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=> letter to Modesto Bee

letter to Modesto Bee
Posted by parhad (Guest) - Friday, June 4 2004, 22:46:00 (CEST)
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...just sent this off today. I want the boys to know that in hopes they`ll flood the paper with their proooves...and also try to discredit me as a crank, a quack, a "hater" of Assyria...and my favorite, the ENEMA of Assyria. That will leave it up to the paper to figure out just how the sculptor of the first Assyrian Monument anywhere in 2500 years could "hate" Assyrians...



Friday, June 04, 2004

Dear Ms Craddock,

My name is Farid Parhad, I am an Assyrian, born in Iraq, who has lived for fifty years in the United States. I am very proud to be an Assyrian and a citizen of America. I am the sculptor of the first Assyrian public monument anywhere on earth in the last 2500 years. That would be the statue of Ashurbanipal installed in San Francisco`s Civic Center in 1988. My second Assyrian monument, of Queen Shumirum (Semiramis to the Greeks), will be installed in Chicago on the campus of the University of Chicago close to the Oriental Institute. I currently live and work in Mexico.

(Note: I have attached a photo of the Ashurbanipal Monument to this e-mail)

I write to tell you that you are being told an old fairy tale by those Assyrians who insist that the descendants of the ancient Assyrians are today exclusively Christian. This is not the case. The majority of the Assyrians today are Muslim, having either held off converting from their religion of Ashur till the Muslim Conquest around 700 AD...or converted away from Christianity to Islam after that.

Those who remained Christian removed themselves from public life while the Assyrians who converted to Islam joined forces with the Arab Muslims to create yet another glorious empire whose Art and Culture all bear the unmistakable stamp of the many civilizations that graced what we call BetNahrain, Mesopotamia to the West...The "Land Between the Rivers" Tigris and Euphrates.

What the people you interviewed for your article are telling you is what the Christian churches in their villages have been telling them for centuries. They have been taught to deny the obvious truth that religion does not make people Assyrian. The things that the Christian minority that calls itself the only and the true remnant of the ancient Assyrians, who were decidedly not Christian, suffered in the Middle East came about as a result of their eager hope that Western Christianity would somehow restore Iraq to Christianity, or carve out a small section for this Christian minority. This belief of theirs has caused them time and again to betray their neighbors and country, much as they are working with the occupying forces of Iraq today...a fact that will again earn them the ill will of the Assyrian Muslim majority. It is this fact for which they suffered any retribution and not because they are Christians and certainly not because they are Assyrian.

In the upheaval in Iran during the First World War, many Christian Assyrians fled Iran and found welcome and refuge in Iraq, another Muslim country, that opened its borders to them. My own father and his family were just such refugees. And yet when the British occupied Iraq some years later, many of these same Christians , against the advice of the majority of our people, agreed to wear British uniforms and receive weapons and pay to be used as a Colonial police force to keep the hostile Muslim Assyrian population in line. They were used by the British, who promised to "see what could be done" about a homeland, and fought against the very people who`d welcomed them only a few years earlier when they`d escaped Iran for their lives. They were again encouraged by priestly tales of Iraq really belonging to them, a Christian minority, because "All modern Assyrians can only be Christian". Having seen its numbers and influence decline steadily, the church has found some people ready and willing to believe what has become a consoling delusion no matter how much misery has come to that segment of the minority who believe it…and is these people you talked with.

It was this act that brought about the reprisal known as Semele...though this fact is never mentioned by the Christian minority. Many of us, who accept all of our people, regardless of their religious affiliation...much as we`ve learned to do here in the West, are afraid there will be more reprisals against these hapless Christians who are again working for the foreign occupiers of Iraq, who are also Christian. Whatever you may feel about the war on Iraq, one can`t help but accept the fact that Iraqis will once again not look favorably upon those of their own nationality, Christian or Muslim, who cheered on this war in the hopes that this time, certainly, there would be something in it for them.

I merely wanted to inform you that you are hearing only one side of a story that is far more complex and compelling than the one being peddled to the press these days by what is essentially a Christian minority whose priesthood still can`t accept the fact that the vast majority of our people turned to Islam rather than Christianity. All of the Iraqi people are descended from all of the glorious cultures that thrived in that small Fertile Crescent, called by the West as well, The Cradle of Civilization. It`s just that the Christians stopped participating while the Muslim Assyrians helped create the glory that was the Baghdad of Haroun al Rashid, the Baghdad of the 1001 Nights, the Baghdad that was the leading center for art, culture and science in its day...situated only a few miles, if not directly above, the center of yet another glorious culture, Babylon, itself merely a stone`s throw away from Sumer.

There is no way to account for the art and architecture and all the achievement scholars the world over credit the Islamic Empire with unless one recognizes that the desert Arabs who swept out of the barren Arabian peninsula were in their turn conquered by the Assyrian people whose lands they settled. This has happened time and again in that region. If you look closely at Islamic Art at its height you will see Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian influence at every level and, indeed, many of us assumed positions of leadership in the Islamic state, as we still do, taking the culture of Mesopotamia to Granada in Spain from where it filtered through to the rest of Europe and was taken to the New World by the Conquistadors.



Here in Mexico they use an Assyrian word that`s filtered all the way from Iraq 4000 years ago, through 700 years of Muslim/Assyrian rule in Spain...coming over with Cortez. That word is "Miskeena" in our language, "Misquin" in Spanish and it denotes a hapless person meant to be pitied.

The real story of the Assyrian people and their legacy is far more interesting than the simplistic version you received from a Christian minority that has been agitating for the impossible, for no one is going to put Christians, landlocked and surrounded by hostile Muslims on all sides who have every good reason to distrust them, on top of oil wells in the MidEast. This fond belief of theirs, fueled by their village churches and the near illiterate-priests, who are the only source for a Christian education, has given them an almost pathological sense of entitlement resulting in their having to leave the region in increasing numbers when they aren`t given what they feel they deserve.

Iraq is very proud of its Assyrian heritage and has been tolerant of its Christian minority, however, they include the Islamic Empire as part of that heritage whereas the Christians refuse to even mention it. The claim that Iraq will not allow the Aramaic/Assyrian language, the language of Jesus, to be taught is partially true but only because the majority of schools are run in church basements and teach the equivalent of sedition... that the Muslim majority are all Arabs, because Islam is from Arabia, who stole the land from Christians who are the "rightful" owners, yet whose religion is no more indigenous to Iraq than Islam is. It is not because they are Assyrian, or even Christian that this minority has been disliked and distrusted (Tariq Aziz is Christian as well as Dr. Donny George, director for all museums in Iraq and many, many others who quietly live and work in Iraq)...but rather because some of them, who`ve ruined it for those who tried to stay, have been ever ready and willing to be used by foreigners against the best interests of the country as a whole. These are the ones you interviewed and they are a minority of a minority.

Thank You,



Farid Parhad



ashurbanipal_2003.jpg



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