This publication marks the final stage of a project that originated in many meetings between Dr Karène Sanchez, a socio-linguist and historian from the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL), Prof dr. Johan Rooryck, a linguist in the same Institute, and myself, then a researcher at the Leiden University Institute for Religious Studies. What brought us together was our shared interest in missions in the Middle East, and especially the effects of these missions on language use and language policies in the intricate linguistic arrangements of the region. Karène Sanchez and myself decided to join forces and set up a research project in which our work on different regions (Palestine, Iraq, Syria), on different groups (Catholics, Syriac and Armenian Christians), and on different periods (Ottoman and Mandate period) was compared with emerging work on the Jews of the region – whose recent history, somewhat surprisingly, often was treated as a case sui generis. The main question in this project concerned the relationship between language, religion and communal identifications. What role did language play in the formative years of the modern Middle East? What languages were preferred in the context of the British and French Mandates? What was the role of Arabic in the emerging Arab states when statehood was fashioned out of the remains of the Ottoman Empire, the heritage of Islam, local and regional identities, and language? Arabic in its newly modernized form became the unifying force of Arab nationalism, but also functioned as the pragmatic choice for those who governed and for those who wanted to join the new states. In turn, it became the model upon which other communal languages fashioned themselves.
We decided on three case studies to probe these questions in more detail, each focusing on a specific non-Muslim minority in areas initially governed by the British: the Jews of Baghdad, the Catholics of Palestine and the Syriac Christians of Iraq. These case studies became the foundation upon which a larger comparative project was built which was funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and which started in the summer of 2012. Early results of the project were brought together in a volume entitled Modernity, Minority, and the Public Sphere: Jews and Christians in the Middle East (2016) in which we compared our work on these three communities with case studies brought in by colleagues from around the world. These additional cases took other cultural practices as a starting point, including city planning, sartorial practices and music – practices that like language were able to create common ground between various communities at the time of nation building but at the same time could (and were) put to work to create distinction and difference. Two dissertations, by Sasha Goldstein-Sabbah and by Tijmen Baarda, provide in-depth studies of two of the three case studies, while a monograph on the Catholics of Palestine by Karène Sanchez is on its way.
The current volume and its introduction conclude the project, although the material is far from exhausted. We sincerely hope that others will continue to add examples, compare with what is here, criticize our conclusions and continue the discussion about how to understand the complicated and sometimes violent interactions between majorities and minorities, between Muslims and non-Muslims, and between Arab speakers and non-Arab speakers in the Middle East. Finally, the fact that many of the encounters and conflicts that we discuss in this volume assume significant Western influence – through missionaries, colonialists and others – should remind us that we are not speaking about an isolated episode of Middle Eastern history, but about a history that should be part of European and American historic consciousness as much as it is of those who are born and raised in the Middle East. We hope that our thinking, reading and writing about it will contribute to an increased sense of shared history. This creation of a shared history includes the analysis of painful episodes in which Western and Middle Eastern majorities were quick to sideline and sometimes erase the voices of minorities in order to advance particular rather than common interests. We hope that this volume, to which authors from many different countries and many different academic, linguistic and cultural contexts have contributed, may serve to re-read and re-appropriate this shared history, not to offer a final conclusion, but to stimulate discussion and ongoing reflection on how different kinds of people may live together, in the Middle East as much as in Europe or anywhere else in this world.
At this time and place, I would like to thank all those who contributed to the project over the past years. The most important of these has been Karène Sanchez who contributed in innumerable ways: she was vital in conceptualizing and developing the project, in writing the research proposal and contribute her own post-doc research. She also took a big share in supervising our two PhD candidates, especially after I took on a position at Nijmegen’s Radboud University in the summer of 2015 and thus no longer was available for day to day supervision in Leiden. The two PhD candidates, Tijmen Baarda and Sasha Goldstein-Sabbah, also have been a great help in pushing the project forward – through their own research and the questions that arose from it, and through their help in organizing conferences and publishing our results. During both conferences we were supported by many different people, but especially by research assistant Farah Bazzi, at the time Research Master student in Leiden, now a graduate student at Stanford University.
This is also the place to thank so many people in Leiden, Nijmegen and elsewhere who through their contributions to conferences and meetings, over many coffees and drinks, and through extended email conversations over the years, helped us to flesh out our questions and concerns. Among these Johan Rooryck, Ernestine van der Wall, Ab de Jong and Léon Buskens deserve special mention. In addition to the scholars who participated in the two conferences that resulted in edited volumes, other scholars took up our invitation to come and discuss our findings with us. We heartily thank Yasir Suleiman, Heather Sharkey and Jacob Norris for their stimulating engagement with our project and we gratefully remember Peter Sluglett (d. 2017) for his support. Finally we thank the colleagues who contributed to this volume in particular, those who published, and those who for various reasons could not write but contributed to our discussions during the conference in June 2016. We thank Robin Beth Shamuel for sharing the wonderful image of the Assyrian School of Mosul for the cover of this volume, Ineke Smit for her fine editorial labor that lifted our work to a higher level, the Hans Sigrist Prize fund (Bern) for its contribution in addition to the NWO grant, and finally the support of Leiden University and of the Institute of Eastern Christian Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen.
Heleen Murre-van den Berg
Leiden/Nijmegen, 22 September 2019