Like the millions affected by conflict, war, and internal strife, Christians in the Middle East have experienced staggering changes over the past few decades. The news cycle reveals grave and existential threats facing peoples whose faith and traditions are deeply embedded within the region. For scholars, highlighting the region’s pluralistic heritage, cultures, and peoples seems an urgent priority and, in this context, research on the Middle East’s Christians mandates greater visibility within our field. Indeed, we are reminded by Talal Asad to investigate why Middle Eastern Christianity has been “conceptually marginalized and represented as minor branches in the Middle East of a history that develops elsewhere--in Europe, and at the roots of Western civilization.” (“The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam”)
This panel intervenes in the pedagogical and structural inclusion of Christianity as a sub-field of Middle Eastern Studies. Our goal is to challenge persistent paradigms in this field: rather than place Christians within discourses of persecution and sectarian conflict or, conversely, within the framework of national unity politics, this panel aims to trouble the conceptual foundations of Middle Eastern Christianity as stuck between a “Muslim Middle East,” and “Western Christendom,” and seeks to present new scholarship on the important place of Christianity in the Middle East and within our field.
Panelists will approach their topics from a variety of interdisciplinary angles, showcasing alternative methods towards the study of Middle Eastern Christians. Their research will highlight everything from the subtleties of inter-communal and intra-Christian dynamics to the construction and expression of political and religious identities. With five richly conceptualized papers and the commentary of a discussant, the panel invites comparative understandings of different Christian experiences and challenges tendencies to seclude the study of Christian communities, considering, instead, how the experience of various groups—in this case, Armenians, Assyrians, Copts, and Maronites—might overlap, diverge, and complement one another. Backed by rich historical and ethnographic research, panelists will discuss a diversity of experiences, from the legal and social challenges facing Armenian “conversos” (“Islamicized Armenians”) in modern Turkey and Assyrian Christians in Baathist Iraq, to the civic and religious activism among Evangelical, Orthodox, and Maronite Christians in Egypt and Lebanon. The panel aims, ultimately, to bring the different histories and ethnographic presents of Middle Eastern Christians to the foreground, in order to provide perspectives on the integral position of Christians to political and social transformations in the Middle East.
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Dr. Alda Benjamen
Akram Khater and Paul Rowe critique the “ahistorical views” that present Middle Eastern Christians either as persecuted minorities or agents of imperialism. This representation is applicable to Iraqi Assyrians, who are passingly referred to within the context of Iraq Levies or the Simele massacre of 1933. In analyzing the role of Assyrians in Iraq’s socio-ideological and political movements this paper sheds light on the ways in which minorities positioned themselves in their societies and elevated issues of significant to their community in the larger Iraqi sphere, while also identifying with Iraqis of their socio-economic class and gender. By moving away from popular representations of minorities, it contributes to new ways of addressing this subject. Ba’thist reports on the Assyrian community will be augmented with Assyrian press culture produced in Baghdad in the 1970s, in Arabic and Aramaic.
In 1972 the Ba’th regime passed Law 251 giving the Assyrians cultural and linguistic rights. Ba’thist policies towards the Assyrians were reflective of the regime’s approaches to internal and external pressures exerted on it. Internally, the role of Assyrians in Iraqi oppositional parties and their transnational interactions with community members in neighbouring countries and regional governments was concerning. Externally, the regime was weary of the influence of diasporic Assyrian organizations and their influence on Western governments. Policies issued in the early 1970s were meant to bring members of this community closer to the party. Following the Algiers Agreement between Iran and Iraq in 1975, Iran stopped supporting the Iraqi opposition, leading to the opposition’s demise. Contradictory policies by the regime towards the Assyrians began to be noticed, and included village destructions and restrictions on the implementation of Law 251.
Further, in Ba’th internal reports the community began to be identified differently. In the preface of Law 251, the Assyrians had been labelled a “national minority,” but in the late 1970s they came to be regarded as a “religious denomination.” This presentation will contextualize this shift in the regime’s identification taking into account the role of Assyrians in the Iraqi opposition and their cultural production in urban centres. It will also nuance the internal interplay between the ethnic (Assyrian), denominational (various Church memberships), and national Iraqi identities existing within the community.
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Febe Armanios
In 1990, a group of lay leaders from diverse denominational orientations decided to establish Télé Lumière, the first indigenous Christian religious station in the Middle East. Through this endeavor, the channel’s founders sought to promote a Christian vision of reconciliation, peace, and human rights and “to rehabilitate the compassion that was lost during the civil war.” (TL documents, 2006) In 1997, the Maronite Church partnered with Télé Lumière and assumed the role of supervising the channel’s programming. Télé Lumière has since expanded considerably: aside from its domestic operation, today it manages nine satellite or internet channels (under the “Noursat” brand) and maintains strong ties with the global Lebanese diaspora. Relying on personal interviews and internal documentation, this paper examines the circumstances that shaped the channel’s rise and investigates its relevance as a vehicle for Christian religious expression and for reinterpreting the Maronite identity after the war.
After the Civil War, the Maronite Church, particularly Patriarch Nasrallah Butrus Sfeir (1986-2011), had been concerned about the unequal place of Christians and had fought to protect their freedom of speech within various media outlets. Lebanon’s 1994 Audiovisual Media Law threatened these rights since it allowed for the licensing of a Sunni Muslim, a Christian Orthodox, a (secular) Maronite, and two Shia (one religious: Al Manar) channels. To pacify criticisms that the Maronites too had the right to their own religious channel and to keep sectarian politics at bay, the state allowed Télé Lumière to continue its operations albeit with no official license, a decision that boosted the channel’s stature among its supporters and within the Maronite community.
In addition to securing this victory for Christian religious expression, the channel also reaffirmed the church’s place and authority in the post-Ta’if years. During the war, political Maronitism overshadowed and even tarnished the Maronite religious identity. In contrast, Télé Lumière has worked to evangelize Christian values such as forgiveness, love, charity, and kindness, and to call attention to pressing social problems such as the plight of addicts, the poor, and the disabled. The channel, in that sense, hoped to realize the Vatican’s longstanding position that Lebanese Christians have a domestic and regional imperative to speak on behalf of the marginalized and to promote dialogue with other communities. In working to showcase these ideals, Télé Lumière has attempted to outline a new and more conciliatory interpretation of Maronite Christianity following years of civil strife.
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Dr. Candace Lukasik
Since 1952, the Egyptian state and the leadership of the Coptic Orthodox clergy have framed and supported the Coptic Orthodox Church as the main political and social representative of the “Coptic community,” while discouraging political leadership independent of the Church. Under the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser, all political and civil society activism was limited. The national transformation under President Nasser and the administrative transformation within the Coptic Orthodox Church, following 1952, had dramatically curtailed the participation of lay Copts in national politics and in Church reform. As a result of increasing corruption and militarization, social movements began to form in the early 2000s to challenge the Egyptian state, which culminated in the events of 2011. Amidst wider social movements and a broader political opening in Egypt over the past decade, Coptic groups formed to raise awareness of increasing sectarian violence to the wider Egyptian public, to challenge the representative role of the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egyptian politics, and to demand legal and social reform around the “Coptic issue.”
These groups are indeed something different from what has appeared in the past, particularly their large youth membership. However, it is important to note their small numbers in comparison to the numbers of Coptic youth actively involved in the Church, particularly its Youth Bishopric. The Bishopric is an integral part of the lives of many youth servants of the Church, and since 2011, involvement in the Youth Bishopric has become even more popular with new programming aimed at including national politics within courses on service to the Church. So, even though there are calls from other Coptic youth for a greater political role outside of the representative power of the Church, there are many others who have maintained and strengthened the Church as the central hub of the “Coptic community.”
This paper aims to unpack the different contexts that have led to an increase in Coptic mobilization over the past decade, while also investigating how a majority of Coptic youth, despite calls for a greater political role outside of the representative power of the Church, have reinforced the Church as a central leader of social, intellectual and, also, political development, particularly through the activities of the Youth Bishopric. This paper specifically explores the ways in which the Church has adapted to shifting political landscapes since 2011 and has reformulated its programming to shift with emerging political desires among Coptic youth.
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Ms. Anna Dowell
This paper analyzes practices of social engagement that Evangelical Egyptians have been producing in the wake of the popular protests of 2011, called in Egypt “The January 25th Revolution.” There is a growing sensibility among Protestant Christians that these years have afforded emergent opportunities for a more expansive space for Christian Egyptian national belonging expressed in church workshops on citizenship and the church and state, election organizing and mobilization, public media appearances as revolutionaries, participation in political parties, and increased involvement in civil society initiatives. In their attempts to situate themselves as distinctively and authentically national citizens, Protestant Christians must negotiate complex subject positions, in relation to their historical connections to Anglo-American colonial-era missionaries and as descendants of the Coptic Orthodox population, as well their membership in Egypt’s politically charged and symbolically powerful Christian minority. These complex negotiations entail a bricolage of evangelical Protestant theological sensibilities, Egyptian nationalist discourse, and abiding connection to the mythology of ancient Egypt and its pre-Islamic Christian roots. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in 2015, this paper seeks to illuminate the way that this distinctively Euro-American form of Christianity - evangelicalism - has become invested in affectively charged and nationally-oriented that is, a religiously inflected sense of national belonging and responsibility. These complex negotiations of Egypt’s “minority within a minority” serves to underscore the deep historic roots of Egyptian Christianity, as well as the way that the category is produced and contested in the wake of colonial missions, and shows the way that this Euro-American religious form is subsumed, or made sense of, in the more salient framework of Middle Eastern Christianity.
