In academia, Assyrians face unique challenges, scholars say
A recent issue of an academic journal on the Middle East included work from two Assyrian scholars highlighting issues faced by the community in academia and beyond. The Word heard from two authors on their works, the significance of the issues they write about and how to combat them as a community. Here is what they said.
Yasmeen Altaji | Nov. 14, 2022
The Nov. 10 issue of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES), the publication of the Middle East Studies Association, featured a roundtable on the “silence, absence and erasure” of ethnic and religious groups within studies of the region. In their responses, scholars centered concerns including representation of the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh — or Artsakh — War, “persecution politics” in a context of Coptic migration and, in two instances, issues of perception of Assyrian identity and preservation of Assyrian language and history.
Linguistic bias in the study of Assyrians
Hindrances to Assyrian studies — and community progress — in academia are tied to biases rooted in the field and expressed in a particular use of language, according to one scholar.
Sargon Donabed, a Professor of History and Cultural Studies at Roger Williams University who authored an article on “epistemic violence” points to “anti-Assyrian rhetoric” as both a symptom and perpetuator of such bias in the field.
The article identifies ways in which, according to Donabed, both Western and Middle Eastern scholars have “shaped narratives of history, culture, language, and heritage that often subsumed, relegated, or negated entirely the experiences and histories of marginalized and minoritized groups of the Middle East including, but not limited to, the Assyrians,” he writes.
“If Assyrians do not control the narrative of their own history and culture, then they lose a large part of who they are,” Donabed told The Word. “Assyrians have to recognize that participating in academia is…an important part of recognition.”
He named the feat “difficult,” acknowledging what he called instances of pressure or disapproval from within the academic community in matters of writing or doing research on Assyrians — and in using the word “Assyrian” to describe the community.
“How can you fight back within a system that, in and of itself, denies your existence, or ridicules your existence, or treats you as a third-class citizen?” Donabed said.
Language preservation and discrimination
Linguistic challenges press beyond academia, according to Hannibal Travis, a professor of law at Florida International University.
He argues that the use — or persecution — of language itself is a reflection of challenges facing the Assyrian community across the globe seeking to preserving their cultural heritage today.
“In Turkey, and even in other countries, the indigenous languages are…not emphasized. And they're not official, they're not funded in the same way,” he told The Word. “And then they're disappearing.”
Assyrians are indigenous to parts of modern-day Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria, and some still call those countries home today.
Iraq’s 2005 constitution guarantees “the right to educate their children in their mother tongue,” in government educational institutions “according to educational guidelines”, but many opt for privately-funded schools for Assyrian language education.
In Turkey, linguistic challenges sit among a backdrop of the government’s denial of what the community considers a genocide carried out by Ottoman forces in 1915. Turkey’s 2007 consitution prohibits any language other than Turkish from being “taught as a mother tongue to Turkish citizens at any institution of education.” Meanwhile, foreign language education at schools is subject to determination by law.
“That's a human rights issue that's often highlighted when it comes to Turkey and other Middle Eastern countries,” Travis said. “There's a spectrum to which countries respect linguistic and minority rights. The schools are a big problem for Assyrian language in Turkey, and even in Iraq and Iran.”
Travis said he believes that because of the lack of a nation-state for Assyrians to call their own, the success of combatting such issues lies with “civil society groups”.
“There's been a lot of controversy and turnover in these civil society groups, where there's like cliquishness, and factions, and then one faction feels left out and they sort of walk away,” he said. “There's splintering, and maybe not as much unity or strength in numbers” as such groups representing other communities or causes.