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The Middle Eastern Christian as Agent

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 July 2010

Paul S. Rowe
Paul S. Rowe*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Studies, Trinity Western University, Langley, British Columbia, Canada; e-mail: paul.rowe@twu.ca
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Extract

The greatest accomplishment of the past ten to twenty years of scholarship on Christian groups in Middle Eastern states is the way scholars have recognized the agency of a population long objectified in both academic and polemical circles. Christians have long been viewed as the object of other actors. For some, they were mere products of Muslim societies that imposed upon them the debatably restricted or protected status of ahl al-dhimma. For others, they were the appendages of external forces determined to use them as devices of their interests. The concerns of such external forces only contributed to Christians' portrayal as vehicles of imperialism. Although these tropes persist, over the last several years many scholars have begun to explore the ways in which Arab and other Middle Eastern Christians operate as subjects in their own right.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , August 2010 , pp. 472 - 474
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

NOTES

1 The perspective is reflected in Abu-Munshar, Maher Y., Islamic Jerusalem and Its Christians (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007)Google Scholar.

2 Yeʾor, Bat, The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, trans. Kochan, Miriam and Littman, David (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

3 For example, Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis argue, in explaining the “political restiveness” of Christian populations in the late colonial period, that at that time “[t]he disruptive notions of European thought, the Enlightenment, liberalism, and nationalism undermined the very different assumptions of Ottoman society.” Braude, Benjamin and Lewis, Bernard, eds., “Introduction,” in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, vol. 1 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982), 28Google Scholar.

4 Said, Edward, Covering Islam (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 138Google Scholar. See also idem, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 191.

5 van Doorn-Harder, Pieternella, Contemporary Coptic Nuns (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

6 Hasan, S. S., Christians versus Muslims in Modern Egypt: The Century-Long Struggle for Coptic Equality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 258Google Scholar; Makari, Peter, Conflict and Cooperation: Christian–Muslim Relations in Contemporary Egypt (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

7 Tsimhoni, Daphne, Christian Communities in Jerusalem and the West Bank since 1948: An Historical, Social, and Political Study (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1993)Google Scholar.

8 For example, McCallum, Fiona, “The Political Role of the Patriarch in the Contemporary Middle East,” Middle Eastern Studies 43 (2007): 923–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rowe, Paul, “Building Coptic Civil Society: Christian Groups and the State in Mubarak's Egypt,” Middle Eastern Studies 45 (2009): 111–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Bailey, Betty Jane and Bailey, J. Martin, Who Are the Christians in the Middle East? (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003)Google Scholar.

10 Gause, F. Gregory III, “Pensée 3: Political Science and the Middle East,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42 (2010): 8–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 See, for example, the Assyrian International New Agency, www.aina.org (accessed 30 March 2010).

12 For example, the Palestinian Ecumenical Liberation Theology Centre Sabeel has published a good deal of work on the Palestinian Christian population, such as that by Ateek, Naim, Duaybis, Cedar, and Tobin, Maurine, eds., The Forgotten Faithful (Jerusalem: Sabeel, 2007)Google Scholar.