Christian Agency and Lutheran Personal Status Laws in Palestine

In describing Christianity in the Middle East, scholars often highlight religious oppression, especially in relation to the larger Islamic context. Such contentious descriptions often cast Christians in the role of dhimmis, who are tolerated but not regarded as equal members of Muslim societies. Only in recent years some scholars have begun to modify their depictions of Christians and Christian-Muslim relations in the Middle East. While Christians in the Middle East have experienced and in certain regions continue to experience persecution, solely portraying them as victims does not do justice to the reality on the ground. By means of a case study on Palestine, I argue that an examination of the interaction between sharia (Islamic law) and Christian personal status laws sheds a different light on Christian identity and Christian-Muslim relations in the Middle East, and demonstrates the agency of Palestinian Christian communities in this respect.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The book has shown that the multiplicity of lived ʻAlawi experiences cannot be reduced to the sole question of religion or framed within a monolithic narrative of persecution; that the very attempt to outline a single coherent history of “the ʻAlawis” may indeed be misguided. The sources on which this study has drawn are considerably more accessible, and the social and administrative realities they reflect consistently more mundane and disjointed, than the discourse of the ʻAlawis' supposed exceptionalism would lead one to believe. Therefore, the challenge for historians of ʻAlawi society in Syria and elsewhere is not to use the specific events and structures these sources detail to merely add to the already existing metanarratives of religious oppression, Ottoman misrule, and national resistance but rather to come to a newer and more intricate understanding of that community, and its place in wider Middle Eastern society, by investigating the lives of individual ʻAlawi (and other) actors within the rich diversity of local contexts these sources reveal.

Does Oppressed Religious Liberty Cause an Uprising in Terror Attacks?

The political community's research comes across as inconclusive in regard to the relationship between liberty and terrorism, given the differing opinions on what defines 'liberty' and 'terrorism.' Having stated that, this research tries to the idea of religious liberty in regards to overall terrorism. Most research up to 2016 has been done on terrorist data after 2001 until 2010 (in some cases 2012.) This research expands to the year 2014 to analyze the connection between religious oppression by country governments and their effect on the number of terror attacks in each country in the span of one year. My research does not support my hypothesis that there is a relationship between these two variables, however, other religious factors included as controls showed a surprising positive correlation with the number of terror attacks in 2014.