Christian Communities in the Contemporary Middle East: An Introduction (original) (raw)

Abstract

Who are the Christians of the Middle East? How have churches and Christian organizations responded to violent conflicts, political unrest, refugee flows, and economic crises in the region? Does such socio-political turmoil define Middle Eastern Christians as a group? By what methods do scholars today study Christian communities in the Middle East? This special issue addresses such pertinent questions and contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the contemporary realities and recent histories of institutional churches and Christian communities in the Middle East. It does so with a specific focus on the Arabic speaking regions of North Africa and West Asia, while including studies on Christians in these regions who are not Arab and who use vernacular and liturgical languages other than Arabic. The diversity and rich heritage of Christianity in the Middle East is apparent in this issue's articles on Christianity in Egypt, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon, while these studies also highlight the ties Christians in these nations have to co-religionists in Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Armenia, and around the world. To convey the particularities of contemporary churches in the Middle East and their place in religious and theological studies, in what follows, I first consider the demographics and denominational diversity within Middle Eastern Christianity and the ways scholars have studied these communities in recent years. Then I introduce the nine articles in this issue, noting the critical gaps this research fills in support of Middle Eastern Christian Studies. 1 Middle Eastern Churches Scholars and Middle Eastern Christian leaders alike describe the distinct expressions of Christianity in the Middle East by dividing the region's churches

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References (68)

  1. 25,800 members); and members of five Eastern Orthodox churches from outside the re- gion (Bulgarian, Georgian, Romanian, Russian, and Serbian) with a combined population of 21,200.
  2. Johnson and Zurlo, World Christian Database. The WCD defines the Middle East as in- cluding seventeen countries, with a combined Christian population of 18,809,000. Of these, Cyprus is the only Christian majority nation, with Christians making up over 70% of the population. Among the other Middle Eastern nations, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Turkey are home to ancient Christian communi- ties. The Christian presence in the Gulf States-Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen-is mainly due to recent migration. For sta- tistics on Cyprus and an overview of Christian demographics in the Middle East, see Todd M. Johnson and Gina A. Zurlo, World Christian Encyclopedia, 3rd edition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 240-241, 933. On the growth of migrant churches in Kuwait, see Stanley J. Valayil C. John, Transnational Religious Organization and Practice: A Contextual Analysis of Kerala Pentecostal Churches in Kuwait (Leiden: Brill, 2018).
  3. Heather J. Sharkey, "Middle Eastern and North African Christianity: Persisting in the Lands of Islam," in Introducing World Christianity, (eds.). Charles E. Farhadian (Malden, porary realities.41 Yet new publications initiated by Arab Christian authors, like Shifting Identities (2016) edited by Mitri Raheb, have helped to fill in this gap.42
  4. 37 Andrea Pacini, ed., Christian Communities in the Arab Middle East: The Challenge of the Future (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998);
  5. Habib Badr, Suad Abou el Rouss Slim, and Joseph Abou Nohra, eds., Christianity: A History in the Middle East (Beirut: Middle East Council of Churches, 2005);
  6. Anthony O'Mahony and Emma Loosley, eds., Eastern Christianity in the Modern Middle East (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010). See also Anthony O'Mahony, ed., Christianity in the Middle East: Studies in Modern History, Theology and Politics (London: Melisende, 2008);
  7. Jan J. Van Ginkel, Heleen Murre-van den Berg, and Theo M. van Lint, eds., Redefining Christian Identity: Cultural Interaction in the Middle East since the Rise of Islam, (Leuven: Peeters, 2005).
  8. Mitri Raheb and Mark A. Lamport, eds., Handbook of Christianity in the Middle East (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming 2020). See also Stephan Stetter and Mitra Moussa Nabo, eds., Middle Eastern Christianity: Local Practices, World Societal Entanglements (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
  9. For an early edited volume see Anthony O'Mahoney, Gören Gunner, and Kevork Hintlian, eds., The Christian Heritage in the Holy Land (London: Scorpion Cavendish, 1995). Baker provides succinct descriptions of pre-2010 texts, including Norman A. Horner, A Guide to Christian Churches in the Middle East: Present-Day Christianity in the Middle East and North Africa (Elkhart, IN: Mission Focus, 1989);
  10. Kenneth Cragg, The Arab Christian: A History in the Middle East (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991); Betty Jane Bailey and J. Martin Bailey, Who Are The Christians in the Middle East? (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003). For commentary on these publications, see Baker, "Christian Traditions," 70.
  11. Heather Sharkey, A History of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). For a recent study of the region's religious diversity, see Ussama Makdisi, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019).
  12. Pacini's book aimed to convey the contemporary realities and demographics of Middle Eastern Christianity in the late 1990s, but that information is now dated.
  13. Mitri Raheb, ed., Shifting Identities: Changes in the Social, Political, and Religious Structures in the Arab World (Bethlehem: Diyar Publishing, 2016). Another recent volume reflects Christian Communities in the Contemporary Middle East Exchange 49 (2020) 189-213 in nearly every region of the Middle East and taken up overlooked subjects such as missions and gender.47 In the latter category, Barbara Reeves-Ellington's 2013 book on Americans in the Near East and Balkans and Beth Baron's 2014 study of American missionaries and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, are noteworthy.48 Even more than the first category of publications, however, these books focus almost exclusively on history up to the early twentieth cen- tury. Further work remains to be done, therefore, on contemporary and recent historical missions in the region.49 and Eleanor Harvey Tejirian, eds., Altruism and Imperialism: Western Cultural and Religious Missions in the Middle East (New York: Middle East Institute of Columbia University, 2002); Martin Tamcke and Michael Marten, eds., Christian Witness between Continuity and New Beginnings: Modern Historical Missions in the Middle East (Berlin: Lit, 2006);
  14. Uwe Kaminsky and Roland Löffler, eds., The Social Dimension of Christian Missions in the Middle East: Historical Studies of the 19th and 20th Centuries (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2010);
  15. Mehmet Ali Doğan and Heather J. Sharkey, eds., American Missionaries and the Middle East: Foundational Encounters (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2011);
  16. Heather J. Sharkey, ed., Cultural Conversions: Unexpected Consequences of Christian Missionary Encounters in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013).
  17. For studies on missions and gender, see Inger Marie Okkenhaug, The Quality of Heroic Living, of High Endeavour and Adventure: Anglican Mission, Women and Education in Palestine, 1998-1948 (Leiden: Brill, 2002);
  18. Deanna Ferree Womack, Protestants, Gender and the Arab Renaissance in Late Ottoman Syria (Edinburgh University Press, 2019);
  19. Christine B. Lindner, "Negotiating the Field: American Protestant Missionaries in Ottoman Syria, 1823 to 1860" (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2009). For other re- cent studies, see Paul Sedra, From Mission to Modernity: Evangelicals, Reformers and Education in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011);
  20. Adam H. Becker, Revival and Awakening: American Evangelical Missionaries in Iran and the Origins of Assyrian Nationalism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015);
  21. Melanie E. Trexler, Evangelizing Lebanon: Baptists, Missions, and the Question of Cultures (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016);
  22. Samir Boulos, European Evangelicals in Egypt (1900-1956) (Leiden: Brill, 2016);
  23. Uta Zeuge-Buberl, The Mission of the American Board in Syria: Implications of a Transcultural Dialogue, trans. by Elizabeth Janik (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2017);
  24. Emrah Şahin, Faithful Encounters: Authorities and American Missionaries in the Ottoman Empire (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2018).
  25. Beth Baron, The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014);
  26. Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Domestic Frontiers: Gender, Reform, and American Interventions in the Ottoman Balkans and the Near East (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013).
  27. One notable exception is Trexler, Evangelizing Lebanon, which includes the history of Baptist missions in Lebanon in the second half of the twentieth century. Brief atten- tion is given to missionary movements of recent decades in Simon and Tejirian, Conflict, Conquest, and Conversion, 203-207.
  28. Christian Communities in the Contemporary Middle East Exchange 49 (2020) 189-213
  29. Studies and its intersection with other fields. McCallum expanded this discus- sion into the broader area of Middle Eastern Christian Studies, for example, in her comparative study on the Coptic and Maronite patriarchs (2010).52 The pi- oneering work of Saba Mahmood (2016) and Angie Heo (2018) has made Cop- tic Christianity a focus within the anthropology of religion as well.53 Like Heo's book, several treatments of recent Middle Eastern Christian relations with Muslims also center on the Egyptian context, including the work of S.S. Hasan (2003), Peter Makari (2007), and Rachel Scott (2010).54 Among the studies of pre-modern Middle Eastern Christianity outside of Egypt, Sidney Griffith's research on early Arab Christianity and Sebastian Brock's work on Syriac Christianity stand out.55 More recent contributions on 2014); Nelly van Doorn-Harder, ed., Copts in Context: Negotiating Identity, Tradition, and Modernity (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2017).
  30. Fiona McCallum, Christian Religious Leadership in the Middle East: The Political Role of the Patriarch (Lampeter, UK: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010).
  31. Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016);
  32. Angie Heo, The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018). For other anthro- pological studies on Copts, see Anthony George Shenoda, "Cultivating Mystery: Miracles and A Coptic Moral Imaginary" (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2010);
  33. Joseph Youssef, "From the Blood of St. Mina to the Martyrs of Maspero: Commemoration, Identity, and Social Memory in the Coptic Orthodox Church," Journal of the Canadian Society for Coptic Studies 5 (2013), 61-73; Carolyn M. Ramzy, "To Die is Gain: Singing a Heavenly Citizenship among Egypt's Coptic Christians," Ethnos 8/5 (2015), 649-670; Candace Lukasik, "Conquest of Paradise: Secular Binds and Coptic Political Mobilization," Middle East Critique 25/2 (2016), 107-125. For ethnographic work on Middle Eastern Christians outside of Coptic Studies, see Andreas Bandak, "Of Refrains and Rhythms in Contemporary Damascus: Urban Space and Christian-Muslim Coexistence," Current Anthropology 55/S10 (2014), S248-S261; Andreas Bandak, "Repeated Prayers: Saying the Rosary in Contemporary Syria," Religion 47/1 (2017), 92-110.
  34. S.S. Hasan, Christian versus Muslims in Modern Egypt: The Century-Long Struggle for Coptic Equality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002);
  35. Peter Makari, Conflict and Cooperation: Christian-Muslim Relations in Contemporary Egypt (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007);
  36. Rachel Scott, The Challenge of Political Islam: Non-Muslims and the Egyptian State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). Others in this genre include Elizabeth Iskander, Sectarian Conflict in Egypt: Coptic Media, Identity, and Representation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012);
  37. Laure Guirguis, Copts and the Security State: Violence, Coercion, and Sectarianism in Contemporary Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016). For a study on recent Christian-Muslim relations in Lebanon, see Heidi Hirvonen, Christian-Muslim Dialogue: Perspectives of Four Lebanese Thinkers (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
  38. Sidney H. Griffith, The Beginnings of Christian Theology in Arabic (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002);
  39. Sidney Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008);
  40. Sebastian Brock, Fire from Heaven: Studies in Syriac Theology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006);
  41. Sebastian Brock, An Introduction to Syriac Studies, 3rd edition (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006);
  42. Sebastian Brock, The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World of Saint Ephrem, revised edition (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1992). See also: Martin Tamcke, ed., Christians and Muslims in Dialogue in the Islamic Orient of the Middle Ages/Christlich-muslimische Gespräche im Mittelalter (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag/Beirut: Orient-Institut, 2007);
  43. David Thomas, ed., Syrian Christians Under Islam: The First Thousand years (Leiden: Brill, 2001).
  44. Philip M. Forness, Preaching Christology in the Roman Near East: A Study of Jacob of Serugh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Jack Tannous, The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). See also: Antoine Borrut and Fred M. Donner, Christians and Others in the Umayyad State (Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2016);
  45. Asa A. Eger, The Islamic-Byzantine Frontier: Interaction and Exchange among Muslim and Christian Communities (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015).
  46. Michelle U. Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth- Century Palestine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Noah Haiduc-Dale, Arab Christians in British Mandate Palestine: Communalism and Nationalism, 1917-1948 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013);
  47. Erik Freas, Muslim-Christian Relations in Late-Ottoman Palestine: Where Nationalism and Religion Intersect (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016);
  48. Laura Robson, Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011);
  49. Aron Engberg, Walking on the Pages of the Word of God: Self, Land, and Text among Evangelicals in Jerusalem (Leiden: Brill, 2019). For prominent texts of Palestinian theology, see in this issue Elizabeth Marteijn, "The Revival of Palestinian Christianity: The Development of Palestinian Theology," Exchange 49/3,4 (2020).
  50. Paul S. Rowe, John H.A. Dyck, and Jens Zimmerman, Christians and the Middle East Conflict (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014); Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005);
  51. Ronald Grigor Suny, "They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015);
  52. Fatma Müge Göçek, Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789-2009 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015);
  53. David Gaunt, Naures Atto, and Soner O. Barthoma, eds., Let Them Not Return: Sayfo-The Genocide of the Assyrian, Syriac, and Chaldean Christians in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017).
  54. Christian Communities in the Contemporary Middle East Exchange 49 (2020) 189-213 of the East, two different studies on the Maronite mystic Hindiyya 'Ujaymi in Lebanon by Bernard Heyberger (2013) and Akram Khater (2011), and Deanna Womack's Protestants, Gender and the Arab Renaissance on the first historical Arab Protestant community (2019).59 This significant body of scholarship does not focus much beyond the mid-twentieth century-with the exception of Coptic Studies research and some publications on Middle Eastern Christian diasporas60 or Christian migrants in the Gulf States and Israel.61 However, ini- 59 Heleen Murre-van den Berg, Scribes and Scriptures: The Church of the East in the Eastern Ottoman Provinces (1500-1850) (Louvain: Peeters, 2015); Bernard Heyberger, Hindiyya, Mystic and Criminal, 1720-1798: A Political and Religious Crisis in Lebanon, trans. by Renée Champion (Cambridge, UK: James Clark, 2013); Akram Fouad Khater, Embracing the Divine: Passion and Politics in the Christian Middle East (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2011);
  55. Deanna Ferree Womack, Protestants, Gender and the Arab Renaissance in Late Ottoman Syria (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Heyberger's book was originally pub- lished in French as Hindiyya (1720-1798), Mystique et Criminelle (Paris: Aubier, 2001). For other studies focused on one particular Christian community or historical period, see Matti Moosa, The Maronites in History (New York: Syracuse University press, 1986);
  56. Sargon George Donabed, Reforging a Forgotten History: Iraq and the Assyrians in the 20th Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015); Tsolin Nabantian, Armenians Beyond Diaspora: Making Lebanon Their Own (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019);
  57. Fiona McCallum, Christian Communities in the Middle East: Faith, Identity and Integration (Abingdon: Routledge, forthcoming 2021).
  58. Andreas Schmoller, ed., Middle Eastern Christians and Europe: Historical Legacies and Present Challenges (Vienna: Lit, 2018);
  59. Naures Atto, Hostages in the Homeland, Orphans in the Diaspora: Identity Discourses among the Assyrians/Syriac Elites in the European Diaspora (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2011);
  60. Lise Paulsen Galal, Alistair Hunter, Fiona McCallum, Sara Lei Sparre, and Marta Woźniak-Bobińska, "Middle Eastern Christian Spaces in Europe: Multi-sited and Super-diverse," Journal of Religion in Europe 9 (2016), 1-25;
  61. Fiona McCallum, "Shared Religion but Still Marginalized Other: Middle Eastern Christians' Encounters with Political Secularism in the United Kingdom," Journal of Church and State 61/2 (2019), 242-261; Alistair Hunter, "Staking a Claim to Land, Faith and Family: Burial Location Preferences of Middle Eastern Christian Migrants," Journal of Intercultural Studies 37/2 (2016), 179-194; Yvonne Haddad and Joshua Donovan, "Good Copt, Bad Copt: Competing Narratives on Coptic Identity in Egypt and the United States," Studies in World Christianity 19/3 (2013), 208-232; Sargon Donabed, "Neither 'Syriac-speaking' nor 'Syrian Orthodox Christians': Harput Assyrians in the United States as a Model for Ethnic Self-Categorization and Expression," in Syriac in its Multi-Cultural Context, (eds.). Herman Teule, et al. (Louvain: Peeters, 2017), 361-371. For historical studies on Middle Eastern migration to the Americas, see Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp, So Far from Allah, So Close to Mexico: Middle Eastern Immigrants in Modern Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007);
  62. Linda K. Jacobs, Strangers No More: Syrians in the United States, 1880- 1900 (New York: Kalima Press, 2019).
  63. Stanley J. Valayil C. John, Transnational Religious Organization and Practice: A Contextual Analysis of Kerala Pentecostal Churches in Kuwait (Leiden: Brill, 2018);
  64. Jose Francisco, "Migration and New Cosmopolitanism in Asian Christianity," in The Oxford Handbook of Christianity in Asia, (eds.). Felix Wilfred (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 576-92;
  65. Womack Exchange 49 (2020) 189-213 tiatives like the Coptic Canadian History Project and two new research proj- ects on Middle Eastern Christians in Europe indicate that further studies of contemporary Christianity in the Middle East are forthcoming.62 Such work is needed to document the survival, the vitality, and the challenges for existing churches in the region and to better explain the place of the Middle East in global Christianity today. The nine articles in this special issue do just that.63 3 Contemporary Middle Eastern Christianity in Context Geopolitical events-including the Arab Spring that began in December 2010, the Syrian civil war since 2011, and the emergence of ISIS in Iraq and Syria thereafter-have brought scholarly and public attention in the west to the plight of contemporary Middle Eastern Christians. Some of this attention has Naomi Hosoda, "Kababayan Solidarity? Filipino Communities and Class Relations in United Arab Emirates Cities," Journal of Arabian Studies 3/1 (2013), 18-35; Watanabe Akiko, "Does Religious Conversion Transcend the Boundaries of Multiple Hierarchies? Filipino Migrant Workers Embracing Islam in the UAE and Qatar," in Asian Migrant Workers in the Arab Gulf States: The Growing Foreign Population and Their Lives, (eds.).
  66. Masako Ishii, Naomi Hosoda, Masaki Matsuo, and Koji Horinuki (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 194-217;
  67. Shlomit Kanari, "Music, Musicians and Migration in African Migrant Churches in Israel," in Religion in the Context of African Migration, (eds.). Afe Adogame and Cordula Weissköppel (Beirut: Eckhardt Breitinger, 2005), 267-84; Galia Sabar and Shlomit Kanari, "'I'm Singing My Way Up': The Significance of Music Amongst African Christian Migrants in Israel," Studies in World Christianity 12/2 (2006), 101-25.
  68. 62 For the Coptic Canadian History Project, founded by Michael Akladios, see https:// thecchp.com (accessed 30 July 2020). The "Rewriting Global Orthodoxy" project at Radboud University is led by Heleen Murre-van den Berg and focuses on Oriental Orthodox communities that have settled in Europe. See: https://www.ru.nl/ptrs/research/ research-projects/rewriting-global-orthodoxy (accessed 30 July 2020). Fiona McCallum Guiney, at the University of St. Andrews, is Project Leader and Principal Investigator in the UK for "Defining and Identifying Middle Eastern Christian Communities in Europe." Lise Paulsen Galal, at Roskilde University, and Marta Wozniak, at the University of Łodź, are Principal Investigators for the Danish and Swedish components of the project, respec- tively. For more on this project and its 2015 study, "Middle Eastern Christians in Europe: Histories, Cultures and Communities," see: https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/dimecce (ac- cessed 30 July 2020). Another encouraging development is the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded summer institute titled "Middle Eastern Christianity: A Historic and Living Tradition," to be held at Bradley University in 2021. 63 Few other journals in theology and religion have published full issues on Middle Eastern Christianity in recent years. A forthcoming issue of Religion, State and Society, edited by George Soroka and Christopher Rhodes, however, will address Christianity and politics in the Middle East and North Africa. Also noteworthy, the Journal of Religious & Theological Information published a historically-focused issue in 2019 on Egyptian Christianity.