Workshop
©Illustration generated with ChatGPT
26‒27 May 2025
Institut français de Jordanie, Amman
Is preaching consubstantial with crisis? This is what is suggested by Max Weber’s sociology of religious work, which distinguishes between “pastoral care” (religious edification of the individual), characteristic of ordinary situations, and “preaching” (collective religious instruction modelled on the prophetic episode), that takes place in contexts of profound upheaval, when a religious tradition is expanding or, conversely, is being threatened by competing doctrines. This Weberian scheme applies perfectly to the major contemporary Islamic preaching movements (e.g. jama’at al-tabligh, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists), all of which present their actions as a solution to the regression into which Muslims were plunged by European colonialism and the secularist political regimes that succeeded it. Similarly, the Coptic revival in Egypt from the late 19th century onwards emerged against a backdrop of British colonialism, political crisis, nationalist effervescence and, later, the rise of political Islam.
This raises the question of whether, and if so how, other religious traditions present in the Middle East came to grips with this notion of crisis during the same period. In particular, what is the situation of those traditions which, like the Catholic Churches, have seen their position strengthened by European influence? A comparative and diachronic approach should also make it possible to identify what “constitutes a crisis” for particular religious actors at a given moment in the contemporary history of the Middle East (e.g. military defeat, feelings of inferiority vis-à-vis Europe, demographic decline of a given religious group, secularisation of institutions, rise of atheism, etc.). Based on this, we will examine the similarities and divergences between preaching endeavours by the different religious traditions concerned, and the transformations in religious discourse in the Middle East from the end of the 19th century onwards. Based on this initial questioning, the workshop will examine the notions of crisis and preaching and how they relate to each other in three ways:
- Firstly, what words do preachers use to describe the crisis? For example, Islamic movements and authors made great use of the notion of civilisational “decline” (Nadwi 1947) and the medical metaphor of “disease” (Kandhlawi, 2011) but their lexicon also included less dramatic expressions such as “difficult times” (Bakkar, 2000) or, quite simply, “crisis” (azma), (Al-Suri, s.d.). In a similar vein, Christian missionaries who settled in the Middle East from the mid-19th century onwards spoke of the “decadence” of the Eastern churches, which they set out to “regenerate” through their apostolate (Sharkey, 2013). Equally, the term teshuva refers to the return to a Jewish identity structured around the Torah. What about other religious traditions? How has this lexicon evolved over time?
- The second issue raised by the question of what constitutes a crisis for each of the actors involved is “framing” (i.e. meaning construction, to use a term from social movement theory) carried out by these actors. The latter construct the crisis discursively and give it a particular meaning: they highlight certain religious, social or political problems rather than others, attribute specific causes to them (divine wrath, inaction by the believers, etc.) and propose solutions in line with these causes (return to piety, religio-political activism, aggiornamento or even replacement of the present order by a new world, as in the case of millenarian and messianic movements). Such framing is likely to vary greatly from one religious tradition to another. This is due to the diversity of contexts encountered by each of them, but also to the divergences that exist between competing currents within a single religious tradition. These currents differ precisely in the type of response they intend to give to the crisis and, therefore, in the meaning they give to it upstream.
- Thirdly and finally, we will look at the possibility of dissociating crisis and preaching. Are there forms of preaching that do not use the notion of crisis to justify their existence? Would this be the case, for example, with the “theology of prosperity” promoted in the 2000s by the Egyptian Amr Khaled, a star television preacher in a Ralph Lauren polo shirt (Haenni, 2005: 64-72?) Or the more recent phenomenon of Orthodox Jewish women preachers using various means and techniques to re-judaize a female audience in Israel? If so, what distinguishes such preaching from the “pastoral care” evoked by Max Weber, assuming of course that this dichotomy is useful? Conversely, are there cases where preaching is inhibited (or, at the very least, drastically transformed) by the crisis itself, particularly when the latter is extremely serious (war, natural disaster)?
This two-day workshop is being organised as part of the PredicMO programme (https://predicmo.hypotheses.org/le-projet). Proposals will focus primarily on Judaism, Islam and Christianity in the Middle East, but other faiths or denominations are not excluded.
Proposals for papers should be sent in English to anna.poujeau@cnrs.fr; thomas.pierret@univ-amu.fr; norig.neveu@univ-amu.fr and annalaura.turiano@univ-amu.fr; n.nakhle-cerruti@ifporient.org, by January 30 2025 at the latest. Candidates will receive a reply by mid-February. Abstracts should indicate the sources and fields on which the paper is based. They should not exceed 500 words and should be accompanied by a short presentation of the author (500 words max).
The workshop will prepare a collective publication. Pre-contributions should be sent in by 7 May to prepare for the discussions. After the workshop, an initial version of the article will be expected by 7 January 2026 (publication planned for late 2026-early 2027).
Najla Nakhlé-Cerruti,CNRS, Ifpo
Norig Neveu, CNRS, AMU, IREMAM
Thomas Pierret, CNRS, AMU, IREMAM
Anna Poujeau CNRS, LESC
Annalaura Turiano, CNRS, AMU, IREMAM
References
Bakkar, Abd al-Karim, ‘Asruna wal-’aysh fi zaman al-sa’b, (Our Era and Life in Difficult Times) Damascus, Dar al-Qalam, 2000.
Haenni, Patrick, L’islam de marché. L’autre révolution conservatrice, Paris, Seuil, 2005.
Kandhlawi Muhammad Zakaria Fada’il al-a’mal, (the Virtues of Good Deeds), Saharanpur, 2011 (1rst edition in Urdu, 1928=1964).
El-Khawaga, Dina, « Le renouveau copte actuel : raisons d’émergence et modes de fonctionnement », in Cedej, Modernisation et nouvelles formes de mobilisation sociale. Égypte-Brésil, 1970-1989, Cedej, Cairo, 1991, p. 115-134.
Nadwi, Abul Hassan Islam and the World: The Rise and Decline of the Muslims and Its Effect on Mankind, UK Islamic Academy, 2003 ( 1rst edition in Urdu, 1947).
Sharkey, Heather (ed.), Cultural Conversions: Unexpected Consequences of Christian Missionary Encounters in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia, Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 2013.
Al-Suri, Abu Mus’ab, Waqi’ al-muslimin: al-azma wal-makhraj, (the Situation of Muslims : the Crisis and the Way to get out of it), undated.
Tank-Storper, Sébastien, “Proselytism in ‘Jewish Worlds’?”, in Norig Neveu, Karène Sanchez-Summerer, Annalaura Turiano, Missions and Preaching: Connected and Decompartmentalised Perspectives from the Middle East and North Africa (19th-21st Century), Leiden, Brill, 2022, p. 42-66.
