ishtartv.com - ncregister.com
K.V.
Turley, MAR. 6, 2018
Recently,
a ceremony took place in the English university town of Cambridge: the official opening and blessing of the
offices of a new charity, Aradin. The charity aims at helping Christians in the
Middle East, and, in particular, in Iraq.
The
founder and guiding light behind Aradin is Dr. Amal Marogy. She crystallizes
the charity’s aim as follows: ‘Aradin helps historic minority communities in
the Middle East to preserve their language and heritage, and to educate their
young people and stabilise endangered communities by giving them the tools to
promote a culture of peace.’
For
now, at least, Marogy has left the world of Cambridge academia. Instead, she
has embarked upon a different mission for and to the displaced and persecuted
Christians of the Middle East — a cause that is natural to her as she is a
Middle-Eastern Christian, born and brought up in Iraq.
Marogy
is determined to make a difference to the lives of her fellow Middle-Eastern
Christians. A forceful character, a combination of fierce intellect and
resourcefulness, she has been readied for the challenges ahead by two wars.
Now, she is entering into the ongoing battle that has engulfed the whole world.
As she points out, ‘Unfortunately, the problems that we always thought were
limited to the Middle East have started popping up in the West. There are great
advantages for the world to becoming a village but also many disadvantages.’
Amal
Marogy was born in northern Iraq, in Kirkuk, a Kurdish city in a predominantly
Arab country. Her childhood was lived under and dominated by the regime of
Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath Party then in power. Their Pan-Arabic political
philosophy had brought about a largely peaceful and, from the 1970s onwards,
because of the boom in oil prices, relatively prosperous Iraq. There was, of
course, another side to this: Iraq was a police state. That said Christians and
other religious minorities were generally left alone during this period.
In
the early 1970s, Marogy and her family moved to Baghdad on account of her
father’s work. He held an important position at an international oil refinery.
Within the family, their Chaldean Catholic faith was lived fully. At all times,
however, there was a need for discretion in its outward witness and practice.
Iraq may have had a secular government but it was still a Muslim country with
varying degrees of tolerance and hostility toward its Christian minority. That
said, Marogy remembers her early childhood as one of security both within the
home and outside it. That was all to change, however, when in 1980 Iraq invaded
Iran.
The
resulting war shattered Marogy’s home life. An aerial bombardment of the oil
refinery caused a massive explosion. It killed her father. He was not yet 40
years old and left behind a grieving wife and four daughters, the eldest of
whom was 10 years old. Looking back now, conscious of what has happened since,
Marogy is able to point to the death of her father as the event that changed
everything but also made her the woman she is today.
After
the tragic loss of Marogy’s father, relatives offered the family the chance to
emigrate to Europe or North America; her mother refused. Looking back, Marogy
sees her time in Baghdad, with her mother and sisters, as invaluable in helping
her understand her mission with Aradin today. Unlike so many in the
international aid world, she has lived in the country she is trying to help;
she knows the people there, Christian and Muslim, their strengths and
weaknesses. Similarly, Marogy is under no illusion about what the Islamic world
really thinks of the Christians in their midst and indeed beyond in the wider
world.
She
is equally clear sighted about her Christian faith. There is no discontinuity
between Marogy’s Catholic upbringing in Iraq and the Catholic Christianity she
experienced in some quarters in the Christian West. She says, ‘When I heard the
voice of Pope Benedict, I heard again the voice of my grandmother.’ Nevertheless,
when she did come to Europe her initial reaction was one of shock. This was not
just a cultural experience but also an emotional one, especially as that
relocation happened as a result of yet another war.
The
1991 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait provoked a backlash from the West. Soon after,
the Desert Storm military campaign was unleashed upon Kuwait’s Iraqi occupiers.
When this happened, Marogy was in Jordan; her mother was visiting family in
Canada. In fact, at that time none of the family were then in Baghdad. Soon it
became evident that none of them could return to their home either. Eventually,
after many adventures, they were to be reunited but with relatives in Belgium.
It
was in Brussels that, eventually, the family was to settle. Upon moving to Belgium,
Marogy expected to find “Christian Europe.” Instead, as she says, “not
everything ‘Catholic’ in Europe is Catholic.” Even then, as a teenager she
sensed that much of what passed for Catholicism in Belgium was not in
accordance with the mind of the Church. Europe’s Christian heritage was either
ignored or simply forgotten by many contemporary Europeans.
Marogy’s
education was to be continued as a war refugee and a displaced person in her
adopted country. Nevertheless, by 2006, she had obtained a doctorate in
Oriental Languages and Cultures from the University of Ghent (Belgium). Soon
after she was teaching at Cambridge University. It is right to say that all
looked fair for the settled life of an Oxbridge academic. Today, however, all
of that is on hold. Now Marogy has set out on a different path, and one that is
perilously uncertain.
From
afar, as a child and teenager, Marogy had watched as Chaldean Christians were
persecuted and then forcibly removed from their ancestral lands. Many were
killed; most fled. Marogy knew she had to do something about this, but what?
One thing was clear, however, she could not stand idly by as an ancient
Christian people and the cultural and religious heritage they embodied were
wiped from the face of the earth.
So
like a modern-day phoenix, out of the burning ruins of the Nineveh plain and
elsewhere, Aradin was born. Its future interventions were to be neither
political nor religious but cultural. As Marogy says, ‘There were too many
parties talking of politics and religion but no one was talking of culture.’
She set about changing that. She pointed to the fact that groups such as ISIS
did not just kill and displace Christians, they also set about obliterating
evidence that Christians had ever existed. Such groups wanted to destroy the
historical context within which the Christian religion had thrived for
centuries. This is a key point often overlooked by the West. The history of a
people, Marogy is convinced, is to be found in and through culture. Preserving
and then learning from these cultural histories is therefore, she says,
crucial, adding, ‘Aradin will serve as a hub to offer those seeking answers, an
oasis where truth and love for culture stand at the heart of every discussion,
debate, solution.’
Marogy
does not see her mission as simply historical conservation though. She
considers the preservation of a Christian Middle Eastern culture in all its
aspects crucial to any future discussion on the nature of coexistence between
adherents of different religions, a debate that is today no longer confined to
any one particular region of the world. For Amal Marogy, therefore, the need to
engage the displaced Christian peoples of that region is not simply about
international aid to meet their basic needs. For her, it is about helping them
to return to their lands to rebuild their culture once more. ‘Aradin will be
the one place where people won’t only talk of politics or religion but, also,
of culture which reflects the beauty of who we really are.’
|