By Kaleb Herman Adney
The Center for Near Eastern Studies at UCLA is committed to promoting public knowledge of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region through initiatives that engage a wide audience and address common pedagogical, theoretical, and historical questions. Under the leadership of Dr. Ali Behdad and with the support of faculty from both the History and Anthropology departments at UCLA, CNES has launched a series of talks and workshops dedicated to introducing the concept of “minorities” in Middle East studies. This initiative, called the Mellon Minorities in the Middle East & North Africa Series is also intends to further develop scholarly understandings of the concept and the associated historical experience of those who are commonly thought of as minorities. Because of the religious and ethnic diversity of the MENA region and the variegated experience of non-dominant groups therein, questioning the usefulness and applicability of this concept is especially intriguing. The question of who is a minority — ethnically, religiously, politically, etc. — is contextual and dependent on the historical experience of the various countries of the region. As such, the minority experience in the region is contingent on the specific social relations of each geographic location and the political experience of its people. This question and the pedagogical dynamics of teaching minority histories is central to the Mellon Minorities in the Middle East & North Africa Series.
CNES efforts to promote public understandings of the MENA region begin with its commitment to pedagogical development. CNES supports pedagogy through a variety of programs including the recent two-part workshop entitled The Making of Minorities in the Middle East and North Africa. The meetings took place online on two separate half-day sessions, each consisting of two panel discussions. The first session, held on March 5th (https: //www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/event/14783), was dedicated to symbols, objects, and images in the medieval and early modern periods. By integrating expert analyses of these material and visual aspects of the MENA past with the goal of the CNES initiative to explore and reconsider the meaning of the minority experience, this session presented the richness of the historical record in the MENA region and contributed to both a material and cultural understanding of the historical minority experience. Ruba Kana’an and Lamia Balafrej both discussed the importance of material sources for exploring the history of free and unfree labor in the Islamic world. Apart from the fact that these scholars presented groundbreaking research on metalworking artisans and enslaved peoples in the medieval period, they also offered insights into the integration of imagery and objects within a well-rounded pedagogy on the MENA region. Amy Landau and Sussan Babaie presented research in the second panel discussion of the workshop’s first session, which was dedicated to the commercial and legal agency of non-dominant members of Iranian society — namely Armenian Christians, Jews, and other religious communities that did not align with the state-sponsored Shi’i Islam of early modern Iran.
Day two of the workshop, held on March 12th (https: //www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/event/14784), also contributed to a robust analytical framework for the concept of minorities and the minority experience. The first panel discussion of day two was dedicated the variegated experience of non-dominant religious communities in modern Iraq and Morocco, respectively. In the case of Iraq, Ethel Wolper presented evidence for a shared religious culture based on shrine usage and the ritual veneration of the dead by both Muslims and Christians. Aomar Boum, on the other hand, discussed the role of photography in creating popular conceptions of a traditional Jewish culture in Morocco that was ‘oriental’ in the eyes of the colonial beholder. Both of these talks, therefore, attempted to challenge orientalist narratives of homogenous minority religious cultures in favor of presenting minority religions as part of a larger cultural fabric. In the second panel discussion, Virginia Rey and Stephen Sheehi furthered the discussion of materiality in representations of regional minorities. In Rey’s case, the presentation of minority cultures is at its core an issue of defining suitable and authentic material for museums that do not avoid discussions of the social tensions of the MENA region but which also do not exaggerate them. For Sheehi, the material experience of the Maronite peasant in the nineteenth century needs to be considered alongside the religious character of peasant rebellions. Only by exploring the class dynamics and the material expression of peasant rebellions can we fully appreciate the dynamics of the “culture of sectarianism,” to borrow Ussama Makdisi’s terminology.
Both days of the workshop were thought-provoking and they integrated the various social, political, and cultural experiences of regional minority groups into a coherent methodological discussion. The workshop was also unique for its broad geographical scope and the range of historical periods discussed from roughly the medieval period through to the modern era. Finally, the workshop successfully furthered the goal of the CNES Mellon Minorities in the Middle East & North Africa Series initiative to promote popular engagement with new conceptualizations of MENA culture and the minority experience. Furthermore, its pedagogical angle provided the speakers as well as attending graduate students and fellow educators to problematize common conceptions of the minority experience and to create new modes of deepening our understanding MENA culture.
Podcasts of the workshop and other related events in the series can be found here (https: //www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/minorities-program).