Identity and migration

Leader: Prof.dr. R.B. ter Haar Romeny

CHRISTIAN MINORITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND IN DIASPORA      

How can we explain that Islamic immigrants from Turkey used to adopt a more negative attitude towards Dutch society than Christians from the same country, and even the same region? How come they were less successful? It seems natural to suggest that this has something to do with the most conspicuous difference between the two groups: their religion. But if this is the case, how does one explain that the same group of Christian immigrants from Turkey has had much more success in settling in Sweden than in Germany or the Netherlands? Should we not also look at factors such as the government policy towards immigrants and the attitude of the receptor society? 

Questions such as these form the starting point of the new project Identity and Migration: Christian Minorities in the Middle East and in Diaspora (IAM). As from October 2006, five researchers will work for five years on the question of the transformation of the identity and culture of three groups of Christians from the Middle East after their migration to Europe and Northern America.   

Three communities

Not many people are aware that in addition to its Islamic population, the Middle East also has an important Christian minority. Most of these Christians belong to a number of ancient churches, which trace their history back to the very beginning of Christianity in this part of the world. The Christian groups to be studied in this project include the Syrian Orthodox (Suryoye/Assyrians/Aramaeans) from Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, the Coptic Orthodox from Egypt, as well as the Byzantine Orthodox from Lebanon, Syria, and Israel/Palestine. Large numbers of these Christians have now settled in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. Though the situation differs from community to community, it is clear that nowadays more Middle Eastern Christians live outside the region than inside.  

Emigration waves

Christians left the Middle East in a number of emigration waves. The last days of the Ottoman Empire saw the genocide of Armenian and Syrian Christians. The survivors fled in large numbers, especially to the New World. Later during the twentieth century, frustration over the social and political development of the Middle East, but also local conflicts, fear of dictatorial regimes, extremist violence, as well as economic troubles, became reasons for Christians to leave their homes. Thus many Byzantine Orthodox left Palestine in 1948 and Lebanon during the civil war; Syrian Orthodox caught between the Turkish state, Muslim extremists, and Kurds started leaving Turkey since the beginning of the 1970s; and at the same time the Copts, who so far had been spared the disintegration of their communities through emigration, witnessed the beginning of an exodus, because of the radical ‘re-islamization’ of the country and the poor economic situation.

Changes in identity

Modernity, including the industrialization and the rise of the nation-state, but also the exposure to other cultures and the sense of uprooting which life in a very different environment entails, have transformed the culture and identity of these groups. Those who emigrated from the Middle East exchanged an environment with an Islamic majority for a secular, in many ways post-Christian one. Moreover, from being an indigenous community, they became a community of immigrants. In order to investigate this, the identity perception of Eastern Christians living in Europe and the US will be described. A diachronic, historical perspective then enables us to see which elements are of a static nature, which appear to have been changed, and which are altogether new. We have to find out which threads continue as they are, which are broken off, and which are dyed a different colour, and give a comparative description of the transformation of the identity of the three groups.   

Interdisciplinary approach

The project has to combine philology, art history, and religious studies with social scientific methods in order to obtain results. Social scientific questions and categories have been applied to these groups and their history before, but in the new project, with its combination of ancient and modern, for the first time historical-philological and fully fledged social scientific research will be combined in one single project.