The Syriac Orthodox community is a religious minority which has been neglected for a long time by the ottoman and turkish historiography. This book aspires to provide a method and information for a new understanding of the community in the contemporary context. Based on a fieldwork consisting of interviews, participant observations complemented by historical and contemporary texts, it reveals the emergence of new socio-political dynamics among the Syriacs of Istanbul in their relationship to Turkish contemporary society and diaspora. The survey shows that these eastern christians have been, and are today, under the influence of a larger phenomenon, that is the globalization of Christianity, marked by Catholicism and recent forms of Protestantism.
Su Erol, Ph.D. (2019), Ãcole des Hautes Ãtudes en Sciences Sociales Paris, is actually an independent researcher. She has published articles on Syriacs and non-muslim minorities of Turkey and a book in Turkish entitled Oppressed and Reasonable: Identity Strategies among the Syriac Orthodox Community of Istanbul (İletiÅim, 2016)
This book is intended for the following readers and institutions: post-graduate students having an interest in contemporary Turkeyâs minorities, Turkish and Ottoman history, minorities in the Middle East, Eastern Christianâs history and anthropology; scholars affiliated to the Institutes of Religious Studies, Institutes of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Middle East, Institutes of Turkish and Ottoman Studies, Institutes of (Modern) Syriac Studies, Center of Urban Studies on Istanbul; academic libraries such as BULAC, Campus Condorcet (Paris), ANAMED (Istanbul), SOAS (London).