Call for Papers: Constitutionalism and Religious Identity in the Middle East: Historical and Transnational Perspectives, 1850-1950

A Workshop

Dates: Thursday and Friday, 11-12 June 2026 

Location: University of Oxford 

Co-convenors: Dr. Weston Bland and Dr. Cyma Farah, Faculty of History, University of Oxford 

Call for Papers Deadline: 10 November 2025 (please send a 400-word abstract and CV to movingstories@history.ox.ac.uk) 

Taking inspiration from the centennial anniversary of the 1926 Lebanese Constitution, this workshop asks how historical actors in the modern Middle East have approached constitutions as mediators of religious identity. From nineteenth-century Ottoman imperial decrees to the constitutional revolutions of the twentieth century, constitutional governance has emerged as a critical feature of debate in the political order of the Middle East during the transition from empire to colonial rule to nation-states.  

We are interested in case studies that challenge the prevailing historiography of global constitutionalism that has been dominated by a Western liberal paradigm. As prominent scholars such as Aslı Bali and Hanna Lerner have highlighted, this paradigm often presents constitutions as products of a "founding moment" or a radical break from the past, designed to entrench secular, liberal, and individualistic principles. This has led to a number of studies on Middle Eastern constitutions that revolve around the (in)compatibility of Islam with secular-democratic constitutionalism, often viewing them as a binary choice. In this context, we believe historical methodologies are uniquely positioned to contribute a deeper understanding of the contingencies and genealogies of constitutionalism and religion in the region. While all disciplines are welcome, we encourage proposals that highlight the dynamic historical nature of constitutionalism and religion in the region. With particular attention to the hybridities, entanglements, and messy overlaps that resist dichotomies, the workshop will focus on the dramatic transitional period between 1850 and 1950, when competing visions of constitutionalism, the secular, and religion were simultaneously being debated, contested, and reimagined. This method and timeline encourage works focusing on genealogies, global encounters, and reciprocal influence rather than fixed concepts defined by an insular reliance on the nation-state paradigm. 

Constitutions often served as a means of mediating religious identities by drawing unstable and evolving boundaries between, for example, an Islamic umma and a more inclusive sense of Ottomanism, religious tradition and the modern nation-state, and clerical and state authority. We are interested in scholarship that explores these categories as arenas where competing visions of political community, legitimacy, and religious belonging were negotiated. Focusing on a broadly defined Middle East from the 1850s to the 1950s, we invite contributions that consider the promise and peril of constitutions’ engagement with religious identity, with relevant topics including minority rights, sectarianism, secularism, political representation, colonialism, and the regulation of personal status laws.  

The workshop is organized as part of the ERC-funded “Moving Stories: Sectarianisms in the Global Middle East” project at Oxford’s Faculty of History. In line with the project’s objectives, we seek papers that look at how ideas, practices and people moved across transregional networks. We seek to recover how narratives of belief and belonging—even when ascribed, pen on paper, and categorized in legal sectarian terms that forged nation-states—were also shaped by encounters that exceeded what constitutions or the nation-state could define or assign.  

In line with a historically-based method, the workshop is interested in recent approaches that extend the study of constitutionalism into the history of archives, record-keeping, and the working processes of bureaucracies. We approach constitutions as more than legal documents, but as the dynamic objects of debate, production, popular consumption, and imaginative reconstruction. Accordingly, we encourage contributions that consider the constellation of sources in which constitutionalism exists, engaging not only with constitutions themselves but also, for example, the private papers of document drafters, press debates over constitutions, records of the state and non-state institutions that constitutions governed and were influenced by, and literary depictions of constitutional values. Additionally, we also welcome considerations of alternatives to traditional constitutional structures, including local regulations, colonial charters, basic laws, and the governing structures of confessional and ethnic communities. 

Finally, the workshop will engage with wider questions about the regional and transregional precedents and genealogies that influenced Middle Eastern constitutions and their engagement with religion. Who participated in writing constitutions and how did they articulate the relationship between constitutionalism and the religious character of the people they claimed to represent? How did these local actors—both elite administrators and ordinary communities—understand constitutionalism in practice and which of its values were perceived as the critical component of a well-functioning society as opposed to those values they considered malleable or disposable? To what degree did constitutions actively reconstruct societies’ religious dynamics rather than passively mirroring existing socioreligious realities? How did colonialism and imperialism put their mark on constitution-making and how did they alter religious imagination? What alternatives to the nation and the state were imagined by quasi-constitutional governing regulations? 

To Apply 

We welcome 400-word abstracts spanning 1850-1950 on the following broad topics:  

• The history, genealogy, and circulation of concepts of religious identity as they appear in the constitutions of the Middle East 
• Considerations of constitutionalism that transcend the paradigm of the nation-state 
• Religious guarantees of constitutions in a global or comparative lens 
• The impact of secularism, minority rights, and majoritarian privilege in constitutional design 
• Microhistories of pivotal figures or moments in the making of constitutions’ religious character and/or their impact on the lived realities of people under their jurisdiction 
• The religious and non-religious visions of specific constitutions and their entanglement with each other 
• The direction of influence between constitutions and the religious dynamics of the societies that they governed 
• The interplay between religion, modernity, the nation-state, colonialism, and empire in the making of constitutions 
• Discussion of sources—state archives and alternative sources—available for the study of constitutionalism in the Middle East and their role in shaping the current conversation in the field 

The workshop will take place over two days on Thursday and Friday, 11 and 12 June 2026. Sessions will be structured around the discussion of individual pre-circulated papers.  These discussions are aimed at providing participants with feedback in order to revise papers for publication as part of a special issue or edited volume arising from the workshop. 

Participants will be required to submit a c. 5,000–8,000-word paper by 20 April 2026 for circulation among the participants. The bulk of the session will be dedicated to discussion of the pre-circulated papers, which means all participants will have to attend having read all the papers.  

The ’Moving Stories’ Project will be able to provide participants with a contribution to travel costs to and from Oxford, as well as accommodation for two or three nights. Those participants with access to funding from their home institutions will be asked to contribute towards their travel costs in order to enable the participation of early career researchers. 

If you would be interested in participating, please send a single PDF file containing an abstract of no more than 400 words and CV including detail of any publications to movingstories@history.ox.ac.uk by 10 November 2025. Proposals will be reviewed by a committee for relevance to the workshop themes and project objectives; it is hoped that outcomes of applications will be sent out by the end of November.

Please direct any questions to the workshop co-convenors, Dr Weston Bland at weston.bland@history.ox.ac.uk and Dr Cyma Farah at cyma.farah@history.ox.ac.uk 

This workshop is supported by funding from the European Research Council Consolidator Grant, Moving Stories: Sectarianisms in the Global Middle East (2021-2026), under the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant number 101001717).