The Moving Stories project concentrates on two areas of research as a way of acknowledging the methodological challenges related to the study of global phenomena like sectarianism. Ranging across the geography of the Ottoman Empire and beyond, delving also into the geography of the neighbourhood, it will examine the global processes behind Middle Eastern sect-formation and the evolution of individual and community identities as they developed in specific localities across the Americas, Europe, Australia and in the Middle East itself. Second, the project will bring out the power of these narratives of translocation and rediscovery, highlighting the very moving storytelling of individuals as they variously described, explained and justified themselves, their communities, their sectarian loyalties and their environments – as much to themselves as to multiple publics in local, national and international contexts.
This will require an activist strategy of outreach. Already, our team has begun a forensic outreach programme, aimed at identifying primary sources that even now remain hidden away in private, communal and academic archives. These documents describe the ways in which issues of identification changed, how state formation and colonialism shaped sect formation, how writers responded in the pages of an articulate and highly partisan press – and how the understanding of sectarianism evolved, within and from without these communities. Documents written by or about the earliest immigrants from the Ottoman Empire and/or the Middle East give us priceless insights into both the settling in process of new arrivals, their assimilation into American society, their establishment as distinct religious or national blocs – and, reconnecting the Mahjar with the Ottoman world, their reflections on events “back home”.
The project team will use these new sources to build on other manuscript resources that have previously been identified and in safeguarded in community or sectarian archives, museums, university libraries and the major institutions that have worked to preserve the heritage of Middle Eastern migrants: institutions as varied as the Arab-American National Museum in Michigan, the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivleri in Istanbul, the Historical Society of Oklahoma or the Archives nationales de France. These might include unpublished journals, correspondence and memoirs; the histories, autobiographies and fictional imaginings that explored alternative outcomes; and the newspaper and magazine articles in which individuals and communities discussed their place in the surrounding environment and worked through their evolving attitudes to faith, identity, assimilation and belonging.
Using these primary sources for the early immigrant experience – in Arabic, Armenian, Syriac, English, French and Turkish – we will compile a new Oxford Sourcebook in Belief and Belonging in the Global Middle East, spanning four continents and an unprecedented range of records, documents and literary sources during this period of acute generational change. This will amount to a global history of sectarianisms and sect-formation, which pays as much attention to personal narratives of reinvention and migration as it does to the grander geopolitical narratives of political, social and religious change. As well as distilling the sheer diversity of genres and sources under study, the Sourcebook will transcend mere anthology by including scholarly essays on source discovery, methodology, context and relevance to the wider context of multiple sectarianisms in the Middle East and beyond.
