The Ottoman Syrians – residents of modern Syria and Lebanon – formed the first Arabic-speaking Evangelical Church in the region. This book offers a fresh narrative of the encounters of this minority ...Protestant community with American missionaries, Eastern churches and Muslims at the height of the Nahda, from 1860 to 1915.
How does a Middle Eastern community create a modern image through its expression of heritage and authenticity? In Among the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Contemporary Syria, Jonathan H. ...Shannon investigates expressions of authenticity in Syria's musical culture, which is particularly known for embracing and preserving the Arab musical tradition, and which has seldom been researched in depth by Western scholars. Music plays a key role in the process of self-imaging by virtue of its ability to convey feeling and emotion, and Shannon explores a variety of performance genres, Sufi rituals, song lyrics, melodic modes, and aesthetic criteria. Shannon shows that although the music may evoke the old, the traditional, and the local, these are re-envisioned as signifiers of the modern national profile. A valuable contribution to the study of music and identity and to the ethnomusicology of the modern Middle East, Among the Jasmine Trees details this music and its reception for the first time, offering an original theoretical framework for understanding contemporary Arab culture, music, and society.
A century after Dussaud's Histoire et religion des Nosairîs (1900), new light is shed on the medieval history and the mysterious religion of the leading sect in Syria in a comprehensive and updated ...study of the Nuṣayrī-'Alawīs.
The recent influx of Syrian refugees into Jordan and Lebanon has stimulated domestic political action against these countries' governments. This is the dramatic argument at the heart of Anne Marie ...Baylouny's When Blame Backfires. Baylouny examines the effects on Jordan and Lebanon of hosting huge numbers of Syrian refugees. How has the populace reacted to the real and perceived negative effects of the refugees? In thought-provoking analysis, Baylouny shows how the demographic changes that result from mass immigration put stress on existing problems in these two countries, worsening them to the point of affecting daily lives. One might expect that, as a result, refugees and minorities would become the focus of citizen anger. But as When Blame Backfires demonstrates, this is not always the case. What Baylouny exposes, instead, is that many of the problems that might be associated with refugees are in fact endemic to the normal routine of citizens' lives. The refugee crisis exacerbated an already dire situation rather than created it, and Jordanians and Lebanese started to protest not only against the presence of refugees but against the incompetence and corruption of their own governments as well. From small-scale protests about goods and public services, citizens progressed to organized and formal national movements calling for economic change and rights to public services not previously provided. This dramatic shift in protest and political discontent was, Baylouny shows, the direct result of the arrival of Syrian refugees.
This book is a decisive contribution to the study of Kurdish history in Syria since the mandatory period (1920-1946) up to nowadays.
Avoiding an essentialist approach, Jordi Tejel provides fine, ...complex and sometimes paradoxical analysis about the articulation between tribal, local, regional, and national identities, on one hand, and the formation of a Kurdish minority awareness vis-à-vis the consolidation of Arab nationalism in Syria, on the other hand.
Using unpublished material, in particular concerning the Mandatory period (French records and Kurdish newspapers) and social movement theory, Tejel analyses the reasons of this "exception" within the Kurdish political sphere. In spite of the exclusion of Kurdishness from the public sphere, especially since 1963, Kurds of Syria have avoided a direct confrontation with the central power, most Kurds opting for a strategy of "dissimulation", cultivating internally the forms of identity that challenge the official ideology. The book explores the dynamics leading to the consolidation of Kurdish minority awareness in contemporary Syria; an ongoing process that could take the form of radicalization or even violence.
Introduction 1. The Kurds During the French Mandate 1.1 Kurdish Populations under the French Mandate 1.2 The Mandate System and the Birth of the Syrian State 1.3 The Mandate and the "Colonial Expertise" 1.4 The Kurdish Cultural Movement in Syria and Lebanon 1.5 Fragmentation of the Kurdish Community: Politics in Jazira 2. Syria in Transition, 1946–63 2.1 Searching for New Political Horizons 2.2 The Triumph of Arab Nationalism and the United Arab Republic 3. The Ba‘athist System and the Kurds 3.1 Ba‘athism: an Exception in Arab Nationalism? 3.2 The Years of Ideological Purity (1963–70) 3.3 The Years of Exploitation (1970–2000) 4. The Kurdish Issue and Its Transnational Dimension 4.1 The emergence of Hafiz al-As‘ad’s Game 149 4.2 The Fall of Saddam Husayn And The Collapse of Syrian Strategy 5. The Kurdish Response and its Margins: "Dissimulation" of a hidden conflict 5.1 The Kurdish Parties at the Margins of the Legal System 5.2 Kurdish Identity at the margins of official islam 5.3 The Defense of Kurdish Culture 6. The Qamishli Revolt, 2004: The Marker of a new Era for the Kurds in Syria 6.1 The Activities Preceding the Kurdish Upheaval 6.2 The Qamishli Revolt 6.3 Toward a Radicalization of Ethnic Divisions? Conclusion
Jordi Tejel is a Ph.D. in History (University of Fribourg, Switzerland) and Sociology (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales-EHESS, Paris). He is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the EHESS, Paris. His research interests focus on nationalism in the Middle East, with a particular interest in Kurdish mobilizations in the interwar period. He is the author of several books and articles, including Le mouvement kurde de Turquie en exil. Continuités et discontinuitées du nationalisme kurde sous le mandat français en Syrie et au Liban (1925-1946).
"Readers curious about more recent developments in Syria, including the 2004 serhildan and subsequent tensions, should see Tejel's book... I, for one, learned a great deal from this book." - David Romano, Department of Political Sciences, Missouri State University; Int. J. Middle East Studies 43 (2011)
The Syrian refugee crisis seriously challenged countries in the Middle East, Europe, the United States, and elsewhere in the world. It provoked reactions from humanitarian generosity to ...anti-immigrant warnings of the destruction of the West. It contributed to the United Kingdom's "Brexit" from the European Union and the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. This book is a unique study of rhetorical responses to the crisis through a comparative approach that analyzes the discourses of leading political figures in ten countries, including gateway, destination, and tertiary countries for immigration, such as Turkey, several European countries, and the United States. These national discourses constructed the crisis and its refugees so as to welcome or shun them, in turn shaping the character and identity of the receiving countries, for both domestic and international audiences, as more or less humanitarian, nationalist, Muslim-friendly, Christian, and so forth. This book is essential reading for scholars wishing to understand how European and other countries responded to this crisis, discursively constructing refugees, themselves, and an emerging world order.
This authoritative and sweeping compendium, the second volume in Getzel Cohen's organized survey of the Greek settlements founded or refounded in the Hellenistic period, provides historical ...narratives, detailed references, citations, and commentaries on all the settlements in Syria, The Red Sea Basin, and North Africa from 331 to 31 BCE. Organized geographically, the volume pulls together discoveries and debates from dozens of widely scattered archaeological and epigraphic projects. Cohen's magisterial breadth of focus enables him to provide more than a compilation of information; the volume also contributes to ongoing questions and will point the way toward new avenues of inquiry.
This is the story of ordinary people whose lives have intersected with the state of politics in the Middle East. Since the civil conflict erupted in Syria, the lives of both Turks and Syrians have ...changed drastically. By voicing individual stories of Syrians who sought shelter in Gaziantep, Turkey, and their encounters with the host community, this book contributes to the current literature on Syrian refugees. As such, rather than offering a dry scholarly account of the war and the crisis, it details the emotional odyssey of two academics who lived through such turbulent times alongside Syrians in the Turkey-Syria borderland.
