|
|
No other work, however, provides an equally detailed and ambitious depiction of Assyrian-Kurdish relations in northern Mesopotamia from the Seljuk Turkish invasions up to the mid-nineteenth century. Furthermore, Aboona’s attention to the various ecclesiastical sects within the Assyrian community and their history during the period in question is of vital importance, as these religious denominations are rarely discussed in reference to each other, but rather solely in reference to the Ottoman State. The work also de-tails geographically the largely overlooked Assyrian tribal homeland in the nineteenth century.
The chapters, in roughly chronological fashion, discuss the process by which formerly autonomous Assyrian tribes came to be brought under more direct Ottoman rule, and suffered cultural and ethnic devastation and the loss of many of their ances-tral villages along the way. Chapter 1 sets the geographic and so-ciocultural stage quite concisely and usefully, and describes, among other things, the difference between the independent Assyrian tribes under the temporal as well as the spiritual leadership of the patriarch of the Church of the East (with the descendible title Mar Shimun), and the dependent and semi-independent tribes, which tended to live in the plains rather than in the mountains. Chapter 2 explains the tem-poral leadership of the Assyrian patriarch, who administered laws from the mountain seat of his church in Qudshanis, in the Hakkari mountains, and enjoyed the loyalty of thousands of Assyrian musket-eers. Chapter 3 details the original division of the Assyrian and Baby-lonian Christians into traditionalist (Church of the East), Catholic (Chaldean), and Monophysite (Jabobite ‘Syrian’) de-nominations. Chapter 4 recounts the competition of European powers for missionary inroads into the Assyrian fold. Chapter 5 describes the origin of the Kurds in Persia and Azerbaijan, and their migration into Mesopotamia beginning in the ninth century and accelerating with the Seljuk Turkish and later the Mongol conquests, reaching a mini cli-max after the Ottoman settlement of Kurds on the Persian border as a sort of defensive barrier. Chapters 6 through 8 deal with the tenta-tively modernizing reforms of an era in which the Ottoman Empire encountered increasing instability in the eighteenth and early nine-teenth centuries, due largely to its conflicts with several European empires, Persia, and Arab, Kurdish, and various Orthodox Christian rebels.