Christians and Jews in Muslim Societies – serie

This volume brings together articles on the cultural, religious, social and commercial interactions among Jews, Christians and Muslims in the medieval and early modern periods. Written by leading scholars in Jewish studies, Islamic studies, medieval history and social and economic history, the contributions to this volume reflect the profound influence on these fields of the volume’s honoree, Professor Mark R. Cohen.

Les intellectuels juifs de Bagdad. Discours et allégeances (1908-1951) raconte l’histoire d’un groupe d’intellectuels juifs de langue arabe à Bagdad. Faisant usage de sources historiques, Aline Schlaepfer examine les stratégies que ceux-ci mirent en place pour s’assurer une présence permanente dans la sphère publique en Irak. En analysant leurs discours et leurs allégeances, l'auteure montre qu’ils ne cessèrent jamais de s’exprimer publiquement sur les débats politiques les plus sensibles en Irak: nationalisme, communautarisme, colonialisme, nazisme et fascisme. Cet ouvrage suit leur parcours à travers une première moitié de XXe siècle irakien particulièrement agitée: la révolution jeune-turque de 1908, la création de l’Etat irakien (1920), plusieurs coups d’Etat (1936 et 1941), et la création de l’Etat d’Israël (1948), qui conduisit finalement à leur départ d’Irak en 1951.In Les intellectuels juifs de Bagdad. Discours et allégeances (1908-1951), Aline Schlaepfer focuses on a group of Arabic-speaking Jewish intellectuals in Baghdad. Making use of historical materials, the author examines how strategies were negotiated by Jewish intellectuals in order to maintain a presence in the Iraqi public sphere. By analysing their discourses and allegiances, she shows that they continuously expressed their views on the most sensitive political debates in Iraq, such as nationalism, sectarianism, colonialism, Nazism and fascism. This work follows their trajectory during a turbulent period in Iraqi history; the 1908 Young-Turk Revolution, the creation of Iraq (1920), several coups d’état (1936 et 1941), and the creation of the State of Israel (1948), eventually leading to their departure from Iraq in 1951.

'His Pen and Ink are a Powerful Mirror' is a volume of collected essays in honor of Ross Brann, written by his students and friends on the occasion of his 70th birthday. The essays engage with a diverse range of Andalusi and Mediterranean literature, art, and history. Each essay begins from the organic hybridity of Andalusi literary and cultural history as its point of departure, introduce new texts, ideas, and objects into the disciplinary conversation or radically reassesses well-known ones, and represent the theoretical, methodological, and material impacts Brann has had and continues to have on the study of the literature and culture of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in al-Andalus. Contributors include: Ali Humayn Akhtar, Esperanza Alfonso, Peter Cole, Jonathan Decter, Elisabeth Hollender, Uriah Kfir, S.J. Pearce, F.E. Peters, Arturo Prats, Cynthia Robinson, Tova Rosen, Aurora Salvatierra, Raymond P. Scheindlin, Jessica Streit, David Torollo.

Arabic and its Alternatives discusses the complicated relationships between language, religion and communal identities in the Middle East in the period following the First World War. This volume takes its starting point in the non-Arabic and non-Muslim communities, tracing their linguistic and literary practices as part of a number of interlinked processes, including that of religious modernization, of new types of communal identity politics and of socio-political engagement with the emerging nation states and their accompanying nationalisms. These twentieth-century developments are firmly rooted in literary and linguistic practices of the Ottoman period, but take new turns under influence of colonization and decolonization, showing the versatility and resilience as much as the vulnerability of these linguistic and religious minorities in the region. Contributors are Tijmen C. Baarda, Leyla Dakhli, Sasha R. Goldstein-Sabbah, Liora R. Halperin, Robert Isaf, Michiel Leezenberg, Merav Mack,Heleen Murre-van den Berg, Konstantinos Papastathis, Franck Salameh, Cyrus Schayegh, Emmanuel Szurek, Peter Wien.

Les éboueurs du Caire (les Zabbalin) se sont installés sur les pentes du Muqattam en 1970. Très vite, ils ont attiré l’attention de nombreux acteurs actifs dans le développement ou la mission religieuse : des ingénieurs égyptiens, une sœur catholique Française, et le personnage central de cette histoire, le père Samʿān, qui se lança dans une mission auprès des Zabbalin en 1974. Ce prêcheur fonda plusieurs églises connues aujourd’hui sous le nom du monastère de Saint-Samʿan-le-Tanneur, un complexe de sept sanctuaires taillés dans les falaises du Muqattam. A travers son style charismatique et ses exorcismes publics mettant en scène une lutte symbolique entre Islam et Christianisme, Samʿān est devenu l’une des figures de proue de son Eglise.The Cairene garbage collectors (the Zabbalin) settled on the Muqattam slopes in 1970. Soon they attracted the attention of different actors involved in development and religious mission: Egyptian engineers, a French Catholic Sister and the most central character of this story, Father Samʿān, who started a mission among the Zabbalin in 1974. This preacher founded several churches, today known as the Monastery of Saint Samʿān the Tanner, a complex of seven churches carved in the Muqattam walls. Through his charismatic style of preaching and his public exorcisms symbolically staging the struggle between Christianity and Islam, Samʿān has become a figurehead of his church.

'The House of the Priest’ presents and discusses the hitherto unpublished and untranslated memoirs of Niqula Khoury, a senior member of the Orthodox Church and Arab nationalist in late Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine. It discusses the complicated relationships between language, religion, diplomacy and identity in the Middle East in the interwar period. This original annotated translation and accompanying articles provide a thorough explication of Khoury’s memoirs and their significance for the social, political and religious histories of twentieth-century Palestine and Arab relations with the Greek Orthodox church. Khoury played a major role in these dynamics as a leading member of the fight for Arab presence in the Greek-dominated clergy, and for an independent Palestine, travelling in 1937 to Eastern Europe and the League of Nations on behalf of the national movement. Contributors: Sarah Irving, Charbel Nassif, Konstantinos Papastathis, Karène Sanchez Summerer, Cyrus Schayegh

This book traces the history of everyday relations of Greek-Orthodox Christians and Muslims of Cappadocia, an Ottoman countryside inhabited by various ethno-religious groups, either sharing the same settlements, or living in neighbouring villages. Based on Ottoman state archives, testimonies collected by the Centre of Asia Minor Studies, and various pre-1923 hand-written and printed sources mostly in Ottoman- and Karamanli-Turkish, and Greek, the study covers the period from 1839 to 1923 and proposes an anthropological perspective on everyday cross-religious interactions. It focuses on questions such as identification and mapping of communities, sharing of space and resources, use of languages, and religiosity in the context of conversions and of shared sacred spaces and beliefs to investigate everyday realities of a multireligious rural society which disappeared with the fall of the Empire.

Les Syriaques orthodoxes est une minorité religieuse longtemps négligée par l’historiographie ottomane et turque. Cet ouvrage aspire à apporter une méthode et des informations pour les aborder dans le cadre contemporain. S’appuyant sur un travail de terrain composé d’entretiens, d’observations participantes accompagnés des textes historiques et contemporains, l’étude révèle l’émergence des nouvelles dynamiques socio-politiques chez les Syriaques dans leur rapport à la société turque contemporaine et à la diaspora. L’enquête montre que ces anciens chrétiens d’orient sont restés, et restent encore aujourd’hui, sous l’influence d’un phénomène plus large, à savoir la mondialisation du christianisme, marquée par le catholicisme et par des formes récentes du protestantisme. The Syriac Orthodox community is a religious minority which has been neglected for a long time by the ottoman and turkish historiography. This book aspires to provide a method and information for a new understanding of the community in the contemporary context. Based on a fieldwork consisting of interviews, participant observations complemented by historical and contemporary texts, it reveals the emergence of new socio-political dynamics among the Syriacs of Istanbul in their relationship to Turkish contemporary society and diaspora. The survey shows that these eastern christians have been, and are today, under the influence of a larger phenomenon, that is the globalization of Christianity, marked by Catholicism and recent forms of Protestantism.