A Racial-Religious Imagination: Syriac Christians, Iconic Bodies, and the Sensory Politics of Ethical Difference in the Netherlands

Since 9/11, political debate over immigration in Europe is often posed as a question of Islam’s distance from Europe’s putatively Judeo-Christian ethical tradition—and therefore a matter of neither explicitly racial nor religious animus. This article interrogates this claim from the perspective of Syriac Orthodox Christians living in the Netherlands, who, despite their conspicuous Christianity, are frequently told by both the state and their neighbors that their ethnoreligious difference is not meaningfully different from Muslim difference. Drawing on fieldwork in the Dutch subprovince of Twente, I analyze both everyday and bureaucratic moments of misrecognition as sites of racialization that illuminate a Dutch racial-religious imagination rooted in post-Calvinist theological anxieties over social reproduction. By showing how minoritized bodies are read as icons of invisible reproductive relations, I deploy the Orthodox Christian doctrine of the holy icon to theorize secular modern racialization as a process of ethical differentiation, classification, and control over reproductive power.

Migration-Related Conflicts as Drivers of Institutional Change?

This article examines the role of social conflicts in the context of migration and discusses the relation between such conflicts and institutional change. We understand conflicts as tensions that evoke contradiction between different social groups or institutional actors. Varied urban contexts together with dynamic immigration of heterogeneous population groups can induce negotiation processes that affect institutional settings and actors. Conflicts have therefore been an integral part of urban coexistence, and cities have always been places where these conflicts play out. We assume that conflicts are social phenomena, which have multiple causes and effects. Public assumptions about conflicts in connection with migration often have a negative or destructive impetus, while conflict theory ascribes to conflicts potential positive effects on societal change. Conflicts can represent forms of socialization and the possibility of adapting or changing social conditions. This article discusses the extent to which migration-related conflicts induce institutional change. Using qualitative empirical results from the BMBF-funded research project MigraChance, we present a case study that reconstructs the emergence and course of a conflict surrounding the construction of a Syriac-Orthodox church in Bebra (Hesse) in the 1990s. Analyzing this conflict both in depth and in relation to its local context, we show that migration is only one part of what we refer to as migration-related conflicts, and we shed light on the complexity of factors that can result in institutional change. Change can also occur indirectly, in small steps, and with ambivalent normative implications.

The Syriac Orthodox and Coptic Orthodox Churches in Austria: Inter-Church Relations and State Recognition

This article explores the inter-church and church-state relations of the Syriac Orthodox and Coptic Orthodox Churches in Austria. The strong historic role of the Catholic Church in Austria's political landscape provides the central framework to understand the “story of success” regarding relations with both the Catholic Church and state authorities in Austria. Summarizing the history of migration and establishment of diaspora churches in Austria, the article explores the impact of the support of the Catholic Church in the process of institutionalization. In addition, state recognition and examples of church-state interaction are highlighted. The findings support the conclusion that minority churches from the Oriental Orthodox tradition have benefitted strongly from their relations with the majority church and the state. However, their authority in both religious and political contexts also affects personal leadership and internal affiliations which can lead to divisions within the church communities.

Oriental Orthodox Young Adults and Liturgical Participation: A Matter of Identity

This qualitative research on young adults of the Armenian Apostolic and Syriac Orthodox Churches in Lebanon considers why participation in liturgy aids the identity formation of youth in both communities. By participating in liturgical rituals, these young adults express identities which transcend the limited spaces they inhabit. These spaces are influenced by the minority context in Lebanon, as well as by traumatic historic experiences of both Armenians and Syriacs. Such spaces stimulate the youths’ appreciation for their ancient traditions and their strong connection to other members of their church communities, both past and present. Their sense of belonging is rooted in ancient languages and narratives, and in the embodied rituals that open Armenian and Syriac young people up to the divine dimension of liturgy in church and in daily life. We argue that, for the research population, engagement in the liturgy is a matter of identity.

Learning Syriac and Garshuni in Early Modern Egypt

The fragments published here consist of a pupil’s exercise sheets. The contents are alphabet exercises as well as repetitive phrases from hymnals. As such, the material sheds light on the pedagogical environment of the Syriac settlement in Early Modern Egypt and helps us connect the received liturgical tradition of the Syriac Orthodox Church with the middle of the second millennium.