The greatest accomplishment of the past ten to twenty years of scholarship on Christian groups in Middle Eastern states is the way scholars have recognized the agency of a population long objectified in both academic and polemical circles. Christians have long been viewed as the object of other actors. For some, they were mere products of Muslim societies that imposed upon them the debatably restricted or protected status of ahl al-dhimma. For others, they were the appendages of external forces determined to use them as devices of their interests. The concerns of such external forces only contributed to Christians' portrayal as vehicles of imperialism. Although these tropes persist, over the last several years many scholars have begun to explore the ways in which Arab and other Middle Eastern Christians operate as subjects in their own right.

In histories of the Middle East, Christians have often been portrayed as either protected, tolerated, or persecuted minorities in Arab and Islamic environments. Condescension to the toleration of Christians in Islamic societies is the boast of the Muslim apologist.Footnote ¹ To Christian and Western polemicists, this treatment contributes to a pathology. Christians and Jews alike are confined to “dhimmitude,” according to the controversial work of Bat Yeʾor.Footnote ² In other studies, Christians are objectified as fifth columns or pawns of Western interests. Historical pieces deal with the way that the various imperialist powers and the Ottoman capitulations, coupled with Western intellectual developments, altered the status of Arab Christians.Footnote ³ Edward Said, a product of that encounter, expresses concerns about the way Christian communities were studied in scholarship on the Middle East. At one point he even criticizes Western educational institutions for perpetuating the study of millet self-organization as a sort of “preferred policy solution,” supporting the divide and conquer strategies that had been used so effectively by the colonial powers.Footnote ⁴

Today, we begin to understand the way that Christians operate not solely as a minority or as an extension of Western civilization but also as centuries-old groups rooted in the history and culture of the Middle East. They have become self-constituting agents with authentic and resonant experiences in the politics of the modern day. For example, Nelly van Doorn-Harder's work on Coptic Nuns breaks down numerous barriers in understanding the milieu of religious activation for Coptic women.Footnote ⁵ S. S. Hasan likewise provides us with a detailed description of the ways in which Egyptian Copts have embarked upon “a deliberate creative enterprise” to stake out a separate realm for themselves, and Peter Makari describes how they have established partnerships with other groups to achieve common ends.Footnote ⁶ The story of the Christian communities of Nazareth is likewise described in Daphne Tsimhoni's detailed work on the topic.Footnote ⁷ The role taken by the churches in Lebanon and Egypt and by parallel nongovernmental institutions constituted by Christians have been taken up by Fiona McCallum and me.Footnote ⁸ Western Christians have been introduced to the diverse Christian communities of the region through a survey written for a popular audience by Bailey and Bailey.Footnote ⁹

Much of this scholarship has taken place outside the leading area studies journals such as IJMES. The absence of significant working groups, networks, or caucuses on the topic (until recently) helps to explain this in part. In addition, one might credit the extent to which post-Orientalist scholarship demonstrates wariness toward religion as an explanatory variable and the fear of the divisiveness of studying the unique experiences of such communities. There is little perceived gain in publishing work on a topic that does not have a large scholarly or popular constituency, and the assumption that Christian communities are in inexorable decline only serves to justify this marginality. Scholarship in this area also challenges the received disciplinary and geographic notions of the Middle East as a region. F. Gregory Gause has discussed the difficulty of matching area study with the demands of generalizable scholarship in my discipline of political science.Footnote ¹⁰ I add that my own work on the politics of Christians in the region often has a global dimension that does not always fit easily under the rubric of Middle Eastern studies.

Appropriately, Middle Eastern Christians have increasingly been involved in efforts to bring attention to their experiences. Assyrian Christians engage in study and propagation of their history and perspective, and the beleaguered Christian populations of northern Iraq register their voices through multiple channels.Footnote ¹¹ A long-term revival has regenerated the Coptic Orthodox Church and contributed to an increased awareness of the experience of Christians in Egypt among audiences throughout the world. In Palestine, a newly energized ecumenism has led to unprecedented acts of cooperation among both established and newer churches in addition to allowing Palestinian Christians to narrate their own plight to their co-religionists abroad.Footnote ¹²

The widespread concern today that Christians are in declining numbers in the Middle East easily falls prey to the enervating assertion that they are victims of persecution or mere relics of a fading past and runs the risk of once again robbing Christians of agency as powerful actors in their own societies. This is not to say that the future of their communities is uniformly rosy—a conversation with an Arab Christian in any part of the region will quickly demonstrate otherwise. Nevertheless, continued consideration and documentation of the vigorous participation of Christians in their own societies—of people who face similar and unique challenges as their compatriots—will help us better understand how Christians remain authentic and active citizens of Middle Eastern states.