6 - The Westernisation and Confessionalisation of Christians in the Middle East: An ‘Entangled History’ (‘Histoire Croisée’)

Summary

For a long time, the culture of Eastern Christians was judged by placing them on a scale of civilisations, ahead of their Muslim environment but behind their Western counterparts. This was already Volney's method when in 1785 he mentioned the progress of writing and reading among Christians. At the end of the nineteenth century, Eastern Christians themselves discussed their place on this scale, and they themselves used the European terminology of ‘decadence’ (inḥiṭāṭ) and ‘renaissance’ (nahḍa), which is still in use in some quarters today. In the 1950s and 1960s, during the period of decolonisation and the Second Vatican Council, voices were raised within Eastern Christianity (in particular by the Melkites) to protest against the imposition of the Latin model that deprived the Easterners of their roots; they demanded their autonomy, a return to their origins and a pursuit of authenticity. This reaction was part of a broader movement that we can qualify as ‘culturalist’, the aim of which was to promote local specificity and to perfect the knowledge of the differentiated workings of societies and cultures. It was based on a dualist vision that assumed a clear opposition between Europeans and others and presented the latter as victims of Western aggression. In the specific case of the Middle East, however, it remained contained within a confessional tension that aimed to reaffirm the specific identity not only of the Christian minorities in Islam, but of one Christian denomination in relation to others. Today, however, we view the situation as incorporating more complex configurations that combine traits of varied origins in often unexpected ways. These include the effects that the encounter with the Other had on European civilisation. The latter can no longer be presented as a monolithic and timeless abstraction. By increasingly taking into account the diachronic dimension, we have become more sensitive to the dynamic of contact situations, in constant transformation. Here, I would like to present one approach from within this historiographical current, applying it to the Christians of the Middle East and their relationship to Catholicism.