Diasporic Devotion: Transnational Religion and Middle East Migrations
Panel 043, sponsored byMoise Khayarallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies, 2017 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 19 at 10:30 am
Panel Description
This panel interrogates the linkages between religiosity and mobility among Middle Eastern communities. How were religious attachments maintained and reinvented by people on the move? What role did religion play in facilitating new forms of migration and in shaping diasporic communities? By bringing together papers that cut across the 'modern'/'early modern' divide, the panel will interrogate existing paradigms within the history of Middle Eastern migration. On the one hand, scholars of the 19th-century mass migrations out of Ottoman Syria tend to depict migrants as purely rational economic actors, motivated variously by capital, class and politics. By contrast, scholars of the preceding centuries are accustomed to giving religious elites a lead role in the creation of new forms of mobility among Ottoman subjects. Five papers from across this time frame will bring the religiosity of Middle Eastern migrants into the center ground, examining the complex ways they experienced and performed their faith. From the mobility of Arabic-speaking Catholics around the Mediterranean in the 17th and 18th centuries; to the miraculous properties Palestinian migrants invested in their devotional objects in the 19th century; to the circulation of Orthodox Christian texts and their authors; and the refashioning of Maronite identity in the U.S in the early 20th century; the panel seeks to uncover previously neglected areas of migrants' religiosity that were nevertheless central to their transient lifestyles. While all the papers are focused on Christian actors, we are keen to use these as case studies for a wider discussion of how historians of migration and diaspora can better capture the types of religious attachment usually overlooked within grand narratives of 'push' and 'pull' factors.
The migration of one-third of the population of Lebanon to the Americas between 1870 and 1920 was deeply transformative at great many levels. While historians have studied the economic, social and political impact of migration on the Eastern Mediterranean and the secular changes amongst the diasporic communities, changes in religious faith, practice and institutions remain opaque. Yet, these are among the most intimate aspect of the lives transformed, and were in fact the most active fault lines in the Mahjar communities (lands of immigration) and at home.
Based on hundreds of letters sent to Maronite Patriarch Elias Howayek (between 1899 and 1931 by Maronites in the United States, this paper examines some of these fault lines. From anguished calls for spiritual guidance to heated polemics about the corrupt nature of clerics, these letters speak of a religious community in tumult trying to rebuild itself in ways that accommodate the changed circumstances of being in America. Competing faiths and new secular ideas, communal and religious divisions, limited funds and dearth of Maronite priests made this process a struggle. Negotiated across unprecedented distances, with painfully slow letters as the only thread to any semblance of decisive patriarchal authority, the very essence of being a Maronite underwent dramatic changes that not only altered the spiritual and ecclesiastical lives in the Mahjar but also transformed the Maronite church itself.
Reading the history of the Middle East from the margins, this paper suggests, can change our understanding of the narrative. In 2012, I was approached to examine the books of Shukri Swaydan, an Ottoman Arab migrant to the United States, whose personal library had recently been donated to Princeton’s Firestone Library. For three days, I played the part of an archivist, pulling this collection apart, cataloguing its contents, and putting it back together again. As I did so, I reflected on Swaydan’s obscure life and varied interests and commitments. Born in Marj‘uyun in 1885, Swaydan was educated at the Russian Imperial Orthodox Society’s school in Nazareth, before joining its staff. In 1909, however, he quit this comfortable existence for a new life in the United States. Taking up residence in Worcester, Massachusetts, he made a living as a translator, notary public, and journalist. But, as his books – those he read, and those he wrote – make clear, he remained committed throughout his life to the Russian Orthodoxy in which he had grown up. Lived in and through books, Swaydan’s life was a profoundly pious one. Focusing on the contents of his library, I will suggest that these can provide fresh insights into the intellectual and cultural histories of the Eastern Mediterranean and its diasporas. For Swaydan’s bookish life offers correctives to two time-worn narratives: that of Arab migrants’ mercantile inclinations and peddling successes, and that of the Arab nahda, or intellectual awakening, as a process of engagement with secular modernity.
This paper looks at the material objects carried in the suitcases of migrants from the Jerusalem area in the 19th and early 20th centuries to explore their sense of religious belonging and spirituality. In particular it focuses on the Holy Land prayer beads that were commonly transported and sold as part of the pedlar’s standard range of merchandise. From Bethlehem to Buenos Aires and from Mecca to Manila, prayer beads were a lucrative commodity for Middle Eastern migrants. But at the same time, they provided a vital source of spiritual sustenance for the migrants themselves in an uncertain world of movement and dislocation. Commerce and faith did not simply co-exist in the global commodity chains of the 19th century; they could be mutually productive.
Shifting our gaze to these everyday objects and the complex meanings attached to them, we gain rare glimpses into the spiritual landscapes of people otherwise typecast within the confines of commercial and familial networks. Drawing on the recent discussions of the materiality of religious experience within the anthropology of religion, the paper recasts these migrants as fervently religious actors, albeit in their own idiosyncratic ways. The paper concludes with a case study of a particular miracle performed in 1909 in which the now-canonised Mariam Ghattas brought a merchant-migrant from Bethlehem back from the dead through the power of her rosary. In this version of the Middle Eastern migration story, prayer beads could perform both economic and supernatural miracles.
