Muslims and Greek Nationalism

I shall greatly look forward to reading this forthcoming book in September upon its release for it sounds like just the sort of work I take perhaps inordinate delight in. It confounds the fabulists who retail fantastical fiction about a past that never was in service of some dreary agenda in the present. This book reminds us once again that history is almost always written with nothing but crooked lines: it is, as I ceaselessly tell my students, messy, and a failure to appreciate that almost always dooms one to buffoonery instead of intelligent commentary and judicious analysis. 

In any event, forthcoming is Islam and Nationalism in Modern Greece, 1821-1940 by Stefanos Katsikas (Oxford UP, Sept. 2021), 321pp. About this book the publisher tells us this: 

Drawing from a wide range of archival and secondary Greek, Bulgarian, Ottoman, and Turkish sources, Islam and Nationalism in Modern Greece, 1821-1940 explores the way in which the Muslim populations of Greece were ruled by state authorities from the time of Greece's political emancipation from the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s until the country's entrance into the Second World War, in October 1940. The book examines how state rule influenced the development of the Muslim population's collective identity as a minority and affected Muslim relations with the Greek authorities and Orthodox Christians.

Greece was the first country in the Balkans to become an independent state and a pioneer in experimenting with minority issues. Greece's ruling framework and many state administrative measures and patterns would serve as templates in other Christian Orthodox Balkan states with Muslim minorities (Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Cyprus). Muslim religious officials were empowered with authority which they did not have in Ottoman times, and aspects of the Islamic law (Sharia) were incorporated into the state legal system to be used for Muslim family and property affairs. Religion remained a defining element in the political, social, and cultural life of the post-Ottoman Balkans; Stefanos Katsikas explores the role religious nationalism and public institutions have played in the development and preservation of religious and ethnic identity. Religion remains a key element of individual and collective identity but only as long as there are strong institutions and the political framework to support and maintain religious diversity.

Byzantine and Balkan Historiographies

I have made no secret of my view that much of the problem of Christian (and other cultural and theological) division, especially between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, is historiographical in nature: how the doleful tales of our division are told, and retold, with tendentiousness formed in the present moment. A new book looks at these issues in a wide context: Byzantium after the Nation: The Problem of Continuity in Balkan Historiographies by Dimitris Stamatopoulos (Central European University Press, June 2021), 330pp. About this book the publisher tells us this: 

Dimitris Stamatopoulos undertakes the first systematic comparison of the dominant ethnic historiographic models and divergences elaborated by Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, Albanian, Romanian, Turkish, and Russian intellectuals with reference to the ambiguous inheritance of Byzantium. The title alludes to the seminal work of Nicolae Iorga in the 1930s, Byzantium after Byzantium, that argued for the continuity between the Byzantine and the Ottoman empires. The idea of the continuity of empires became a kind of touchstone for national historiographies. Rival Balkan nationalisms engaged in a "war of interpretation" as to the nature of Byzantium, assuming different positions of adoption or rejection of its imperial model and leading to various schemes of continuity in each national historiographic canon.

Stamatopoulos discusses what Byzantium represented for nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars and how their perceptions related to their treatment of the imperial model: whether a different perception of the medieval Byzantine period prevailed in the Greek national center as opposed to Constantinople; how nineteenth-century Balkan nationalists and Russian scholars used Byzantium to invent their own medieval period (and, by extension, their own antiquity); and finally, whether there exist continuities or discontinuities in these modes of making ideological use of the past.

Problems in Balkan Historiographies after Byzantium

The long-lasting, if conflicted, imprint left by "Byzantium"--both real and imagined--is itself a topic worthy of further consideration in any number of ways. In September of this year, we had one such way from the hand of Dimitris Stamatopoulos, Byzantium after the Nation: The Problem of Continuity in Balkan Historiographies (Central European University Press, 2020), 330pp.  

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Dimitris Stamatopoulos undertakes the first systematic comparison of the dominant ethnic historiographic models and divergences elaborated by Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, Albanian, Romanian, Turkish, and Russian intellectuals with reference to the ambiguous inheritance of Byzantium. The title alludes to the seminal work of Nicolae Iorga in the 1930s, Byzantium after Byzantium, that argued for the continuity between the Byzantine and the Ottoman empires. The idea of the continuity of empires became a kind of touchstone for national historiographies. Rival Balkan nationalisms engaged in a "war of interpretation" as to the nature of Byzantium, assuming different positions of adoption or rejection of its imperial model and leading to various schemes of continuity in each national historiographic canon.

Stamatopoulos discusses what Byzantium represented for nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars and how their perceptions related to their treatment of the imperial model: whether a different perception of the medieval Byzantine period prevailed in the Greek national center as opposed to Constantinople; how nineteenth-century Balkan nationalists and Russian scholars used Byzantium to invent their own medieval period (and, by extension, their own antiquity); and finally, whether there exist continuities or discontinuities in these modes of making ideological use of the past.

Religion, Authority, and the State: Constantine and Beyond

Debates about religious freedom are by no means unique to the United States in these early years of the 21st century. So too debates about the legacy of Constantine are not new developments either. Two recent books shed light on both questions, giving them wide context.

The first, Religion, Authority, and the State: From Constantine to the Contemporary World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 249pp. is a collection edited by Leo Lefebure.With at least two chapters focusing on Slavic Orthodox debates around religious freedom, this book promises to be of interest to Eastern Christians.

The publisher further tells us about this book:

In commemoration of Constantine’s grant of freedom of religion to Christians, this wide-ranging volume examines the ambiguous legacy of this emperor in relation to the present world, discussing the perennial challenges of relations between religions and governments. The authors examine the new global ecumenical movement inspired by Pentecostals, the role of religion in the Irish Easter rebellion against the British, and the relation between religious freedom and government in the United States. Other essays debate the relation of Islam to the violence in Nigeria, the place of the family in church-state relations in the Philippines, the role of confessional identity in the political struggles in the Balkans, and the construction of Slavophile identity in nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox political theology. The volume also investigates the contrast between written constitutions and actual practice in the relations between governments and religions in Australia, Indonesia, and Egypt.  The case studies and surveys illuminate both specific contexts and also widespread currents in religion-state relations across the world.

The second study, by Kyle Smith, is Constantine and the Captive Christians of Persia: Martyrdom and Religious Identity in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 2016), 256pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

It is widely believed that the Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity politicized religious allegiances, dividing the Christian Roman Empire from the Zoroastrian Sasanian Empire and leading to the persecution of Christians in Persia. This account, however, is based on Greek ecclesiastical histories and Syriac martyrdom narratives that date to centuries after the fact. In this groundbreaking study, Kyle Smith analyzes diverse Greek, Latin, and Syriac sources to show that there was not a single history of fourth-century Mesopotamia. By examining the conflicting hagiographical and historical evidence, Constantine and the Captive Christians of Persia presents an evocative and evolving portrait of the first Christian emperor, uncovering how Syriac Christians manipulated the image of their western Christian counterparts to fashion their own political and religious identities during this century of radical change.

The Politics of Iconoclasm and the Modernity of the Nation-State

A quarter-century ago now, Alasdair MacIntyre, widely recognized as the most influential moral philosopher of the last half-century, wrote that "no coherent political imagination is any longer possible for those condemned to inhabit, and to think and act in terms of the modernity of the twentieth-century nation-state." For that nation-state has been created by, and in the image of, the liberalism of the so-called Enlightenment and it has such monopolistic powers that it obviates all alternatives, leading to the "imaginative sterility of the modern state," which can only be resisted and outwitted through the creation of new local forms of community beyond the state's reach and imaginative power, a power that is such that it arouses in the hearts and minds of millions the willingness to kill themselves on its behalf, as MacIntyre puts it in a famous passage frequently quoted:

The modern nation-state, in whatever guise, is a dangerous and unmanageable institution, presenting itself on the one hand as a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services, which is always about to, but never actually does, give its clients value for money, and on the other as a repository of sacred values, which from time to time invites one to lay down one’s life on its behalf… [I]it is like being asked to die for the telephone company ("Poetry as Political Philosophy: Notes on Burke and Yeats," published in 1988 and republished in 2006 in The Tasks of Philosophy: Volume 1: Selected Essays).

This is not, of course, some kind of "conservative" rant against "big government" or the "welfare state" or some kind of "liberal" rant against "militarism." MacIntyre argues that all politics is flawed today: "Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative, radical, or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of the virtues; for modern politics itself expresses in its institutional forms a systematic rejection of that tradition" (After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory).

These thoughts of MacIntyre, who has done more to shape my own thinking about politics and philosophy than anyone (but whose political arguments are not without problems, as this very perceptive essay carefully shows), came back to me recently as I just finished reading a compelling and fascinating new book: James Noyes, The Politics of Iconoclasm: Religion, Violence and the Culture of Image-Breaking in Christianity and Islam (I.B. Tauris, 2013), 288pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

From sixteenth-century Geneva to urban developments in Mecca today, The Politics of Iconoclasm offers a bold and original history of image-breaking and of the culture of violence and its paradoxical roots in the desire for renewal. Examining these dynamics of nationhood, technology, destruction and memory, a historical journey is described in which the temple is razed and replaced by the machine.

This is a fascinating book whose central thesis is that any outbreak of iconoclasm--whether in Calvinist Geneva, Wahhabist Afghanistan, revolutionary France, Nazi Germany, or the Balkans in the 1990s--is always the prelude to political reconfigurations and the emergence of a new state or new state actors. The theological arguments about icons and iconoclasm are in fact secondary in this book: "a study of iconoclasm must examine such acts as political statements against authority as much as theological statements against the mediation of divine beauty" (12). He goes on to note that in many cases it is difficult if not impossible to isolate one single cause of, or reason for, iconoclasm, but that it is often motivated by a tangle of theo-political reasons. In, e.g., Geneva of the sixteenth century, "beginning with the attack on Geneva's St. Pierre Cathedral in 1535," it was then, and remains today among historians, difficult to know "whether Calvinist iconoclasm had primarily religious or political motives" (14).

This mention of the cathedral of St. Pierre brought back a powerful memory for me. I was in Geneva in 1992 as a freshman undergraduate attending a meeting of the World Council of Churches, and I wandered over one afternoon to the cathedral to see it. At that time, I had never heard of "iconoclasm" and knew nothing about it in its Byzantine expressions; my ignorance of Calvinism was only slightly less--though I had heard hoary tales about Calvinists in Scotland from my Glaswegian grandmother, who thought them rather insufferable and who used to suffer their taunts at being a "crypto-papist" for belonging to the Scottish Episcopal Church (which has rarely if ever been a hotbed of "high" church practices comparable to the so-called Anglo-Catholics). I had heard, too, of how the churches of the continental Reformation, particularly in Switzerland, were usually much more spartan inside than the relatively "high" Anglican church of my upbringing with its wonderful carved rood-screen, neo-Gothic structures, stained glass windows, and frescos and mosaics covering virtually every inch of wall space. Having come from such a sensually rich parish, nothing prepared me for the shock of the cathedral in Geneva: I found it an acutely cold and barren place for reasons I could scarcely articulate then. Indeed, I have never, before or since, been in such a frigid, vacuous building, though I have been in many Protestant churches of various traditions. The Geneva cathedral felt as though there remained in her cold, lapidary walls a palpable memory of the "iconographic violence" done to them and the rest of the building.There was indeed a very strong sense of an "absent presence" so to speak. I could not wait to leave the building, and could not then, nor certainly now, understand how anyone could find such a place a warm, inviting, or remotely compelling place to worship. I know that one can worship God in a forest, in Auschwitz or the Gulag, in jail, or in much more modest surroundings than, say, the Vatican basilica or Hagia Sophia or Westminster Abbey or Chartres, but why would one want to? If, to use the familiar line from Dostoevsky, "beauty will save the world," then the house of God should be as beautiful as possible.

But let me not lapse here into sermonizing. Let me instead commend this book that insightfully traces the complex relations between Church and state--or, better, between "religion" and "politics"--in various times and places. It is an important book and deserves a place in courses not only on iconoclasm, but also political theology, and art history. If time permits, I will say more about Noyes' book in the weeks ahead as I am preparing a public lecture on iconoclasm.