Exploring the Core Through the Margins

This research project funded by the FWF (Elise Richter fellowship) will investigate two separate topics that have so far been largely neglected by prevalent scholarship: firstly, a Christian community in the Middle East and secondly, Islamic attitudes toward local Middle Eastern Christians. This project will focus initially on the rebuilding of the Syriac Orthodox community in Lebanon (19181982). This community, historically called Jacobite or monophysite, holds a special status in the context of Middle Eastern Christianity, on the one hand, as a group which is especially at risk and, on the other hand, as preservers of Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ. To this day, the Syriac Orthodox Church continues to use the Syriac Aramaic language in its liturgy. Up until the First World War, they mostly lived in what is today Southeastern Turkey (then part of the Ottoman Empire), where they were targeted during the Armenian genocide. Yet it is not widely known that many of those who survived managed to successfully rebuild their communities in the new nation-states of the Middle East, among them Lebanon. However, at the same time, the Syriac Orthodox struggled in Lebanon to be fully recognized as part of the Lebanese nation. The history of the Syriac Orthodox in the twentieth century therefore offers a fresh insight into our understanding of modern nation-state formation in the Middle East and especially into the question of how these states managed to accommodate religious and ethnic diversity. This project will then go on to focus on another unknown and neglected topic as regards Islam: Islamist attitudes towards Middle Eastern Christians over the last decades. A key question, raised not only in a strictly scientific context, is whether Islamist parties and movements moderate their ideological stance, especially when they strive to establish an Islamic system, and under what circumstances they may do this. In this regard, their attitude towards the Christian communities of their countries, whether that country is Egypt, Lebanon, or Jordan, are salient because Christians are useful political tools, allowing Islamist figures to appear as moderate and serious political actors (or not). The focus on such not unreservedly Islamic topics gives us a better understanding of core elements of the Islamic heritage and the establishment of an ideal Islamic society.