Religious Minorities In The Middle East

Focusing on the situation of both Muslim and non-Muslim religious minorities in the Middle East, this volume offers an analysis of various strategies of resilience and accommodation from a historical as well a contemporary perspective.

The Future of Religious Minorities in the Middle East addresses the domestic and international politics that have created conditions for contemporary religious cleansing in the Middle East. It provides a platform for a host of distinguished scholars, journalists, human rights activists, and political practitioners. The contributors come from diverse political, cultural, and religious backgrounds; each one drawing on a deep wellspring of scholarship, experience, sobriety, and passion. Collectively, they make a major contribution to understanding the dynamics of the mortal threat to the social pluralism upon which the survival of religious minorities depends.

Focusing on the situation of both Muslim and non-Muslim religious minorities in the Middle East, this volume offers an analysis of various strategies of resilience and accommodation from a historical as well a contemporary perspective.

Within the Middle East there are a wide range of minority groups outside the mainstream religious and ethnic culture. This book provides a detailed examination of their rights as minorities within this region, and their changing status throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The rights of minorities in the Middle East are subject to a range of legal frameworks, having developed in part from Islamic law, and in recent years subject to international human rights law and institutional frameworks. The book examines the context in which minority rights operate within this conflicted region, investigating how minorities engage with (or are excluded from) various sites of power and how state practice in dealing with minorities (often ostensibly based on Islamic authority) intersects with and informs modern constitutionalism and international law. The book identifies who exactly can be classed as a minority group, analysing in detail the different religious and ethnic minorities across the region. The book also pays special attention to the plight of minorities who are spread between various states, often as the result of conflict. It assesses the applicable domestic legislative instruments within the three countries investigated as case studies: Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, and highlights key domestic remedies that could serve as models for ensuring greater social cohesion and greater inclusion of minorities in the political life of these countries.

This book offers fresh insights to enhance and diversify our understanding of the modern history of the state and societies in today’s Jordan, while also providing examples of why and how scholars can challenge the static and discursively government-minded approaches to minorities and minoritisation – especially the traditional emphasis on demographic balances. Despite its small size and initial appearance of homogeneity, Jordan provides an excellent case of a dynamic, relational, historically contingent and fluid approach to ethnic, political and religious minorities in the context of the imposition of a modern state system on complex and varied traditional societies. The editors and contributors present dynamic and relational perspectives on the status of and historical processes involved in the creation and absorption of minority groups within Jordan.

In a world where almost all societies are multi-religious and multi-ethnic, we need to study how social cohesion can be achieved in different contexts. In some geographical areas, as in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, people of different religious belonging have, through the ages, lived side by side, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in dissonance. In other geographical regions, as in Scandinavia, societies have been quite religiously homogeneous but only recently challenged by immigration.In both locations the relations between religious minority and majority are very much on the agenda. In order to discuss the situation for non-Muslims in Muslim majority societies, a consultation was convened with both Muslim and Christian participants from Pakistan, Palestine, Lebanon, and Sweden. Some of the participants work in academic settings, others in faith-based organisations, some in jurisprudence and others with theological issues. Non-Muslims in Muslim Majority Societies is the result of thatconsultation. The intention of the book is to trigger reflection and further thinking, through papers that discuss issues such as freedom of religion, minority rights, secular and religious legislation, and inter-religious dialogue in Muslim majority societies. Although the articles are presented as 'works in progress' and remain tentative in many of their conclusions, this book is an important contribution to the global debate over religious tolerance and religious pluralism.

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

Relations among minorities and majorities, whether religious, ethnic, cultural or other, have been a triggering factor of social dynamics all over the world for millennia. Indeed, their relevance has further grown in recent decades due to turbulent politics and rapidly changing social relations. The Middle East and Asia have traditionally been home to a vast array of religious and ethnic groups, yet a series of both armed and ideological conflicts have begun to re-shape their classic complex social composition. This volume offers valuable insights into the issue of minorities in various geographical and political settings, from the Uyghurs of China and the modern Christian movements of India to the Romas and Dervishes of early 20th century Iran, the Mandaeans of Mesopotamia, and the Muslims of Western Europe.