After World War I, Iraq was established as an Arab kingdom under British tutelage. The official state ideology of Arab nationalism provided room for Christians and Jews, and Iraq’s first king was... Show moreAfter World War I, Iraq was established as an Arab kingdom under British tutelage. The official state ideology of Arab nationalism provided room for Christians and Jews, and Iraq’s first king was known for his tolerant rhetoric towards non-Muslims. At the same time, events such as the Simele massacre of 1933 against Assyrians and the Farhud of 1941 against Jews show that the ideal did not always materialize. Despite having a shared religious heritage and Classical Syriac as a common ecclesial language, the Syriac Christians belonged to different denominations and there were large differences in languages that were used outside the church, causing different attitudes towards society. One group, mainly consisting of Chaldean Catholics, made a radical positive choice for Arabic and supported Arab nationalism. Another group, mainly connected to the Church of the East, saw themselves as Assyrian and stressed their use of Neo-Aramaic for informal and formal purposes. Other positions included that of secular Christians who stressed their Arab identity and argued against the influence of religion in society. The dissertation shows that while Arab nationalism provided room for Christians, this ideology was at the same time strongly restrictive for Christians who sought to stress their own culture. Show less
This dissertation presents the results of a computer-assisted linguistic analysis of the __Book of the Laws of the Countries__, a religious prose text, attributed to the 3rd-century theologian... Show moreThis dissertation presents the results of a computer-assisted linguistic analysis of the __Book of the Laws of the Countries__, a religious prose text, attributed to the 3rd-century theologian Bardaisan, which is one of the earliest representatives of Syriac literature. Using the computational tools and methods that were developed in the Leiden project __Turgama: Computer-Assisted Analysis of the Peshitta and the Targum: Text, Language and Interpretation__ by dr. Wido van Peursen, I have analysed this corpus on different linguistic levels: orthography / morphology, phrase structure, and clause structure. This analysis enables us to gain deeper insight in the peculiarities of the Syriac language of the 3rd century; the same period in which the Hebrew Bible was translated into Syriac, resulting in the so-called Peshitta. As such, the Book of the Laws of the Countries represents a corpus written in __native__ Syriac, to which the translated Syriac of the Peshitta can be compared. This will allow us to attain a better view of the considerations which played a role in the creation process of the Syriac Bible; e.g., the amount to which translation was influenced by interpretation, the two possible meanings of the Syriac word __Turgama__. Show less
