The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Continuing With The Book

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Saturday, April 7 2007, 16:10:49 (CEST)
from 189.156.7.192 - dsl-189-156-7-192.prod-infinitum.com.mx

Mexico -

Windows XP -

Mozilla
Website:
Website title:

The real trouble began with the advent of the foreign missionaries in the 19th century. The evangelical “awakening” in both Europe and America, at that time, would eventually lead to more missionaries stationed among these few Nestorians than anywhere else on earth, with each group disparaging the other and vying for influence and converts among the Nestorians. Since, in Islam, religion and politics go hand in hand, the Muslims could be forgiven for believing that Christian missionaries worked hand in hand with their own governments and that the coming of the one meant the other was sure to follow, if not present already in the person of the missionaries themselves.

Prior to that the Nestorians suffered no more persecution from their Muslim neighbors than the Muslims themselves suffered at the hands of landlords and government officials in what was a feudal system which rendered both groups powerless and subject to the whims and exactions of their overlords.

The coming of the missionaries plus the expansionist dreams of Czarist Russia along with the growing thunder of the drums of the “great” war to come all had a hand in disrupting the relative calm and prosperity under which the Nestorians, especially those in the Urmia region, had lived for at least five centuries prior to the 1830s. All that was lacking, to complete their undoing, was the handful of budding nationalists among them who saw in the rebirth of a modern Assyrian consciousness their ticket to enter the nation-building sweeptstakes resulting from Wilson’s “Fourteen Points”, the League of Nations charter and the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. This belief in the “opportunities” presented by the break down of Muslim rule then, as now, led to tragic results for all Nestorians.

From the first time Russian troops occupied Persian lands (1724) and every time after, as well as when they entered Ottoman lands, the local Nestorians believed they had the powerful friends and co-religionists they’d been lacking to even their score. Indeed the Christian soldiers took the part of the Nestorians several times but went even farther, subjecting the Muslims to violence and persecution such as the Nestorians themselves had never suffered at the hands of Muslims. Great anger and resentment built up among the innocent Muslim population so that when the Russian troops withdrew, as they always wound up doing, the Muslims fought back and subjected the Nestorians to the retaliation they could not visit on their Christian “friends”. This has always been the pattern, as it will be again: a moment’s revenge-by-proxy has led to massive and prolonged retaliation.

At a later time it will be well worth examining more closely what foreign missionaries actually thought about the Nestorians, their Muslim neighbors, and their own mission among them. For the present it’s enough to point out that what the missionaries meant by “help” and “saving” the Nestorians was quite different from what the Nestorians understood by such terms. The missionaries meant they would “help” the Nestorians to see the true light of Jesus and “save” them from continuing in their errors and heresies.

When missionaries such as the American Dr Asahel Grant and others told the Patriarch that “their people”, and governments, had a great interest in the Nestorians and wanted to do all in their power for them, the Patriarch, his family and community leaders, all of them very pleased with their own religious beliefs and seeing no “error” or cause for concern over Nestorian souls, naturally believed what was being promised was political as well as economic aid, for it was these things they were lacking, not Jesus Christ. Indeed, right up to the eve of World War I, according to Dr Joseph, the “Chaldean” Catholics felt themselves to be Nestorian at heart and would gladly have rejoined their mother church if only the Patriarch could offer them the same political protection the French government was. In short, the two sides, Nestorian and missionary, did not clearly understand one another…unless, of course, the missionaries were deliberately suggesting one thing in order to win “converts”, while really meaning something quite different.

The arrival of Dr Grant in the Hakkari region coincided with a planned uprising by the Kurds against the new centralizing policy of Sultan Mahmud II (1839). Dr Grant unwittingly caused suspicion among the Kurdish leaders planning the revolt…especially in Badr Khan who believed that these were the first moves by foreigners to take over his lands. Additionally Dr Grant raised false hopes among the Nestorians that they were to have powerful friends and allies who would intervene on their behalf. Their subsequent behavior, as a result of this misconception…. along with the building of what looked to be a huge fortress by Dr Grant in a Nestorian village, led to attacks against the Nestorians, as well as moves against the life of Dr Grant, when the uprising finally came. As a result over seven thousand Nestorians were killed and several villages destroyed. A European newspaper of that day placed the blame for the slaughter of the Nestorians squarely at the feet of the foreign missionaries and the false hopes for political help they’d raised among the Nestorians, as well as the suspicions their unsanctioned activities in the tribal and Ottoman lands engendered among the Kurds and central Ottoman and Persian governments.

---------------------

- BACK TO INDEX - REPLY - QUOTE - EDIT - DELETE -

The full topic:
No replies.

Content-length: 5949
Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Accept-encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-language: es-es,es;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: *hidded*
Host: www.insideassyria.com
Keep-alive: 300
Referer: http://www.insideassyria.com/rkvsf5/rkvsf_core.php?.5ANn.
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; es-ES; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3