Domination, Resilience, and Power: Religious Minorities in the Imperial and Post-Imperial Middle East

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Religious Minorities in the Ideology and Politics of Syria

International Journal on Minority and Group Rights ◽

10.1163/15718115-bja10057 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-18

Author(s):

Anita Sylwia Adamczyk ◽

Fuad Jomma

Keyword(s):

Civil War ◽

Middle East ◽

Religious Groups ◽

Religious Minority ◽

Religious Minorities ◽

Arab Nationalism ◽

Theoretical Issues

Abstract Although the Middle East is widely associated with Islam, it is diverse in terms of religion. Syria is an example where two religious groups dominate, i.e. Muslims and Christians, which are internally diverse. The purpose of this article is to examine the position of religious minorities in the ideology and politics of Syria. Syria is not chosen by accident as the authors believe that the failure to recognize the existence of minorities and to respect their rights was one of the reasons for the civil war in Syria. The article consists of three parts. The first discusses the theoretical issues related to the definition and understanding of the notions of what constitutes a religious minority and of pan-Arabism in Syria. The next presents the complex religious pattern in country, and the last concerns the policy of the Syrian authorities, who are influenced by Arab nationalism, towards various religious groups.

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Violence, Crisis, and the Everyday

International Journal of Middle East Studies ◽

10.1017/s0020743813000937 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 45 (4) ◽

pp. 798-800 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Veena Das

Keyword(s):

Middle East ◽

Sexual Violence ◽

Everyday Life ◽

Public Domain ◽

War And Peace ◽

Religious Minorities ◽

Political Autonomy ◽

The Public ◽

Long Period ◽

The Everyday

An important issue in considering violence at both the conceptual and empirical levels is the question of what counts as “violence” and how it is acknowledged. In many polities of the Middle East, including Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan, there is no clear boundary between war and peace. Conflicts have lasted over a long period and even the project of securing a future in which the struggle for decolonization and political autonomy can be kept alive faces enormous hurdles as everyday life is corroded by betrayals, accusations, and the sheer exhaustion of keeping political energies from waning. Most acute observers of prolonged conflicts recognize the corrosive effects of these conflicts on everyday life. In this brief thought piece, I want to reflect on one aspect of the problem: that of the relation between sexual violence as an aspect of dramatic and spectacular violence—in wars (including modern ones), pogroms against ethnic or religious minorities, or episodes of lethal riots between sectarian groups—and everyday forms of sexual violence that could be both part of the public domain and constitutive of domestic intimacy. Said otherwise, I am interested in how experience of violence travels from one threshold of life to another.

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Jewish-Iranian Identities in the Pahlavi Era

International Journal of Middle East Studies ◽

10.1017/s002074381400066x ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 46 (3) ◽

pp. 602-605

Author(s):

Lior Sternfeld

Keyword(s):

Middle East ◽

Jewish Community ◽

Vantage Point ◽

Archival Research ◽

Religious Minorities ◽

Seminal Work ◽

Large Group ◽

Iranian History ◽

History Of ◽

Global Nature

A few years ago, while conducting archival research on Pahlavi-era Iranian newspapers, I came across a photo from the anti-shah demonstrations that took place in late 1978 and early 1979. It showed a large group of Armenians protesting against the shah. In these years many Iranians and Westerners considered the shah's policies beneficial for religious minorities in Iran. Around the same time, I found a sentence that made this discovery more intriguing. In his seminal workIran between Two Revolutions, Ervand Abrahamian mentions that throughout the Muhammad Riza Pahlavi era, the opposition to the communist Tudeh party accused it of being controlled by “Armenians, Jews, and Caucasian émigrés.” I tried to find references in the current scholarship to Jews participating in the party, which could have earned them their part in this propaganda campaign, but found very little. Having read the important works of Joel Beinin, Orit Bashkin, and Rami Ginat on Jewish revolutionaries, including communists, in the Middle East, I wondered where the Jewish radicals in Iran were. Several factors may contribute to this silence in the historiography: the writing of Iranian history from a Zionist vantage point, a lack of interest in the history of the Iranian left in the postrevolutionary historiography, and an inability to conceptualize the transregional and global nature of the Iranian Jewish community.

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