Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East (Audiobook)

from dickmanikowski

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 Mande...

from stillatim

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 a...

from bezoar44

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 ...

from nmele

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 ...

from vpfluke

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...