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Heirs To Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East by Gerard Russell (Simon & Schuster, £20)

They have survived, some of them, for millennia. They are threatened now like never before. Some of the world’s most ancient religions, the bedrock of civilisations, now on the brink of extinction. All in the wider Middle East.

In what is a tragic miracle of publishing serendipity, Gerard Russell’s Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms begins in Iraq — and the latest efforts by a murderous death cult calling itself Islamic State to wipe out whole religious traditions that, ironically, survived and even flourished under the real Caliphate.

Reincarnation of the soul is a common thread that the disappearing religions, the Haranians, Yazidis and Alawites share. As is a reverence for fire. The Druze believe in reincarnation too. Like the Alawites, they say they’re “Muslims” but believe that the great philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and, among the Druze especially, Pythagoras, are all prophets who have helped bring divine revelation to earth.

Now threatened with annihilation at the hands of Islamic State or the Shi’a fanaticism of the mullahs in Iran, many of these esoteric traditions survived until now behind walls of theological secrecy and by only marrying their own kind.

I cannot claim the expertise to offer a deep critique of Russell’s representation of the finer points of the belief systems he explores — I’ll warrant few can. But he has got under the skin of many of the region’s endangered peoples and what he has found is rather beautiful. The mustachioed hill people of the Lebanon, Golan, Syria and central Israel, tight-knit, tough, warlike and enduring, the Druze trust in their Pythagorean tradition that holds that “planets made music as they rotated across the sky”. And “that a person who concentrated long enough and knew what to listen for could hear ‘the music of the spheres’”. What a delightful whimsical contrast with the religious certainty of the IS death cult, whose members no doubt look forward to the feast of Nowruz, the Islamic New Year. They won’t like to know that this is, in fact, a Zoroastrian event.

The Persians once built an empire on Zoroastrianism — the pre-Judaic monotheist creed which, Russell gently implies, probably underpins the belief systems of the great religions that followed. These days Zoroastrians are fading from Iran. Worn down by persecution and mockery, they have emigrated — to India, to America and to Britain.

The Yazidis have all but vanished as a coherent culture in Iraq — driven from Mount Sinjar by IS. An elder tells Russell that we are witnessing the end of his people; they hold that there is no hell but they have been plunged into it.

Travelling by bus and taxi across the region even as IS irrigated the landscape nearby with blood, Russell’s command of Arabic and Farsi (combined with prodigious scholarship) enables him to bring us this valuable compendium of fast vanishing cultures.

My favourite among his many discoveries are the Kalasha of the mountainous border lands around Chitral, who have survived in remote valleys between Afghanistan and Pakistan. They are wine-drinking pagans who are “never melancholy” and are wildly social, their madcap, chaotic dance festivals contrasting strongly with the sadness of Muslim converts left out of the partying.

Russell confesses to catching some of the “Kafiristan fever” that gripped Victorians after Rudyard Kipling’s publication of The Man Who Would Be King, in which two British soldiers discover the Kalasha’s ancestors in the top right hand corner of Afghanistan and exploit their credulity to rule them until their con trick is discovered. Often believed to descend from the remains of the army of Alexander the Great, the Kalasha have been able to cling on to their way of life, amid grim pressures to convert to Islam, largely as a consequence of their isolation.

Most of the others are fading. This is a cultural and philosophical tragedy leaving a contemporary religious world untethered to the past — save for the echoes of beliefs such as the Zoroastrian motto: “Good thought, good word, good deed”.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £16, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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