Georgetown University Presents Syrian Christian who Supports the “Revolution” : Andrew Harrod
With ACMCU professor and fellow Syrian Christian expatriate Yvonne Haddad moderating, Awad drew upon his previous writing to recast minority in Syria’s context away from a numerical concept. Referencing French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Awad discussed “minoratization as a verb,” a process in which oppressive circumstances create for disfavored groups a status “qualitative in nature…something people transform into.” During decades of Syria’s Assad family dictatorship in particular, regime opponents endured “radical and merciless minoritization,” even though they were Syria’s “dominant majority” across ethnic and sectarian divisions. “In the Arab world today, secularism, democracy and liberalism are the real minority,” he wrote in 2014, including in Syria the “majority of the Syrian public rebelling against the systematic suppression and criminality of the regime.”
With these assertions, Awad’s lecture rejected politically separating Syria’s small Christian community and other minorities from Syria’s Arab-Sunni majority. “Oriental Christians lean increasingly towards self-protectionism” and a “tangible overemphasis” on “non-Islamic identity,” confirming the “Western Orientalist tradition of segregating and totally contrasting Oriental Christianity with Islam.” This “divisive black versus white reading” presents Christians as “mere victims,” not “actors and bridge-builders between Muslim confessions” and the wider world.
From such thinking Middle Eastern Christians had begun to consider an “alliance of minorities” with Kurds, Shiites, and others against a “crushing, allegedly Muslim Sunnite terroristic danger,” Awad noted. In Syria the Assad dictatorship with its primary supporters in the country’s Alawite minority, a Shiite offshoot, has become the “primary patron of the alliance of minorities” and uses claims of protecting minorities to gain international support. Many Syrian Christian leaders “didn’t stand with the people, unfortunately” but rather “decided to stand in the shadow of the ruler” and his regime, a “counter-Christian group.”
In Syrian Christians seeking such protection Awad discerned a “profound need of liberation” from a “self-inferiorization trap” involving “self-dhimmitudization.” “If the Christians do not want to be marginalized and undermined as members in their broader society, they should not then push the Muslims toward treating them as a helpless and dependent community,” he said. This is “telling the locals…we don’t really, really deeply belong with you” and therefore “Christians are being looked at very negatively by the broader Muslim community in Syria.” Awad criticized a “very much sentimental and psychological” attitude towards Islam, a “phobia,” among many Syrian Christians who “live as if they are wandering Jews” given past Ottoman Empire massacres.
Awad, by contrast, proclaimed piously that among the Middle East’s Arabs “on the human level we are all one” irrespective of faith and professed his political allegiance by stating “I am Syrian, I am not a Christian.” “If we are really part of that Arab world” and the “people there, then we have to suffer with that people as that people suffers, then we have to struggle with them and to dream with them, because their dreams are my dreams as well.” He noted that Christians “were pioneers in creating the Arab renaissance” of the pan-Arab nationalist movement. Most Syrian Christians are not “afraid of Islam as a religion,” he had likewise stated in a 2012 “Arab Spring” lecture, and are “in full solidarity and concurrence with their non-Christian compatriots along the entire Arab world.”
Awad conceded to audience questions that his views make “me actually a prodigal son in the face of many Christian clerical leaders” in Syria. Subsequently interviewed, he reiterated his past self-description as an “intellectual supporter of the revolution,” yet only a “small group of Christians would support the revolution publicly, clearly, bluntly like me.” The “quiescent majority” of Syrian Christians “definitely identify with the revolution’s values,” but is alienated by the opposition’s “dominant jihadi confrontationalist approach.”
Awad indicated to his audience questioners why his views were so unpopular among Syrian Christians. The “primarily minoritized group” by all sides in Syria’s current fighting is “democrats, secular and free-minded citizens,” the “creators of the Syrian revolution.” Free Syrian Army (FSA) founders, for example, were mostly regime defectors but have now been “replaced by crudely confessionalist troops” in the FSA in accord with foreign opposition funders. Contrary to his presentation of an enlightened Arab world, he noted the derivation of politics in Arabic (siyaasa) from a root meaning “you control the horse” with “connotations that indicate power, control, rule.” Politics in the Western tradition, in contrast, derives from the Greek politia meaning “public affair,” suggesting that a politician is a “public servant.”
Awad’s presentation once again showed how Christian panelists at Georgetown/ACMCU events manifest a subordinate, dhimmi-like outlook on the Middle East’s Muslim majority free of disagreements. He recalls how the only Egyptian Christian ACMCU could find for a past panel on the 2013 overthrow of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB) government was a MB supporter. Completely uncharacteristic of Egyptian Christians, this individual had to withdraw his planned Georgetown appearance when his neo-Nazi past became public.
Awad’s unconvincing ideas of pan-Arabism uniting Christian and Muslim Arabs predominate at Georgetown as shown by professors like Paul Heck. He stated that “Christians are deeply embedded with their Muslim neighbors” at a conferenceexamining jihadist genocidal religious cleansing in the disintegrating artificial states of “Iraq” and “Syria” to which Awad still pledges allegiance. Yet pan-Arabism’s founding father Michel Aflaq converted from Christianity to Islam and concluded that “Islam is Arab nationalism.”
Georgetown events visitors would hardly know that Christians throughout the Middle East consistently speak of their historic struggle for survival under Islam (see here, here, here, here, and here). Given MB,Iranian, and Assad dictatorship links to Awad and Hartford Seminary, he would be unlikely to change this fact. Real Christian-Muslim relations gain no benefit from such propaganda.
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