This article investigates the institutional evolution and identity formation of the Armenian Catholic community of Jerusalem and Palestine from the late Ottoman period to the end of the British Mandate. Using the analytical tools of historical institutionalism, it argues that the community’s development cannot be understood simply as a shift from one imperial order to another. Instead, it resulted from interlocking processes of institutional layering, adaptation, and conversion that reconfigured communal structures across dramatically different political regimes. During the Tanzimat era, reforms of the millet system and the introduction of Ottoman imperial citizenship produced a hybrid political order that combined confessional segmentation with newly articulated forms of juridical universalism. The Armenian Catholic Patriarchal Vicariate operated within this framework as both an ecclesiastical authority and an administrative institution, shaping communal governance and mediating between local society and imperial power. After 1917, the British administration neither dismantled nor replaced the Ottoman communal system; instead, it reinterpreted it as a device of colonial governance. Through processes of institutional conversion, the Mandate authorities reframed the millet system as a means of managing social difference, depoliticising intercommunal conflict, and stabilising their rule. This continuity of structures enabled the small, post-genocide Armenian Catholic refugee community to negotiate modernity, maintain cohesion, and fashion new forms of collective self-understanding within the administrative and cultural environment of the Mandate. The case demonstrates how enduring institutional legacies mediated between empire, confession, and emerging modern identities. More broadly, it illuminates the transformation of ethno-confessional communities during the transition from Ottoman to colonial rule in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Keywords: Armenian Catholic community, Jerusalem, Palestine, Ottoman Empire, British Mandate, millets, historical institutionalism, identity formation, colonial governance, Tanzimat.

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Sanoyan D.A., Fadeyev I.A. Between Empire and Mandate: The Institutional Transformation of the Armenian Catholic Community in Jerusalem and Palestine (1850s–1940s). Christianity in the Middle East, 2025, vol. 9, no. 5, pp. 5–27. https://doi.org/10.65324/cme006

This work highlights Christian scripture and ritual within a broader Middle Eastern and cross-cultural framework, drawing parallels with Judaic, Islamic, Egyptian, and other traditions in which sacred space and bodily form converge to engender a symbolic and theological embodiment of divine revelation and perception. By pointing out the shared physiological symbolism in religious architecture, ritual, and scripture, it shifts the perspective towards an externalized and directly experienced spiritual dimension and offers a novel glimpse into aspects of embodied theology and divine perception. The demonstrated continuity of corporeal imagery, scriptural symbolism, and incorporation of the human form in ritual and architecture contributes to the areas of manuscript studies, comparative theology, and the history of religious thought in the Middle East. The focus on the body as a transhistorical and cross-cultural medium and site of divine manifestation presented in this study offers a model for multidisciplinary research on embodiment and cognition across the monotheistic religions and beyond. Using the methodological approach of symbolic and semantic analysis, the observed converging patterns are interpreted as examples of an embodied theology and hermeneutics that bridges metaphor and physiological processes. The work highlights the congruence between key scriptural terminology and symbolism, such as lamp, crystal, and niche, across cultures — illustrated by passages from the Qurʾanic Light Verse and Revelation — and suggests the possible theological implications of detailed neuro-anatomical knowledge. The results provide a new interdisciplinary framework for comparative theology that incorporates linguistic analysis, theological exegesis, neuroanatomy, and cognitive science. They underscore the centrality of corporeality as a neglected yet crucial theological category in the Abrahamic religions and emphasize the experiential dimension of revelation.

Keywords: Embodied Theology, Comparative Exegesis, Manuscript Studies, Religious Phenomenology, Symbolic Anthropology, Interreligious Dialogue.

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Gansinger M.A.M. Embodied Covenant: Physiological Interpretation of Scripture and Cross-Traditional Parallels. Christianity in the Middle East, 2025, vol. 9, no. 5, pp. 28–50. https://doi.org/10.65324/cme007

The earliest urban centers in Mesopotamia date back to Sumerian times, but the city of Qāmišlī in Northeastern Syria — now home to approximately 300,000 inhabitants — is only one hundred years old. It was founded spontaneously during the period when modern Middle Eastern states were being established within their present borders. This article examines the circumstances of the city’s founding, as well as the controversies surrounding its name. It also discusses Qāmišlī’s rapid development, particularly in the field of agriculture, which was made possible by innovations introduced by members of the Assyrian Aṣfar and Naǧǧār family. The author further examines the evolution of the local education system and the city’s cultural achievements — from folklore to sports — listing the names of folk ensembles and notable writers and athletes associated with Qāmišlī. In addition, the paper presents further, lesser-known aspects of the Syrian authorities’ approach, which at various times adopted a nationalist or Islamist stance. Such policies limited the Assyrian community’s ability to participate freely in the country’s economic and intellectual life, ultimately contributing to successive waves of emigration.

Keywords: Ṭūr Abdin, Aṣfar and Naǧǧār Conglomerate, Syrian Al-Ǧazīra.

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Abdalla M. The Syrian City of Qāmišlī (Zālīn) as a Testament to the Forced Migration of Assyrian Christians from Southeastern Turkey after World War I. Christianity in the Middle East, 2025, vol. 9, no. 5, pp. 51–66. https://doi.org/10.65324/cme008

This article aims to investigate the possibility of the soul’s motion across its various existential realms, based on the Islamic and Christian philosophical foundations. To this end, the viewpoints of three major thinkers — Ibn Sīnā and Mullā Ṣadrā from the Islamic tradition, and Thomas Aquinas from the Christian tradition — are analyzed, drawing on their most significant works and using a descriptive-analytical methodology. Ibn Sīnā limits the soul’s motion to its accidents, holding that the soul’s substance is static and lacks essential motion. In contrast, Mullā Ṣadrā, by introducing the primacy of existence, the gradation of existence, and trans-substantial motion, affirms motion in the substance of the soul as long as it is connected to the material body. Although both philosophers initially reject motion in the immaterial or purely intellectual soul because it lacks matter, other philosophical principles for the motion of the immaterial soul can be considered. They include Ibn Sīnā’s development of the meaning of potency and matter, and Mullā Ṣadrā’s principle of existential intensification and the unity of the intellect, the intelligizer, and the intelligible. In the Christian tradition, Thomas Aquinas generally rejects the soul’s motion by affirming its simplicity. Nevertheless, he paves the way for affirming motion in the soul by proposing a new kind of definition for passivity/receptivity and potency that does not necessitate matter but is related to existential imperfection. By distinguishing between the intellectual grade of the soul, which he considers to possess potentiality, and the pure intellect, which is pure act, he opens a new avenue for proving the soul’s motion even after its separation from the body. Consequently, despite considerable commonalities in their philosophical foundations, these three philosophers offer different analyses of the soul’s motion by relying on specific distinctions, which, in the case of Mullā Ṣadrā and Thomas Aquinas, show points of convergence.

Keywords: Substantial Motion, Intellectual Motion, Potency and Act, Existential Perfection.

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Roodgar N. The Motion of the Soul According to Avicenna, Mulla Sadra, and Thomas Aquinas. Christianity in the Middle East, 2025, vol. 9, no. 5, pp. 67–87. https://doi.org/10.65324/cme009

This article represents the first systematic grounding of comparative theology in the sources of Shiite Islam. While contemporary comparative theology has taken form mainly within the framework of Christian teachings and by Christian comparative theologians, particularly Francis X. Clooney, Catherine Cornille, and Klaus von Stosch, no parallel effort has been made to ground this ever-growing discipline in the foundational sources of Shiite Islam. This article fills that scholarly gap by drawing on the primary sources of Shiite Islam, namely the Qur’an, the hadiths of the infallibles, and reason. These sources are explored for their identifying elements, teachings, and principles for learning across religious borders within the framework of Shiite Islamic orthodoxy and orthopraxy. The study demonstrates that the Qur’an reveals truths in the sacred texts of pre-Islamic religions. Furthermore, hadiths of the infallibles encourage us to seek truth, knowledge, and wisdom in any source. In addition, rational principles such as tarakum al-zunun, intertextuality, and tu’raf al-ashya’ bi-addadiha provide the necessary methodological background for encountering sources of other religious traditions. These extra sources are equivalent to the loci alieni in Catholic Christianity. The article argues that fundamental Shiite Islamic sources provide a legitimate framework for grounding a confessional comparative theology and open the horizon for rereading and enriching Shiite Islamic theological thought through constructive engagement and dialogue with other religious traditions. The article paves the way for Shiite Muslim theologians to participate more fully in the ever-expanding inter-religious project of comparative theology.

Keywords: interreligious dialogue, interreligious learning, confessional approach, faith seeking understanding.

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Rastegar M., Meftah A.R., Sadeghnia M. A Shiite Islamic Grounding for Comparative Theology: Insights from Catholic and Shiite Sources. Christianity in the Middle East, 2025, vol. 9, no. 5, pp. 88–101. https://doi.org/10.65324/cme010

One of Europe’s most pressing challenges today is the large number of Middle Eastern, non-Christian, primarily Muslim, refugees who have relocated and entered its society since 2015, compelling Western scholars to ask, “How should European society manifest and practice a truly plurality-particularity balance in the contexts of coexistence with these religiously different refugees?” And, “What should the European Christians avoid in addressing these refugee populations, lest they fail in maintaining their pluralist-particularist equation? This essay addresses these questions in light of Marianne Moyaert’s recent monograph, Christian Imagination of the Religious Other: A History of Religionization. It examines whether Moyaert’s proposal provides an accurate model of interrelationality between the European ‘self’ and the incoming refugee ‘other’, or if her thesis results in a reading exercise that causes Europeans to unnecessarily flagellate themselves intellectually. The essay situates Moyaert’s discourse within the larger context of examining the ‘selfing-othering binarism’ that persists in Western scholarship, and then suggests that the core challenge may not lie primarily in the mechanism of ‘other-othering’, but rather in an equally perilous game of ‘self-otherizing’.

Keywords: Binarism, Christianity, Interreligious relations, Islam, Middle Eastern refugees, Post-colonialism, Western Europe.

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Awad N.G. Religionizing or Self-Religionizing? A Provocative Assessment of Selfing-Othering Binarism and the Meta-Narrative of Christian Religionization. Christianity in the Middle East, 2025, vol. 9, no. 5, pp. 102–116. https://doi.org/10.65324/cme011