National, linguistic, and religious identity of Lebanese Maronite Christians through their Arabic fictional texts during the period of the French Mandate in Lebanon.
French rule over Syria and Lebanon was premised on a vision of a special French protectorate established through centuries of cultural activity: archaeological, educational and charitable. Initial French methods of organising and supervising cultural activity sought to embrace this vision and to implement it in the exploitation of antiquities, the management and promotion of cultural heritage, the organisation of education and the control of public opinion among the literate classes. However, an examination of the first five years of the League of Nations-assigned mandate, 1920-1925, reveals that French expectations of a protectorate were quickly dashed by widespread resistance to their cultural policies, not simply among Arabists but also among minority groups initially expected to be loyal to the French. The violence of imposing the mandate 'de facto', starting with a landing of French troops in the Lebanese and Syrian coast in 1919 - and followed by extension to the Syrian interior in 1920 - was met by consistent violent revolt. Examining the role of cultural institutions reveals less violent yet similarly consistent contestation of the French mandate. The political discourses emerging after World War I fostered expectations of European tutelages that prepared local peoples for autonomy and independence. Yet, even among the most Francophile of stakeholders, the unfolding of the first years of French rule brought forth entirely different events and methods. In this book, Idir Ouahes provides an in-depth analysis of the shifts in discourses, attitudes and activities unfolding in French and locally-organised institutions such as schools, museums and newspapers, revealing how local resistance put pressure on cultural activity in the early years of the French mandate.
This collection of 16 reflective accounts and data-driven studies explores the interrelationship of religious identity and English Language Teaching (ELT). The chapters broaden a topic which has traditionally focused on Christianity by including Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and non-religious perspectives. They address the ways in which faith and ELT intersect in the realms of teacher identity, pedagogy and the context and content of ELT, and explore a diverse range of geographical contexts, making use of a number of different research methodologies. The book will be of particular interest to researchers in TESOL and EFL, as well as teachers and teacher trainers.
Modernity, Minority, and the Public Sphere: Jews and Christians in the Middle East explores the many facets associated with the questions of modernity and minority in the context of religious communities in the Middle East by focusing on inter-communal dialogues and identity construction among the Jewish and Christian communities of the Middle East and paying special attention to the concept of space.This volume draws examples of these issues from experiences in the public sphere such as education, public performance, and political engagement discussing how religious communities were perceived and how they perceived themselves. Based on the conference proceedings from the 2013 conference at Leiden University entitled Common Ground? Changing Interpretations of Public Space in the Middle East among Jews, Christians and Muslims in the 19th and 20th Century this volume presents a variety of cases of minority engagement in Middle Eastern society. With contributions by: T. Baarda, A. Boum, S.R. Goldstein-Sabbah, A. Massot, H. Müller-Sommerfeld, H.L. Murre-van den Berg, L. Robson, K.Sanchez Summerer, A. Schlaepfer, D. Schroeter and Y. Wallach
The Great War transformed the Middle East, bringing to an end four hundred years of Ottoman rule in Arab lands while giving rise to the Middle East as we know it today. A century later, the experiences of ordinary men and women during those calamitous years have faded from memory. A Land of Aching Hearts traverses ethnic, class, and national borders to recover the personal stories of the civilians and soldiers who endured this cataclysmic event. Among those who suffered were the people of Greater Syria—comprising modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine—as well as the people of Turkey, Iraq, and Egypt. Beyond the shifting fortunes of the battlefield, the region was devastated by a British and French naval blockade made worse by Ottoman war measures. Famine, disease, inflation, and an influx of refugees were everyday realities. But the local populations were not passive victims. Fawaz chronicles the initiative and resilience of civilian émigrés, entrepreneurs, draft-dodgers, soldiers, villagers, and townsmen determined to survive the war as best they could. The right mix of ingenuity and practicality often meant the difference between life and death. The war’s aftermath proved bitter for many survivors. Nationalist aspirations were quashed as Britain and France divided the Middle East along artificial borders that still cause resentment. The misery of the Great War, and a profound sense of huge sacrifices made in vain, would color people’s views of politics and the West for the century to come.
This prize-winning study of Levantine migration to Mexico brings “a new and revelatory light” to the subject (Christina Civantos, author of Between Argentines and Arabs). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, migration from the Middle East brought hundreds of thousands of people to the Americas. After a pause during World War I, this intense mobility resumed in the 1920s and continued through the 1940s under the French Mandate. A significant number of these migrants settled in Mexico, building transnational lives. The Mexican Mahjar provides the first global history of Middle Eastern migrations to Mexico. Making unprecedented use of French colonial archives and historical ethnography, Camila Pastor examines how French control over Syria and Lebanon affected the migrants. This study explores issues of class, race, and gender through the decades of increased immigration to Mexico, looking at narratives created by the migrants themselves. Pastor sheds new light on the creation of transnational networks at the intersection of Arab, French, and Mexican colonial modernisms. Revealing how migrants experienced mobility as conquest, diaspora, exile, or pilgrimage, The Mexican Mahjar tracks global history on an intimate scale. Winner of the 2018 Khayrallah Prize in Migration Studies
Combining insider and outsider perspectives, Women in Lebanon looks at Christian and Muslim women living together in a multicultural society and facing modernity. While the Arab Spring has begun to draw attention to issues of change, modernity, and women's subjectivity, this manuscript takes a unique approach to examining and describing the Lebanese "alternative modernities" thesis and how it has shaped thinking about the meaning of terms like evolution, progress, development, history, and politics in contemporary Arab thought. The author draws on extensive ethnographic research, as well as her own personal experience.
Annotation By providing a new framework for understanding Shi'ite national politics in Lebanon, Roschanack Shaery-Eisenlohr recasts the relationship between religion and nationalism in the Middle East