Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-42gr6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T10:33:03.451Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Christians in the Middle East: A New Subfield?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 July 2010

Fiona McCallum
Fiona McCallum*
Affiliation:
School of International Relations, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Scotland; e-mail: fm25@st-andrews.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The topic of Christians in the Middle East appears to be enjoying a growing vitality within Middle East studies. This is not to say that scholarship ignored the subject in the past, but it was rarely seen as an independent area of study. Works tended to focus on the historical origins, faith, and rites of the different churches within Eastern Christianity. Those that looked specifically at Christian communities tended to concentrate on their relations with other groups, especially in the context of a minority framework. Some interdisciplinary volumes such as those edited by Andrea Pacini and Anthony O'Mahony moved beyond this limited approach to cover a wider range of issues, but several of the contributions retained this descriptive tendency rather than relating directly to theoretical debates within different disciplines.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , August 2010 , pp. 486 - 488
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1 See Betts, Robert Brenton, Christians in the Arab East (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1979)Google Scholar; Masters, Bruce, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Meinardus, Otto, Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

2 See Bengio, Ofra and Ben-Dor, Gabriel, eds., Minorities and the State in the Arab World (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1999)Google Scholar.

3 See Pacini, Andrea, ed., Christian Communities in the Arab Middle East: The Challenge of the Future (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)Google Scholar; O'Mahony, Anthony, ed., Christianity in the Middle East: Studies in Modern History, Theology and Politics (London: Melisende, 2008)Google Scholar; and O'Mahony, Anthony and Loosley, Emma, eds., Eastern Christianity in the Modern Middle East (London: Routledge, 2010)Google Scholar.

4 Winslow, Charles, Lebanon: War and Politics in a Fragmented Society (London: Routledge, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Hanf, Theodor, Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon (London: Centre for Lebanese Studies, 1993Google Scholar).

5 David Kerr, “The Temporal Authority of the Maronite Patriarchate, 1920–1958: A Study in the Relationship of Religious and Secular Power” (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 1973).

6 Elizabeth Picard, “The Dynamics of the Lebanese Christians: From the Paradigm of the Ammiyyat to the Paradigm of Hwayyek,” in Christian Communities in the Arab Middle East, ed. Pacini, 200–21.

7 Hasan, S. S., Christians versus Muslims in Modern Egypt: The Century-Long Struggle for Coptic Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar and Anthony O'Mahony, “Patriarchs and Politics: The Chaldean Catholic Church in Modern Iraq,” in Christianity in the Middle East, ed. O'Mahony, 105–42.

8 McCallum, Fiona, “The Political Role of the Patriarch in the Contemporary Middle East,” Middle Eastern Studies 43 (2007): 923–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jehan al-Awit Adwan, “L'action politique et diplomatique du Siege, Maronite de Bkerke sous le patriarcat de Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir” (PhD diss., Institut d'etudes Politiques de Paris, 2006).

9 Henley, Alexander, “Politics of a Church at War: Maronite Catholicism in the Lebanese Civil War,” Mediterranean Politics 13 (2008): 353–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Chatelard, Geraldine, Briser la mosaique: Lien social et identites collectives chez les chrétiens de Madaba, Jordanie, 1870–1997 (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rabo, Annika, “Legal Pluralism and Family Law in Syria,” in The Governance of Legal Pluralism, ed. Zips, Werner and Weilenmann, Markus (Münster, Germany: Lit-Verlag, forthcoming)Google Scholar; Rowe, Paul, “Neo-Millet Systems and Transnational Religious Movements: The Humayun Decrees and Church Construction in Egypt,” Journal of Church and State 49 (2007): 329–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McCallum, Fiona, “Religious Diaspora and Information Communications Technology: The Impact of Globalization on Communal Relations in Egypt,” in The New Arab Media: Technology, Image and Perception, ed. Zweiri, Mahjoob and Murphy, Emma C (London: Ithaca Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

11 Christians in the Middle East Research Network, www.cme.stir.ac.uk (accessed 8 February 2010).