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Selective Reading Deceives Readers

Posted by Tiglath (Guest) - Tuesday, October 19 2004, 11:51:49 (CEST) from 203.173.2.134 - 203-173-2-134.dyn.iinet.net.au Australia - Windows XP - Internet Explorer Website: Website title:

Selective Reading Deceives Readers John Joseph, Ph.D. Lewis Audenreid Professor of History, Emeritus Franklin and Marshall College A few years ago, I pointed out on the Assyrian Forum that Fred Aprim had misrepresented the source that he had cited--Hagarism, by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook. He had totally ignored information from that book that contradicted what he quoted from it. I wrote to ask why not tell the readers all that Crone and Cook had said on his subject. The following was Aprim's response on the Forum : "Joseph, I will NOT be that person who propagate[s] ANTI Assyrian material. I will leave that to others..."; not realizing that he had just admitted that his information, which he wanted to base on the authority of two distinguished scholars, was deliberately falsified. If Aprim thought that Patricia Crone and Michael Cook were "ANTI Assyrian," intellectual integrity demanded that he either ignore their book, or give his readers the whole truth and then proceed to correct his source with his own evidence. Instead, he quoted their book out of context in order to confirm something that Patricia Crone and Michael Cook did not write or believe in. Last month one of Fred Aprim's "posts" on the Forum and Zinda caught my eye; it started with these high-minded words: "It is very unlikely that an educated nation would fall in a deceitful trap, because an educated nation is a conscious nation and an informed nation is rarely misguided. Therefore, our people must continue their efforts to educate themselves and undo the mistakes of the past." With some hesitation I read on. In his effort to educate, Aprim proceeded with a history lesson on the Christian villages of northern Iraq, starting with "Tel-Kepe" (Telkaif), a place that his sources presumably told him "was inhabited by the remnants of the Assyrians." Alqosh, likewise, was not only the seat of the patriarchs of the Church of the East for many centuries, but also "an Assyrian city since time immemorial." From the above and other details noted below, Aprim concluded with these "Final Thoughts." "Alqosh," he wrote, "must be joined with the other Assyrian towns in the Nineveh plain, such as Karamlesh, Bartella, Baghdeda, Baqufa, Tellosqof, Batnaya, Tel Kepe, and others as a special administrative region, within the Republic of Iraq, for the Assyrian Christians." History has proved, he "informed" us, that this is the only way that can guarantee the survival of the indigenous Assyrians on their ancestral lands." I am not interested here in Aprim's personal opinions--right or wrong--but in what he attributes to his sources. Let us look at a few of his references, three of which are lumped together in one brief paragraph. He begins it with "Xenophobe" [for Xenophon--an understandable error].In Aprim's own words: "Xenophobe in 401 B.C. writes that the Greek army crossed the Zab River northeast of Nimrud. The army then passed by Karamlesh (according to Fletcher, 'Notes from Nineveh,' Philadelphia, 1950"--[the date should be 1850, not 1950] ) and continued on and went by a town near Maspilla (Mosul), where they gathered provisions. [S]cholars believe that the town in question near Mosul was Tel-Kepe. Ainsworth (died 1622) declares that Tel-Kepe was inhabited by the remnant of the Assyrians." My Comments 1. Xenophon does not "write" that the Greek army crossed the Zab River northeast of "Nimrud." He never heard of Nimrud nor does he mention it in his celebrated memoir Anabasis. He called what we now know as its site, "Larisa" and described it as "deserted." 2. Mespila is not Xenophon's name for Mosul. He identified, again, what we now know to be the site of Nineveh, as Mespila. He and his troops passed by its "ruins." The names Nineveh, Mosul, , or "Kermalis", used by Fletcher, are not mentioned in Anabasis. There is no mention also of 'Assyria' or 'Assyrians.' even though he and his"Ten Thousand" passed through geographical Assyria. He referred to the two famous Assyrian cities of Nimrud and Nineveh as Median cities, "inhabited in ancient times by the Medes." Throughout his memoir, he refers to ancient Assyria as Media. [See Xenophon's Anabasis, III.2,25--p.265 of the 1998 edition. ] Let us remember that the Greek general and his troops passed through Assyria a little over 200 years after the downfall of the Assyrian empire. For the fifty years that followed, the country was ruled by the Medes, one of the members of the "coalition" that had invaded Assyria. The Greek army lived off the meager fat of the land for weeks. They gathered information from villagers and prisoners that they had held. Apparently, for these natives the defeat of the Assyrian empire was too far back in the distant past to be retained in their collective memory as part of the local lore. IMPORTANT NOTE: The name 'Assyrian' eventually came to life when Christianity reached northern Mesopotamia, especially when the Hebrew Bible--which spoke extensively of the ancient Assyrians--was translated into Syriac' this was over 800 years after Xenophon had passed through these lands.[For details, see Modern Assyrians, pp. 22-27. ] 4. Aprim speaks of "Ainsworth (died 1622)"; he most probably is referring to William F. Ainsworth, born some 200 years later. In 1840 Ainsworth was sent, together with Christian Rassam, on an expedition jointly sponsored by the British Geographical Society and the Society for Promotion of Christian Knowledge. They were to make inquiries concerning Kurdistan and its people, and to look into the life of the "Christians in Coordistan." In a two-volume book that Ainsworth published in 1842, titled Travels and Researches in Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Chaldea and Armenia, he says nothing about the Eastern Christians being "the remnant of the Assyrians." [ I will be glad if I am corrected on this.] What he reported was that these Easterners considered themselves "Chaldeans"--"descendants of the ancient Chaldeans of Assyria, Mesopotamia and Babylonia." Fletcher also referred to "Kermalis" as a large "Chaldean" village; actually, all Catholic villages are referred to as Chaldean and he uses it to name their ethnicity--he refers in one instance to someone as looking "More English than Chaldean." The facial features of the Persian Christians [of Urmiyah ] could be traced, according to Fletcher, to the Magians (Persians & Medes).[ J. P. Fletcher, Notes from Nineveh , pp.172,188, 224. For details and reasons why the name "Chaldeans" was used as distinct from "Assyrian", see Ainsworth, vol. 2, p.272; Modern Assyrians, pp.3-9.] Let us look at some other liberties that Aprim takes in the misuse of his sources. Speaking of "the region of Dohuk," he claims that it "was suppose[d] to be assigned to Assyrians per the recommendations of the Special Commission of the League of Nations when the Iraqi-Turkish frontiers were being discussed in the 1920s." These Special Recommendations say nothing about "assigning" land to the Assyrians, who.to the League of Nations in the late 1920s and early 1930s, were those followers of the Church of the East who had found refugee in Iraq after World War I. The Chaldean and Syrian Orthodox communities were not a part of these negotiations, nor did they want to be. Only the Patriarch of the Church of the East, Mar Eshai Shamun, waa involved in the deliberations with the League of Nations which centered around the future of the entire province of Mosul. What the Special Commission specifically said about these Assyrians was the following: "Whichever may be the sovereign State [over the province of Mosul, Turkey or Iraq], it ought to grant these Assyrians a certain local autonomy, recognizing their right to appoint their own officials and contenting itself with a tribute from them, paid through the agency of their Patriarch." [ For details see Modern Assyrians, pp.175-194.. ] Another book that Aprim grapples with is David Wilmshurst's imposing work,The Ecclesiastical Organization of the Church of the East, 1318-1913. For a great deal of his information on the Christian villages of northern Iraq, Aprim depends on this valuable resource; it covers many of these villages as well as the various dioceses of the Church of the East, its monasteries, etc. Wilmshurst also has extensive demographic data on a large number of these Christian centers from the nineteenth century on. According to Aprim these villages have been "demographically Assyrian for centuries," yet Wilmshurst's massive study of over-800 pages, covering some 600 years, says nothing about "Assyrians." The Syriac documents that Wilmshurst had consulted refer to "Suraye Madenhaye" which he translates as 'East Syrians,' meaning Arameans, a usage established as far back as the third century B.C. when the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, and almost 1,000 years later, into Syriac. Instead of explaining to his readers why he found Wilmshurst's translation of 'Suraye' into 'Syrian' wrong, Aprim silently substituted 'Assyrian' for 'Syrian' and offered only a sly verbiage to justify his sneaky translation:. "Suraye Madenhaye" became "Eastern Assyrians or Syrians as used by some theologians"--informing his readers that only "some theologians" translate "Suraye" as 'Syrians.' Here again, I am not interested in what Aprim's preferred translation of 'Suraye' is; important is the misrepresentation of .David Wilmshurst's monumental work. Nowhere does Wilmshurst tell us that "these [Christian] villages have been demographically Assyrian for centuries.," as Aprim claims. Aprim, like everybody else, knows better than to say only "some theologians" translate Suraye into Syrians. Are all the Syrian Orthodox and Catholics, or all scholars of Syriac language and literature, theologians? And what does Aprim have against theologians? Haven't some of world's leading scholars in the field of Semitic studies been theologians? [ For details on the meaning of 'Suraya' and the history of its usage, see Modern Assyrians, pp. 9-15. or ask for a copy of those pages from j_joseph@fandm.edu ] Aprim wrote that "an informed nation is rarely misguided." A corollary of his maxim would be more to the point: "A misinformed nation is always misguided." That, sadly, has been our lot for a very long time, and those who misguide us have been our "educated," some of whom, as we have seen above, deliberately hide or distort the information that they pick-and-choose for us. I would like to end with the final paragraph of a piece that I wrote in Zinda in 1999: "I seriously believe that the single most important problem facing our Assyrian community and the reasons for our disunity stem from the fact that nobody takes us seriously on the question of our identity--not our friends, not our enemies. Actually, they all seem to know our history better than we do, be they [educated] Kurds or Arabs, the Syrian Orthodox or the Chaldeans , the Iraqi [political] parties or the scholars at Oxford, Harvard, Yale or Chicago, or the U.S. Census Bureau in Washington D.C., let alone the Department of State there.We seem to have an identity crisis and for no reason. We have an illustrious history as Christians, as speakers of the Aramaic language for centuries, as descendants of a number of great nations of the distant past. United with our other Christian brethren, the Suroyo and the Chaldeans, we--who also called ourselves Suraye/Suroyo in my boyhood days [and still do] --can fight for our basic human rights [in the land of our ancestors] and we will be respected for it." --------------------- - BACK TO INDEX - REPLY - QUOTE - EDIT - DELETE -

The full topic: Selective Reading Deceives Readers Tiglath - Tuesday, October 19 2004, 11:51:49 (CEST) Oppps! Aprim did it again. Tiglath - 10/19 11:56 Re: Selective Reading Deceives Readers parhad - 10/19 19:47

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