Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East
    Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East
    Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East
    Audiobook11 hours

    Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East

    Written by Gerard Russell

    Narrated by Michael Page

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Despite its reputation for religious intolerance, the Middle East has long sheltered many distinctive and strange faiths. These religions represent the last vestiges of the magnificent civilizations in ancient history: Persia, Babylon, and Egypt in the time of the pharaohs. Their followers have learned how to survive foreign attacks and the perils of assimilation. But today, with the Middle East in turmoil, they face greater challenges than ever before.

    In Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms, former diplomat Gerard Russell ventures to the distant, nearly impassable regions where these mysterious religions still cling to survival. He lives alongside the Mandaeans and Ezidis of Iraq, the Zoroastrians of Iran, the Copts of Egypt, and others. He learns their histories, participates in their rituals, and comes to understand the threats to their communities. Historically a tolerant faith, since the early twentieth century, Islam has witnessed the rise of militant, extremist sects. This development poses existential threats to these minority faiths. And as more and more of their youth flee to the West in search of greater freedoms and job prospects, these religions face the dire possibility of extinction.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJan 13, 2015
    ISBN9781494578770
    Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East

    Related to Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms

    Related audiobooks

    Social Science For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Dangerous Quest for Identity

      Jan 21, 2023

      The Dangerous Quest for Identity
      5 min read

    • Article

      “Medieval Christians Were Capable Of Imagining Goddess-like Beings That Looked Thoroughly Pagan”

      May 12, 2022

      Rhiannon Davies: Your new book. Queens of the Wild, explores four goddesses who evolved into hugely popular cultural figures in the Middle Ages. Can you introduce us to them? Ronald Hutton: First up, there’s the figure of Mother Nature, or Mother Ear

      9 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Jul 27, 2021

      Reviews
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Mysterious Middle Ages

      Jul 7, 2023

      The Mysterious Middle Ages
      4 min read

    • Article

      Campaigner. Iconoclast. Absent Friend. LGBTQ People Who Changed The World

      Feb 15, 2024

      NOMINATED BY GABRIELLE STOREY Christina, queen regnant of Sweden from 1632 until her abdication in 1654, was one of the most learned women of the 17th century. Her sexual identity and orientation have been the cause of much debate due to her cross dr

      6 min read

    • Article

      Rod Dreher Comes Home

      Apr 28, 2022

      THE AMERICAN WRITER ROD DREHER is an unfamiliar figure in Britain, where his diagnoses of the problems ‘“liquid modernity” presents for moral living are incomprehensibly alien to most Tories. Conservative electoral success, allied to the natural Blai

      9 min read

    • Article

      Fairy Origins

      Jul 13, 2023

      For many decades British folklorists have been largely silent on the difficult question of where fairies come from. There has been a great deal of discussion of where fairies go – “always going, never gone” – why fairy belief declined, and the fairie

      10 min read

    • Article

      The Lure Of Merfolk

      Jan 28, 2021

      A Human History Vaughn Scribner Reaktion Books 2020 Hb, 320pp, £20, ISBN 9781789143140 Lusty, dangerous, pious, monstrous, thought provoking, ancient, modern. These are only a few of the ways in which merpeople can be described in Vaughn Scribner’s i

      8 min read

    • Article

      Bringing The Bacchae To The Bush

      Apr 27, 2023

      ‘‘TO ME, EDUCATION BASED ON no Latin is a house built on stilts.” This admirable statement, drawn from early in this new book, was made not by some moth-eaten Classics master desperate for custom. Instead, it is a quotation from Dr Hastings Kamuzu Ba

      4 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Jan 10, 2023

      Reviews
      2 min read

    • Article

      Welcome

      Sep 7, 2023

      Welcome
      1 min read

    • Article

      A Dizzying Labyrinth Of Credulity

      Jan 27, 2022

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM From Oracles at Delphi to Spiritualism in America Loren Pankratz Prometheus Books 2021 Hb, £25, 472pp, ISBN 9781633886681 If you have ever asked yourself “How can an

      11 min read

    • Article

      The Unholy Roman Empire

      Jan 31, 2024

      The Unholy Roman Empire
      3 min read

    • Article

      K’noath

      Dec 20, 2020

      K’noath
      4 min read

    • Article

      Michael Wood On…

      Sep 1, 2022

      In my job, travelling the world making films on history and culture, I’ve spent a lot of time exploring religion in its many manifestations. Religion, after all, is a gift for the camera: full of colour, action and often moving rituals. It’s also a c

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms

    4/5

    81 ratings10 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Both less substantively revealing and more personally engaging than I hoped, Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms combines travelogue with historical researches and anthropology of religion. The chief virtue of the book is that it identifies seven different minority Middle Eastern faiths as existing, and portrays their adherents with sympathy and respect. Several of the religions are fairly secretive about their beliefs, rituals, and philosophies, and so there's not a lot of detail about some of the faiths' dogmas or cosmologies. A recurring theme across several of the chapters is the diaspora of believers from the Middle East to Europe and the United States. This scattering offers significant improvements in opportunities for some families, but increases pressure for outmarriage and therefore for the ultimate dissolution of these very small religious traditions. Although the author is self-effacing, he comes across as someone it would be a real delight to know: intrepid, curious, and apparently possessed of a genuine gift for learning languages. One can hope he publishes more on this topic in the future; at any rate, this book is a fine jumping off point for further reading about the Mandaeans, Yazidi, Zoroastrians, Druze, Samaritans, Copts, and Kalasha.
    • 5/5
      An excellent book that I would recommend to anyone.

      It inspires me to go through the excellent and well annotated biography.
    • 4/5
      A journalistic book, and a very good one: it's unlikely that you know much about the religions covered here (I certainly didn't), and Russell is a nice entry point. It's very mixed--some theology, some history, some sociology, but mostly travel narrative, interviews and memoir. Russell talks to and describes Mandaeans (mostly in the Iraqi marshes, followers of John the Baptist), Yazidi (very secretive, I'd describe them as gnostics), Zoroastrians, Druze, Samaritans, Copts and Kalasha (whom I hadn't even heard of).

      It's not too often you get a book that's well written and fills an unnecessary lack. Only one real flaw, it's a bit repetitive. Better maps would have been nice, too.
    • 4/5
      Russell has written an elegiac and informative account of ancient faiths which range from Coptic Christianity with millions of followers to Kalasha, with a few thousand, to the Samaritan community which has fewer than 800 followers in his account. He also discusses the history, current situation and beliefs of Zoroastrianism, Yazidis, Mandaeans and Druze. Russell provides helpful suggestions for those who wish to learn more. I was fascinated!
    • 5/5
      Coming from a non-religious family in Australia, perhaps the most secular nation on Earth, there is much for me to learn about religion, and Russell has provided me with an excellent introduction to some of the more "obscure" religions of the Middle East, with a travelogue included to boot.Zoroastrians once ruled the world but are now down to 100,000 or so adherents, the Samaritans get a shout out in the Bible but now exist only in a small village in Palestine/Israel, and the Copts still sing the songs of the Pharaohs. Some great insights flow throughout "Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms" but if I had to provide a piece of criticism is that Russell left me somewhat none the wiser about the tenets of some of the religions covered. However, I guess that's what his extensive "further Reading" section is for.
    • 4/5
      During a tour of duty at the Baghdad embassy in the mid-2000's, British diplomat Gerard Russell began to take an interest in the many tiny religious groups that still populate isolated communities in the Middle East. This book is a compilation of his research into religions as varied as the Mandeans (who claim to be the last followers of John the Baptist) to the Yazidis (who venerate Menek Taus, an angel who rebelled against God and was restored to the position of the highest angel and who is represented in the form of a peacock). The participants in all of these religions are dwindling as economic pressures force young people to abandon their home communities.
    • 5/5
      A fascinating, insightful look at small, mysterious religions that have survived in regions of the Middle East for thousands of years and continue to cling to survival. The author ventures to the distant, nearly impassable regions to learn about the Mandaeans and Yazidis of Iraq, the Zoroastrians of Iran, the Druze of Lebanon, the Copts of Egypt, and others.
    • 5/5
      A startlingly informative book on a fascinating subject. I consider myself fairly well informed, but was delighted that Russell lifted a veil of ignorance on the peoples and history of this region.

      Highly, highly recommended.

      SR
    • 5/5
      In this book, a British diplomat tells us what he has learned about several minor religions of the Middle East, in years of travel and research. It is a thrilling story, revealing a astonishing breadth of religious expression. It is also a sad one. These religious groups have persisted for centuries (indeed, for more than a millennium) within the broad Islamic world, but the tolerance that permitted this is vanishing quickly, and the groups no longer benefit from the geographic isolation that helped preserve many of them. Indeed, many of their adherents have fled the region. Mr. Russell's book ends with an epilogue set in the U.S., where he visits the scattered representatives of several of these groups, where they face assimilation and disappearance. Mr. Russell's book is a delight to read, consistently informative without being in the least didactic, and illuminated by his own gentle and curious spirit. It is also one from which I learned a great deal. A wonderful work, all around.
    • 4/5
      This is a good introduction to a number of religious minorities in the Middle East nd their generally diminished numbers. The Mandaeans are an outgrowth of some form of Babylonian religion with considerable influence from Christianity, Manicheism, and Judaism. They live in the marsh areas of Iraq. Yazidis are Kurdish speaking and somewhat similrar to Zoroastrians, but are generally monotheistic with a Peacok Angel at the head. Zoroastrians are ancient Persian with a dualistic philosophy of good and evil which has had a considerable influence on later religions. The Druzes are an offshoot of Islam, but reallly a secretive mystery religion, existing mostly in Lebanon and some adjoining areas of Syria and Israel. The Samaritans are ancient religion in religion and are somewhat similar to Jews, but have lived very apart. The Copts are the main Egyptian Christians considerably regarded as heretical by the main groups of Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians, but have their own Pope with a distinctive but not aberrant Christology. The Kalasha live in obscure mountainous areas of Pakistan and have a somewhat Vedic style religion. These religions all have varying degrees of survival, but it is a group of fascinating stories.