2 of 3

Mosul, too, had its stellar Christian past. And surrounding the cities were hundreds of monasteries that were certainly equal to anything in, say, contemporary Ireland in terms of scholarly tradition.

These Mesopotamian monasteries were also the base camps for one of the greatest missionary enterprises in Christian history. Especially between the 7th and 9th centuries, the Church of the East was establishing bishoprics and metropolitans across Asia — through Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, into Tibet and Kyrgyzstan, and as far as India and China.

Looking at the world in 850 or so, few observers would have doubted that the Christian future lay in the Middle East and Asia, rather than in the barbarian-ravaged lands of Western Europe.

Insofar as they know the story of Christianity in the East, Westerners generally assume that those churches must have shriveled quite soon after the rise of Islam during the 7th and 8th centuries. Actually, the decline was much slower; Iraq's churches and monasteries were still booming well into the 12th and 13th centuries.

What effectively finished them off were the Mongol invasions and their aftermath, which devastated most of Central Asia and the Middle East from the 1220s onwards. Also, in the late-13th century, the world entered a terrifying era of global cooling, which severely cut food supplies and contributed to mass famine.

Meanwhile, the collapse of trade and commerce crippled cities, leaving the world much poorer and more vulnerable. A hungry and desperate society looked for scapegoats. Europe's Christians turned on Jews, killing and expelling hundreds of thousands; in Mesopotamia and elsewhere, Muslims inflicted a similar fate upon their Christian neighbors.

Christian communities were uprooted or wiped out across the Middle East, and ceased to exist in most of Central Asia. Churches suffered mass closure or destruction, including at such ancient centers as Erbil, Mosul, and Baghdad. Bishops and clergy were tortured and imprisoned.

Christianity survived, but was confined to poorer and more remote regions. The Patriarchs of "Babylon" now literally headed for the hills: in later centuries, patriarchs made their home at the Rabban Hormizd monastery, in the mountains near Mosul. Iraq's shining Christian millennium had ended.

The final phase of the Mesopotamian churches began with the First World War, when the Muslim Ottoman Empire began slaughtering Christians across its territory. Among others, they targeted the Assyrians — that is, the last remnants of the Nestorian church that had once carried the faith of Yeshua to the Pacific Ocean.

(The Nestorians had split into the Chaldeans, who accepted papal authority, and the Assyrian church, which retained its independence. The ancient Jacobites, meanwhile, became known as Syrian Orthodox.)

Matters scarcely improved under the successor states established on the ruins of Ottoman rule. In 1933, Muslim forces in the new nation of Iraq launched a deadly assault on the surviving communities of the Assyrian peoples. Government-sponsored militias cleansed much of the far north of Iraq of its Assyrian population, killing thousands and eliminating dozens of villages.

next page... |  2 of 3

share this page

December (Web-only) 2008, Vol. 53