When and how did modern Assyrians start to identify with ancient Assyria? This thorough, smart, and interesting book seeks to answer that question by considering the development of Assyrian nationalism through encounters with 19th-century American protestant missionaries.
At the outset, this book may seem primarily geared to scholars interested in American religious history. Becker devotes considerable attention to 19th-century religious trends in the United States and the various American personalities who conducted missionary work in today's northern Iran (Urmia) and Iraq among the East Syrians. Yet the Middle Eastern context is far from ignored in this well-researched book.
Becker is interested in the extensive encounters and contact between Assyrians and the American missionaries and their publications, which were printed in the local languages. In fact, one of the major contributions of this book is the utilization of sources in rare languages such as Neo-Aramaic. To better understand and contextualize these encounters, Becker engages with work on the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, as well as recent scholarship on American missionaries in the region (e.g., Ussama Makdisi, Paul Sedra, and Heather Sharkey). Given this thorough research, it is surprising that he does not seem to extensively consider standard works on Qajar Iran that could have helped him to evaluate the similarities and differences of the Assyrian articulation of modernity in relation to other such developments among Iranians at the time. His aim, however, is not to evaluate how the Assyrians fit in to the overall Iranian mosaic, but rather how the American presence contributed to the particular East Syrian version of self.
In his opening chapter, which is refreshingly jargon free yet not devoid of theory, Becker considers influential theories of religion and secularism (e.g., Charles Taylor), nationalism (Benedict Anderson), and postcolonialism (Partha Chatterjee) and how they apply or do not apply to his study. Becker argues that many of the basic ingredients of Assyrian nationalism had already developed in the community but the cultural changes, which were largely the result of the American missionary activities, created a conducive context to systematically retrieve and identify with the ancient Assyrian past.
After the useful introduction, the subsequent discussion focuses on the missionary activities. His first chapter offers helpful overview of the Church of the East, including a useful breakdown of the various languages and dialects of the East Syrians, as well as differences in ecclesiastical and political authority in Urmia and Hakkari. The second chapter highlights the work of the influential Justin Perkins, who wrote a well-known memoir of his time in Iran, especially his thinking on the importance of printing religious and secular literatures in the mission. The third chapter focuses on the content of this new media and how the message was a “pious venture to transform the hearts of individual East Syrians and to awaken the East Syrian ‘nation’” (p. 133) all in accordance with 19th-century American liberalism. In Chapter 4, Becker analyzes the various missionary schools, including a female seminary whose purpose was moral reform through the study of the Bible. These schools created a “social matrix in which a new set of national practices, as well as affects and ideas, came about” (p. 179).
At this point, Becker is describing a fairly common trajectory of American evangelical practice in the Middle East. Yet in Chapter 5, Becker enters a surprising terrain by moving inwardly and evaluating how the missionaries promoted a new relationship to death that sought to cultivate an “interiorized form of piety” (p. 182) that was part of the missionaries’ desire to inculcate new ideas of the private self and community. This shift to the inner life is also tied to a change in the source base. Earlier in the book, Becker focused primarily on American writings. But by Chapter 6 he starts to consider how these new ideas appeared in various indigenous writings, especially in the journals of “native assistants.” These are fascinating sources. Becker should be commended for bringing us the writings of Yonan of Geogtapa and Khamis of Gawar, for example, and their travel accounts in East Syrian lands. Becker's penultimate chapter describes the proliferation of Christian missions towards the end of the 19th century and how this activity helped create a pluralistic environment for a secularized notion of nation to emerge exactly at the time when ideas of nationalism were spreading across the globe. Becker points out how the East Syrians become modern Assyrian nationalists, and how, like other nationalisms, Assyrian nationalism is an “invented tradition” (p. 299). This transformation, Becker argues, is an “instance of autoethnography, a response to missionaries’ introduction of orientalist forms of knowledge” (p. 300). Becker ends his study in the World War I era and points out that after the 1920s the East Syrian community became fractured due to a variety of geopolitical, cultural, and theological reasons.
This book is highly recommend to anyone interested in Christianity in the Middle East, the development of modern identities, and the role of American missionaries in the 19th century. It is a valuable contribution to Middle East studies because of its focus on an understudied minority ethnoreligious population during a period of transition and how this community constructed a particular pattern of modernity that provided them with a distinct process of retrieving their past. Though Becker does not extensively interrogate possible imperialistic consequences of the American activities or how these missions fit more broadly in the geopolitical landscapes of the Ottoman Empire or Qajar Iran, his book is a thought-provoking and rigorous analysis of the effects of cross-cultural encounters and interactions in the modern age.
