This panel explores how Middle Eastern Christian communities navigate religious, linguistic, and political difference through practices of encounter across time and space. Bringing together medieval interreligious debate, modern political solidarities, and ecclesiastical contestation, the papers show how language, power, and institutions shape Christian identities.
The first paper examines eleventh-century disputations between Elias of Nisibis and the Abbasid vizier ʿAli al-Maghribi, arguing that Elias’s defense of Syriac offers a theological critique of Islamic conceptions of revelation. The second turns to Palestine, tracing histories of Christian–Muslim solidarity and their relevance for contemporary interfaith engagement in the United States. The third analyzes Palestinian Orthodox contestation of Greek ecclesiastical dominance in the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, highlighting how authority is negotiated within overlapping Ottoman and colonial legacies.
Together, the papers demonstrate that “difference” is an ongoing process shaped through dialogue, struggle, and institutional critique.
This paper explores the long tradition of Christian–Muslim solidarity in Palestine and considers how this history can inform contemporary solidarity efforts in the United States and beyond. Palestinian Christians and Muslims have often worked together in shared political, social, and cultural struggles. Drawing from this history, this paper argues that the Palestinian experience offers an important model for strengthening relationships between Muslim and Christian communities with solidarity for Palestine as their focus. Such partnerships can deepen interfaith engagement and strengthen faith-based advocacy for justice and human dignity.
At the beginning of his sixth of seven “sessions” (majālis) with Abbasid vizier ‘Ali al-Maghrebi (d. 1027), Church of the East metropolitan Elias of Nisibis (d. 1046) declares his intention to show that the Syriac language is “better, more useful, and of greater merit” than Arabic. In response to various questions posed by his Muslim counterpart, Elias enters into an analysis of grammar, handwriting, and speech that reflects his awareness of not only foundational principles of Arabic grammar, but also of contemporaneous debates among Islamic grammarians regarding the interpretation of the Qur’an. Following a 2009 study of David Bertaina, this paper will place Elias’ linguistic analysis within its broader Islamic intellectual context, thereby demonstrating that the dialogue might best be read as a Christian theological critique of the Islamic conception of revelation, ultimately occasioned by Christian concern about the increasing prevalence of Arabic over Syriac in the medieval Middle East.
Palestinian Orthodox Christians, the largest Christian population in historic Palestine, have formed, sustained, and long been affiliated with the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, tracing their origins to the apostles and the leadership of James the Just. Since the Ottoman period, the patriarchate’s clerical hierarchy has been dominated by foreign Greek nationals, producing persistent tensions between church leadership and the indigenous laity. This paper examines how Palestinian Orthodox Christians navigated authority, representation, and communal identity from the nineteenth century to the present. It situates the community within its historical and religious context, analyzes the establishment of a Greek ecclesiastical monopoly over the patriarchate, and explores the consequences of this structure. Drawing on fragmentary historical sources and community accounts, it argues that Palestinian Orthodox Christians have experienced overlapping structures of spiritual, cultural, and political domination—through ecclesiastical hierarchy and colonial governance—shaping both their identity and the broader dynamics of Middle Eastern Christian communities.