|
Assyrians:
From Bedr Khan to Saddam Hussein
Assyrians: From Bedr Khan to Saddam Hussein
|
|||||||||
ISBN:
1-4257-1300-9 (Hardcover
available only at publisher)
Book is also available at
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Throughout the Christian Era, the
Assyrians have faced an immense tragedy
through persecution, oppression, and
massacres. The Assyrian tragedy in
Mesopotamia continued intermittently during the Sassanid
Persians (A.D. 226 – 637), Seljuk Turks invasion of the eleventh
century, Mongols invasion in 1258, Tamerlane’s destruction that
began in 1394, the Saffavid Persians in early sixteenth century
and during the rule of the Ottoman Turks since the middle of the
sixteenth century. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, Turks and Kurds committed numerous massacres
against the Assyrian Christians in their secluded mountains of
northern Mesopotamia and in Tur Abdin region in modern
southeastern Turkey. As the Ottoman Empire entered WWI, it
declared jihad (holy war) against its Christian subjects. Backed
by Kurds, the Turkish army invaded northwestern Persia (Iran)
and committed further atrocities against the Assyrian refugees
who fled the Ottoman territories and against Assyrians of Persia
as well. The jihad transformed into an ethnic genocide against
the Assyrians that was perpetrated by the Turkish state and
Kurdish warlords...
BOOK REVIEW
“After the establishment of Islam as a state religion in the Fertile Crescent by the eighth century, the ferocious attacks by the Timurids, plundering the region as they descended from Central Asia in the fourteenth century, drove many Christian Aramaic speakers who did not convert to Islam into the mountains of the Taurus, Hakkari, and the Zagros for shelter. Others remained in their ancestral villages on the Mosul (Nineveh) Plain only to face heavy pressure to assimilate into Arab culture. The greatest catastrophe to visit the Assyrians in the modern period was the genocide committed against them, as Christians, during the Great War. From the Assyrian renaissance experienced when, miraculously, they became the objects of Western Christian missionary educational and medical efforts, the Assyrians fell into near oblivion. Shunned by the Allies at the treaties that ended WWI and after, Assyrians drifted into Diaspora, destructive denominationalism, and fierce assimilation tendencies as exercised by chauvinistic Arab, Persian and Turkish state entities. Today they face the growing clout of their old enemies and neighbors, the Kurds, another Muslim ethnic group that threatens to control power, demand assimilation, and offer to engulf Assyrians as the price for continuing to live in the ancient Assyrian homeland. As half of the world’s last Aramaic-speaking population has arrived in unwanted Diaspora, some voices are making an impact, including that of Frederick Aprim.”
— Eden Naby, PhD
Afghanistan:
Mullah, Marx and Mujahid (Westview, 2002)
The Assyrian Experience (Harvard College Library, 1999)
Related Information...
Education Conference
Educational Books Archives