Religious Minorities in the Middle East pdf

Religious Minorities in the Middle East – Domination, Self-Empowerment, Accommodation

Edited by Anh Nga Longva – Anne Sofie Roald

RELIGIOUS MINORITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Book introduction

Until recently, religious minorities in the Middle East were not the object of much scholarly interest. With the exception of a few classic works by historians on Christians and Jews, mostly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the field was dominated by literature written by activists and Western missionaries, the bulk of which deals with one specific period, the last years of the Ottoman Empire, and one specific type of event, the massacres of Christians in Eastern Anatolia.

Wider scholarly interest for religious minorities in the Middle East developed in the 1980s, triggered by the Iranian revolution and the rise of Islamism in the Muslim world.

 The 1990s saw a series of publications on the topic, but it was in the first decade of the twenty-first century that the religious minorities in the Middle East really moved to the foreground of academic research. This is in part related to the so-called war on terror, especially the military intervention by the US and its allies in religiously plural Iraq.

This intervention and the ensuing change in the sectarian balance of power led to violent retaliations exerted, by proxy as it were, against the local religious minorities. Besides these topical events, the twentieth century has been described as the century of minorities, or more precisely, the century when concern with the need to provide a legal framework to protect minorities gained unprecedented attention.

The United Nations, the key forum where minority issues were debated, has contributed importantly to fostering greater awareness and mobilization among the groups concerned. By the late twentieth century, minorities no longer accepted tolerance as an ideal value; instead, they were demanding the right to recognition, and there are no signs that these demands will diminish. The combined interest in minority issues and political