Andreas Bandak

Of Refrains and Rhythms in Contemporary Damascus

Christians in the Middle East have traditionally clustered around cities. As minorities in a Muslim majority context, difference manifests itself in many ways. In recent decades, the sounds of the city, in the form of calls to prayer from minarets and church bells, have increased, while green and blue lighting likewise crafts a plural setting that is not only audible but visible to all. In this article, I explore Christian ways of inhabiting the city in Damascus, Syria. The orchestration of space is intensifying as the region appears to be becoming an ever more vulnerable place to live for a Christian minority. I argue that an anthropological engagement with Christianity may do well to listen to the particular refrains that are formed in and of the city. Such an engagement attests to the ways in which Christianity is lived in particular locations but also how Christianity is continuously made to matter.

Problems of Belief: Tonalities of Immediacy among Christians of Damascus

This article examines the different effects Christianity has among Christians of Damascus. Instead of focusing on devout subjects, I trace out the ramifications Christianity has in different settings. Christianity sets different kinds of foregrounds and backgrounds which in this article are attended to during the Feast of the Holy Cross. During this Christian feast, a great variety of themes are brought into play with different kinds of relations to what it is to be a Christian in Damascus. I argue that what I term tonalities of immediacy is a fertile way to understand how contingencies and histories are played upon in concrete situations. The problem of belief, I argue, is not settled by pointing to a particular Christian and Western heritage or to default reactions against imagined certainties; rather the interplay between faith and scepticism may be a productive lens through which to grasp local Christian concerns.

Reckoning with the Inevitable: Death and Dying among Syrian Christians during the Uprising

ABSTRACT Since 15 March 2011, Syria has seen a humanitarian crisis escalate and we are now witnessing outright civil war in many parts of the country. From a relatively peaceful start, the whole affair has turned ugly. Bombs are exploding not just in remote parts of Syria but in its largest cities. Death and dying has now become a salient feature of Syrian life, both inside and outside its national borders. It is this salience of death and dying that I explore in this paper. My focus will be on Syrian Christians and their ways of perceiving the materiality of death. Most centrally, I argue that the fear of extinction that death and dying evoke in the minority prevents them from embracing oppositional politics and is instead used by the regime to propagate the fact that it alone will be able to ensure a future for all of the countrys citizens.

Our Lady of Soufanieh: On Knowledge, Ignorance and Indifference among the Christians of Damascus

This chapter reflects on the nature of evidence as it is negotiated among the Christians of Damascus regarding the contemporary Christian stigmatic and visionary Myrna Akhras. In 1982, Myrna started to receive apparitions of the Virgin Mary. The phenomenon of Our Lady of Soufanieh drew varied reactions from the very onset of the events. The chapter argues that the lack of attention from local society towards seemingly miraculous events necessitates different strategies to make what the extended family of Soufanieh experience as the gift of God visible and audible. This is examined as a cross-field of indifference and knowledge, where mixed motivations exist in the relationship with Soufanieh in that most Christians know of the place and Myrna but only few frequent it regularly. The chapter explores the nature of evidence as it relates to forms of knowledge, and this involves the opposite equally as much, namely indifference and ignorance. Keywords:Christians of Damascus; God; miracles; Our Lady of Soufanieh; Virgin Mary

The social life of prayers – introduction

ABSTRACT In this introduction the theme of prayer is brought into an anthropological discussion. Attending to prayers and how they are performed and seen to intervene in a social world is a significant way to engage with matters close to people. As argued in this introduction, prayers are a way to map affect and affective relationships people hold in what they are oriented towards and care about. Here a social perspective on prayer taking its cue from Marcel Mauss is particularly relevant as it invites us to go beyond the individual and see how prayers always point to a broader landscape. The reason for honing in on the social life of prayers is that it entices a particular form of situated comparison of diverse forms of Christianity that thereby pushes the anthropology of Christianity to consider central questions of agency, responsibility and subjectivity. This introduction argues that attending to the social life of prayers can be seen as a way of mapping affect. Prayers in different ways attest to the implicatedness of human beings in a social world. Furthermore, prayer works as a didactic tool and is in itself an internal scale of comparison and evaluation in various Christian formulations.

Introduction: Sainthood in Fragile States

Sainthood is more than an abstract, ideal model of defining the order of charismatic figures. This chapter argues that the field of sainthood is productively conceived through the interplay between structural and existential states. It explains the applications and investments in ideas of sainthood in order to offer a broad and dynamic understanding of the oscillations between polemics and apologetics, ignorance and indifference, and oppositional and parallel movements, creating sanctity and sainthood. The authors conceive of sainthood as bound to a saint in Christian tradition, pertaining to ascriptions and a bestowing of sanctity in veneration of imagery and objects, as well as Islamic, Jewish and secular figures. The chapter presents sainthood as a poly semantic term with porous boundaries, spanning from the ecstatic, a shaman, Christian saints and Islamic ‘friends of God’ to national heroes. Keywords:Christian; Islamic revival; Jewish figures; sainthood; saints

The Ends of Revolution: Rethinking Ideology and Time in the Arab Uprisings

It is difficult to believe the level of disruption and despair that we are witnessing in the Middle East, from a broken Gaza, to a ruined Syria, a Yemen being bombed, a Libya in disintegration, and an Egypt on the slide toward state-centric fascism. These developments seem to be distantly removed from the days of Tahrir Square in early 2011, when people with elated spirits poured into the streets to demand a better political future. If the large-scale social mobilization back then provided the best refutation of Francis Fukuyama’s the-endof-history thesis then the failure to translate mobilization into structural change has made the current moment a liminal, open-ended situation lingering between hope and despair, action and inaction, exhaustion and revolutionary belief. Was this the end of revolution, a stillborn moment that caught fire but transformed and today has lost its radical potential? Or does the end goal of revolution still call forth actions to establish a new and different world, a better one? What, in other words, are the ends of revolution? The aftermath of the 2011 uprisings opens a number of pertinent questions for researchers of revolution in the Middle East and beyond. What is failure for a revolutionary movement? What is certainty and what is doubt? How is a sense of direction created and dismantled in global times when the very possibility of historical direction is circumspect? Can critique create ideological innovation, or does it become a symptom of permanent crisis—crisis of critique as well as crisis of social change? Has the temporality of revolution changed, or can we use previous post-revolutionary situations, from France to Russia and to Iran, to mirror current concerns? Are radical new horizons of possibility emerging from the last six years’ experience with revolution, and if so, in which directions do they point? These are the questions we address in this Introduction as well as in the individual articles that follow.

States of Exception: Effects and Affects of Authoritarianism Among Christian Arabs in Damascus

The Syrian regime has, for decades, emphasized the strong and authoritarian focus of national security. Following independence after World War II, various regimes took charge of the country, most notably the current Ba’ath party, which seized power in 1963. The Ba’ath party staged a series of coups or “corrections” in 1966 and 1970, which ended up with Hafiz al-Asad as president, and the Alawite minority as his immediate power base. Throughout Hafiz al-Asad’s reign, he was known to be ruthless and brutal in fighting all sorts of radicalism and religious fundamentalism, in particular the Sunni Muslims. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, several attempts by the Muslim Brotherhood to denounce the president culminated, in early 1982, in a bloody massacre in the city of Hama in middle of Syria, where more than 10,000 people were killed by the army. This incident marked the regime as authoritarian with a strong will to uphold power in a region known for its instability. The authoritarian line has also been continued, since the death of Hafiz al-Asad in 2000, by his son Bashar al-Asad. In this chapter, I explore the effects and affects of authoritarianism on the Christians of Damascus. This minority, consisting of a great variety of denominations, 2 regards security as a necessity with which to guard the country against Muslim fundamentalism.

Politics of Worship in the Contemporary Middle East

Acknowledgments List of Figures Introduction: Sainthood in fragile states - Andreas Bandak and Mikkel Bille Part I - Sustained Sainthood Contesting Fragile Saintly Traditions: Miraculous healing among Twelver Shi`is in contemporary Syria - Edith Szanto Saints, Media and Minority Cultures: On Coptic cults of Egyptian revolution from Alexandria to Maspero - Angie Heo Part II: Contested Representations Enigmas of a Pakistani Warrior Saint: Interrogating media conspiracies in an Age of Terror - Pnina Werbner The Samer, the Saint and the Shaman: Ordering Bedouin heritage in Jordan - Mikkel Bille Part III: Indeterminate Sainthood Our Lady of Soufanieh: On knowledge, ignorance and indifference among the Christians of Damascus - Andreas Bandak Ecstatic Sainthood and austere Sunni Islam: A majzub in northern Pakistan - Juergen Frembgen Part IV: Secular Sainthood Imbued with Agency: Contesting notions of the extraordinaryness of Turkan Saylan - Daniella Kuzmanovic The Secular Saint: Iconography and ideology in the cult of Bashir Jumayil - Sune Haugbolle

Foregrounds and Backgrounds – Ventures in the Anthropology of Christianity

In this introduction, we take our point of departure in the question: what difference does Christianity make? We argue that the anthropology of Christianity must encompass believers, skeptics and observers, in that the differences Christianity makes never are simple or singular. We pose the play between foregrounds and backgrounds as a viable way to venture, but argue that this must be paired with a focus on the particular assemblage made in and across contexts. The effect of Christianity is therefore best conceived of in the very bundling of affects, forms, ideologies and practices. We contend that a focus on Christianity within anthropology should not be conceived as yet another subdisciplinary move, but is a focus that revitalizes the discipline of anthropology writ large. The theoretical elaboration on foregrounds and backgrounds we argue is of purchase beyond the focus on Christianity.