Changes

When Islam went towards Mesopotamia and Persia, it swept the strongholds of the Sassanid state and gradually penetrated throughout the country north and south, until the Abbasid state was established and concentrated in Baghdad, the new capital, and the Arab-Islamic culture became the official culture of the country, and it was clear that other marginal cultures confined to its surroundings, including the Aramaic culture, imposed on it the new conditions to gradually recede to the diora, churches and empty areas. As for Christians, Islam has made them “dhimmis” who “pay jizyah while they are small.” Thus, the name of the Nestorians and Jacobins became the common and expressive name for the identity of Christians in the Abbasid state departments, and in the literature of that era, they are subject in matters of their religion to the heads of their churches and their laws, and in their worldly matters to a civil status system, dictated by the state to them within the framework of practices ranging from harassment and tolerance.

The concept of nationalism in the contemporary sense, that is, the feeling of belonging to a certain group strengthened by cultural, emotional and geographical interdependence and historical sequence, is an issue that gradually clarified starting from the Middle Ages, coinciding with the Mongol penetration that broke through the barriers of the Abbasid state and the administrative organizations that emerged from it, until the national identity crystallized with clear features in recent times. We will see how the Chaldean name was the axis and the most likely reference around which the national consciousness of the Christians of Mesopotamia crystallized in their various phases. To the documents: