Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (43 page)

This village of Nuristanis stands at the top of the Kalasha valley of Rumbur. It was founded by refugees from the forcible conversion to Islam of the peoples of the region now called Nuristan. Photo by the author

As Wazir and I were walking up a mountainside on our way to the border with Nuristan, we encountered a group of his Muslim friends. “Here’s a mix of everyone around,” Wazir said as he introduced me: “a Chitrali, another Kalasha convert like myself, a Gujar, and a Nuristani.” The second-to-last man he named was from an especially dark-skinned nomad group, and the last man had brown hair and was notably fair-skinned. The Kalasha convert was stolidly carrying a big box that he had tied around his shoulders, which he planned to deliver to a shop in the Nuristani village. As we walked, the box burst and six bags of sweet bread fell out. We each gave him a hand by taking one. I had often imagined visiting a village of Nuristanis, but I had never imagined that in a snow-swept wilderness hard by the borders of Afghanistan I would be delivering them their daily supply of brioche. Nor did I expect them to be playing golf—“Nuristani golf,” that is, as Wazir called it. A group of Nuristani youths were standing on the edge of the ravine the Kalasha River—here, more like a stream—had carved in the narrow valley, hitting wooden balls across it with long pieces of wood shaped like hockey sticks while smaller children scampered to recover them. The winner was simply the person who hit the balls the farthest. Wazir was a champion player.

The village itself consisted of a single building made of wood, like the one that I had seen in Birir. Each family had a room, and the rooms were linked to one another by balconies and exterior wooden stairways. Once inside, I found that the passages smelled of urine. An old man lay, weak and coughing, on a bed; the hearth was in the center of the room, other beds lined the walls, and a collection of shiny metal crockery was displayed on a set of shelves. (Displays of silver are mentioned by Robertson as a status symbol among the Kafirs.) The old man’s wife made tea for me and Wazir while two small boys, obviously her grandchildren, sat and stared at everything I did. One of them asked to have one of my Kalasha garlands. I gave it to him, and then the other could barely leave me alone, tugging at one of my remaining garlands in the hope that I would let him take it. I asked to take a photograph of a small girl who had been watching us from outside, but the question apparently offended the grandmother: taking pictures of the boys was allowed, but not girls. Still, the family was not quite as strict as some, because they had allowed us into their room. This was perforce shared between women and men, so some Muslims would not have allowed us to enter it. As I got up to go, a pile of bedclothes at the side of the room moved, and a woman underneath them spoke.

The Kalasha are famous for their homemade wine and brandy, which their religion does not prohibit. Here Wazir Ali (left), Azem Bek (third from left), and the author (between them) sample it during the Chaumos festival in January 2013.

After our tea, Wazir and I went down to the floor below, and he knocked on the door of another house, to say hello. At the mention that there was a foreigner outside, two small girls popped their faces around the door for just a second and then were gone and could not be persuaded to emerge again. The village men, however, were very happy to be photographed, pointing out to me their own distinctive features and light-colored hair, and gesturing proudly to their village mosque, the only freestanding structure they had besides their village house.

—————

WHEN THE TIME CAME TO LEAVE THE VALLEY
, Azem Beg rode with me in the car to Chitral, and asked if we might stop at a house at the foot of the Kalasha valley, where the people are all Muslim (it was in the same town, in fact, as Wazir’s school). He was paying a condolence call on the family who lived there and invited me to join him. I noticed what a good ambassador he was for his people, and that a part of this was how he played down his Kalasha identity. His name could be taken for a Muslim one (it was twenty years, one person told me, since any child had been given an old-style Kalasha name). He prayed with the family Muslim style, extending his hands and symbolically wiping his face with them. Earning Muslims’ respect in such ways could come in very handy when needed. Some Kalasha had once been taken as hostages in the course of a dispute over land, and Azem had worked with this family to set them free.

The Kalasha needed diplomacy because they were vulnerable. A book written in 1982, by a passionate Pakistani Muslim defender of the Kalasha, presented a gloomy picture of Kalasha-Muslim relations: vandalism of Kalasha holy sites, money offered to Kalasha who converted, “missionary activity of the school teachers and a continuous denigration of the Kalasha culture by them.” The writer believed that, as he put it, “outsiders suffering from a feeling of superior culture” were destroying the old traditions. He was in part reflecting the efforts made in the 1950s, shortly after independence, to convert the Kalasha forcibly to Islam.

Azem Beg and Wazir said that things had improved over the past few decades. The Pakistani police were controlling access to the valley and keeping out some of the most aggressive missionaries. Their own numbers, they told me, were increasing. Tourism—though it has decreased—has clearly benefited their villages, which now have a number of new, well-built houses. Even so, I was told by one Kalasha man that Muslim visitors would always nag him by asking, “Why have you not yet converted?”

I feared that much worse might await them. Pakistan was a country of contradictions. It was founded by a liberal Shi’a Muslim, but in the past twenty years, four thousand Shi’a have been killed there, a blasphemy law has been deployed oppressively against the country’s minorities, and religious extremists have carved out areas of virtual self-rule in the Pashtun areas near Chitral, where they are challenged only by controversial, lethal US drones. Pakistani politicians who see a whole range of difficult constituencies that they must buy can see one that is cheap: religious fundamentalists will give their support for free if they are given influence over education and the morality of the people. All that is needed is to mortgage the future.

However, a vein of tolerance can still be found in Pakistan wherever the fundamentalists have been kept out, and Chitral had long been largely cut off from the rest of Pakistan by its topography and by the British-drawn border, which put part of the valley in Afghanistan. In winter, the only land route for a long time had been a very tough climb over the Lowari Pass (at ten thousand feet) or else a trip through Afghan territory. But at the time of my visit a tunnel had been dug under the pass, which when it was fully opened would create an easy route between Chitral and the rest of Pakistan. It would boost the local economy but might also bring other, less desirable changes. “When that tunnel is open,” the Pakistani photographer Zulfikar gloomily said to me, “I wonder how long the Kalasha will last.”

Epilogue

DETROIT

I
N A SUPERMARKET IN METROPOLITAN DETROIT
, a conurbation that houses half a million people whose roots lie in the Middle East, I overheard a woman in a white smock take a break from stacking shelves to address a customer in a language that was half familiar to me; it was like Hebrew and Arabic, but different, its words unknown to me, smooth-flowing but laden with harsh consonants. It was Aramaic. Amid the Muzak and synthetic fruit drinks in a suburban American store, I was hearing the language of Christ.

Aramaic was once the pre-Islamic lingua franca of the Middle East. Its different dialects all closely resemble both Hebrew and Arabic, to which Aramaic is essentially a linguistic cousin. (For example, “peace be with you” in Arabic is
salaam aleikum,
in Hebrew
shalom aleichem
, and in Iraqi Aramaic
shlama lokhum
.) It is still the language traditional rabbis in Jerusalem use when they curse. One of the most famous of Jewish rituals, the Kaddish prayer, has an Aramaic name, not a Hebrew one. (
Kaddish
is Aramaic for “holy.”) In the Middle East, Aramaic has now been all but displaced by Arabic, but in the distant northern villages where Iraq’s Christians endured over the centuries, it remains in use. When people from those villages watched Mel Gibson’s 2004 film
The Passion of the Christ,
which was in the language that would have been used in Jesus’s time, they could understand it without subtitles.

Originally these villagers’ ancestors belonged to the Baghdad-based Christian Church of the East. Hardly known in Europe, this was once one of the world’s great churches; it had the allegiance during the Middle Ages of 10 percent of all Christians in the world, and its Patriarch, based in Baghdad, had bishops and monasteries across a wider swath of the world than the Pope in Rome. Its missionaries brought Christianity to China in
AD
635, a fact recorded on the so-called Nestorian Stele in Xi’an. In the thirteenth century it was the only Christian church to have at its head a man of East Asian origin (his name was Yahballaha, and he was Chinese or Mongolian; he came to Baghdad on an extraordinary four-thousand-mile pilgrimage from Beijing). Both Mongolia and Tibet have alphabets based on the Syriac script introduced by Iraqi Christian missionaries more than a millennium ago.

The Church of the East evolved among Christians living under the Persian Empire, who found that their ideological differences with Western Christians usefully protected them from suspicion that they might be secretly in league with the rival Byzantines. Its members have sometimes been called Nestorians, a name that identifies them with Nestorius, who rejected the idea that a Christian could say on Good Friday that “God is dead.” He wanted to distinguish between Jesus as God and Jesus as man. The Church of the East never quite adopted the teachings of Nestorius, but it did reject the use of icons and play down the role of the Virgin Mary. British missionaries called them the “Protestants of the Middle East,” choosing to ignore their un-Protestant cult of saints and practice of monasticism.

This church is today hardly even a shadow of what it once was. Much of this is due to Tamerlane, who sacked Baghdad in 1401 and left ninety thousand skulls on its ruins. He was particularly hostile to Christians, and from his time onward, it seems, the Church of the East clung on only in the mountains of northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, and southern Turkey. In the 1830s its members faced a similar threat when a militia sent from a nearby Kurdish chieftain, probably at the behest of the Ottoman government in Istanbul, killed twenty thousand Christian men, women, and children. The Church of the East—sometimes called also the Assyrian Church—had a number of splits over the centuries, some of them provoked by disputes over the church’s leadership which often historically went from father to son, leaving other potential claimants disappointed. Often the dissident group would pledge loyalty to the pope in Rome, who eventually created a Uniate “Chaldean” Church for them that was recognized by Rome but preserved its distinctive rite and customs. Today, as a result, there are both “Assyrian” and “Chaldean” Christians, as well as a small number of Christians from other traditions.

After the supermarket, I went to a nearby church—a prefabricated building set back from the road, surrounded by parked cars. Outside, it was suburban America (an area with no trace of the urban decay that has blighted the city of Detroit—Detroit’s metropolitan area is far larger than the city and more prosperous). Once inside, however, I was back in Iraq. There were stickers in Arabic on the collection boxes. A deep male voice was chanting the Chaldean liturgy, which dates back to the fifth century
AD
and is the oldest Christian service still in use, in Aramaic. “Kaddisha, kaddisha, kaddisha,” recited the priest: holy, holy, holy. Chaldean cookbooks were on sale at a little bookstore at the back, and the Catholic-style altar was decorated in gold leaf and bunches of artificial fruit. A black-and-white poster by the church door showed a picture of Mar Addai Scher, after whom the church was named.
Mar
is the Aramaic word for a holy man, and Addai Scher was a Chaldean bishop executed by Turkish soldiers in 1915. Alongside the more than one million Armenians who died in that terrible year, hundreds of thousands of Chaldeans and Assyrians were also killed, and still more fled to Iraq. In Mardin, which is now a beautiful holiday resort near the southern border of Turkey, there are houses bearing the names, carved above the door, of their onetime owners who were killed or driven out.

After 2003 it was the turn of Iraq’s Christians to flee, this time to the West. As late as the 1990s there were still 1.4 million Christians in Iraq. Now the country is not stable enough for a survey to be carried out, but probably only a third of that number remain, or even fewer. This enormous wave of emigration is not just because of the dangers that Christians have been facing there, but also because of the possibilities of building a better life elsewhere—and perhaps most of all the feeling, as one Iraqi Christian put it to me, of no longer being wanted in Iraq.