The Chaldeans by Yasmeen Hanoosh;

Author:Yasmeen Hanoosh;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Figure 18 The author chanting next to Patriarch Paul Cheikho in a first communion ceremony he attended in Baghdad shortly before his death. St Joseph Church, July 1988.

Patriarch Rouphael I Bidawid (1989–2003) activated additional transnational ties on behalf of the Chaldean community in Iraq during decades that were dominated by traumatic internal displacement and several waves of outward migration of Iraq’s Christians. These new transnational ties included representing the Chaldean community in transnational contexts, advancing ecumenical bonds, launching a literary-heritage-saving campaign in diaspora and establishing Chaldean dioceses in the United States.

Bidawid’s earliest exposure to transnational circles dates back to the 1940s, to his time in the junior Chaldean seminary in Mosul, which was administered by the Dominican mission. However, his tenure in Lebanon (1965–89) serves as a good example of how the current formulation of the Chaldean ‘minority’ cannot be understood without reference to transnational processes and the changing political environment in the Middle East. Bidawid continued his education in Rome, which, coupled with his subsequent exposure to Europe and the United States, allowed him to obtain a position as the chaplain in service of the Christians working in the Iraq Petroleum Company. This company extended from Tripoli in Lebanon to Kirkuk in Iraq, ethnically diverse regions with sizable Christian expatriate communities.16 In 1958, at a time when the Iraqi government engaged in a tumultuous conflict with the Kurds, Bidawid was serving as the bishop of one of the largest Chaldean dioceses that spread through a large section of Kurdistan, a region that would become the centre of the conflict between the fighting Arab and Kurdish factions. While Bidawid had to employ a great deal of political tact in order to maintain good relations with the fighting Kurdish factions and the government of Iraq, he was aware that transnational political relations were as essential as transnational religious ties for extending protection to the politically marginalized Chaldean minority in turbulent, post–Second World War Iraq.

From 1958 and until his transfer to Lebanon in 1965, Bidawid’s challenge was to maintain good relations with both factions, without compromising the position of the Chaldean Patriarchate in Baghdad or the livelihood of the Chaldean villages caught in the maelstrom. Moreover, witnessing the fragmentation of the Chaldean communities in the Nineveh Plains and their mass migration to major cities in Iraq or abroad, Bidawid foresaw the beginning a heritage-saving campaign that was to extend its roots internationally wherever Chaldean families congregated. In the early 1960s, Bidawid began supervising the cataloguing and transferring of the rich holdings of books and manuscripts from his bishopric to the patriarchal library in Mosul. He also published several articles on the Chaldean Church’s relations with the Christian West, a topic he was exceptionally passionate about.17 From his tenure in Lebanon in 1965 to his death in 2003, Bidawid’s career went far beyond his prolific Syriac literary and theological pursuits. While in Beirut, Bidawid focused his efforts on representing the Chaldean community in multiple transnational contexts. In addition to presiding over the religious

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