The Palestinian revolt against British rule and Zionism from 1936-1939 had an impacted intercommunal relations among Palestinians. The anti-Christian actions of a few Muslim rebel leaders caused fear among Christians that Palestinian would descend into communal violence. While extensive intercommunal conflict never materialized, the nature of the debate about religious and national identification was altered dramatically. In the early 1920s Christian and Muslim elites joined together to present a united front to the British and the League of Nations that oversaw the mandate. Intercommunal tensions and violence that erupted during the revolt did not decrease Christian adherence to the national cause, but it did elicit a change in the way a new generation of Christian leaders viewed their position in society. The leaders of both major Palestinian factions (the Husayni-led Palestine Arab Party and the Nashashibi-led National Defence Party) were deported, killed, or imprisoned during the revolt, leaving behind a leadership void. Christian notables, too, had been involved in those movements; those remaining active in the 1940s spent most of their time abroad seeking international support; meanwhile, a new cadre of Christian leaders redirected the local Palestinian community. The Union of Arab Orthodox Clubs was indicative of the shift in Palestinian Christian identification. Rather than rely on non-religious political parties, Orthodox Christians established a widespread and highly active social organization that quickly became known to the British, Zionists, and other Arabs as the mouthpiece of the Arab Orthodox community. The Union fed the poor, organized social events, established an literary journal, participated in national sports leagues, and offered religious education programs. While the Union identified itself explicitly as Orthodox, members debated how to balance religious and national identification. Twenty years earlier Christians discussed the same issue, but overwhelmingly sought to downplay their Christian-ness in favor of their ethnicity. In the 1940s most Christians sought to enhance the Orthodox religious community as part of the national movement. The British did not understand this unique form of communalism. They viewed the full integration of religious and national identification as contradictory, and assumed Christians were lying about their nationalism in order to protect themselves from Palestinian Muslims. Indeed, 1940s Palestinian communalism was very different than the exclusionary communalism that developed in Lebanon or India, and provides a new example for understanding the complex relationship between religion and politics.

This paper will examine the historical narratives of WW1 massacres in the Ottoman Empire and the French mandate period among the Christian communities who found refugee in Syria in 1920s. As the past is given meaning in terms of the present, the reworkings of the memory will be analyzed in relation to the Christian insecurities and anxieties prevailing in today’s Syria. While the Syrian official Arab nationalist ideology emphasize the “collective suffering” aspect of the WW1 years and the following colonial experience, the categories employed in the memories of the present day Syrian-Christians about the massacres and the pre-WW1 life, the explanations given about the underlying reasons of the massacres and the French rule imply “difference”. They evoke feelings of indignation and mournfulness and hostility. The memories speak of the nature of the relations between Christians and Muslims in the past. They conjure up the contentious issues between different sects and the state in Syria. In Syria today, it is the religion in the form of sect that embodies the difference. Thanks to the long lasting populist-authoritarianism in the county and that, unlike the neighbouring states of Lebanon and Iraq, sectarianism is not built in the political system, the “difference” is articulated in a supremacist language of modernity. However, this supremacist particularism does not mean that the “generous inclusiveness” of the Syrian official ideology does not appeal to the newcomer Christians. On the contrary, the terms of particularism conform with the state-determined terms of membership to the Syrian nationhood. Showing significant similarities with the French colonial understanding of the governance of the Syrian society, the Syrian official ideology defacto differentiates the society on the basis of certain religious communities. The Christians act on this state-sponsored sectarianism, in other words they highlight the difference through a culturalist but definitely a non-political discourse. This paper will try to portray different manifestations of sectarianism in Syria and show the particular ways in which it is employed by the social actors. It will argue that the sect/religion becomes the “idiom” for the Christians to cast their aspirations as well as to negotiate relations of power in the local and national environment in the face of an Islamist and Kurdish challenge gaining ground in the county and the failure of secular Arab nationalism and socialism to create more equal decent societies. The paper is going to conclude with the contradictory trajectories of sectarianism.

The massacre of members of Iraq’s Assyrian refugee community in 1933 remains one of the most controversial moments in the early history of independent Iraq. It has become an all too common practice of scholars and pundits alike to reach back into earlier moments in Iraqi history to find the roots of sectarianism, even an inherent predisposition of Iraqis toward communalism and mass atrocity. Alongside the “Farhud,” the “Assyrian Tragedy” is one of the events highlighted in this historical genealogy. Linking the “Tragedy” to current events, beyond just being a simple problem of anachronism, also obscures the larger significance of this moment to understanding important transformations in both Iraqi society, as well as the role of international humanitarianism in a neocolonial environment. What is likewise obscured by a presentist focus on the “Tragedy” is that it tends to render one-dimensional the Assyrian refugee presence in Iraq, underscoring their role as agents of British imperial rule, rather than exploring the larger significance of the nature of the refugee in interwar Iraq, what their status can tell us about question of the citizen and the state in the post-Ottoman Arab Middle East, and the tension between a post-colonial country and colonialist-dominated, though humanitarian-oriented League of Nations. This paper analyzes a key element at the interface of humanitarianism and the massacres, namely the way the League of Nations came to consider the continuing presence of refugee Assyrians in Iraq as subject to a permanent and essential sectarianism ¬– understood as both an ethnic and religious form of difference. The League’s view – which built from similar moments, including the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey and the resettlement of Armenian refugees — engender again a policy of transfer as the preferred “solution” to what it considered implacable sectarianism. Welcomed by many sides of the conflict, the League’s actions reinforced the authority of sectarian elites against emerging forms of citizenship and national belonging – weakening both in the process. The Assyrian case, while perhaps the most bloody, was not especially unique in the Arab Levant, where the movement of displaced peoples created the extraordinarily difficult problem of how to fit “outsiders” into new national constructs, while at the same time fulfilling explicit and implicit requirements of an emerging international humanitarian régime

In the last few years, sectarianism has become a word encountered every day in almost all forms of media, in connection with recent events in the Middle East. Many political commentators and scholars have adopted the term without explicitly defining it because its meaning appears to be implicitly understood. However, it is clear upon even a cursory examination that the term, sectarianism, in its various contexts both in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world refers to rather different concepts, even when the field of examination is confined to the twentieth century. So what do we mean when we talk about sectarianism? And perhaps more importantly, how useful is it as a “category of analysis,” to borrow Frederick Cooper’s phrase? Through an analysis of the Shi’i press in Lebanon and Iraq in the interwar period, this paper will argue that sectarianism constitutes neither a clear category of practice nor a useful category of analysis in the Iraqi and Lebanese contexts because it has no independent political definition apart from its relationship with the ideology of nationalism, and that the two are in fact intimately connected concepts in the ideology of the modern nation-state. As a result, the use of sectarianism as a category of analysis in scholarship on the Middle East has reified both the concept itself and that of the nation-state as the only legitimate form of political organization. The first half of this paper will briefly trace the definitions of sectarianism and the uses of the term in contemporary scholarship on the Middle East, with a particular focus on the wide range of definitions currently in use that blur the boundary between category of analysis and category of use. The second half will present a new model for exploring community relations in the Middle East, focusing specifically on the Shi’i communities of Iraq and Lebanon before World War II.