Saint Mark’s Monastery in Jerusalem and Saint Mary’s Church in Bethlehem are two churches of the Syrian Orthodox Church which have undergone numerous structural and moniker changes over the past century. The churches have been influenced by a century of nationalist struggles between Arabs and Jews as well as local and regional politics. As with the Druze communities of the region, the Syrian Orthodox Christians have come from a variety of regions including Tur Abdin and Northern Syria as well as those who have lived in the area since the 15th century. Much of how their people as a church community have come to be identified (in etic terms) and identify themselves (in emic terms) can be seen in the cultural productions of the community, both literary and edificial, which are visual representations of a character configuration. The work’s hypothesis states that the community has moved from a more inclusive nomenclature or identity to a sectarian one. This work tackles issues of identity and symbolism in urban centers including language, script, and also speculates on whether or not marginalization from both religious and lay persons can occur in such communities if the new dominant or proposed identity is not accepted by some of its members. What forms does discrimination take and can it be violent as well as subtle? What can such marginalization be termed? This paper aims to set a chronological and linguistic discussion for the nomenclature of the Syrian Orthodox Church in the region in question using visual depictions, specifically language and symbols, to delineate a process of ethno linguistic and ethno-symbolic change. The languages used will include Arabic, English, Hebrew, and Syriac and the time period will focus on three distinct periods which represent major historical transformation in the region and indeed the world: pre 1950s, 1950-2000, 2000-today

The first Intifada was a watershed for Palestinian Christians in their participation in the Palestinian national movement. Palestinian Christians were instrumental in organizing tax boycotts and non-violent resistance. They marked the beginning of organized Palestinian Christian activism, notwithstanding prior Christian support for the secular movement. Over the following twenty-five years, Christian organizations began communicating the plight of the Palestinian community at home and abroad. They provided a counterpoint to the Islamic movement that had arisen among the majority Muslim population, a form of deprivatization described by Jose Casanova. However, it also demonstrated that more independent forms of religious organization have become more assertive during the period of state consolidation, as seen by Toft, Philpott, and Shah in their recent work God’s Century. The inverse relationship between the decline in relative numbers of Christians and their growing significance as a voice for the Palestinian national movement shows how telling an alternative narrative has been a type of survival strategy for Christians. The first stage in this process was the push for indigenization of the clergy within both the Protestant and historic Christian churches. From 1990 to the early 2000s, almost all of these churches had replaced largely foreign hierarchies with indigenous leaders. Prominent Christian clergy, including Anglican Canon Naim Ateek and Melchite Archbishop Elias Chacour, arose to lead solidarity movements that would link the churches with the national movement. Others, such as Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah and the patriarchs of the other historic churches, began to embrace ecumenical initiatives that culminated with the Kairos Palestine declaration of 2009. As the indigenization of the clergy proceeded, their efforts at contextualization have equally fostered lay activism in support of the national movement. Today’s Palestinian Christians have taken up the reins of non-violent resistance, pursued alternative trade, and lead annual events that communicate the plight of Palestinians under occupation to the global community. Taking advantage of their position on the inside, as Israeli citizens or as residents living under occupation, these Christians have mobilized the national message to Christian communities that might otherwise remain hostile to the Palestinian narrative. In this paper, I will explore evidence from first-person accounts told by Palestinian Christian authors and the work of several years of interview research among Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank to demonstrate how organized groups of Palestinian Christians are casting their own narrative of the national movement to domestic and global audiences.

The dominant western narrative that described the Syrian conflict as that of a “tyrant killing his own people” suffered from a fatal misunderstanding of the sectarian and political structure of Syrian society. That Western diagnostic failure led to recurrent false predictions of an imminent collapse of the regime, which in turn emboldened the armed groups fighting it and prolonged the conflict. For more than a millennium, the tradition of attributing infidelity (takfīr) and apostasy (irtidād) to religious communities that did not conform to the dominant Sunna orthodoxy led, in the best case, to their marginalization. Those marginalized communities, including the Alawis of Syria, lived through circumstances of extreme uncertainty and hardship and faced long-term challenges for survival. This paper suggests that the Syrian regime’s resistance to political reform prior to the Arab Spring uprisings and its recent resilience in withstanding the overwhelming economic, political, and lethal means deployed to topple it cannot be explained without a grounding in the historical roots of the ongoing conflict. Placing the Syrian uprising in its historical context provides an alternative interpretation of events from the perspective of those marginalized communities. These groups saw both the initial emergence of protests from mosques and the subsequent foreign arming of rebels as attempts to settle the unfinished battles of 1979–1982 between the Alawi-led regime of those perceived as apostates and infidels by the self-proclaimed faithful among the Sunna majority. This paper argues that the sectarian conflict between the religious groups in Syria was generated by the Middle Eastern cultural model that prioritizes religious identity over other social identities. Larger or more powerful groups demanded the conformity of smaller or weaker ones to symbolic representations of their identities and associated beliefs and value systems. Those demands were reinforced by prejudicial attitudes, which in turn were transmitted through intra- and intergroup interaction. Viewing nonconformists as apostates and infidels inhibited assimilation, providing fertile ground for recurrent violent sectarian conflict. Accordingly, while the ongoing Syrian conflict was preceded by a matrix of prevailing social, political, and economic conflicts, violence nevertheless proceeded along religious lines. Because of the Syrian people’s prioritization of their sectarian identities, those who shared the religious identity of the ruling elites were judged as complicit in the elite’s transgressions and even responsible for conflicts of a secular nature. This logic transmitted grievances along religious lines, so that even secular disputes escalated into religious conflict.

This paper is concerned with providing a counter-narrative of the history of the Iraqi state. Historical context is vital to the study of the contemporary politics of any state. The common story of Iraq has been most frequently told chronologically through periods marked by major events. This well-rehearsed story emphasizes moments in time upheld as the critical junctures of Iraqi history, from 1950 to the 2003 American-led invasion and subsequent regime change. These narratives are problematic because they not only perpetuate the myths of Iraq as a homogenous nation but also offer a limited understanding of Iraqi society. There is a great deal of scholarship concerned with explaining the processes of nation-building and democratization in post-2003 Iraq. A critical engagement with contemporary Iraqi politics requires a break and a deconstruction of these metanarratives in order to compose a more inclusive re-telling of Iraqi history, which lays a stronger foundation for ‘democratization from below’. Historically, Iraq’s nation-building project, as all nation-building projects, has attempted to construct a homogenous national identity through the exclusion of segments of society considered not to belong. One such mechanism is enacting policies aimed at re-writing the history of the Iraqi state to construct an exclusively Arab or Kurdish national identity. This historical revisionism has resulted in the marginalization of various religious, linguistic, cultural and ethnic minorities. To narrow the scope of the paper, I use the case of the Assyrian identity to argue that oftentimes, those on the margins or the periphery allow for a more accurate depiction of the politics on the ground. Using a mixture of newspapers, archives, and oral interviews, the paper aims to disrupt the common narratives of the Iraqi state using a genealogical method of narrative analysis through process tracking. A genealogical method is appropriate for this research because a fuller understanding of democratization in post-2003 Iraq requires a more complete and contextualized picture of Iraq’s history and its peoples.

The concept of the common heritage and brotherhood of all Jews is central to Zionist ideology. And yet, the nascent state of Israel was dominated by a majority culture with its roots in Central and Eastern Europe. Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, the vast majority of whom arrived in the country after 1948, found that this society considered them poor and backward. Prominent Israeli politicians such as David Ben Gurion regularly referred to them as ‘primitive’, and it is clear from the sources that the state bureaucracy’s only desire was to integrate these Oriental Jews into the ‘modern’ and ‘European’ society that the newly independent country imagined itself to be. Distinguished by their own traditions, food, language, and often appearance, Israelis of Middle Eastern and North African origins were marginalised and subsumed by the hegemonic culture, with its emphasis on modernity. The concept of modernity in this society was heavily influenced by Western ideals. While modern consumerism first arose in the West, it rapidly spread across the world. Of course, there had always been consumption of various degrees in the eastern Mediterranean, but modern consumerism is a beast of the West and is wrapped up in issues of Western influence. The new and modern city of Tel Aviv was at the centre of this secular, modernising culture. However, it increasingly became divided into two halves: north Tel Aviv was entirely European in ethnicity and outlook, while south Tel Aviv and Jaffa were described as ‘Levantine’ – a synonym for ‘Arab’, and ‘backward’. Through a study of advertising and personal memoirs, this paper will explore the consumption patterns of this marginalised community during the first twenty years following independence, in order to understand both how they represented themselves, and how they were represented by the dominant group. Consumers use the meaning of the goods they consume to express cultural categories and principles, cultivate ideals, create and sustain lifestyles, construct their identity, and create social change. Through the lens of consumption, therefore, it is possible to trace the development of the social identity of Oriental Jews in Tel Aviv in reaction to and relationship with mainstream culture, and explore the creation of the Israeli identity we see today. As such, this look at the so-called fringe of society can give us a better understanding of the culture as a whole.