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Add to cartQuick viewJames Bryce’s Blue Book as Evidence
Investigations of the Armenian Genocide began as soon as news of the mass killings reached Great Britain in May 1915. The 1916 publication in Britain of The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as a Parliamentary Blue Book by Viscount James Bryce provided compelling and verifiable evidence of the systematic elimination of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. Today the Blue Book is largely forgotten as a documentary and historical source on the massacres. This article situates the Blue Book in its historical context, arguing that its publication provided the foundation for the evidentiary standard by which the act of genocide is corroborated and judged by the international community. The uses and abuses of the Blue Book at the time by the British government and the humanitarian movement in making the case for genocide reveal the problematic legacy of the first efforts to catalog and document what the Allies labeled during World War I as “crimes against humanity.”
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James Bryce and the Origins of the Armenian Question
Free!James Bryce's association with Armenia became well known from his, and Arnold Toynbee's, famous Blue Book on the Armenian Genocide (1916). However, only a handful of studies have been published about Bryce's life-long, and especially about his “early,” Armenian engagements. As this article aims to show, his Armenian mission from the 1870s until the massacres of 1894–1896 deserves greater attention. In these years Bryce attempted to stir up awareness of the suffering of the Armenian communities in the Ottoman Empire. These efforts were mainly aimed toward the internal British scene. Some followed Bryce's lead and supported his Armenian cause, while others doubted his reports and regarded them as “exaggerations.” Bryce's comprehension of the Armenian Question resulted from his general assessment of the power struggle between the major European powers. This struggle has in recent years become, as seen for instance in Donald Bloxham's book The Great Game of Genocide (2005), a central theme in the study of the Armenian Question. In the context of this power struggle, especially between Britain and Russia, Bryce had, quite uniquely, grasped the ominous potential of the Armenian Question by the end of the 1870s. As elaborated in the article, despite Bryce's firm position about the urgent need to intervene in Armenia, there was an almost unbridgeable gap during these years between his moral or ideological stance and the actual abilities of the British government. In short, a breach existed between Bryce's compulsion and Britain's realpolitik constraints.
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The Meaning of “Tolerance,” Which Is the Basis of Modern Civilization
Free!The following translation is a selection from the debate that occurred in 1902 and 1903 between Muhammad ʿAbdu (1849–1905) and Farah Antun (1874–1922), an Ottoman Orthodox Christian intellectual who emigrated from Tripoli to Egypt. The translated section focuses on the question of tolerance and illustrates both the advent of the liberal concept of tolerance in the Arab-Ottoman intellectual sphere and the reception of its ideational content.
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Ronnie Ellenblum. The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean: Climate Change and the Decline of the East, 950-1072. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 270 pp.
Ronnie Ellenblum. The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean: Climate Change and the Decline of the East, 950-1072. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 270 pp.
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Elizabeth F. Thompson. Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. 432 pp.
Elizabeth F. Thompson. Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. 432 pp.
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Marc Aymes. A Provincial History of the Ottoman Empire: Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean in the Nineteenth Century. Oxon: Routledge, 2013. 240 pp.
Marc Aymes. A Provincial History of the Ottoman Empire: Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean in the Nineteenth Century. Oxon: Routledge, 2013. 240 pp.
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Julia Phillips Cohen Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 219 pp.
Julia Phillips Cohen Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 219 pp.
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Of Vines, Fig Trees and the Ashes of Bigotry
Free!In 1790 the head of the Jewish Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, approached George Washington, the first president of the new United States, leading to an exchange of letters between Moses Seixas (1744–1809), warden of the Newport Community, and Washington. This essay begins with an analysis of the biblical context of the exchange between the two, which provided the background for Washington’s beautiful statement on the freedoms that an exilic minority people could hope for. In his reply to Seixas, Washington invoked the powerful biblical image of the vine and the fig tree in his words of assurance to the Jewish community. Reconstructing this context helps to clarify questions regarding the boundaries within which such a people can operate as a distinct group. I show that the original context within which the phrase about a vine and fig tree is expressed was in effect a contract between the sovereign and the ruled.
Later in this essay, I turn to an instance of a new sovereign breaking his promise right after assuming power. Having received assurances of religious tolerance from Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, King Boabdil, the last sultan of the kingdom of Granada, surrendered to the Reyes Católicos. This understanding, however, did not last.
Against the backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition that ensued, I discuss the theme of book burning through history. Such events, I argue, present the exact opposite of what Washington argued for in his letter: they highlight the connection between religious intolerance and violence. Reflecting on book burnings gives us an opportunity to explore the processes of the destruction of one culture and the creation of a new one on its ruins.Add to cartQuick view -
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The Iraqi Novel and the Christians of Iraq
Free!After the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian regime in 2003, the Christian communities of Iraq faced forced emigration. In this article I examine how the Christians of Iraq and their recent precarious situation are reflected in the Iraqi novel. First, I set the political and conceptual grounds with an exposition of the debate over the place of Christians in the Iraqi nation, as discussed by two Iraqi intellectuals belonging to the Sunni and Shi‘i Muslim traditions. This debate frames the liberal political discourse on the Christians and thus provides a framework for the analysis of the novels, the main focus of the article. Iraqi novelists are less refined than intellectuals and politicians in their exposition of views about Christians, or in the case of Christian novelists, their views of their own community and of Iraqi Muslims. I examine representations of Christians in novels written by both Muslim and Christian Iraqi writers, as well as how novels by Christian Iraqi writers reflect the controversy they live with and the crisis of their identity vis à vis their community and its current place in Iraq. What emerges is that increasing numbers of Christians question both their alliance with the Arabs in Iraq and, even more so, their Arab identity. For various reasons Arab Muslim intellectuals find this difficult to accept.
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The Hybrid Women of the Arab Spring Revolutions: Islamization of Feminism, Feminization of Islam
Free!Arab and Muslim women who led the Arab Spring revolutions in their countries were often characterized as secular and liberal. According to this binary approach, religious women are identified with a conservative world view, a traditional education, and a medium to low socioeconomic status. The norms of honor and modesty governing these women are assumed to oblige them to confine themselves exclusively to their roles as wives and mothers and limit their presence in the public sphere. Furthermore, this binary approach stigmatizes those who wrap their heads in the hijab and cover their faces with the niqab as women who are forced by their fathers and husbands to accept traditional norms. Secular women, however, are portrayed as those who have liberated themselves from the shackles of religion and tradition. They are assumed to be highly educated, liberal in their world view, socially and politically engaged, and aspiring to build careers as competent professionals with the goal of becoming economically independent. To achieve this, they are prepared to struggle for their rightful place as equals in both family and society.However, the revolutionary Tunisian, Egyptian, and Yemeni women’s life stories, their world views, and their sociopolitical agenda and outer appearance indicate that their prototype is an amalgamation of a faith-motivated religiosity and a liberal, pluralistic world view. These women join their sisters who, since the last decades of the ninetieth century, have taken part in social- and gender-oriented struggles in the Middle East and North Africa. Their retention of their cultural authenticity, religious beliefs, and moral values clearly highlights the fact that for these hybrid women—to borrow Homi Bhabhi’s concept of hybridity—Islamic religious belief and a liberal world view are intertwined.Add to cartQuick view -
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Islamic Legal Hybridity and Patriarchal Liberalism in the Shari’a Courts in Israel
The civil judicial family law system and the shari‘a courts in Israel are a fascinating site for the study of legal hybridity, particularly with regard to cases involving the legal and religious rights of women. Legal hybridity is found both in the shari‘a courts, even when ruling on cases that are under their exclusive jurisdiction, and in the family courts that apply provisions of Islamic and Israeli law. In this article, I examine as a case study of the problem of appointing a woman as arbitrator between quarelling spouses in the shari‘a court arbitration process. This example shows how a shari‘a court operates under pressure from the secular civil judicial system. It is discernible how a system of legal hybridity gives rise to multiple discourses deriving from different normative systems and various players—such as human rights organizations, Islamic feminist movements, secular feminist movements, and the Israel Supreme Court—seeking to navigate the discourse in pursuit of their interests. My central thesis is that this system of legal hybridity is enhancing a patriarchal liberalism that is filled with obstacles and hurdles preventing full equality.
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Theology of Migration: Toward a Comparative Conceptualization
Free!This article introduces the concept of “theology of migration” in a comparative analysis of texts by religious leaderships that portray migration as the fulfillment of a religious call. Based on a reading of primary sources and field studies, five cases are examined: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, the Islamic wasati approach, the Jewish Hasidic Chabad movement, and African Independent Churches built by labor migrants in Israel. The article distinguishes between “proactive-adaptive” and “retrospective-adaptive” theologies of migration. The former constitute repeatedly modified theological calls for religious communities to move from one land to another, while the latter constitute legitimizations of already existing migrations that were motivated by temporal considerations and that challenged religious norms. Analysis reveals theologies to be dynamic, evolving corpuses and suggests that the potential of migrating religious groups to endure physical setbacks and moral challenges is dependent on the ability of their leaderships to accommodate their theological narratives to changing circumstances.
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