Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms - by Gerard Russell

ISBN: 9780465030569
Date read: 2025-08-11
How strongly I recommend it: 7/10
(See my list of 430+ books, for more.)

Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.

The subtitle says it best: “Journeys into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East”. British author, fluent in Arabic and Farsi, goes deep into Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, and Pakistan to meet Mandaeans, Yazidis, Zoroastrians, Druze, Samaritans, Copts, and Kalasha. Fascinating bold anthropological adventure with insights into religion and history.

my notes

In Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon, I encountered religious beliefs that I had never known of before: a taboo against wearing the color blue, obligatory mustaches, and a reverence for peacocks.

These religions were vestiges of the pre-Christian culture of Mesopotamia but drew as well from Indian traditions that had been transmitted to the Middle East through the Persian Empire, and from Greek philosophy.

They have held on to practices and traditions without change for more than a thousand years - sometimes preserving them for many millennia, under constant pressure to convert. Most of these groups, though, are now more vulnerable than ever, and this book aims to give them a voice.

Greek philosophy influenced the Middle East as much as it did Europe.

The Christians of Iraq a thousand years ago shared their church with Mongolians. They had a Chinese patriarch and a bishop of Tibet.

Apparent differences can conceal unexpected connections and commonalities.

Disprove the theories and beliefs of those who want to corral people into separate cultures and civilizations.

Some religious groups (such as the Yazidis and Assyrians, for example) enjoyed a high degree of autonomy for many centuries, outside the reach of governments.

There is a tendency to hold such groups collectively liable for the actions of anyone who has their religion.
Hence the past attacks on the Armenians and Jews.
The Samaritans, living on a mountain in the West Bank, try hard to avoid alienating either the Israelis or the Palestinians.
The Yazidis of northern Iraq are being pressed to choose between Arabs and Kurds.
The Egyptian Coptic Church has had to decide whether to back military or Islamic rule.
Each choice makes enemies for the whole community, not just its leaders.

There is no quicker way to build a sense of group identity than to point to a common enemy who is wicked and powerful yet can be defeated.

Communism and nationalism:
Both movements offered minorities a cause in which they could stand side by side with Muslims.
With the decay of postcolonial nationalist movements, religious divisions became easier to exploit.

Lebanon, where a terrible civil war ended only about twenty years ago.
Polling suggests that religious tolerance is higher than it is in many European countries.

In the Samaritan calendar the year is 3652, measured from the day when the people of Israel entered the Promised Land.
In the Muslim calendar it is 1435, measured from Mohammed’s migration to Medinah.
In the Zoroastrian calendar it is 1383, measured since the last Zoroastrian king was crowned.

Noah’s ark? Ancient Iraqi legends speak of a great deluge, and of a man called Utnapishtim who survived it in a great boat.
The legend, which influenced the biblical account of Noah, was based on fact.
Iraq’s low-lying cities were exposed to devastating inundations.

Iraq’s cities appeared as early as 5300 BC - three thousand years before Pharaoh Cheops built the Great Pyramid.
Iraq’s cities were almost as ancient for him as Tutankhamun is for us.

Estimates of the Jewish population of Iraq go as high as two million by the year AD 500 - perhaps something like 40 percent of its population.

It was the Babylonians who first divided the sky into the twelve signs of the zodiac, choosing twelve to match the number of cycles of the moon in every year.

Diligent watchers of the skies saw early on - certainly by 1500 BC - that some stars behaved differently than others.
They were brighter and moved through the sky in a different way.
The observers called these lu-bat, meaning “wandering sheep.”
The term was translated into Greek as aster planetes, meaning “wandering star”.
Which in turn gave us our word planet.

Babylonian astronomers identified five planets - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
They put the sun and moon in this group as well, making seven - and named each one after a god.
They invented the week as a period of seven days, one for every planet god.
We have inherited from the Babylonians the habit of naming the planets and the days of the week after gods.

For the Babylonians, one day in seven was an evil day, when activity should be avoided - which may have been the origin of the Sabbath day adopted by Judaism.

Iraq middle class until 1990 made up over half the population.
After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, United Nations sanctions destroyed its economy.
Per capita income declined by 85 percent.

History’s longest war:
Hostilities between Rome and Persia continued, with intervals of truce, for nearly seven hundred years.

According to the Koran, “people of the book” - including Christians, Jews, and the so-called “Sabians” - deserved special tolerance.
Polytheists, on the other hand, were generally thought to deserve death if they did not convert.
It was not clear to which of these categories the Harranians belonged.
Then they spotted the reference to “Sabians” in the Koran and latched on to it: they declared that they were the Sabians, and in doing so won another three hundred years of peace.

Ancestral customs included a ban on eating camel or rabbit meat, and on eating meat from any animal of a different sex from oneself:
women ate the meat of female animals and men the meat of male animals.

The Alawite holy books list many figures from history as having been the human equivalents of God’s celestial servants:
Mohammed and Jesus, but also Plato and Alexander the Great.
The greatest of them, in their tradition, is Ali, the son-in-law of Mohammed. He was a glimpse or image of God, and the closest thing to God on earth.
It would be right to exalt Ali by saying that he was God, but wrong to limit God by saying God was Ali.
The Alawites actually say “the image is God but God is not the image,” a phrase that resembles that used by Nestorian Christians in a text dated to AD550: “The Messiah is God but God is not the Messiah.”

When Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon it provoked a theological crisis among Alawite scholars.
Like the Harranians, they believed that the moon was a physical manifestation of a spirit that stood in the heavenly hierarchy as an intermediary between God and man - but how could that be true if it was a lump of rock, and not even the only moon in the universe but one of many?

Kurmanji, the Kurdish language, which has for a hundred years survived consistent efforts by the Turkish government to suppress it.

When the charismatic Mustafa Kemal, called “Ataturk,” was trying after World War I to shape the decaying remnants of the Ottoman Empire into the modern state of Turkey, he felt that his new country’s diversity was a source of weakness and division.
He attempted to suppress the many local and regional identities, and in some cases succeeded - but not with the Kurds.
He and his successors banned Kurmanji in schools, but it survived (and the ban has now been lifted).

On Turkish soil, “Kurdistan” was a forbidden word, suggestive of separatism and the breakdown of Turkey into its separate ethnic parts.
In Iraq, I found that people said “Kurdistan” as often as they could.
Iraqi Kurds used it emphatically, assertively, as though it had a magic force, as though its use were the source of their freedom and growing prosperity.
Iraqi Kurds are enjoying unity without uniformity.

It is in the areas where Kurdish is spoken that a foreigner is safest.
On a map I saw during my visit showing a red dot for every violent attack in the past year, Kurdistan was an empty space.

Sufi preachers who converted people on the frontiers of Islam often gave themselves flexibility to accept aspects of their converts’ old beliefs, sometimes grafting Islamic names onto them and reshaping them so that they could sit alongside Muslim practices.

The Yazidis’ view of God is a very abstract one - nothing can be said of God with any certainty, they say, except that he exists.

The Druze in Lebanon believe that it was the peacock, not the serpent, that was the tempter in the Garden of Eden.
Some Zoroastrians in Iran believed that the peacock was the one good thing that the devil made, as a way of showing that he had the power to do good if he so chose.

Houses painted in pastel colors with metal poles sticking out of their roofs, ready for when the next story would be built for the next generation.

Like many of the Yazidi intellectuals I spoke with, he was fascinated by the history of his own religion.
I was getting used to every Yazidi giving me a slightly different account.

The Yazidis’ original contribution to Western life: for this is the custom that, thanks to the cult of Mithras, has become our handshake.

The word “magic” comes from the name for the Zoroastrian priests, the Magi.
The distinction between black and white magic (one evil, the other good) parallels the difference between Angra Mainyu and Ahura Mazda.
And the animals that accompany a practitioner of black magic, such as snakes, toads, and of course cats, are all creatures of Angra Mainyu.

It was after the Greeks encountered the Persians that the Greek philosopher Plato suggested souls went to reward or punishment after their death, depending on what they had done in their lives.
Religion had been fundamentally changed.
Nietzsche, looking back at these events, judged that “Zarathustra created this most portentous of all errors - morality”.

Islam offered an escape from the Zoroastrian caste system, in which priests and warriors were at the top.
The lower castes were taught less about the religion and were quicker to abandon it, as is apparent from the high proportion of priestly families among those who have remained Zoroastrian.

Iran was in those days mostly Sunni rather than Shi’a. It became majority Shi’a only in the sixteenth century.
Yet it seems more than a coincidence that this fallen empire has ended up with a version of Islam that has embedded within it a sense that all is not right with the world - that the true order of things has been inverted.

Shi’a Islam began with twelve imams, who were meant to be the successors to the Prophet Mohammed.
They were all descended from Mohammed.
One of the points on which the Shi’a insist is that the rulers of Islam must be from the Prophet’s family.
Only the first of these Shi’a imams was accepted by the majority of Muslims, and many of them died amid accusations of foul play.
For the Shi’a this embedded in their faith a contempt for worldly governments and a pious hope that the last of the twelve imams would one day return as the Mehdi - the equivalent of the Jewish and Christian Messiah - to usher in the end of the world.
The Avesta, too, prophesied a Messiah.
This Zoroastrian concept appears to have predated both the Jewish belief in the Messiah and the Muslim belief in the Mehdi.
Some scholars think that it inspired them both.
Though the idea of a historical figure rising from the dead to rescue his people is one that might appeal to any society whose past was greater than its present.

Greek science was so much revered in Persia that even after the West had adopted newer ideas, the Persians continued to follow the Greeks.
Into the nineteenth century, anyone going to a doctor in Persia would have had his or her humors analyzed, based on the prescriptions of the second-century Greek doctor Galen.
The astronomy that Iranian clerics were still being taught at the start of the twentieth century was that of Ptolemy, a second-century Greek scientist.

Shiraz, a city where in the 1840s a conservative Muslim sayyid called Ali Shirazi declared himself to be the Mehdi and won a hundred thousand followers before he was brutally put to death by the authorities, who regarded him as a blasphemer.
His followers called themselves the Babis, because Shirazi was the “Bab,” the mystical gateway to God.
Their customs, some of which showed clear Zoroastrian influences.
The secrecy was justified: Iran’s nineteenth-century government slaughtered thousands of Babis.
The Babis’ religion eventually morphed into Baha’ism.
In recent years the Baha’i leaders have been imprisoned and their followers systematically harassed, excluded from government jobs, and sometimes arrested on the grounds that they are apostates from Islam.
Since the Islamic Revolution, two hundred Baha’is have been killed.

Hafez is Iranians’ favorite poet.
Hafez’s Diwan is one of the two books that every traditional Iranian family owns - the other being the Koran.

In Zoroastrian tradition Zarathustra gave the saint-king Vishtaspa wine to drink, which put him into a trance.
In that trance he ascended to heaven and glimpsed the glory of God.
Herodotus said that the Persians made a decision only if they had considered it twice - once when sober and once when drunk.
When I first read this, I assumed it was a joke - but in fact it makes sense.
If wine gives a special kind of mystical insight, then it would seem to be a good idea to get drunk before making decisions.

Parsees, descendants of Zoroastrian refugees who had left Iran a thousand years before for Gujarat.

Zoroastrians, too, have a holy book, which, along with belief in a single God, is traditionally a prerequisite for toleration under Islam.
The “people of the book” are spoken of highly in the Koran, and in Iran the Zoroastrians are counted among their number.
The regime derides them, however, because of their reverence for the sacred fires in their fire temples, alleging that they “worship fire.”

Participants would go home and wash themselves with bull’s urine.
The ammonia this urine contains makes it a good disinfectant, and apparently after years of storage it loses its smell.

In 2004, the Zoroastrians themselves estimated their numbers in the United States at ten thousand and in Canada at five thousand.
Numbers in Iran itself have declined, though official statistics do not show this, because however badly the Zoroastrians are treated, the Baha’i fare worse, and so many Baha’is have begun to register themselves officially as Zoroastrians.

Though Lebanon’s fourteen-year civil war officially ended in 1989, the various religious groups whom that war pitted against each other still eye each other warily.
The war wounded one in four Lebanese and killed one in twenty.
All groups committed atrocities. All suffered them.

Lebanon, whose five million people are divided between eighteen recognized sects and religions, offers the closest thing to religious equality that exists in the Middle East:
The constitution declares that “the State respects all creeds”.
People are more tolerant of religious diversity than most others in the world.
The reason for all this variety, though, is a virtuous one:
These groups were safer in Lebanon than in most other places, because it consisted largely of mountainous areas that government forces could enter only with difficulty.
Meanwhile, its location on the Mediterranean Sea made Lebanon part of both West and East.

Pythagoreans believed in reincarnation, and this drove them to purify the soul, which was immortal, and neglect the body, which they viewed as only its temporary casing.
They identified themselves to each other through secret phrases and symbols deriving from their fascination with numbers and geometry.

An event some historians regard as the end of antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages:
In the year AD 529 the Academy of Plato closed its doors for the last time.
The Byzantine ruler Justinian, a devoutly Christian emperor, decided that the existence of the Academy was an insult to his religion and to his imperial power. In Athens, he ordered, “no one should teach philosophy nor interpret the laws.”

Philosophers had sometimes been treated as prophets or even gods.
The mysterious mathematician Pythagoras, Socrates’s teacher, was regarded as a miracle worker, able to see the future and be in two places at once.

The Druze’s relationship with Islam was like that of Mormons with Christianity.
They have their own revelation and philosophy that mainstream Muslims would consider unorthodox.

The pentagram was a particularly significant symbol for the Pythagoreans, and one they could use to identify themselves to other members.
It interested them because it is made of ten triangles - ten being a number that to them signified perfection, and the triangle being an emblem of Pythagoras’s famous theorem.
Pythagoreans believed that numbers, and the geometrical projections of numbers, were the building blocks of the universe.
So when there was a pattern in geometry or mathematics, they read into it moral and practical messages.
Two was the number for a woman, and three was the number assigned to a man, and so five was the number for marriage.
Four represented justice because it could be equally divided twice over.
So the three-, four-, and five-inch sides of the triangle spelled out a message written into the mathematical fabric of the universe:
“Man must behave justly in marriage.”
Pythagorean husbands were renowned for their faithfulness to their wives.

Druze number around a million people, of whom half or more are in Syria and the remainder split between Israel (120,000) and Lebanon (250,000).

Druze laypeople live essentially as they choose, provided they help defend and maintain the community and marry within it.
But they are not allowed to know what their religion teaches.
This is why they are known as juhhal (literally, “the ignorant ones”).
Only the initiates - who are also known as sheikhs or uqqal, and who dedicate themselves to lives of contemplation and poverty - know the religion’s teachings in full.

The Druze leader was keen to demonstrate that the Druze were orthodox Muslims.

He made no apology for not telling me more. “It is about privacy, not secrecy,” he said.
“Doesn’t a woman have privacy in her home? We’re asking for the same privacy for our beliefs.”

A famous painting by Raphael shows all the philosophers ancient Greece in one imaginary scene, with Aristotle and Plato standing side by side at the center of them all.
Aristotle is pointing down toward the earth and Plato up toward the heavens.
The picture neatly sums up the difference between two schools of thought.
Aristotle’s philosophy focused on the material world: the modern word “physics” derives from the title of one of his books.
Plato saw the material world as a mere shadow of the world of ideas.

Every journey in Lebanon is a religious education, because the country’s different religions all tend to advertise themselves.
Shop names in one Druze town: Wisdom Pharmacy and Enlightenment Hospital.

Freemasonry:
The Freemasons believed that they carried on the traditions of the masons who built Solomon’s Temple.
Brother Haskett thought that the Druze were the real thing - the masons’ actual descendants.

The Druze in Israel (now numbering a little over 120,000) were separated from their brethren in Lebanon when national borders were imposed on the region after World War I.

The Muslim scholar al-Ghazali argued that philosophy was self-contradictory.
It could not explain God and therefore could only lead those who studied it to skepticism.

Fortified by the belief that death would quickly lead to rebirth:
Going into battle, Druze soldiers would shout, “Who wants to sleep in their mother’s womb tonight?”

Pythagoras was the first to delineate the musical octave, spotting that pleasing harmonies operated according to mathematical formulae.
He believed that the planets made music as they rotated across the sky,
and that a person who concentrated long enough and knew what to listen for could hear the “music of the spheres.”

Druze believe that the world is part of God in the same way as the dream is part of the dreamer.

The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel must be the most found of all lost people.

Modern Hebrew, was actually devised from the 1880s onward as a simplified version of biblical Hebrew by a scholar called Eliezer Ben Yehuda.
Ben Yehuda’s son was brought up, at his father’s insistence, to speak only Hebrew - a tough rule, because it meant that no other children could understand him.

Samaritans saw themselves as keeping to the letter the ancient traditions that their southern neighbors the Jews had abandoned.
They saw the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem as an unholy innovation by King David, who is a figure they particularly dislike.
To this day, no Samaritan is ever given the name David.

Jesus’s meeting with the Samaritan woman by Jacob’s Well and the parable of the Good Samaritan show a friendlier attitude toward the Samaritans.
At one point Jesus was accused of being a Samaritan himself.
Perhaps because of this, Christianity attracted Samaritan converts early on.

This mountaintop village, which they called al-Loz (meaning “the almond trees”), and a street in a suburb of the Israeli capital, Tel Aviv, were the two remaining places where the world’s 750 Samaritans could still be found.

At one point Jews and Muslims both prayed in the same direction, toward Jerusalem, before Muslims turned toward Mecca instead.

Several verses of the Koran teach respect and tolerance for Jews.
Muslims and Jews generally regarded each other as more thoroughly monotheistic than Christians because both groups rejected the idea that Jesus was God incarnate, and they refused to depict God in any kind of image.

Samaritans had not forgotten that they were descendants of Joseph, who had been betrayed and sold into slavery by his brothers.
The Samaritans had inherited his grievance and thus resented the Jews.

The Samaritan Torah is slightly different from the Jewish one.
Its version of the Ten Commandments does not include any ban on using the Lord’s name in vain,
but it does include a commandment to build an altar on Mount Gerizim.
Benny argues that the Samaritan Torah is the more authentic version.
His people preserved the text better over the centuries, as he sees it, because they stayed in one place, scrupulously copying the precious scriptures from old scrolls onto new ones.

“We are trying to be a kind of bridge between Palestinians and Israelis,”
Samaritans were the one issue the Palestinians and Israelis could agree about.

First-century evangelists first brought Christianity to Egypt.
Those Egyptians who remain Christian are known as Copts.
Estimates of their numbers vary widely, from four million to twelve million.
Because of a split in the Christian Church in the fifth century over the nature of Christ, Copts have since then developed their own distinctive brand of Christianity.
Copts have kept or even toughened many of the rules that European Christians have relaxed.

I was in love with Arabic.
It was my key to a world hidden in plain sight.
It admitted me into places where otherwise I could not have gone, let me read books and poetry that dated back over a thousand years - for it had changed little during that time, being the sacred language of the Koran - and opened up conversations I never could have had without it.
The language also had an extraordinary system to its design.
Take three letters, and it formed a root.
That root, like a musical motif, could be treated in one of twelve different ways, each one changing its meaning in a subtly different way.
The result was a language as sweetly mathematical as a Bach motet.

Egyptian courtesy:
Exaggerated compliments, half-meant invitations, and gargantuan hospitality.
One particular exchange that the priest had with a flower merchant summed it up for me.
After a lengthy negotiation over price, the flower seller declared: “Of course, I would like you to have them for free.”
Nimbler at this than I would ever have been, the priest had an equally insincere compliment ready in reply:
“You know, I only came here for the pleasure of seeing you.”

A devout Copt should pray seven times a day, avoid drinking alcohol, and never smoke.
Copts fast not only during Lent but also during Advent and at other times of the year - 210 days of the year in total.

Egyptians believe themselves to be the most religious people in the world.

Egyptians are asking, ‘Who am I? Am I Arab or Egyptian?’”

The pharaoh Akhenaten, father of Tutankhamun, was the first known monotheist in history. He abolished all gods except his beloved Aten, the sun god.

Native Egyptians came to be given their own special label, to distinguish them from the Greek settlers who owned most of the land and ran the administration.
They were called Aiguptioi - from which the words “Egypt” and “Copt” are both derived.

Nasser saw himself as an Arab, not an Egyptian.
The title of his biography is not The First Egyptian but The Last Arab.
For more than a decade the name “Egypt” vanished from the map, as Nasser changed the country’s name to the United Arab Republic and sought to unify it with Syria.

In 1956, after Israel joined with Britain and France in a secret conspiracy to destabilize Egypt and seize the Suez Canal, Nasser stripped many Jewish Egyptians of their citizenship.
He went on to expel thousands from the country, and nationalize - that is, confiscate - their businesses.

One Egyptian banker, a Muslim, told me that the attitude toward the Copts was one “that you might have toward a younger brother - a half brother, really. Someone you know is there, but you’d really rather he wasn’t.”

For some Copts the answer was emigration, made easier for them by their relatively high levels of education and a favorable attitude from Western governments.
Between 1993 and 1997, 76 percent of requests from Egyptians for permanent emigration to the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were made by Copts.
Emigration to the West is the Copts’ preferred way out. In the United States there are more than two hundred Coptic churches and an estimated three-quarters of a million Copts.

Summer 2007: when foreigners were heading for Kabul: they were mostly burly, muscular characters with North Face backpacks.

Hindu Kush, a great mountain range that runs along the eastern borders of Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan and separates those countries from China.
They are really part of the Himalayas.
Though they are called the “Roof of the World,” it is more apt to think of them as a wall or a rampart:
Many times over, they have been the furthest point eastward that any people has reached.
These mountains are to human cultures what coral reefs are to marine life: rich and diverse.

Kafiristan went unvisited and came to be called the “dark spot on the map of Asia.”

The Kam often had vendettas against each other, but a neat custom enabled them to dodge these if they wished:
A man needed only to pretend to hide from his would-be killer, who then pretended not to see him.

In 1895 three military units loyal to Abdur Rahman advanced on Kafiristan.
The territory that Abdur Rahman conquered was eventually renamed Nuristan, the “land of light,” to celebrate its forced conversion.

The last pagans of Pakistan.
These people were the Kalasha. They survived the forced conversion of their Kafir cousins in the high mountains.

The mehtars of Chitral were under British protection and Abdur Rahman could not enter their territory.
It is for this reason, too, that their valley is in Pakistan, which annexed Chitral in 1969.

The mountains, however, have also protected them from almost all invaders, and their valleys can still be peaceful even when there is chaos and violence just a few miles away.

I decided to venture into the Hindu Kush from the other side.
From Beijing, I traveled by train and road west through China’s troubled province of Xinjiang and into a northern province of Pakistan called Hunza.
The area was in many respects very similar to Afghanistan, but free of danger.
I could ride the local minibuses, go shopping in the markets, and talk freely to people (in a little Dari, and mostly English widely spoken because the region has no single universal language).

Pakistan is a country stitched together in 1948 from a collection of provinces - including Chitral - that had little but religion in common.
Constant tension with India also helped create a feeling that being more Islamic was the same as being more patriotic.
Widespread corruption created a sense that only the pious could be trusted to run things honestly.
Pakistan is a country of contradictions. It was founded by a liberal Shi’a Muslim, but in the past twenty years, four thousand Shi’a have been killed.

If I ask Kalasha people, ‘Why do we do this thing?’ or ‘Why do we follow that tradition?’ they will only say, ‘That was how our grandparents did it.’ They don’t know what it means.

They regarded adultery, for the most part, as a matter of general hilarity.
When a man and a married woman were caught making love, the tribe would come to watch and laugh.
The man did not find it nearly as amusing, as he would have to pay the cuckolded husband a heavy fine.
The woman did not pay a penalty.

A blasphemy law has been deployed oppressively against the country’s minorities, and religious extremists have carved out areas of virtual self-rule in the Pashtun areas near Chitral, where they are challenged only by controversial, lethal US drones.
Pakistani politicians who see a whole range of difficult constituencies that they must buy can see one that is cheap: religious fundamentalists will give their support for free if they are given influence over education and the morality of the people.
All that is needed is to mortgage the future.
A vein of tolerance can still be found in Pakistan wherever the fundamentalists have been kept out.
Chitral had long been largely cut offfrom the rest of Pakistan by its topography and by the British-drawn border, which put part of the valley in Afghanistan.

Both Mongolia and Tibet have alphabets based on the Syriac script introduced by Iraqi Christian missionaries more than a millennium ago.

There are more speakers of Aramaic in metropolitan Detroit than there are in Baghdad: over a hundred thousand Iraqi Chaldeans live in the city.

Large-scale emigration from the Middle East began in the late nineteenth century, driven by growing poverty and land shortages in Lebanon and Palestine, as well as Ottoman oppression and conflict.
Most of the migrants were Christian, and Latin America was a favored destination because it both encouraged immigration and offered plenty of economic opportunities.
As a consequence, it attracted the lion’s share of Arab Christian migrants, with some startling results:
Today, 5 percent of Latin America’s population is ethnically Arab.
There are more Christians of Palestinian descent in Chile than in Palestine.
Eight presidents of South and Central American countries have been of Middle Eastern descent.
The world’s richest man (Carlos Slim Helú, a businessman), one of its best-known singers (Shakira), and the actress Salma Hayek all have Lebanese ancestry.

Michigan that has a higher proportion of Arab Americans than any other state.
Their history is explained by the Arab American Museum in Dearborn, a city where 20 percent of the population are Arab.
A majority of Arab Americans are Christian.

Now nearly 3.5 million Americans have roots in the Arab world, according to the Arab American Institute.

He was a Christian Palestinian living in a largely Jewish neighborhood. He had married a non-Arab woman.
He had chosen to live in a Jewish neighborhood in part as a challenge to the voluntary segregation most immigrants practiced.
“Peer pressure controls kids. And they had Jewish friends, which made me happy - that we can coexist.”

“We are melting,” Yusif agreed, quoting a line of Palestinian poetry.

Druze had much trouble explaining themselves in the overtly religious culture of America.
“It’s like the Chinese system - we have traditions but no rules.”

A Druze sheikh once offered some consolation to a worried expatriate mother whose daughter had left the religion.
“When your child dies, she will be reincarnated back in Lebanon as Druze again.”

Middle Eastern émigrés from these smaller religions find common ground with Jews - especially because the latter practice their traditions and customs in private, keeping their identity and community alive but outwardly assimilating into secular society.

They had no nostalgia for the Middle East.
“There are more rights for prisoners here than for free men there.”

A knowledge of history can help us see that any civilization is at its most successful where it is most open to others and the ideas of others.

Focusing on extremism only when it turns violent ignores the fact that violence comes at the end of a long process of radicalization, which begins with the encouragement of anger and hatred.