Documents from a CUA research trip to to Urmia, Van, and Mosul. Courtesy of The Catholic University of America.
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By Adelaide
Mena
Washington
D.C., Jun 16, 2017- Ancient artifacts. Centuries-old legends. Prayers
dating back to the time of Christ. An enemy seeking to destroy it all. And a
team of dedicated scholars trying to save the memories before it’s too late.
It
may sound like the start of the next Indiana Jones movie, but for the team
behind the Christian Communities of the East Cultural Heritage Project, the
reality of Christian communities disappearing from the Middle East is a
pressing threat.
Faced
with persecution at the hands of ISIS, more than a decade of war, and
generations of economic struggle, these researchers are looking to record the
memories and traditions of the Christian communities of Iraq before they are
lost forever.
But
instead of swinging through empty tombs or digging through rubble, these
scholars are asking the community members themselves to engage in the rich
Middle Eastern tradition of storytelling, sharing their memories and descriptions
in their own native Arabic and Neo-Aramaic languages – some of them singing and
speaking the same language Christ himself did.
Dr.
Shawqi Talia, a lecturer on Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literatures at
The Catholic University of America explained that his colleagues’ quest to
preserve the history and culture of Iraqi Catholics is essential for passing on
their meaning, not only to the next generation, but for the world.
Talia,
himself an Iraqi Chaldean Catholic, told CNA that he wants young people “to
know how life was and what life was all about for the Christians – not just up
north but in Iraq as a whole – in the ’50s and the ’40s and the ’30s, and to
know that our history goes back for 2,000 years.”
Yet
as Christians from the Nineveh plain continue to leave their homeland due to
threats of violence, Talia hopes Middle Eastern Christians in diaspora will see
the stories, songs, histories and memories contained in the project not only as
a record, but as a tool. He wants Middle Eastern youth to “work in order to
keep this kind of heritage alive, not just for the Christians from that part of
the world who are now living in diaspora, but because it’s the history of
humanity – for all of us.”
This
history is not just for the Christian communities of the Middle East, but for
all Christians and the whole world to learn from and preserve – especially as
the ancestral lands continue to be embroiled in conflict. “You can read
something in a history text, but now you see it, and you hear it in person,”
Talia said of the recorded interviews.
Preserving
the past
The
idea behind Christian Communities of the East Cultural Heritage Project – a
joint partnership between the Institute of Christian Oriental Research and the
School of Theology and Religious Studies at The Catholic University of America
– was born over the course of years of conversations between Dr. Talia and Dr.
Robin Darling Young, an associate professor of spirituality in the university.
“The
reason that we started this project was that we wanted to put together
materials that would make available to other people and to communities
themselves records of various kinds of the life of Christian communities in the
Middle East,” Darling Young told CNA.
Attacks
by ISIS against Christian and other minority religious communities in northern
Iraq heightened the sense of urgency in preserving this culture’s heritage and
history.
Since
2003, violence in Iraq and Syria has killed hundreds of thousands of people and
displaced millions more, including whole communities of Middle Eastern
Christians. In the past 14 years, an estimated 1 million Christians have left
their communities in Iraq, leaving less than 500,000 Christians in the lands
inhabited by the faithful for 2,000 years.
To
begin preserving their history before it completely vanishes, the group used
Talia’s connections to the Chaldean Catholic community in the United States,
particularly those in the Washington, D.C. area and in Southeast Michigan,
where some 150,000 Chaldean Catholics have established new homes over the past
century. Plans also exist to interview Iraqi Christian communities in Europe
and elsewhere, as well as release a documentary funded by the Michigan
Humanities Council.
After
developing a detailed questionnaire, the team began to record interviews with
members of the Chaldean communities in both English and Neo-Aramaic, a form of
the language spoken by Christ. The researchers also collected photographs and
documents to digitize and present online along with the recordings as part of a
comprehensive online archive.
Ryann
Craig, a doctoral student in the department of Semitics, explained that after
consulting with oral history experts at the Library of Congress and elsewhere,
the team sought to “draw out descriptions of communal life in their original
languages” in the interview process.
“My
challenge was to try to craft questions that would get people to answer in
their native tongue.” One of the first questions, she said, was to ask
community members to explain the meaning behind their family name and its
importance in their home village. This same technique was also used in getting
participants to sing special communal songs created for special occasions like
marriages or births, as well as to describe childhood games, or record how
family recipes were made and their importance.
Given
the circumstances that have brought some Chaldean Christians to the United
States, however, some interviews have captured a much different side of the
Middle Eastern Christian experience: persecution and flight. Craig told CNA
that some of the first interviews of the project were conducted with recent
refugees, many of whom were still processing the traumatic circumstances
leading up to their exodus.
“A
lot of the questions we were asking just weren’t relevant for them,” she said
of the questions about traditions and history on the group’s questionnaire. “At
that point we just decided to let them tell whatever story they wanted to tell,
and didn’t really prompt as much as we do with people who have been here for
decades and feel more settled.”
In
collecting both these stories as well as those from Chaldean Christians who
moved to the United States decades ago for economic reasons, the group has been
able to document a cross-section of Iraqi Christian life. Among those who came
over in the 1950s-70s, the researchers have recorded histories by people from
smaller Christian villages who spoke Neo-Aramaic and were very much connected
to the Chaldean identity and more ancient traditions and ways of life.
Meanwhile,
the majority of Chaldean refugees coming over to the United States as a result
of violence and persecution are more likely to speak Arabic than Neo-Aramaic,
and are also more likely to come from larger, more cosmopolitan cities. Still,
among those persecuted, “there’s a profound sense of them being Christian,
because they’re being persecuted for that reason.”
'More
than just memories'
Though
Talia is not involved directly in the interview process, he stressed to CNA the
importance of gathering oral histories due to their unique ability to capture
the essence of what it’s like to be a Middle Eastern Christian.
Just
as his mother painted the experience of growing up in her hometown for Talia
and his siblings, so too do these oral histories transmit the feeling of being
in the communities of northern Iraq. “When you see these memories put on audio
or on video, you can feel as if you were, or are present.”
While
Talia was raised in Baghdad, his mother came from a Christian village of around
5,000 people in the northern Nineveh plain, without electricity, but
maintaining many ancient traditions in their daily lives, including use of the
Neo-Aramaic language.
“It’s
more than simply nostalgia,” he explained of the stories. “It’s more than just
memories. It’s a way of life which has disappeared or is disappearing.”
For
Talia, the importance oral history plays in Middle Eastern culture has all the
more weight due to the uncertainty faced by many communities. Even those that
have been freed from the hands of ISIS are often in ruins, and much of the
Middle Eastern Christian community is now in diaspora. Talia wants to help
ensure “that the community isn’t gone simply because it isn’t in the villages
or the towns.”
The
next generation
The
preservation of their home cultures and traditions is also a major concern for
young Middle Eastern Christians who want to know more about their roots.
Yousif
Kalian is a second-generation Iraqi immigrant and a member of the Syriac
Catholic Church. As an undergraduate student at The Catholic University of
America, he was a young adult researcher on the Christian Communities of the
East Cultural Heritage Project, and he has continued to work with the endeavor
after graduation. He initially learned about the project while taking a class
with Dr. Talia.
“I’ve
always had an interest in the region from a professional point of view, on top
of being Iraqi-American,” Kalian told CNA. He said that within both Catholic
and secular culture in the United States, there is a lack of understanding
about Middle Eastern Christians, as well as a culture gap between Middle
Eastern parents or grandparents and their children or grandchildren. This, he
said, has left a lot of questions about identity and culture among many of his
Middle Eastern Christian peers.
Kalian
sees this project’s blending of oral history and multimedia access as a way for
young people to help change that knowledge gap.
“If
you know anything about the Middle East, the oral tradition is the most
prominent tradition there,” he said, pointing to the recitation traditions in
Islam, Judaism and several Christian churches. Singing and storytelling are
closely tied up with the identity of the people, he explained.
“I
think not just preserving dates and numbers and facts, but really preserving
the stories is the most important thing to preserve from Middle Eastern
Christian culture,” Kalian stressed.
“We
all grew up with stories. The monastery that my grandfather is named after was
destroyed by ISIS in 2015,” he said. “And my grandfather’s name was Behnam.”
Saint
Behnam and Saint Sara monastery was established in the 4th Century in the
Nineveh plain, about 20 miles from the city of Mosul. In late 2014, ISIS
fighters took control of the monastery, expelling the monks under threat of
death. On March 19, 2015, the terrorist group released images of the
destruction of the tomb of Saint Behnam and the surrounding buildings.
Yet,
Kalian keeps the memory of the monastery with him, as a part of who he is. “The
story goes that my great grandma couldn’t have a son,” he told CNA. “Kept
having daughters, and in Middle Eastern culture having a son is a point of
pride: he carries the name and the wealth and protection. So she went to St.
Behnam monastery and was praying, ‘Please give me a boy, St. Behnam. I’ll name
him after you if you give me a boy’.”
“Sure
enough, she gave birth to a boy, and he survived,” Kalian said, “He survived,
and she named him Behnam.”
“You
can find a book on Christianity in Iraq, or you can find a book on this
monastery. But stories like this: they’ll die with our parents or
grandparents.”
“That’s
why I think this project is so important: to get the recipes of the food that
they cook and the history behind the food they cook, and the names of our
parents and grandparents and where they come from, and these saints and stories
and traditions…once we move here, to an extent it stays and is alive, but in
another sense it gets lost,” he lamented. “That’s why I think that this project
really is important.”
And
he is not the only one who is excited about the chance to pass on these
stories: his siblings and other friends from his Syriac Catholic community have
been interested in having a template to interview their parents and
grandparents, and a way to digitize their memories. Kalian himself hopes to
interview his family members and priests to collect their oral histories.
“I
think every young person, if offered the opportunity, would love to speak with
their grandparents or parents, if you gave them a structure to find out more
about their own history,” he said.
“If
you make it an active thing to learn about your culture and not just have it be
reading or watching documentaries. Being able to engage – having it be an
active thing and have an active culture – will engage them more and therefore
persevere our communities, our history, our culture and our language.”
Once
completed, the Christian Communities of the East Cultural Heritage Project will
be accessible at www.ccmideast.org and
in the archives of the Institute of Christian Oriental Research at The Catholic
University of America. Documentary video will also be distributed in Michigan
at a later date.
Photos
courtesy of The Catholic University of America.
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