Download PDF | Assyrians Kurds and Ottomans, Intercommunal Relations on the Periphery of the Ottoman Empire, Cambria Press (2008).
173 Pages
FOREWORD
Hirmis Aboona’s Assyrians, Kurds, and Ottomans: Intercommunal Relations on the Periphery of the Ottoman Empire is a work that will be of great interest and use to scholars of history, Middle East studies, international relations, and anthropology. It presents compelling research into numerous primary sources in English, Arabic, and Syriac on the ancient origins, modern struggles, and distinctive culture of the Assyrian tribes living in northern Mesopotamia, from the plains of Nineveh north and east, to southeastern Anatolia and the Lake Urmia region.
Among other findings, the work debunks the tendency of modern scholars to question the continuity of the Assyrian identity to the modern day by confirming that the Assyrians of northern Mesopotamia told some of the earliest English and American visitors to the region that they descended from the ancient Assyrians and that their churches and identity predated the Arab conquest.’ It details how the Assyrian tribes of the mountain dioceses of the ‘Nestorian’ Church of the East maintained a surprising degree of independence until the Ottoman governor of Mosul authorised Kurdish militia to attack and subjugate or evict them.
Many scholars, in the U.S. and elsewhere, have decried the racism and ‘Orientalism’ that characterises much western writing on the Middle East. Such writings conflate different peoples and nations, and movements within such peoples and nations, into unitary and malevolent hordes, uncivilised reservoirs of danger,” while ignoring or downplaying analogous tendencies towards conformity or barbarism in other regions, including the West.? Assyrians in particular suffer from Old Testament and pop-culture references to their barbarity and cruelty, which ignore or downplay massacres or torture by the Judeans, Greeks, and Romans who are celebrated by history as ancestors of the West.* This work, through its rich depictions of tribal and religious diversity within Mesopotamia, may help serve as a corrective to this tendency of contemporary writing on the Middle East and the Assyrians in particular. Furthermore, Aboona’s work also steps away from the age-old, oversimplified rubric of an ‘Arab Muslim’ Middle East, and into the cultural mosaic that is more representative of the region.
Assyrians, Kurds, and Ottomans: Intercommunal Relations on the Periphery of the Ottoman Empire will stand as a lasting contribution to the history of Christianity in Asia, of the Ottoman Empire, and of one of the Middle East’s largest ethnic and religious minorities. As an account of the Assyrians’ nineteenth-century struggle for independence from Ottoman rule, it has no peer. Other works are strong on Assyrian history and Ottoman-Christian relations in Mesopotamia during other periods, particularly in the fourteenth through eighteenth centuries (e.g., David Wilmshurst’s The Ecclesiastical Organisation of the Church of the East, 1318-1913 and Christoph Baumer’s The Church of the East: An Illustrated History of Assyrian Christianity); the Hamidiye massacres of the 1890s (e.g., Sébastien de Courtois’ The Forgotten Genocide: The Eastern Christians, the Last Arameans); and World War | and its aftermath in Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Persia (e.g, Abraham Yohannan’s The Death of a Nation, or, The Ever Persecuted Nestorians or Assyrian Christians, Joseph Naayem’s Shall This Nation Die?, David Gaunt’s Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia During World War I, and Ronald S. Stafford’s The Tragedy of the Assyrians).
No other work, however, provides an equally detailed and ambitious depiction of Assyrian-Kurdish relations in northern Mesopotamia from the Seljuk Turkish invasions up to the mid-nineteenth century. Furthermore, Aboona’s attention to the various ecclesiastical sects within the Assyrian community and their history during the period in question is of vital importance, as these religious denominations are rarely discussed in reference to each other, but rather solely in reference to the Ottoman State. The work also details geographically the largely overlooked Assyrian tribal homeland in the nineteenth century.
The chapters, in roughly chronological fashion, discuss the process by which formerly autonomous Assyrian tribes came to be brought under more direct Ottoman rule, and suffered cultural and ethnic devastation and the loss of many of their ancestral villages along the way. Chapter | sets the geographic and sociocultural stage quite concisely and usefully, and describes, among other things, the difference between the independent Assyrian tribes under the temporal as well as the spiritua! leadership of the patriarch of the Church of the East (with the descendible title Mar Shimun), and the dependent and semi-independent tribes, which tended to live in the plains rather than in the mountains. Chapter 2 explains the temporal leadership of the Assyrian patriarch, who administered laws from the mountain seat of his church in Qudshanis, in the Hakkari mountains, and enjoyed the loyalty of thousands of Assyrian musketeers. Chapter 3 details the original division of the Assyrian and Babylonian Christians into traditionalist (Church of the East), Catholic (Chaldean), and Monophysite (Jabobite ‘Syrian’) denominations. Chapter 4 recounts the competition of European powers for missionary inroads into the Assyrian fold.
Chapter 5 describes the origin of the Kurds in Persia and Azerbaijan, and their migration into Mesopotamia beginning in the ninth century and accelerating with the Seljuk Turkish and later the Mongol conquests, reaching a mini climax after the Ottoman settlement of Kurds on the Persian border as a sort of defensive barrier. Chapters 6 through 8 deal with the tentatively modernizing reforms of an era in which the Ottoman Empire encountered increasing instability in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, due largely to its conflicts with several European empires, Persia, and Arab, Kurdish, and various Orthodox Christian rebels. Chapters 9 and 10 recount how the Ottomans determined to bring the independent Assyrians and nearby Kurds under central government control, leading to the deaths of thousands of Assyrians in campaigns by Kurdish tribes under Badr Khan Beg with Ottoman acquiescence. Chapters 11 and 12 describe the final siege of the independent Assyrian tribes and British efforts to urge the Ottomans to put down the Kurdish tribes under Badr Khan Beg. Ultimately the Ottomans and a rival Kurdish leader prevailed in 1847, ending the ‘Kurdish war’.
This work provokes new questions that may give rise to further research. How, for example, did the independent Assyrian tribes and the Church of the East manage to carve out a zone of autonomy so close to the Ottoman vilayet of Mosul, not to mention Persia? Why were the independent Assyrian tribes caught off guard and deported from their lands so easily in the 1830s and 1840s, after resisting centuries
of such attacks by their local rivals? How did the Jacobite Assyrians of _
southeastern Anatolia and the Chaldean Assyrians of urban Mosul and its environs react to the devastation of the independent Assyrian tribal regions, as it occurred?
Aboona’s book is an engaging first look at the tribal politics and ethnocultural and interreligious conflict and cooperation in northern Mesopotamia and southeastern Anatolia during the late Ottoman period. He has begun to carve out a niche for Assyrian studies within the field of modern Middle Eastern studies that specifically deals with this understudied indigenous people, laying the groundwork for future research.
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