Name: Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms
ISBN: 9781471114694

Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms

Despite its reputation for religious intolerance, the Middle East has long sheltered many distinctive and strange faiths: one regards the Greek prophets as incarnations of God, another reveres Lucifer in the form of a peacock, and yet another believes that their followers are reincarnated beings who have existed in various forms for thousands of years. These religions represent the last vestiges of the magnificent civilizations in ancient history: Persia, Babylon, Egypt in the time of the Pharaohs. Their followers have learned how to survive foreign attacks and the perils of assimilation. But today, with the Middle East in turmoil, they face greater challenges than ever before.

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yamtaddleFeb 2023

A while back I read a book called Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms about disappearing, often-obscure (at least to Westerners) Middle Eastern religions, which stretched its scope over to Iran/Persia at times and IIRC did treat of Zoroastrianism (maybe the least-obscure and least-nearly-extinct of the bunch).

Reading it, a pattern emerged of common elements to most or all of these religions: 1) Not seeking converts—in some cases, not permitting them at all—and 2) mostly or purely oral transmission of traditions, often with a "mystery" element—i.e. steps of initiation required to learn the "deeper" levels, which were regarded as secret.

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aomurphyMar 2018

I don't quite agree with the author about modernity. I argue that the modern Ultra-Orthodox are modern, specifically in the way they justify their beliefs. Most of what I'm going to say is just a summary of this lovely paper by Haym Soloveitchik then at Yeshiva University: https://www.lookstein.org/professional-dev/rupture-reconstru...

The basic point is that modernity has destroyed tradition as a justification for a way of life. Look, before people were often happy to say "We do this because our ancestors did it." and that alone was enough. And when the sacred texts was a little off with tradition, people were happy to try and make sure that they could be read to agree with tradition. But now, you have to try and fall back and argue from higher authority. In the end this often looks the same, but it lends much greater power to those who interpret sacred texts, and pushes people to more and more extreme interpretations.

There's a book I just read, Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms by Gerard Russell. It's a travelogue though the Middle East meeting the small religious movements that survived Christianity and Islam over the last ~2000 years: Mandaeans, Yezidis, Coptic Christians, Samaritans, and the Kalasha. The Kalasha are a tiny group of pagans who live on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and one of the interesting things that comes up when Russell visits them is that they don't really have explanations for a lot of their rituals. They do things because their parents did them, and so on. and it's troublesome because when faced with Islam, or outsiders, it's hard for them to justify what they're doing, there's no intellectual basis.

And I think that, on a much smaller scale (Judaism has had a more formal intellectual basis for a long long time) is what modernity, chiefly through literacy and improved communication, brings. I also think that blanket rejection of groups like the Ultra-Orthodox or fundamentalist Christians as "dated" or just wrong isn't very helpful, certainly they're not going away any time soon.

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