Sulaimani, Iraq — From my place here in Kurdish Iraq, I can look down the street to the dilapidated green-domed Shiite mosque and, from there, to the more prosperous Sunni mosque not far behind it. Up the street is the Kurdish Cultural Center next to the Chaldean Catholic Church next to the headquarters of the Communist party. Overlooking it all is a heavily treed compound that everyone says is the CIA headquarters. No one seems to think twice about any of this; religion, tribe, sect, nationality, politics . . . in this part of Kurdistan they all seem to coexist peacefully, even happily, together.
The Kurds of Iraq, once surely one of the most ferocious people anywhere, have calmed down a good bit. Getting a job, owning a Nissan dealership, visiting Europe, flirting, and being flirted with . . . all these are more important these days than cutting off your neighbor’s ear. Commerce, trade, and money-making have worked their wonders on this part of the world, and turned peoples’ attention to less sanguinary pursuits. Islam — never as fanatical here as in other parts of the Middle East — remains a mildly cohesive rather than a divisive element. And nationalism, Kurdish nationalism, exercises an attractive force that dissolves many of the petty differences that only recently separated tribe and village and family.
Beyond politics and nationality, even the ancient religious landscape seems to have been upended by time. These mountains once were populated with tribes of nomadic Jews, Yazidis, dervish orders of Muslims, and Nestorians. But the Jews are gone, the Yazidis diminished, and, even among serious Christians, who these days knows anything about the “Nestorians”? Yet it wasn’t all that long ago that American doctors and missionaries came to the land of the Kurds, and especially to the Nestorians, to minister to them, to build schools for them, to bring comfort and medicines, and often to die here.
But, perhaps, as the French might say, the more things change the more they remain the same. Look again at the Kurds. It wasn’t all that long ago that half the Kurds of Iraqi Kurdistan, under the banner of the Kurdistan Democratic party, called upon their arch-enemy, Saddam Hussein, to help them exterminate their political rivals in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. Not to be outdone, the PUK, in turn, called upon the hated Iranians to help them in destroying the KDP. And now, 15 years later, a political alliance brings both parties together, based, as always, on newly perceived shared interest. And the cycle called history rolls on.
More importantly, perhaps Americans haven’t changed much, either. I recently read an account of one Asahel Grant, M.D. — physician, missionary, and educator. Grant came to Kurdistan in the 1830s and 40s to help improve the harsh lives of the Kurds and, especially, his fellow Christians, the Nestorians. His life epitomizes everything admirable, everything naive, and everything almost incomprehensible to the rest of the world about the American spirit.
In some ways, the Kurds of times past are unremarkable. Tribal warriors, they display the many virtues and all the vices catalogued in stories, travelogues, and histories of such warring tribes since the start of writing. The amazing thing about the Kurds is not their fierce past, but what they seem to have become of late.
No, perhaps the most amazing thing to see looking back over time is that there are people like Asahel Grant, the American. In the account I just mentioned, we meet him in the sixth year of his work. He has already lost his wife and two infant daughters to the ravages and diseases of Kurdistan. Yet he perseveres. Why? To bring some semblance of literacy and education, some medical relief, and some moral support to a people — in this case the Nestorian Christians — that civilization seems to have passed by.
But, again, why? Why should Asahel Grant care so much about people he barely knows to lose his wife, his children, his health, and ultimately his life over them? In a world these days where we so easily talk about the common threads of our humanity, how all of us are really the same, why does Asahel Grant, the American, seem so different? Why is he concerned about the health of — of all people! — Kurds? Why does he exhaust himself over the education of children not his own? To be sure, not one of the people he ministers to would have given up all he possessed to cross the ocean and climb the hills to minister to him. So why? Why does he do it?
This is hardly an idle question in my life. When I look out my window here in Kurdistan, I see more than buildings. Not missionaries exactly, but I do see Americans setting up schools, starting clinics, laying sewer pipe, helping to build roads. . . . All with lives elsewhere, all with families left behind. Like Asahel Grant, none of them is here for money or oil or politics or honor. What’s the idea or the idealism that drives them? Is it the same vision of humanity that drove Grant? I think it is, though I’m not sure what to call it. Nor do I know exactly why it’s there. But I do know that it is there.
Perhaps the Kurds are changed from what they were in 1840. But Asahel Grant, the American, seems still to be around, with all his idealism and hopefulness, all his boundless energy, all his up-to-date technology, all his mistakes, and, all too often, all the failures that come from his high hopes and misplaced good intentions.
We Americans are often accused of being vain, materialistic, self-interested, and self-centered. I guess, with freedom, all parts of our common human natures come out, the bad as well as the good. Still, I do know there’s another part, a part that stretches back 200 years and will probably carry forward for 200 years more. If you want to see that other side of what it means to be American, take a walk around my neighborhood here in Kurdistan.
– John Agresto, provost and acting chancellor of the American University of Iraq, lives in Sulaimani, Iraq, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. The book he refers to on Asahel Grant is Fever and Thirst, by Gordon Taylor.