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Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies (BRIIFS)

In February 2007, a conference was held at the British Institute in Amman to explore the impact of constructions of the East/West dichotomy on research around the Mediterranean and to document and understand more complex relationships and cultural realities between these two distinct, yet close political geographies. The conference was organized by the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) and the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies (RIIFS) under the patronage of HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal. This introduction and the following papers have not been updated since the start of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, so do not reflect any of these recent and ongoing events. ‬

The Phoenicians have long been recognized as one of the major cultures of the Mediterranean’s Iron Age period, noted for their maritime activities and over- seas settlements. This contribution explores the origins of Phoenician movement overseas, and assesses the nature of this expansion. It discusses ancient literary perceptions of the Phoenicians and examines how study of the Phoenician over- seas settlements has been considered by the disciplines of Near Eastern and Classical archaeology. When compared to discourse on contemporary Greek colonial activities, a sense of competition between the two disciplines is revealed. At the same time, however, the recognition of common sets of practices and shared bodies of knowledge suggest complex connectivities during the Iron Age, reminding us that cultures should never be considered in isolation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore aspects of international interaction dur- ing the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean, taking a specifically Egyptian perspective. The main foci of attention are the related themes of topos (especially royal propaganda) in the representation of Egyptian relations with foreigners, and the reality of institutional contact between Egyptians and foreigners within and without Egypt’s New Kingdom empire, mimesis. The extent to which personal interactions existed within and alongside this ideological framework and imperial institutional apparatus will be considered. Particular attention will be given to the ways in which particular classes of object can act is cultural indicators, especially in the representation of foreigners in New Kingdom Egypt. Local cultural transformations in objects which have varied resonances will be considered through a case study of ostrich-eggs in the East- ern Mediterranean during the Late Bronze Age.

This article considers the relationship between Christians and Muslims in Caucasia in the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, with special reference to the King- dom of Georgia, the most powerful non-Muslim state in the region. Georgia already had a Muslim population of its own-Tbilisi was a Muslim city up to the twelfth century-but with the invasion of Turks and Mongols, Muslim culture and institutions came to exert a profound influence on the Christian king- dom, a phenomenon examined in the first part of this paper. Conversely, however, interest in Georgian culture on the part of Georgia’s Muslim inhabitants and vassals was more limited, although not entirely absent. The essay concludes by studying conversion in Caucasia, both Christian conversions to Islam and vice versa, arguing that on both sides, changes of religion among the élite were generally prompted by political necessity, such as the desire to conclude advantageous marriage alliances. ‬

Henri Pirenne’s Mahomet et Charlemagne (1937) is one of the seminal works of history written in the twentieth century. His argument that it was the Arab conquests of the seventh century, not the earlier Germanic invasions, that broke the unity of the Mediterranean world remains valid. The conquering Islamic umma saw the new world in terms of the Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-Harb, the latter being a space filled with fantastic and exotic barbarities that reinforced the Muslim sense of superiority. The old Roman empire, faced with the hard task of adjusting to reduced circumstances, reinvented itself as a New Israel, a Chosen People, whose embattled circumstances were a paradoxical proof of God’s favour. Only in the west did past perspectives survive. In 1096, an expedition now called the First Crusade marched to the east. Where they were going was not a strange and new world, but the most familiar landscape imaginable; a Biblical world whose names were better known than anywhere other than their most immediate local surroundings. The creation of the Crusader states did not pre- figure nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialism; still less did Crusader attitudes exemplify what Edward Said dubbed ‘Orientalism’. But the Crusading experience did in due course fundamentally alter the Latin vision of the Near East and lead to the creation of a new sense of Europe. ‬

This paper reviews the archaeological and historical evidence for the nature and dynamics of life in town and country during the Ottoman centuries in Greece, from the fourteenth century to the early twentieth in total.

This article addresses the prevalent notion of divide or split in late Ottoman society purportedly created by the Western influence and identifies some of the pitfalls that such a problematic notion entails. It demonstrates that even among the groups and institutions most often cited as symptomatic of such a putatively bifurcated society, namely, among the most Westernized élites and the organi- zations most influenced by the West, where we would expect such a reading to be most clearly reflected, we find deep contradictions which render the entire notion practically untenable. The article juxtaposes the expectations raised by the notion of divide against examples of late Ottoman experience drawn from three different areas: the political opposition movements; the new schools frequently assumed to have reoriented an entire generation of Ottoman subjects towards the West; and the lived experience of the Istanbul élite. The conclusion is that late Ottoman society was far more able to assimilate political, social and cultural difference than their observers have given it credit. ‬

In the Middle East, a dynamic region of multi-layered histories and geographies, and the crossing point for multiple cultures, identities and traditions, tourism is rapidly becoming a major economic phenomenon with complex and socio-cultural implications. For as well as the obvious movement of people, largely for leisure purposes, tourism is one of the foremost mechanisms for the transmission of knowledge, the circulation of ideas and imaginaries and material objects. International tourism in the Middle East does not work in a vacuum but is shaped by historically conceived binaries stretching beyond mere geographies to polarities around culture, language and religion. Formal and institutionalised narratives of tourism, exemplified by travel brochures, work on these binaries and fit within the much discussed notion of ‘orientalism’. This paper examines the ‘east-west’ binary framework in the context of tourism in the Mid- dle East and the ways in which tourism can contribute to the process of inter- cultural dialogue. It distinguishes between tourism as a structural development format on the meta level, and the intimacies of ‘being’ a tourist at the micro- level. It is argued that it is at the level of individual encounter between tourist and host, that moments are created, born out of angst in the face of difference, which allow, temporally at least, peoples to bypass the binary legacies of history and the contemporary visions of global politics, and engage instead in shared notions of humanity. In this way the act of tourism, or rather of ‘being a tourist’, is a vital transformative experience. The paper suggests that in the Middle East in particular, tourists require greater opportunities and spaces to interact with host communities. ‬

(First §) The Growth of Foreign Trade and its Connection to the Global Market WHEN THE GEOGRAPHICAL AREA we know today as Iraq came under Ottoman rule in 1534, Iraq became an Ottoman border state. The search into the history of this state in the late Ottoman era, therefore, is in fact a search into part of the history of the Ottoman state itself. That historical period was not, under any circumstances, void of economic and social deterioration. There was little or no movement, especially social life in the cities of the three Iraqi provinces, Basra, Baghdad and Mosul. The various Ottoman concepts, ideas, traditions and customs were not entrenched, not just in individuals’ minds, but also among the civilian social groups and units. In addition, historical events, particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, confirm the receding role of the Iraqi city, as it isolated itself and Bedouin values and customs became prevalent among its residents. ‬

Although In modern times, Jews were nowhere as open to participation in the wider Arabic-Muslim culture, and at home in literary standard Arabic, as from the 1920s in Iraq. Writing in literary standard Arabic, Iraqi Jews produced works that quickly became part of the mainstream of modern Arabic literature. Following the war in Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel, many Iraqi Jewish intellectuals, poets and writers emigrated to the new state. On their arrival in Israel they faced a new linguistic situation in which the Hebrew language was limited to a single religion, a single nation, and a single ethnic entity. While in Iraq, Arab cultural and national identity encompassed Jews together with Muslims and Christians—in Israel, Jewish identity became enmeshed with cultural and national identity. Such immigrants thus faced a fierce clash between their original Iraqi-Arab narrative and the Jewish Zionist Western-oriented dominant master narrative. The natural Iraqi hybrid of a Jewish-Arab identity became contradistinct and even diametrically opposed identities—Arab versus Jew. As a result, the literature twentieth century Iraqi Jews produced in Arabic has been gradually disappearing; there is no Jewish writer on record born in Israel after 1948 who writes belles-lettres in Arabic. The demise of Arabic literature among Jews has precipitated a controversy regarding the cultural preferences of Israeli society. The dilemma is whether Arab culture can be considered a ‘correct’ source of inspiration for the Israeli Hebrew culture. ‬