Routledge Handbook of Minorities in the Middle East

Paul S Rowe

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317233787
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Routledge Handbook of Minorities in the Middle East gathers a diverse team of international scholars, each of whom provides unique expertise into the status and prospects of minority populations in the region. The dramatic events of the past decade, from the Arab Spring protests to the rise of the Islamic state, have brought the status of these populations onto centre stage. The overturn of various long-term autocratic governments in states such as Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, and the ongoing threat to government stability in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon have all contributed to a new assertion of majoritarian politics amid demands for democratization and regime change. In the midst of the dramatic changes and latent armed conflict, minority populations have been targeted, marginalized, and victimized. Calls for social and political change have led many to contemplate the ways in which citizenship and governance may be changed to accommodate minorities – or indeed if such change is possible.

At a time when the survival of minority populations and the utility of the label minority has been challenged, this handbook answers the following set of research questions.What are the unique challenges of minority populations in the Middle East? How do minority populations integrate into their host societies, both as a function of their own internal choices, and as a response to majoritarian consensus on their status? Finally, given their inherent challenges, and the vast, sweeping changes that have taken place in the region over the past decade, what is the future of these minority populations? What impact have minority populations had on their societies, and to what extent will they remain prominent actors in their respective settings?

This handbook presents leading-edge research on a wide variety of religious, ethnic, and other minority populations. By reclaiming the notion of minorities in Middle Eastern settings, we seek to highlight the agency of minority communities in defining their past, present, and future.

1
INTRODUCTION

Reclaiming “minorities” in the Middle East

Paul S. Rowe

A revealing headline featured on the satirical news site The Onion at the height of global concern over the rapidly expanding civil war in Syria announced: “Everyone in Middle East Given Own Country in 317,000,000 State Solution”. The involvement of multiple ideological, ethnic, and religious groups spoke to the apparent impossibility of achieving a harmony of interests in the region. The solution was simply to surrender to its intricacies. The article went on to quote a fictional president of the United Nations Security Council who stated that

We are confident that with every man, woman, and child possessing his or her own autonomous area of sovereignty to run as he or she sees fit, we will avoid many of the conflicts that have plagued this part of the world for centuries¹.

Such satire reflects the bemused response of a global public newly acquainted with the complexities of regional politics.

Up until the year 2000, few but those most intimately tied to the region were aware of the underlying complexity that undergirded Middle Eastern societies – in this book defined as the larger Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Though the region has long had a reputation for its instability and violence, this reputation typically focused on the broad strokes of Middle Eastern politics: the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, or the rising tide of Islamism as a challenge to the secular tradition in Arab states. For the casual reader, the major cleavages of the Middle East paralleled divisions in global affairs.

Important developments over the past twenty years have brought to light the vast diversity of Middle Eastern societies. In the wake of 11 September 2001, Western states began to parse among various populist Islamist movements in the region, highlighting the putative differences in the movement among the so-called moderates and radicals. The US decision to follow up its 2001 invasion of Afghanistan with an armed intervention in Iraq in March 2003 revealed just how fragile the Iraqi state was, composed as it was of disparate Arab Sunni, Shi’i, Kurd, Assyrian, Mandaean, Yezidi, Turkoman, and various other ethnoreligious groups. As chaos descended upon Iraq, the smaller communities increasingly found themselves caught in a maelstrom of violence that pit Iraqi nationalists, Sunni and Shi’i Islamists, and Kurds in a civil conflict over their shared territories.

Eight years later, the Arab uprisings that brought regime change to MENA fueled dreams of democratization and reform that served to bolster new forms of majoritarianism, even as activists and dissidents dreamed of a freer and more inclusive future. In Libya, Syria, and Yemen, demands for regime change ushered in protracted civil conflicts that once again revealed the diversity at the heart of Middle Eastern society, as battle lines deepened among ethnic and sectarian groupings. The vision of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (later claiming the more expansive title “Islamic State”, and popularly referred to by its Arabic acronym “Da’esh”) presented the most egregious form of majoritarian tyranny over the region. After establishing its power base in war-torn Syria, Da’esh embarked upon a genocidal campaign against all those who refused its narrow and austere form of Salafist Islam. Entering northern Iraq, Da’esh’s path of destruction disrupted life for a variety of smaller communities that had survived the multiple waves of violence that had taken place in the centuries before.

Minority communities have been slowly departing the Middle East for generations, and their relative numbers have not kept up with the larger populations of Sunni and Shi’i Arabs. But it was the crisis caused by Da’esh that awakened the world to the imminent extinction of many of these communities. While most of these ethnic and religious groups, such as the Egyptian Copts, the Mandaeans of Iraq, or the Alawis of coastal Syria, have roots in antiquity, many of them had been ignored or neglected by analysts and scholars more interested in the wider cultural and political developments taking place in the region. The growing crisis of minority communities amid the breakdown of state authority and the growing popularity of Islamist majoritarianism, along with the dangers of democratization without liberalization, brought the concerns of these communities to light. The plight of these minorities has become especially important to Western states as they fled the region in large numbers amid the growing global refugee crisis of 2014–2016. The crisis revealed to the world how little the rest of us knew about these people groups whose relative size had long obscured them from view.

This handbook is intended to help fill that lacuna. It is aimed at introducing the reader to the various communities in the Middle East that form minority populations, either in terms of their dispersion across many different states in the region, or as a proportion of the population in their own societies. In marshaling the most important scholars of these communities, our collection goes beyond mere introduction. This book informs the reader about the major and important debates that define the status of minority populations, the controversies that surround the very idea of “minority” status, and the concerns of integration and advocacy that bedevil public debates about the place of such minority groups in their own societies.

Such a collection of essays could hardly be more timely. The global refugee crisis arising from the depopulation of Syria and northern Iraq, in addition to vast numbers of people from North Africa and Central Asia, has become an ongoing challenge for the region as well as for the Western states to which they had fled for sanctuary from persecution and violence. The imminent disappearance of entire communities in the Middle East raises concerns for world heritage and historical memory. And the ongoing crisis of governance and stability suggests that a solution for the future of minority populations may have a great deal to say about the future of citizenship in the region, no matter one’s faith, ethnicity, orientation, or politics.

Why “minorities”?

First, however, a word about the title. The use of the term “minority” to refer to various ethnic, religious, and other groups within Middle Eastern society has come under considerable criticism over the past decade. Nonetheless, even the limitations of the term helps us to structure some of the common debates over minority status for the various communities that we discuss in this handbook, as we shall see.

During the era of colonization, imperial powers preyed on internal divisions within colonial states in order to “divide and rule”. A common practice was for the colonial power to patronize specific religious or ethnic groups as trusted client elites. In many cases, this patronage was enabled by cultural and religious connections forged among coreligionists. As the Ottoman Empire crumbled over the course of the nineteenth century, British, French, and Russian efforts to bolster their own influence in the region led them to build relationships with indigenous groups. In the late colonial period, imperial interests were increasingly conflated with the interests of smaller communities of indigenous Christians, non-conformist Muslim sects, and other groups whose cultural distinctiveness stood out. Imperial patronage of these groups led to their emancipation from Ottoman-era strictures under the Tanzimat reforms of the early and mid-nineteenth century – but they also built relationships between these communities and the newly arrived imperial powers from Europe.²

These relationships of patronage were both beneficial and problematic for the various Middle Eastern communities.³ Mixed motives underpinned the imperial efforts to improve the status of non-Muslim and sectarian communities even as the colonizers saw them as natural allies. Russian intrigues in the former Ottoman Empire contributed to the suspicion with which Ottoman Turks viewed Armenians in their own state, bringing lethal consequences to that community. Those Armenians who survived were divided by the patronage of Russian and Western powers and between contending religious factions, as Tsolin Nalbantian demonstrates in Chapter 20 in this volume.

French support for their Maronite (Catholic) coreligionists undergirded the rise of Maronite dreams of statehood during the period of the Tanzimat, in which Western forms of citizenship were being adopted within the Ottoman Empire. This ultimately led to French intervention in the Lebanese civil war of 1860. Ultimately, French colonial patronage created a separate state of “greater Lebanon” in 1923. The French decision to divide the former Ottoman territories of Syria remains controversial among the native inhabitants of the region to this day.

British colonial interests in Egypt also played a role in elevating Egyptian Coptic (Christian) interests in the early 1910s, threatening to divide Egyptians on the basis of religion. Though the British authorities did not find Copts to be altogether trustworthy allies, modernization had elevated the Copts to influential positions in professional associations.⁴ When the Coptic Prime Minister Boutros Ghali was assassinated in 1910, some Copts saw the need for political organization along communal lines. However, most Copts resisted pursuing division and instead participated in the demonstrations that promoted Egypt’s nationalist revolution of 1919.

In his historical critique of minority status under the French mandate in Syria, Benjamin Thomas White argues that the term minority was never used for Middle Eastern people groups until the early twentieth century. It came into use as a means of establishing the modern state. In the Ottoman context, the existence of a multinational state did not occasion the identification of various communities in their relative sizes. White goes as far as to say that “there was no articulated concept of ‘minority’ prior to the modern period because minorities did not exist: the concept acquires meaning only once certain conditions associated with the existence of the modern nation-states have been fulfilled”.⁵ As Ottoman power declined in Eastern Europe, the notion of national self-determination was embraced by liberals. The League of Nations, and later the United Nations, enshrined the idea of minority rights among newly emergent nation-states.⁶ Later, as Europeans carved up new states out of the former Ottoman domains, under League of Nations “mandates”, colonial administration felt the need to articulate the rights of people groups based on what they held to be their primary identifying features.⁷ By the mid-1930s, religious sects and ethnoreligious groups were labeled “minorities” within the state, and modern sectarianism was born.

Though the Ottoman Empire may never have described non-Muslim communities as minorities, they did enforce status differentiation between officially recognized Muslim and non-Muslim subjects. This marked a division between the dominant Muslim, non-Muslim, and heterodox communities, even in cases in which non-Muslim subjects formed a numerical majority. As modern states began to employ the term minority for these populations, the label acquired a more pernicious implication, resembling our use of the term to refer to a juvenile who has not yet achieved full rights as the adult majority. Anh Nga Longva refers to this inferior social status of a minority group as its “sociological” minority status as opposed to its “numerical” status.⁸

Many Middle Eastern communities are wary of embracing the status of minority if it widens the divide between fellow citizens. Under Islam, non-Muslim minority groups who were recognized as fellow monotheists came to be known as ahl al-kitab (“people of the book”). Islamic law considered these people ahl al-dhimma (“protected peoples”), or dhimmis. Though their religious practice was thereby protected under Islamic law, many non-Muslim groups today view dhimmi status as a second-class citizenship that limited their full participation in public life. In this view, recognition as minorities runs the risk of merely extending their dhimmitude into an uncertain future, one “fundamentally conditioned by fear”.⁹

Whether or not minority status implies a reduction in rank for non-Muslim populations, many still view it as an unnecessary way in which to divide them from the majority population. In his research on Palestinian Christians, Quinn Coffey notes that

minority status can be seen as potentially threatening from the perspective of the Christian communities themselves, not only because it can potentially lead to what they view as unnecessary special treatment, but also because it can in some ways degrade the significant contribution that this community has made to Palestinian society.¹⁰

Saba Mahmood argues that the combination of religious minority rights with the language of secularism threatens both, since the state presumes a stance that elides religious differences even as it seeks to define citizens by their minority identities.¹¹ Indeed, wariness about the (mis)use of the term minority led to a major firestorm in the press, and even to public riots in Egypt in 1994. When the Egypt-based Ibn Khaldoun Center partnered with the British Minority Rights Group to host a conference on the Coptic minority, public backlash focused on the way that foreign support was being marshaled to highlight divisions in Egyptian society. Egyptians, both Copt and Muslim, argued that it was inappropriate to label Copts a “minority” in their own homeland. The Coptic Orthodox Church agreed and criticized the way the conference had been framed. The furor ultimately forced the conveners to relocate the conference to Cyprus.¹² Likewise, in Chapter 19 in this volume, David Romano observes that Kurds see minority status as “an impediment to either assimilation or full participation” in their societies. As a result, most Kurds resist using the term. Almost all of the groups profiled in this handbook have similar concerns.

All of these objections – and more – to the facile use of the term minority to refer to the various non-Muslim, non-Arab, sectarian, and non-conformist communities are raised by our contributors throughout this volume. In some cases, our contributors seek simply to explore the distinctive histories and cultures of communities without reference to their status as minorities. In other cases, they refer simply to diverse groups or to non-majority communities. Nevertheless, the centrality of the term minority to their critiques, and the significance of this debate to our modern conceptions of the region, provides ample reason for us to comment on minorities in the context of the region, even if only to critique the concept. Beyond the contested nature of the term, our use of minorities in the title of this handbook is designed to highlight the numerical and demographic realities that leave these communities outside the mainstream – geographically, culturally, or normatively.

In sum, our use of “minority” in the title of this volume is meant to convey the numerical distinction between Muslim, Arab, straight, and other “majority” populations and those of smaller cultural, religious, ethnic, or gendered communities. It is not intended to imply the subordinate status of any of these groups or the derivative nature of their activities. On the contrary, all of our contributors are interested in profiling their particular “minority” group as an actor or set of actors in their own right. We are interested in developing a fulsome understanding of these groups, with all of their own complexities, as self-constituting and self-directed communities in spite of the many challenges that they face.

Reclaiming agency

The sociological use of the term minority defines the existence of ethnoreligious communities as a function of their relation to the “majority” populations of Arabs, Muslims, Jews, Iranians, or Turks. In this context, minorities are nothing more than a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: reclaiming “minorities” in the Middle East
• Section I Majority-minority relations in the Middle East
• Section II Religious and ethnoreligious minorities
• Section III Ethnic minorities
• Section IV Emerging issues and minorities in the Middle East
• Bibliography
• Index