Religious Minorities in the Middle East
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Religious Minorities in the Middle East Social, Economic and Religious Minorities Political Studies of the in the Middle East Middle East and Asia (S.E.P.S.M.E.A.) Domination, Self-Empowerment, Accommodation (Founding editor: C. A. O. van Nieuwenhuijze) Edited by Anh Nga Longva Editor Anne Sofie Roald Dale F. Eickelman Advisory Board Fariba Adelkhah (SciencesPo/CERI, Paris) Roger Owen (Harvard University) Armando Salvatore (University of Naples “L’Orientale” – Humboldt University, Berlin) VOLUME 108 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/seps Religious Minorities in the Middle East Domination, Self-Empowerment, Accommodation Edited by Anh Nga Longva Anne Sofie Roald LEIDEN • BOSTON 2012 This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. Further information and the complete license text can be found at https://creativecom mons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ The terms of the CC license apply only to the original material. The use of material from other sources (indicated by a reference) such as diagrams, illustrations, photos and text samples may require further permission from the respective copyright holder. An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. More information about the initiative can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. Cover illustrations: The Mohammed al Amin Mosque and the Greek Orthodox Saint George Cathedral, Beirut, Lebanon. Photographs: Hala Abou-Zaki. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Religious minorities in the Middle East : domination, self-empowerment, accommodation / edited by Anh Nga Longva, Anne Sofie Roald. p. cm. — (Social, economic, and political studies of the Middle East and Asia, ISSN 1385- 3376 ; v. 108) The result of a workshop held in 2008 in Bergen, Norway and in 2009 in Aix-en-Provence, France. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-20742-4 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Religious minorities—Middle East—Congresses. 2. Middle East—Religion—Congresses. I. Longva, Anh Nga. II. Roald, Anne Sofie. III. Title. BL1060.R448 2012 305.60956—dc23 2011036463 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/ brill-typeface. ISSN 1385-3376 ISBN 978 90 04 20742 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 90 04 21684 6 (e-book) Copyright 2012 by the Authors. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect the publication against unauthorized use and to authorize dissemination by means of offprints, legitimate photocopies, microform editions, reprints, translations, and secondary information sources, such as abstracting and indexing services including databases. Requests for commercial re-use, use of parts of the publication, and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV. This book is printed on acid-free paper. CONTENTS List of Contributors ....................................................................................... vii Preface ............................................................................................................... ix Introduction Domination, Self-empowerment, Accommodation ........................................................................................ 1 Anh Nga Longva PART I: NON-MUSLIM MINORITIES 1. Millets: Past and Present ........................................................................ 27 Maurits H. van den Boogert 2. From the Dhimma to the Capitulations: Memory and Experience of Protection in Lebanon ................................................ 47 Anh Nga Longva 3. Contemporary Muslim-Christian Relations in Egypt: Local Dynamics and Foreign Influences ........................................... 71 Grégoire Delhaye 4. Land, Law, and Family Protection in the West Bank .................... 97 Bård Kårtveit 5. Conviviality and Conflict in Contemporary Aleppo ...................... 123 Annika Rabo 6. Freedom of Religion in Sudan ............................................................. 149 Anne Sofie Roald 7. From Power to Powerlessness: Zoroastrianism in Iranian History .......................................................................................... 171 Michael Stausberg 8. Bahaʾis of Iran: Power, Prejudices and Persecutions ..................... 195 Margit Warburg vi contents PART II: MUSLIM MINORITIES 9. Shiʿi Identity Politics in Saudi Arabia ............................................... 221 Laurence Louër 10. Nationalism and Confessionalism: Shiʿis, Druzes and Alawis in Syria and Lebanon ............................................................... 245 Kais M. Firro 11. Education and Minority Empowerment in the Middle East ..... 267 Catherine Le Thomas 12. Alevis in Turkish Politics ...................................................................... 289 Ali Çarkoğlu and Nazlı Çağın Bilgili 13. Nationalism and Religion in Contemporary Iran ......................... 309 Eliz Sanasarian Conclusion Nation-Building and Minority Rights in the Middle East ............................................................................................... 325 Elizabeth Picard Index .................................................................................................................. 351 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Maurits H. van den Boogert is affiliated with Leiden University’s Centre for the Study of Islam and Society and its School for History, and works for Brill. His research focuses mainly on the Ottoman period. He is also the Managing Editor of the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient. Nazlı Çağın Bilgili holds a Ph.D. in political science from Sabanci University, Istanbul. Her research is in the fields of political sociology, political culture, Islam in social and political life, and Middle Eastern politics. Ali Çarkoğlu is professor in the Department of International Relations at Koç University, Istanbul. His research interest lies in comparative politics, voting behavior, public opinion, and party politics in Turkey. Grégoire Delhaye is doctoral student in political science at the IEP Aix-en- Provence, and Adjunct Professor in Comparative Politics at the American University in Washington DC. His work focuses on transnational identity politics, particularly in the Egyptian Coptic community. Kais M. Firro is professor in Middle Eastern History at the University of Haifa. He has published widely on economic history, ethnicity, and nationalism. Bård Kårtveit holds a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of Bergen. He is currently Senior Lecturer in the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo. His research areas are nationalism, sectarianism, minority-majority relations and migration in the Middle East. Catherine Le Thomas holds a PhD in political science from Sciences Po (Paris). She is currently associate researcher at the French Institute of the Near East (IFPO) in Beirut. Her research focuses on religion and education in Lebanon and the Near East. Anh Nga Longva is professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Kuwait, Bahrain, and viii list of contributors Lebanon. Among her topics of research are migration, ethnic relations, tribalism, sectarianism, citizenship and education. Laurence Louër is research fellow at Sciences Po, the Centre for International Studies and Research (CERI) in Paris, France. She specializes on issues of minorities in the Arab Middle East. Elizabeth Picard is senior researcher at the Institut de Recherches et d’Études sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman (IREMAM), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, in Aix-en-Provence, France. She has written extensively about security and identity politics in the Middle East. Annika Rabo is professor in Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. She has conducted fieldwork in the Middle East, mainly in Syria, since the late 1970s focusing on a variety of topics related to state-citizens relationships. Anne Sofie Roald is Professor in Religious Studies at Malmö University College, Sweden, and Senior Researcher and former head of the research program Politics of Faith at Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen, Norway. Her publications deal mainly with gender issues, religious conversion, multi- culturalism, Islamism, and Arab media. Eliz Sanasarian is Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern California. She is the author of The Religious Minorities in Iran (Cambridge, 2006) and has also written on gender issues in Iran. Michael Stausberg is Professor of Religion at the University of Bergen. He has published widely about Zoroastrianism and theories of religion. He serves as the European editor of the international journal Religion. Margit Warburg is Professor in Sociology of Religion at the University of Copenhagen. She has published widely on the Bahaʾi religion and has also authored works on East European Jewry and civil religion. PREFACE This volume is the result of a workshop which was held twice, the first time in 2008 in Bergen (Norway) then a year later in Aix-en-Provence (France). The papers presented in Bergen were discussed