Awakening, or Watchfulness: Naum Faiq and Syriac Language Poetry at the Fall of the Ottoman Empire

Abstract

From the Hindu Kush to the Brecon Beacons, the rise of nationalistic feelings in the early twentieth century was accompanied by an outpouring in nationalistic literature. This was also the case among the Syriac-language communities of the Middle East, who wrote in what linguists call Aramaic. This language is attested in the tenth century BC in today’s northern Syria, and in the second and early third centuries AD became the primary medium for literary expression around Edessa, Urfa in today’s southeastern Turkey. This specific form of Aramaic is referred to in English as Classical Syriac, and its importance as a literary language for various forms of Syriac Christianity (in today’s Maronite Church, Syriac Orthodox Church and Church of the East, and their Roman Catholic counterparts) has contributed to its survival, even as it ceased to be spoken outside learned circles. The Syriac-language poetry we will be examining in this paper was written in that Classical Syriac dialect, taught to its practitioners in school and not in the home, and was allied with a sense of nationalism associated with a perceived ethnic connection to the ancient Assyrian empire. The literary movement therefore could be styled, following earlier authors, as an “Assyrian Awakening.”1 The poetry produced by this movement during the waning years of the Ottoman Empire is a valuable witness for the study of contemporaneous minority nationalisms. Our exploration of the content, craft, and tradition of this poetry serves to demonstrate the relationship of nascent Syriac-language nationalism to contemporary Arabic-language nationalism and nationalist poetry, and to show the importance of Classical Syriac as a poetic medium in the further development of an Assyrian national identity. First, I hope to show that, although the political impulse towards a particular Assyrian nationalism was part of a contemporaneous movement widespread throughout the Ottoman Empire in the 1910s, and at least partially an offshoot of the more developed