The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> H.G. Wells on Nestorians

H.G. Wells on Nestorians

Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Saturday, February 14 2009, 19:58:17 (CET)
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But first on the Arab mind...

“..the Arab mind had been, as it were, smouldering, it had been producing poetry and much religious discussion; under the stimulus of the national and racial successes, it presently blazed out with a brilliance second only to that of the Greeks during their best period. It revived the human pursuit of science. If the Greek was the father, then the Arab was the foster-father of the scientific method. Through the Arabs it was, and not by the Latin (Christian, mine) route, that the modern world received that gift of light and power.”

And now for us....

“ The Nestorian Christians, the Christians to the east of orthodoxy (within the Persian empire, mine) seem to have been much more intelligent and active-minded than the court theologians of Byzantium, and at a much higher level of general education than the Latin-speaking Christians of the west. They had been tolerated during the latter days of the Sassanids, and they were tolerated by Islam until the ascendancy of the Turks in the eleventh century (as a result of the Crusades no doubt, mine). They were the intellectual backbone of the Persian world. They had preserved much of the Hellenic medical science, and had even added to it. In the Omayyad times most the physicians in the Caliph’s dominions were Nestorians, and no doubt many learned Nestorians professed Islam without SERIOUS COMPUNCTION (emphasis, mine) or any great change in their work and thoughts. They had preserved much of Aristotle both in Greek and in Syrian translations. They had a considerable mathematical literature. Their equipment makes the contemporary resources of Saint Benedict or Cassiodorus seem very pitiful. To these Nestorian teachers came the fresh Arab mind out of the desert, keen and curious, and learnt much and acquired much.”

The Semites came from Arabia....Sargon the Great and his Akkadians...Hammurabi and his Amorites and, ultimately, Muhammad and his Muslims, all came from the desert and they all “learnt much and acquired much”. No one thinks to ridicule the desert tribes of Sargon or Hammurabi for “merely copying” those whom they conquered and were in turn conquered by....only in the case of Islam, because of Christian prejudice and hatred, do our nationalists insult and slander Muslims as “unoriginal” and “copycats”.

Wells again...

“And a century or so in advance of the West, there grew up in the Moslem world at a number of centers, at Basra, at Kufa, at Bagdad and Cairo, and at Cordoba, out of what were at first religious schools dependent on mosques, a series of great universities. The light of these universities shone far beyond the Moslem world, and drew students to them from east and west. At Cordoba in particular, there were great numbers of Christian students, and the influence of Arab philosophy coming by way of Spain upon universities of Paris, Oxford, and north Italy, and upon Western European thought generally was very considerable indeed.”

This is the point Dr Joseph stresses in his book; that Nestorians have a noble and proud history as teachers and compliers and guardians of the treasures of the ancient classics which would have been lost to the world without their scholarship. This is a heritage to be proud of, on its own. There is no need, he says, to tack on this absurd “we are Assyrians” foolishness thereby making a joke out of such a noble tradition...as Nestorians. This adoption of the Assyrian heritage has brought nothing but disgrace and destruction to us...as it continues to do. Without it Aprim and any number of fairly bright people among us would have settled down and contributed something meaningful...maybe.

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