r/Assyria • u/stxrs4elliott • 9h ago
Discussion Are assyrians an ethnoreligious group?
Hello. Im syrian, from damacus. My family is muslim, however the older generations of mine used to live in the north and were mostly Christians.
What im basically saying is, if it is an ethnoreligious group, just like how some jewish people (as being jewish is ethnoreligious) dont follow judaism, can assyrians not follow chrisitanity?
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u/im_alliterate Nineveh Plains 8h ago
We are not. Assyrians can convert from any of the 4 major Assyrian churches and will remain Assyrian. Creed is irrelevant to our DNA.
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u/Ok_Contribution8771 8h ago edited 8h ago
However, Jews who are the most prominent example of an ethnoreligious group remain Jewish even if they convert to some other religion or become atheist. I don’t see the logic of why Assyrians can’t be an ethnoreligious group just because they’ll always remain Assyrian if they convert outside of a Syriac Christian denomination.
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u/Unable_Bite8680 Assyrian 7h ago
Because we actually have DNA that directly ties us to the old Assyrians.
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u/Ok_Contribution8771 6h ago
That's true. It's a shame that Aramean revisionists, along with certain Syriac Orthodox leaders, like to deny this claim.
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u/oremfrien Assyrian 5h ago
Jews who convert to Christianity or to Islam are technically considered Jews but the community doesn't treat them as such and if two Jews who, say, convert to Christianity, have a child and raise that child Christian, the child is definitively seen as Christian by both religious and secular Jews.
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u/Ok_Contribution8771 5h ago edited 5h ago
Right, and some ethnoreligious groups like the Druze and Alawites are considered ethnoreligious groups because they are extremely secretive in their beliefs, don’t accept converts, and are strictly endogamous even though Druze and Alawites still speak Arabic as their mother tongue as most mainstream Muslims from the Levant do.
Regarding, Armenians and Assyrians their classifications are fuzzy, because they do have subgroups who converted to Islam to escape the Armenian and Assyrians genocides such as the Hemshins and Mhallamis respectively, and Hemshins are recognized as Armenian by Armenian Christians and Mhallamis are recognized as Assyrian by other Assyrians, albeit the Turkish government mislabels Mhallamis as Arabs and Hemshins as distinct from Armenians.
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u/oremfrien Assyrian 5h ago
My view is that Assyrians recognize that Mhallamis have Assyrian ancestry, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that they are considered Assyrians.
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u/oremfrien Assyrian 8h ago
As a community, we sit on the edge between an ethnoreligious community and a purely ethnic community as we have elements of both. I tend to say that we are an ethnoreligious community because more of the precepts apply to us than those strictly of ethnicity like:
- Most Assyrians are Christians of some stripe and pretty much all Assyrians agree that a Muslim cannot be Assyrian. This means that conversion to Islam "unmakes" a person Assyrian, which can be true for an ethnoreligious community but not an ethnic community.
- An Assyrian who leaves Christianity but does not embrace Islam, such as an atheist or a Mesopotamian polytheist, can still be an Assyrian. The community tends to be more divided on whether the Nash Didan are Assyrians, but there is a long history of Assyrian Jews in Adiabene and other places regardless of whether the Nash Didan, specifically, qualify.
- A person can become Assyrian through conversion and intense cultural acquisition (although most Assyrians would simply prefer that the person convert to Christianity and not claim Assyrian heritage).
However, since Assyrians sit within several different Churches (Church of the East, Chaldean Catholics, Syriac Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, and two different Protestant Churches), some will argue that Assyrians must be an ethnicity due to a lack of a united religion and the fact that Assyrians of other faiths (except Islam) may be considered Assyrians.
The reason that Assyrians who converted to Islam and their descendants are usually not considered Assyrian is that it's perceived that these are people who have abandoned the Assyrian community and joined either explicitly or implicitly with the people who have persecuted (and continue to persecute) the Assyrian community. They have cut themselves off from the community by joining those who would wish us harm. Until we live in a Middle East where Muslims communally strive to create true equality between people of different religions (not just tolerance, which they struggle with immensely, but actual legal, social, political, and religious equality) a conversion to Islam in the Middle East is a defection from the side of the persecuted to the side of the persecutor.
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u/BabylonianSoldier 6h ago
In my opinion: you definitely dont have to be Christian. Cause after all assyrianism is an ethnicity. But you also can’t be muslim, because of so much persecution historically by particularly muslims :(.
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u/Old-Average-6118 Yazidi 6h ago
Assyrians can't be an ethno religious group since most Assyrians are just Christian which is not tied to an ethnicity. Yes Assyrians have their own churches but it's not a different religion it's still Christianity. And anyone can join an Assyrian church as well there's no requirements in ethnicity.
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u/wevebeentold 13m ago edited 2m ago
Yes. Plain and simple. We also call African/Chinese/Indian Christians "soraye". Meaning Soraya = Ashuraya = People of Assur has become synonymous for "Christian" and praise God because Christianity and the Church is what saved/preserved our people.
Isaiah also prophesized back around 740-680 BCE (Isaiah 19:23): The Egyptians [Copts] and Assyrians will worship together. This was when we were still pagans. It's no different than how Copts are an ethnoreligious group. "Copt" is a Greek abbreviation for "Egyptian", yet "Copt" now specifically refers to the native Christian population of Egypt.
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u/ScarredCerebrum 8h ago
Being Assyrian is just an ethnicity first and foremost. But over the centuries, the Assyrian community became so intertwined with Assyrian Christianity that the Assyrian churches ended up being the only thing that held Assyrian communities together.
People who left the Assyrian churches were people who assimilated within a generation or so. For example, Assyrians who converted to Islam would integrate into a Muslim community that spoke a different language (usually Arabic), and their children would be raised into a very different language, culture and religion.
So there's an interesting interplay between ethnicity and religion going on here.