessly plundered and destroyed. The defenceless civilian population was indiscriminately massacred. Among the acts of cruelty were not only the torture of priests and the rape of women but also small children being run over by large vehicles or thrown into the air to be impaled on bayonets, and pregnant women likewise killed with bayonets. The tragic highpoint was the massacre in the village of Simel; over the course of about ten days, over 3000 innocent people died. Only those who meekly converted to Islam could save themselves. But General Bakr Sidqi, who was responsible for the massacre, was celebrated as a hero in Baghdad and received from King Ghazi I (ruled 1933–1939) a medal and the title of pasha.62

Although the political situation of the Assyrians in the British protectorate remained unsatisfying, at least their security was ensured. But this, too, was only for a limited time, as the Anglo-Iraqi negotiations over a British withdrawal began in 1927 and led in 1932 to Iraqi independence. It was foreseeable that the Assyrians would lose the protection of the British. The situation grew worse after the patriarch travelled to Geneva in 1932 to the League of Nations, and early in 1933 this body definitively rejected the Assyrian claim to be acknowledged as a homogeneous group and be granted an autonomous region. Upon his return to Iraq, Patriarch Mar Shimun was placed under house arrest and given an ultimatum to surrender all secular authority. Because he fought this deprivation of power, he was deported from Iraq to Cyprus at the end of August 1933; he also lost his Iraqi citizenship. The Assyrians were now without their leader, and the patriarch was without his people. Metropolitan Mar Yosip Khananisho (1893–1977), acting as deputy, conducted the affairs of the Church in Iraq.

The situation was also explosive because since 1919 the Assyrians had provided the British occupying forces with troops, the so-called Assyrian Levies. Since the British had again and again used the Christian Assyrian Levies to suppress Kurdish and Arab revolts, they were accordingly hated by the Muslims. The situation deteriorated further when a British–Iraqi plan announced the dispersal throughout the country of the Assyrians, who had until then lived homogeneously in refugee camps; the Assyrians were to be settled in Kurdish, Sunni and Shi’ite villages, which spelled the destruction of their political and cultural identity.

For the surviving Assyrians it was crushing to experience the fact that an Islamic state, only a few months after the establishment of sovereignty, could allow itself to butcher members of a religious minority with impunity. No one reacted; Great Britain helped Iraq to hush up what had happened, and the League of Nations appointed a commission. This commission did not consider at all how the security of the

At the end of the British mandate a group of Assyrians decided in July 1933 to emigrate to Syria and settle in the Little Khabur in the north-east

Assyrians in Iraq could be ensured, but instead recommended that the Assyrians ‘simply’ move to Argentina, Brazil, British Guyana, Canada, Colombia, Niger or South Africa, and thus the Assyrians had the status of refugees within their own homeland.63 The affected people paid little attention to these naïve recommendations, however; a few hid in the Kurdish region of Iraq, and others fled to the refugee camp of Habbaniyah west of Baghdad, where Great Britain maintained an air force base. In May 1941 the remaining Assyrian Levies had the satisfaction of successfully defending the base at Habbaniyah, together with the British, against 15,000 Iraqi soldiers and defeating the military putsch of the officers who sympathized with Nazi Germany. Their units were dissolved in 1955.64 About half of the Assyrians left Iraq, with some accepting France’s offer to settle in Syrian Khabur and others emigrating to the United States, especially to Chicago. numerous Kurds, so they could not realistically claim their own state. The failure of the Assyrian movement in the summer of 1933 dragged the Church with it into the abyss.

Why did the Church of the

East collapse?

The disintegration of organisms – be they living things, state organizations, societal structures or religious institutions – is part of life. Nevertheless, it is extraordinary that a Church that from the beginning belonged to the extremely successful Christian religion shrank from seven to eight millions to 400,000 members, or that its share of the world population decreased from about 2–3 per cent during the Middle Ages to 0.005 per cent. Numerous external and internal reasons account for this, of which no single one but rather their combination was decisive.65 Nine external reasons contributed. First, the Church of the East was isolated from its sister Churches and spread itself over enormous distances. This factor was especially serious when wars prevented all communication between the patriarchate and distant provinces, sometimes for years. Second, the Church, except in Mesopotamia, remained numerically weak in relation to the overall population; it never achieved the critical mass necessary to become generally accepted but remained a minority religion. Third, it never experienced the advantage of becoming a state religion; it was always dependent on the goodwill of non-Christian rulers and was correspondingly vulnerable. Fourth, in Asia East Syrian Christianity encountered strong, deeply rooted religions, such as Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. The three Far Eastern religions were so closely tied to the cultures and mindsets of the local people – and had indeed helped to create these – that an aura of foreignness always clung to the Christian message. In contrast, the Latin Church met with

The Iraqi Chaldeans, by contrast, who now greatly outnumbered the Nestorians, were hardly affected by persecutions, as they had, under the leadership of their patriarch Emmanuel II Thomas, given up any claim to political and territorial autonomy and consciously assimilated into Iraqi society. While Mar Shimun XXI had to live in exile, Emmanuel II sat in the Iraqi Senate until his death in 1947. His three successors – Joseph VII Ghanima (1947–1958), who was likewise a senator, Paul II Cheiko (1958–1989) and Raphael II Bidawid (1989–2003) – advanced a cautious strategy of submissiveness towards the ruling authorities, which guaranteed the Chaldeans relative peace, despite three revolutions and three wars. In contrast to the Chaldean Church, which distanced itself from nationalist ambitions, the Church of the East appropriated the goal of an Assyrian national state in the 1920s and 1930s, an effort at which they inevitably failed. The Assyrians were a small community fraught with internal debates, whose scattered territories overlapped those of the vastly more

a more favourable situation in the third/fourth centuries, since the Roman religion had long since hardened into state propaganda, and the Gallic, Celtic and Germanic religions gave no answers to many existential questions. religion supported by another armed power can maintain itself over the long term. Regions that once had predominantly Christian populations were either radically cleansed of Christians – as happened, for instance, in Anatolia and North Africa – or the Christians came to constitute only a small minority, as in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Egypt. In contrast, in Christian Europe, it was military operations that either stopped Islam or repulsed it – as, for example, at the Battle of Tours and Poitiers in 732, the Reconquista of Spain in the fifteenth century and at both sieges of Vienna in 1529 and 1638. Since in Islamic states conversion from Christianity to Islam was desired, while conversion from Islam to Christianity usually brought the death penalty, the Church of the East was always at a disadvantage in the competition with Islam.

Fifth, the Church and its members faced persecutions, often lasting for centuries, and serious social discrimination, which led quite a few Christians, despite the awe-inspiring general resistance, to convert to the state religion. Six, the East Syrians of Kurdistan lived in a narrow social and geographical ghetto, which resulted in a self-focused life and a lack of intellectual development. Seventh, the activities of Catholic and Protestant missionaries hastened the decline of the already greatly weakened Church. Eighth, the East Syrians were twice the victims of a general genocide – first in the late fourteenth century by Tamerlane, and then in 1915/1918 by the Turks and Kurds. Ninth, the Church saw itself confronted with an essentially intolerant religion, Islam, which dictated not only the forms of society but also law and the administration of justice as soon as it achieved a majority in a state.

To these external reasons should be added two internal ones. First, the Church of the East focused its efforts on the ruling classes, because it was dependent on them, but neglected to work for the conversion of the general population. This strategy had the consequence that, upon a change of heart in the ruler or a regime change, the Church found itself isolated, with no foundation among the people. Second, the Church was often plagued by internal conflicts, arguments among personnel and schisms, which greatly weakened it and alienated the faithful from the clerical hierarchy. While large organizations such as the Catholic Church could weather internal power struggles and divisions, these were disasters for smaller groups situated in hostile environments.

The last two points demonstrate the relative validity of the argument of the Muslim theologian Ali at-Tabari (†855), a former Christian. In his Refutation of Christianity, he wrote that no religion without a concept of holy war could survive. He referred to the triumph of Islam, which had succeeded and greatly weakened Christianity everywhere, that no one had met it with armed force.66 A passing glance at history shows that, in confrontation with an aggressive religion equipped with military means, only a