Assyrians, Kurds, and Ottomans: Intercommunal Relations on the Pe ...

Many scholars, in the U.S. and elsewhere, have decried the racism and ‘Orientalism’ that characterises much western writing on the Middle East. Such writings conflate dif-ferent peoples and nations, and movements within such peoples and nations, into unitary and malevolent hordes, uncivilised reservoirs of danger,² while ignoring or downplaying analogous tendencies towards conformity or barbarism in other regions, including the West.³ Assyrians in particular suffer from Old Testament and pop-culture references to their barbarity and cruelty, which ignore or downplay massacres or torture by the Judeans, Greeks, and Romans who are celebrated by history as ances-tors of the West.⁴ This work, through its rich depictions of tribal and religious diversity within Mesopotamia, may help serve as a corrective to this tendency of con-temporary writing on the Middle East and the Assyrians in particular. Furthermore, Aboona’s work also steps away from the age-old, oversimplified rubric of an ‘Arab Muslim’ Middle East, and into the cultural mosaic that is more representative of the re-gion.⁵

Assyrians, Kurds, and Ottomans: Intercommunal Relations on the Periphery of the Ottoman Em-pire will stand as a lasting contribution to the history of Christianity in Asia, of the Ottoman Empire, and of one of the Middle East’s largest ethnic and religious minorities. As an account of the Assyrians’ nineteenth-century struggle for independence from Ottoman rule, it has no peer. Other works are strong on Assyrian history and Ottoman-Christian relations in Mesopotamia during other periods, particularly in the fourteenth through eighteenth centuries (e.g., David Wilmshurst’s The Ecclesiastical Or-ganisation of the Church of the East, 1318–1913 and Christoph Baumer’s The Church of the East: An Illustrated History of Assyrian Christianity); the Hamidiye massacres of the 1890s (e.g., Sébastien de Courtois’ The Forgotten Genocide: The Eastern Christians, the Last Arameans); and World War I and its aftermath in Mesopo-tamia, Anatolia, and Persia (e.g, Abraham Yohannan’s The Death of a Nation, or, The Ever Persecuted Nestorians or Assyrian Christians, Joseph Naayem’s Shall This Nation Die?, David Gaunt’s Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Rela-tions in Eastern Anatolia During World War I, and Ronald S. Stafford’s The Tragedy of the Assyr-ians).