The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Second Book by Dr John Joseph

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Tuesday, August 7 2007, 1:48:57 (CEST)
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Just began Dr Joseph’s book titled, “Muslim-Christian Relations and Inter-Christian Rivalries in the Middle East…the case of the Jacobites in an age of transition”. For the sake of brevity I’ll refer to it as “Muslim-Christian Relations”. As with the previous book, the very first pages shed a new light, at least for me, on our recent history … a period of time when very little that is not folk history or tribal myth is known.

Ordinarily one pays little heed to the braying of asses except when their noise threatens to arouse the “enemy”. This is what makes the cries coming from Magpie, Aprim and the rest worth noting: because the sum total of their so-called national work will be to again awaken the antipathy of the Muslims among whom the rapidly dwindling minority Iraqi Christians must live. It’s bad enough for the Iraqi Christian minority that this war was brought to Iraq by western Christian nations praying to their god for divine guidance, but to have ex-pat Iraqi Christians, living in those same countries and paying their taxes for the weapons used to destroy Iraq, claim to be working for the “liberation” and a “homeland” for the Christian Iraqis, to be carved out by force of Christian arms, is more than will be tolerated.

If, as they claim, they are interested in protecting this minority they would refrain from the kind of rabble-rousing intended to get an “assyria” for those Christians in Iraq who themselves know better than to make such demands and would dread being roped off in a Christian enclave only made possible by the same Christian nations that have waged a totally unjustified war for the last 18 years against their neighbors. We saw already that these so-called nationalists lent their support enthusiastically and uncritically to every idiotic pretext and promise Bush gave for this most inhumane and illegal war…also that the result was, predictably, very far from the rosy promises they made of a “liberated” Iraq where democracy would guarantee them “minority rights”…not only has nothing like it occurred but Kurdistan has risen up where their “assyria” was supposed to go. How wrong can you get?

Before exploring the dismal past history of just such betrayals of their own people for “promises” from western Christianity to “do something” for them and how often this has resulted in tragedy…tragedy the nationalists have then had to blame on “enemies”, both without and among themselves so they could continue their “work” cloaked in the same catchy phrases that just failed them…I thought to respond to the preposterous claim that Dr Joseph and other scholars, who happen to disagree with the half-barbarous explanations of history these nationalists churn up from their fevered imaginations, are all paid and trained agents corrupting knowledge, scholarship etc. in the service of a nefarious scheme hatched by Western Powers, the CIA, Ford Foundation etc. to deny modern Assyrians validity as lineal descendants of the ancients out of some never-explained “fear” of what will happen if these people unite in an “assyria”.

As ignorant of true scholarship as everything else, Magpie and her nationalist brood consider any bit of information as issuing from an “enemy” when it contradicts their own childhood mythology. Believing what they were told as children they’ve not been able, or dared, to develop a truly academic and scientific attitude towards discovering facts, no matter how shattering to those pleasant accounts of their supposed greatness, as lineal descendants of the ancient Assyrians, they may be. The result has been adults held in an advanced state of arrested-development who lash out like children when they can’t get their way and see only “enemies” out to “get them” by frustrating their narcissistic conceit that they are the “children of Shalmanessar”. If a nation could be won by holding one’s breath and turning blue, they might stand a chance.

Recently they latched onto Professor Hitti, who guided Dr Joseph through to his doctorate at Princeton University, as the person who “trained” Dr Joseph to hold “erroneous” views meant to “deny Assyrians”etc etc. In an academic work one is not supposed to set out to prove one’s pet thesis, mustering all of one’s “friends” to show popular support, but rather test it against all available scholarship pro and con leaving it to the reader, especially in an academic endeavor, to determine validity. To merely pull out of context whatever seems to verify one’s own prejudices and beliefs, while passing over contrary views, is the work of a propagandist, not an acclaimed scholar.

In the very first pages of this book I came across the following…

“Some scholars have concluded that Islamic mysticism (Sufism) “is wholly based on the teachings and practices of the Christian monks and ascetics,” and that “there is hardly a point in Islamic Mysticism which has not been borrowed from the main body of earlier Christian mystical thought.” Professor Phillip K. Hitti has written that the introduction of neo-Platonic speculation and mysticism to the Arabic world was chiefly through the influence of Jacobite authors. Some Orientalists, such as Louis Massgnon, disagree. They argue that Sufism was a direct offshoot of the Muslims’ own primitive ascetism, brought about by their intensive meditation on the Quran and on the Sunna of the Prophet;it owed little to Christian or other influences.”

Reading the above you get no idea of Dr Joseph’s own views on the matter. He presents two opposing theories, one of them held by his mentor or, according to the nationalists, his “trainer”… and very flattering to Christianity, into which Dr Joseph was born. The other gives credit to the Muslims themselves and contradicts the professor, or “trainer”, who approved Dr Joseph’s dissertation…so much for being trained. Also, the view held by Professor Hitti, who supposedly “trained” Dr Joseph, is set against theories of other noted scholars, without any indication of which view, even when expressed by Dr Joseph’s professor OR “trainer”, is correct or held by Dr Joseph himself.

This is scholarship…this is academic and scientific writing and research…it is not partisanship or propaganda. And for this very reason is anathema to our nationalists who despise true scholarship, the institutions of higher learning where it is practiced, and those whose profession, not hobby, it is, even while they extol their own and their friends’ “higher education”( none of which is in the field of modern Middle Eastern history but most often the sciences or business), which, to them, means nothing more than the ability to get a good job after college and buy that first Rolex. That and telling the “truth” about their lineal descent from the ancient Assyrians…based solely on what “we know”.

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