On 10 June 1738 Maria Qari wrote her Catholic MelkiteFootnote ¹ bishop, Athnasius Dahhan, an emphatic letter rejecting the authority of the Melkite church to impose the Eastern rite Rule of Saint Basil upon her and her fellow ʿabidāt (devotees). She unequivocally states, “It is important that your Excellency knows once and for all that I will only adopt the Augustinian Rule with the Ordinances of Saint Francis de Sales. I will not become a nun under any other circumstances, for God has called me to be free from all that binds my spirit, and I will not accept any oversight [from the Melkite church] . . . Four Jesuit missionaries are in agreement with me on this point.”Footnote ² This is but one missive in a voluminous record of equally rancorous discourses that spanned the better part of two decades (1730–48) and entangled the ten Aleppan devotees, their Jesuit confessors and supporters, the Melkite Church, and the Vatican.

Although the immediate issue was the rule these ʿabidāt were expected to follow, the larger question was about construction of a new Christianity in the Levant. From the end of the 17th century through the early part of the 19th century, two projects competed to reform Levantine Christianity and to transform it from a diffuse religious culture to a disciplined and disciplining religious faith. In the words of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, both sought to objectify religion by changing the definition of “religion” from “faith” to a system of ideas and practices meant to institute an individual recognition of God.Footnote ³ Using apostolic approaches, Latin missionaries and a new generation of local Catholic clerics exhorted and edified believers and tried to corral them within stricter boundaries of religious belief and practice that were textually based and “scientifically” elucidated.

Both groups saw women as key to this process. They were the mothers who would raise Christian children, and they were the conduits for bringing the new religion into the most intimate aspects of society. Perceived as marginal actors in religious public life, women were viewed by Latin missionaries as more inclined to accept new ideas of Christianity. Although not necessarily of the same mind on the matter of women and religion, Levantine Catholic authorities and hierarchs nonetheless jealously regarded women as central to maintaining local control over the nature and future of Christianity. In their eyes, women were repositories of religious honor and authenticity.

The tension between these two competing—and at times conflicting—visions created a space within the Levant's religious landscape that allowed some (overwhelmingly Aleppan) women to construct and advance their own alternative notions of Christianity. This article examines the early part of this history, which in its totality stretches across the 18th century. In necessarily cursory fashion, the article looks at the rise of the Latin missionary movement in the Levant and its impact on local religious life. From this point of departure, I examine one episode that unfolded during the first half of the 18th century that involved nuns, Latin missionaries, and the Melkite Church. This is the ʿabidāt affair alluded to previouslyFootnote ⁴—a moment when a few nuns asserted their right to shape and transform local Christian monastic practices to accommodate new social realities borne out of the economic transformations of Aleppo.

In and of itself this is a compelling and telling story because women have been conspicuously absent from histories of religion in the Middle East. The little scholarship that has focused on nonancient Christianity in the Middle East has largely ignored the role of women.Footnote ⁵ Thus, it is critical to begin reclaiming these stories not simply to add a missing dimension, but also to highlight the centrality of gender—and more specifically gender-based paradoxes.Footnote ⁶ In particular, two paradoxes suffuse the history of the ʿabidāt as well as other religious women across the 18th century. The first is the paradox of “an ideological system that espouses universal equality (in this case, the spiritual equality of all Christians before God) at the same time that it upholds sexual difference as a natural fact and basis for social (and spiritual) differentiation.”Footnote ⁷ The second paradox is inherent in the duality of the language employed by the ʿabidāt in addressing Latin and local male clerics. The ʿabidāt adopted a sometimes confrontational tone in conversations with local Melkite monks and priests even as they resorted to the trope of the “weak and meek woman” in beseeching the Vatican or Latin missionaries for help. Both paradoxes changed the structure and language of Levantine Christianity by inserting a feminine voice in the male-dominated discourse, by questioning the sources of religious authority (local or Latin, male or female), and by problematizing religious tradition and authenticity.

I am also intrinsically arguing that our focus on the 19th century as the modern moment of reform in the Middle East is problematic at two levels. On the one hand, it chronologically misplaces that “moment,” if it ever was so contained a phenomenon. By focusing our historical research and narratives on the 19th century, we privilege a time when European power and influence in the Middle East was clearly ascendant; this makes it more difficult to parse modernization (hybridized transformation) from Westernization (wholesale imitation).Footnote ⁸ As I show, modernity—or the process of a localized and contingent cultural transformation depicted as a rational emancipation from custom and self-consciously linked to a global phenomenonFootnote ⁹—predates the 19th century. In this earlier manifestation, it is clearer that modernity was the product of competing projects; power was more equally distributed, so labeling it as Westernization is more difficult. Presenting this history as an example of earlier modernization is not meant simply to shift the “starting date” but rather to question the representation of modernization as a historically discrete, rather than diffused, phenomenon.

On the other and weightier hand, this essay challenges the dichotomy of religion and history inherent in many studies about modernity in the Middle East. Our focus on the 19th century conflates modernity and secularism and exaggerates the tension between reform and religion. Studies of the 19th-century Middle East certainly have emphasized attempts to find a place for religion within the projects of modernity. That very construction, however, assumes that religion is marginal and even largely hostile to modernity. However, as David Shaw argues, this opposition between religion and history is “an artifact of modernity.”Footnote ¹⁰ Indeed, one of the defining elements of modernity is the self-referential binary of secularism/religion that is constructed, along with other binaries, to characterize it as a discrete and clearly delineated historical event. We erroneously conclude from our focus on the 19th century that the role of religious women in modernity is even more marginal.Footnote ¹¹ I argue that religion was at the center of earlier modernizing projects in the Middle East, which were important precursors and guideposts for 19th-century projects. In short, this paper explores the role gender played in the modernization of religious thought and practice in the early modern Middle East.Footnote ¹²

ALEPPO: MAMMON AND CHRIST

Aleppo in the 18th century was an Ottoman metropolis undergoing tremendous changes materially, demographically, and religiously. Throughout the 17th century the city had attracted Christian and Jewish immigrants because it provided an abundance of commercial ventures and a relatively stable and secure government.Footnote ¹³ Trade and caravans from Iran, India, Anatolia, and Europe came together in its caravanserais and khans, and its markets were filled with products from the East and West. In 1605 Pedro Teixeira, a Spanish sojourner, described the European trade with Aleppo. He noted that just the hire of camels for the transport of goods between Aleppo and the port city Alexandretta “rises at least to . . . near 90,000 Ducats. A sum I should have doubted, had I not computed it very particularly with some of those gentlemen, for my own satisfaction.”Footnote ¹⁴ About eighty years later, in 1683, the French consul in Aleppo—Laurant D'Arvieux—estimated that the trade between Aleppo and Britain had increased twentyfold and was close to six million livres.Footnote ¹⁵

Commercial opportunities in Aleppo were accentuated by privileges newly acquired in the 17th century. After 1675 the commercial treaties signed between European powers and the Ottomans allowed for the employ of local Christians in the European merchant houses based in the empire. In Aleppo, as elsewhere, this provided local Christian and Jewish agents with the added legal and economic benefits of extraterritoriality, or exemption from local and Ottoman law. As European power grew within the Ottoman Empire during the 18th century, those associated with French, British, or Italian consuls and ambassadors became more influential politically and economically in their towns and cities. Coupled with greater and relatively faster access to European markets, these new privileges not only attracted an increasingly larger number of Christians, including migrants from Mount Lebanon, but also translated into the rise of many wealthy Christian and Jewish families throughout the 18th century.Footnote ¹⁶

This wealth brought about notable changes in material culture and social mores among some Aleppan elites. Homes of wealthy merchants became bigger, more ornate, and lavishly furnished. For instance, houses in the northwestern suburb of Saliba al-Jdaydeh, a predominantly Christian neighborhood, were bought and sold for thousands of piasters, whereas dwellings in the poorer neighborhoods were valued at 84, 87, and 132 piasters during the 1750s.Footnote ¹⁷ On the inside these houses were replete with apartments richly appointed, especially in china and carpets “to rival those of the [Ottoman pasha's] Seraglio.”Footnote ¹⁸ Clothes became equally luxuriant, displaying in colors, material, and style newfound wealth and access to the finest products of Iran, India, and Istanbul. The affluence of this relatively cosmopolitan city loosened the binds of secular and religious traditions among Christian elites of Aleppo, and women and men began to distinguish themselves through a conspicuous display of material culture. Alexander Russell, a British “physic” living in Aleppo during the 1740s, observed, “Christian ladies are extravagant in the article of dress which only varies in a few circumstances from the Turkish fashion.”Footnote ¹⁹

Some Maronite and Melkite ecclesiastical authorities noted these and even more troubling trends. In 1697 the Melkite deacon Jirjis bin Safarshah wrote a long list enumerating the sins of Aleppans, which included “drunkenness . . . consumption of opium . . . [and] emulation of their non-Christian neighbors.”Footnote ²⁰ In a letter to the Maronite community in Aleppo dated 1709, Patriarch ʿAwwad in turn exhorted his flock to return to modesty in dress for women, and he ascribed the “Muslim persecution” of Christians to the scandalous behavior of women in the community.Footnote ²¹ However, it was not only clerics who commented on unwelcome social behavior. Alexander Russell, for instance, wrote, “Some [Christians] . . . have deviated from this custom [gender segregation], and adopting the use of tables, chairs, and service in the European style, not only make the female part of the family sit down with them at meals, but permit them occasionally to appear before the Europeans, whom they entertain at their houses.” More drastically, “the crime of incontinence is more frequent among the Christian youth . . . than among the Turkish [Muslims]. The sexes, in common life, are not so strictly separated, and caution is lulled by the use of strong liquors, while the passions are inflamed.”Footnote ²² What was noteworthy for Russell and the priests was that this behavior was taking place among elites of the Christian community.Footnote ²³

At the same time that some Aleppan elites were leading a bacchanalian existence, a century-long spiritual revivalism was transforming Aleppo and its Christian communities in profound and intimate ways. Indeed, as Bernard Heyberger observes, the chastisements by clerics of Aleppan parishioners' transgressions is one manifestation of that transformation—an attempt by clerics to impose greater authority on the public and private lives of Christians.Footnote ²⁴ Driving this religious effervescence and upheaval were two main, and at times clashing, factors. One was the arrival of Latin missionaries assiduously seeking to bring other Aleppan Christian sects into the fold of the Roman Catholic Church. Another was the rise of a vibrant and confident local religious culture that sought to Arabize Christianity even as it Christianized Arabic culture. This movement was catalyzed by the vigorous example and activities of Latin missionaries, it was financially supported by the rising fortunes of the Christian community in Aleppo, and it was peopled with graduates of the Maronite College in Rome (established in 1584) as well as intellectuals and literati who studied with local Muslim ʿulamaʾ.

By the 17th century Aleppo had become a proselytizing center for Latin missionaries in the region. The Lesser Friars of the Holy Land came to Aleppo in 1571, the Capuchins and the Jesuits followed them in 1625, and the Carmelites arrived in the city in 1627. This sudden increase came about in part because of France's rising influence within the Ottoman Empire in the wake of the Capitulations. The first of these ahidname, or pacts, was concluded in the 14th century with Venice. In 1569 the Ottomans granted France its first Capitulations agreement, which was subsequently reconferred in 1604 and 1673, each time increasing rights given French consuls, merchants, and churchmen.Footnote ²⁵

Among these was the right of Latin missionaries to serve European communities and to proselytize in the Ottoman Empire. For the Vatican, the opening of the Ottoman lands for missionary work was a boon for expanding its global ecclesiastical reach. With the 1622 establishment of the Propaganda Fide, the Sacred Council for the Propagation of the Faith, by Pope Gregory XV, the Vatican inaugurated a vigorous missionary campaign that was intended, among other things, to bring into the Catholic fold of the Vatican the “heretical” Eastern Christians—Arabic-speaking Melkites and “Jacobites” (non-Chalcedonian) Christians.

These renewed and systematic efforts bore fruit in Aleppo. Latin Catholic missionaries sent account after account to Rome describing a steady stream of men and women who joined the Catholic movement. According to one estimate, three-quarters of the “Jacobite” and “Nestorian” Christians had become Catholic by the end of the 17th century.Footnote ²⁶ According to a report sent by the Jesuits to the Propaganda Fide, between 5,000 and 6,000 individuals were taking communion from them in Aleppo by 1714.Footnote ²⁷ Although these reports were highly exaggerated, conversions were indeed taking place, sometimes in alarmingly—at least for the Orthodox prelates—large numbers. Thus, the Orthodox patriarchs of Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Antioch had to admit in a report sent to the sultan that the majority of Melkites in Aleppo had become Catholic.Footnote ²⁸

Success was due to a variety of factors, some local and others pertaining to the nature of the new missionary work. The most self-evident of these is that missionaries came to Aleppo to proselytize. Jesuits and other missionaries undertook a door-to-door campaign of spiritual education and exhortation. Alexander Russell noted, for example, that “the houses of the Maronites, and of the other Christians in union with the Romish church, are open to the Latin missionaries who regularly make their daily rounds in the [Saliba al-] Jideida [sic].”Footnote ²⁹ Missionaries wrote letters to their superiors in Europe telling them how doors to homes in the villages of Mount Lebanon and the city of Aleppo had been opened wide to them. Frère Anselme de l'Annonciation, of the Carmelite order, exulted: “When we enter the homes of the Greeks, Armenians, Syrians and Nestorians . . . they receive us with a welcome that they do not show to their bishops, and not even their patriarchs.”Footnote ³⁰ Setting aside the triumphalist and self-congratulatory tone and purpose of this and similar letters, what emerges is the diligence of some Latin missionaries in taking their proselytizing outside the confines of churches and into the most intimate quarters of the Christian communities.Footnote ³¹

Bringing the gospel into the households of Christians in Aleppo reached those who until then had been excluded in large part from the public religious life of the community: women and girls. Latin missionaries considered this exclusion both a malady that “is worse than the plagues of Egypt” and an opportunity to spread their version of the Catholic faith.Footnote ³² Presaging 19th-century arguments in the Middle East that called for the modernization of womanhood through education, one Jesuit priest noted in 1652 that “women's lack of devotion and their extreme ignorance, which is notably greater than that of men, with regard to all that pertains to the mysteries of our religion, causes the loss of the youth.”Footnote ³³ The Aleppan devotees were among those who were influenced by this new missionary tactic as they came under the spiritual direction of various Jesuit confessors.

Schools were another tool of proselytism employed by all Latin missionaries in Aleppo. Practically every group of Latin missionaries set up a school in its residence or in a donated room or taught at existing schools. The indefatigable Carmelite Père Anselme went “morning and evening into the public schools of the schismatics to teach catechism and Christian doctrine.”Footnote ³⁴ Père Queryot, a French Jesuit, was occupied every Saturday with teaching “over 70 students . . . Christian doctrine.”Footnote ³⁵ It was not only the Latin missionaries who established such schools. In 1682, Père Justinien de Tours, a Capuchin monk, wrote about a group of “around twenty-two or twenty-three Syrian and Armenian girls” who had taken religious vows as seculars in Aleppo. “They established a school for children, and taught them to read in Arabic and Armenian . . . but the main goal of these good religious women, in teaching the youth . . . was to teach them prayers, catechism, belief in God, obedience to the Church, and the manner after which they were to confess and take communion.”Footnote ³⁶ Of course, Aleppan women had been working outside their homes long before this.Footnote ³⁷ However, this development marked the first time that elite women engaged in public work and of the type that was meant to shape the moral fiber of Aleppan society. They were going beyond the elite norm of female seclusion within the household to claim a public role on the basis of their newfound religious vocation.

Augmenting this missionary work was a thriving literary movement in Aleppo between the 1650s and the latter part of the 17th century. This included the establishment of printing presses (a short-lived one in Aleppo and a more permanent one in Lebanon), the refutations of Muslim and Eastern Christian critiques of Catholicism, and the translation of spiritual guidebooks and the lives of saints into Arabic.Footnote ³⁸ Among these was Le guide du pécheur by Louis de Grenade, which the Capuchins translated into Arabic around 1635.Footnote ³⁹ The life of Teresa de Avila was rendered in Arabic by the Carmelites in 1662, and more than twenty other spiritual works were translated by either Latin missionaries or Maronite clergy educated in Rome.Footnote ⁴⁰ For religious women—and the community at large—these vitae provided models of Christian behavior for men and women not only in seeking individual salvation but also in projecting public piety. For women so inclined, the biographical sketches of European female saints represented “the devout believer who puts personal faith into action” on behalf of the Christian “nation.”Footnote ⁴¹ In doing so, the faithful responded to local historical dynamics even as they self-consciously became part of a larger universalizing narrative of new religious roles for women.

Beyond the written and spoken word, Aleppan women and men experienced Christianity visually in ways that were novel in content and availability. From the wall-sized rendering of The Final Judgment inside the Armenian Church of Forty Martyrs to smaller religious tableaux and icons that Aleppan elites displayed in their homes, paintings rendered Christianity present and visible in an evocative manner. Christianity was also represented to Aleppans through a theater of sorts. On Christmas 1668 the Carmelite Justinien de Neuvy choreographed a procession “led by an acolyte burning incense around the cross carried by a child dressed as [an] angel [who walked] between two other children each carrying a taper. They were followed by images of Christ and the Virgin carried on banners, and then [came] the Armenian chanters accompanied by musical instruments.”Footnote ⁴² Similarly, religious confraternities, such as the Immaculate Conception, established in 1638, and the Rosary, founded in 1679, sponsored annual processions. In 1701 one observer noted that on the first Sunday of every month the image of the Virgin was carried with throngs of Christians following her around the square where the four churches of Saliba al-Jdaydeh were located.Footnote ⁴³ As members of the Virgin Mary confraternity, the devotees not only observed but also took part in such public demonstrations of piety.

Finally, a local cultural revival rejuvenated and Arabized Christian belief and piety, which paralleled, cooperated with, and at times competed with the Latin missionary movement. The list of individuals who formed this early nahḍa Footnote ⁴⁴ includes, among others, Istifan Duwayhi, Butrus Tulawi, Jibrail Hawwa, ʿAbdallah Qaraʿili, Yusuf al-Sharabati, Jermanous Farhat, and ʿAbdallah Zakher. Emblematic of the formation, career, and impact of these and other intellectuals is Jermanous Farhat. He was born in Saliba al-Jdaydeh in 1670 to a wealthy merchant Maronite family, and he spent the rest of the 17th century in Aleppo. There he studied theology, philosophy, and history with Bulus Tulawi in the Maronite madrasa, a college established in 1668 by Istifan al-Duwayhi. As a result of the revival of classical Arabic among the Christian community, Farhat studied with two Arabic teachers, one of whom was Maronite (Yusuf al-Dibsi) and the other Muslim (Shaykh Sulayman, “The Grammarian”). Although Farhat did receive some education in Latin and Italian, it was Arabic that captured his imagination and became the vehicle and subject of his literary career. Well educated in Arabic poetry, he composed poems inspired by such luminaries as the Persian philosophers Ibn Sina (d. 1037) and al-Suhrawardi (d. 1191), adapting the tradition thematically to treat the baptism of Christ, sin, the human soul, and “the search for redemption through faith and the Virgin Mary.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Farhat's long list of achievements, along with those of other Maronite and Melkite intellectuals, adds up to a prodigious production that augmented the impact of missionary work in promoting a Christian consciousness and discourse. That it did so in Arabic only accentuated its “authenticity” as a counterpoint to the Latinization efforts on the part of missionaries.

Maria Qari and the rest of the ʿabidāt thus grew up in an environment rife with religious fervor, discourse, and symbolism, which in turn were focused on a novel representation of Christianity. While in Eastern churches the notion of redemption centered on Christ's conquest of death through resurrection, the new model of Latinized Christianity emphasized the suffering and sacrifice of Christ on the cross and, most critically, the individual's relationship with that legacy. Unlike Western Catholicism, Eastern churches did not have hymns like “Stabat Mater” that embodied the agonies of the trek along Via Dolorosa, nor did they have stations of the cross, flagellations, or passion plays. In contrast to Eastern Orthodoxy, the new Christianity insisted upon the humanity of Christ even as it introduced a personal piety centered on spiritual contemplation and aspiration to be Christ-like. This was a Christianity that demanded effort and commitment on the part of the individual penitent. Being born into Christianity was not satisfactory in the eyes of Latin missionaries or the new generation of Catholic Christians, who worked diligently to redefine Christianity in Aleppo—and beyond—as the perpetual struggle against sin. Reflection upon the afterlife (with a special emphasis on the hell that awaits sinners), individual confession, communion, prayer (lots of it), learning the proper faith through books and pamphlets, joining confraternities, abstention from material indulgence—these were spiritual exercises to promote a stronger individual faith and Christian community.

This was a very modern Christianity.

MOUNT LEBANON: “NATURAL CHRISTIANITY”

Certainly not all Aleppan Christians were listening or even accepting these pronouncements at face value. Yet this rich and heady brew of new religious doctrine did lead to conversions to Catholicism, a plethora of religious publications, establishment of confraternities, expansion of churches and increases in their endowments, and the emergence of a vibrant and highly structured monastic movement.Footnote ⁴⁶ Within this context Mount Lebanon emerged as a Mecca of sorts. The rugged topography, sparse population, and unassuming habitations that distinguished Mount Lebanon from Aleppo, as well as the predominantly Maronite Christian population of the mountainous region, contributed to its representation (mainly by outsiders) as a sanctified wilderness. Such a reputation was constructed out of the confluence of European and local imaginaries of these mountains. It was cultivated by the unique position of Mount Lebanon as a place where Christianity could be practiced freely, especially relative to the surrounding Ottoman lands.Footnote ⁴⁷ However, it was also a place that in its Christian “purity” stood in marked contrast to Aleppo, where different millets mixed, clashed, and coexisted. Moving to Mount Lebanon was thus an ideologically conscious move away from the Ottoman model of mixed urban spaces to a supposedly pristine “national” environment.

Mount Lebanon was the seat of the Maronite and Melkite patriarchates and until the end of the 17th century the seat of the bishops of Aleppo. Building a convent, ringing a church bell, or manifesting religiosity in other public ways were not subject to limitations placed (not always consistently) on Christians in other parts of the Ottoman Empire, including Aleppo. Of the most importance, though, Mount Lebanon was seen as a sanctified mountain closer to God and distant, in its imagined sectarian and natural purity, from the worldliness and even corruption of the city and urban society.Footnote ⁴⁸ For instance, the cedar trees in the northern and highest part of the mountain range were referred to as arz al-rabb (God's cedars)—not by locals so much as by Maronites from Aleppo.

Jermanous Farhat—the Maronite cleric we encountered previously—wrote several poems evoking the sanctity of this wilderness. One 1709 poem eulogizes Dayr Qizhaya (Qizhaya Monastery or, in Syriac, “treasure of life”): “The wilderness of Lebanon has been honored by a hermitage [Qizhaya] . . . I see in the stem of every cedar around it a temple . . . and its monks are lines of angels facing lines of angels.” In another poem written while he was in Rome in 1711, he speaks of his yearning for the “holy valley” of Qannubin, where Dayr Qizhaya is located. His panegyric paints rarified images of flowers and fields, of brooks composing hymns to the heavens, and of mountains “whose tops are proud fortresses distant from the humiliating bondage of the cities.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Missionaries in the Levant were also among those who constructed Mount Lebanon as a space of naturalized religion, primitive in its sincerity, untouched by time, and thus a tenuous link to the times of Christ and the apostles.Footnote ⁵⁰ For instance, in 1671, Sylvestre de Saint-Aignan, a Capuchin missionary, wrote a book about Mount Lebanon titled Description abrégée de la sainte montagne du Liban et des maronites. After describing the mountainous regions as paradisiacal, he turns his attention to the Maronites who inhabited it. “They are,” he writes, “very zealous for the religion, good, devout and simple in their words, happy in their conversation, civil and charitable, but austere in their manner of living because they imitate the Ancient Fathers.”Footnote ⁵¹ However, he adds, they needed missionaries because “their souls can be compared to an excellent vine that has not been cultivated and thus has become sterile because of that abandonment.”Footnote ⁵² P. Joseph Besson, a Jesuit missionary to Syria in the second half of the 17th century, wrote a more complete articulation of this view in his book La Syrie et la terre sainte au XVII ^esiècle. In the section dedicated to Mount Lebanon, he begins by noting that the “inhabitants are naturally very good and religious . . . here at the frontier of the holy land where the blood of Jesus Christ has kept these Christians vigorously Christian and abiding by the rules of the Ancient Fathers.”Footnote ⁵³ Continuing with an arborial reference, he remarks that Mount Lebanon constitutes “a good land capable of bearing excellent fruit albeit it remains hardly cultivated.” Its people, he writes, never blaspheme, always pronounce the name of God, and kiss the hand of any priest they meet and ask for his benediction; “the women” are very modest, rarely appearing in public.Footnote ⁵⁴

In emphasizing the “natural” state of the Christians in the “wilderness” of Mount Lebanon, Latin missionaries were resorting to a familiar trope centered on the concept of the “natural man,” who expressed a “primordial religious yearning that could be satisfied only by Christian revelation.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Yet the population of Mount Lebanon was neither pagan nor in need of Christian revelation. As Père Besson wrote in La Syrie et la terre sainte, “Some may think that I am . . . describing here a golden age . . . of twelve centuries of Christianity at the edge of the Holy Land where the blood of Jesus Christ can nourish the faith of these Christians in the tradition of the Fathers of the Church.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Such impressions, obtained from the Latin missionaries' own narratives, left them with the task of self-consciously explaining their raison d'être and justifying what may have struck audiences in France as a superfluous mission diverting resources and energy from more pressing projects. Justifying their presence in the Levant was especially necessary against a backdrop painted by the voluminous Jesuit Relations sent by missionaries from far more arduous missions in the “savage” and “exotic” territories of New France and Central America.Footnote ⁵⁷ The justification came in the form of shining the religious Enlightenment upon these “natural” Christians, a project that was in fact part of the larger Jesuit theology.

According to this positivist notion of spiritual development and to Jesuit missionaries in the Levant, what was missing from Mount Lebanon (and among Middle Eastern Christians in general) was textualized knowledge and rational religion. Although naturally “good,” these Levantine Christians were nonetheless seen by missionaries as corrupted by their proximity to the Muslim and Druze communities and religions. Generations of such interactions supposedly left local Christians with an irrational approach to religion characterized by ignorance of the “mysteries” of the faith and by a spiritual inertia that kept them from seeking enlightenment about the articles of Catholic faith. Père Besson, for example, concludes his observations about the Maronites of Mount Lebanon by noting that they lack only religious “Enlightenment” to make them completely orthodox Catholics.Footnote ⁵⁸ On the eve of the Maronite Council of 1736, Père Fromage, one of the most influential Latin missionaries, penned his thoughts about the Christians of Mount Lebanon to a fellow Jesuit priest in France: “While they may not be more enlightened than other people, they may at least take pride in being more docile and faithful . . . The faith of our Christians is pure.”Footnote ⁵⁹

In other words, the repeated emphasis on the “natural” state of faith in Mount Lebanon was meant to justify the presence of missionaries in an area already populated by Christian communities to an 18th-century European audience steeped in a rationalized and textualized form of Catholicism with a “demarcatable system of doctrines-scriptures-beliefs.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Mount Lebanon was depicted as a wild space that defied Cartesian geography, full of naturally faithful people who lacked the most rudimentary religious knowledge. To paraphrase C. John Sommerville, for the missionaries the population of Mount Lebanon (and the rest of the Middle East for that matter) practiced Christianity but did not think about it and thus did not know it as a “religion.”Footnote ⁶¹ Put another way, Levantine Christians approached Christianity as a religious culture but not as a religious faith.

Within this context, missionaries saw—and represented—themselves as an essential tool for taming the convoluted and wild religious landscape (where Christians as well as non-Christians mixed and exchanged habits and traditions) into a cultivable plot clearly delineated and identifiable by sect (Maronite, Melkite, Armenian, etc).Footnote ⁶² They saw their role as imposing discipline on a chaotic religious culture and delimiting the boundaries of any particular church (but most notably the Maronite one) while rationalizing its hierarchy, liturgy, and teachings in concordance with the Roman Catholic Church. In the words of Père Besson, “The forest must be cleared, and its trees must be pruned.”Footnote ⁶³

In crystallizing this modernizing project, missionaries focused on women, whom they saw both as symbolic of the ignorance rampant among Levantine Christians and central to the process of edifying and uplifting the local population. Père Besson believed that exclusion of women from public religious spaces and ceremonies—out of misplaced modesty—and “their lack of devotion and extreme ignorance, which is notably greater than that of men, with all that pertains to the mysteries of our faith, lead to the loss of the youth who do not receive any instructions from their parents. It must be said that the pitiful circumstances of the children is the fault of the mothers. I am astounded that Christian women of Syria, who previously were celebrated in their piety, and were faithful followers of Jesus Christ during his life, have now become so degenerate.”Footnote ⁶⁴ In this the 17th- and 18th-century edifying letters of Latin missionaries were similar to the “secular” Orientalist texts of the 19th century in constructing a binary of an “irrational” and “traditional” Eastern Christianity juxtaposed against a “rational” and “modern” Western theology.

CONVENTS AND NUNS: GENDER AT THE CENTER

The juxtaposition between the ensnaring materialism of the cities and the liberating sanctity of the “wild” mountains was, among other things, the imaginary that attracted a stream of religious men and women—including the ʿabidāt—from Aleppo to Mount Lebanon to establish a new monastic movement. The wealth of Aleppan Christians allowed for this migration by underwriting the purchase of lands, construction of monasteries and convents, and at least initial financial support for nuns and monks. Ideologically, this movement was an embodiment of a rejuvenated and emboldened Levantine Christianity that increasingly sought to accentuate its distance and difference from the surrounding Muslim milieu. Generationally, it was constituted in large part by the sons and daughters of Aleppo's Christian bourgeoisie, who saw religious vows as a way to be independent from the expectations and limitations of their parents' world. These sentiments are evoked in Jermanous Farhat's dedicatory poem in his Bulugh al-ʿArab fi ʿIlm al-Adab (Height of Eloquence in the Science of Literature):

Among the earliest Aleppans seeking the monastic life in Mount Lebanon were Jibrail Hawwa, Abdallah Qaraʾli, and Yusuf al-Tibn, who came to Qannubin from Aleppo in 1695 to ask patriarch Istifan Duwayhi for permission to establish the first “modern” monastic order.Footnote ⁶⁶ After questioning whether “soft” city residents like them could handle the rigors of mountain living and toil, he granted them leave to establish the order. Not long after, in 1710, a group of Melkite monks from Aleppo established a new monastic order in Mount Lebanon, and they came to be known as the Shuwayrite order (after Shuwayr, the village where they built their first monastery). In 1716 Wanis al-ʿAttar and Yaqoub Yusuf al-Armani left Aleppo for Mount Lebanon, where they asked ʿAbdallah Qaraʾali of the Lebanese order for help in establishing the first Armenian Catholic monastic order.Footnote ⁶⁷

Religious women soon followed suit. The first ones we know about were Maria Qari and the other nine devotees. Like the majority of her male predecessors and fellow Aleppan nuns, Qari was from a wealthy mercantile elite family that had made its fortune only a generation or two before. She was described in the records of the Shuwayrite order and by Msgr. Emmanuel de Saint Albert—a Carmelite missionary—as “advanced in age” (forty years old), very intelligent, and capable.Footnote ⁶⁸ Unlike her siblings and other Melkite youth, she “refused to enter into the world” (i.e., to marry) and instead sought a religious vocation in seclusion, prayer, and spiritual exercises. In the 1720s she quickly rose to prominence within the Virgin Mary confraternity established and promoted in the early 18th century by the Jesuits and in particular by Père Fromage. By the end of that decade Père Fromage, who had assumed the spiritual direction of the sodality, appointed her superior of this confraternity, and she “became an important person in Aleppo. Not only did members of the confraternity seek her prayers and counsel, but also Melkite women and a good number of the notable families of Aleppo.”Footnote ⁶⁹

In 1730 she approached Père Fromage with the idea of establishing a Melkite convent in Mount Lebanon modeled after the monastery founded by two Aleppan monks two decades earlier.Footnote ⁷⁰ Until then, the Melkite devotees of Aleppo—like other Aleppan religious women—sought seclusion within private homes, where they met to undertake spiritual studies and exercises. Their intent was to retreat even further from the materialistic world of Aleppo and to dedicate themselves more fully to religious life. However, from the beginning the project was fraught with tensions and conflicts that lasted until the end of the 1740s. The first difficulty the devotees faced was to convince their parents to allow them to depart from Aleppo and familial supervision. During the 18th century this was certainly a departure from the ordinary. Young women did not leave their parents' houses unless they were moving to their husbands' homes, and it was unprecedented for unmarried women to go so far beyond the family's sphere of influence and authority. Only the moral weight of the prevalent religious discourse and environment allowed the ʿabidāt to obtain permission after months of pleading and cajoling (and Jesuit missionary support). Because the Christian elites of Aleppo had used—among other things—public trappings of newfound religiosity to distinguish themselves as a class, it was difficult for them to reject the logical conclusion their daughters were drawing. In other words, the larger emphasis on an individual spirituality—rather than communal religious culture—validated the idea of a religious vocation for women and allowed them to go beyond the secular norms of society and to legitimately reject its expectations for young elite women.

The second issue was to raise enough money to purchase land in Mount Lebanon and to construct the convent. “Sacrificing” their dowries, obtaining financial support from parents, and fundraising among the Melkite elites of Aleppo, the devotees gathered enough money (five to six thousand piasters in total) to build eight cells for the future nuns, as well as associated buildings (refectory, church, kitchen, etc.).Footnote ⁷¹ This substantial financial support further illustrates the validation of women's religious vocation in Aleppo. Dowries were investments in a family's social capital meant to establish or consolidate alliances between families within the same socioeconomic strata. To dedicate that money to the construction of a convent can certainly indicate the devoutness of devotees' parents. However, it is also a sure pronouncement that being a nun not only became acceptable but also endowed families with social prestige—a return on their investments if you will.

Once funding was secured, the ʿabidāt wrote letters to Abdallah Zakher (a Melkite intellectual and founder of the first printing press), Father Niqula al-Sayigh (superior general of the Melkite Shuwayrite order), and Athnasius Dahhan (bishop of the diocese), asking for their assistance in building the convent in the Kisrawan district of Mount Lebanon.Footnote ⁷² Although this initial correspondence was warm and positive, it also established the parameters of the relationship between the devotees and the Shuwayrite monks. In a letter to Zakher the ʿabidāt wrote, “Since we are very inexperienced in spiritual matters . . . we feel the urgent need to depend on your eminence and that of our venerable Jesuit fathers who have always been our confessors and spiritual advisors. To that end . . . we would like to locate a piece of land that is situated close to Mar Yuhanna [al-Shuwayr] and not too far from the Jesuit fathers in ʿAyntoura.”Footnote ⁷³ Their proposal not only physically situated their convent halfway between the Melkite monks and Jesuit priests, but it also indicated where they desired to be in terms of spiritual matters. The devotees' humble prelude avowing inexperience, sincere though it may have been, was coupled with a statement that distinctly presumed their control over their spiritual and physical environment. At a time when older monastic establishments were mixed and the gender boundaries within them blurry, the nuns wanted their convent to be separated from any male institutions. However, in keeping with the Council of Trent segregation of religious orders, all new monastic institutions in Mount Lebanon assumed that nuns and monks should not cohabit and that both should have very limited and controlled encounters with the opposite sex. Gender segregation, then, became a central tenet and a key marker in the foundation of new Christian orders in Bilad al-Sham. For the ʿabidāt this segregation was a means to greater religious and personal independence.

In their response, the three male correspondents appear oblivious to these issues and tensions as they lavish praise and support upon the devotees. Zakher, for instance, wrote back in August 1730, “Allow me to offer you my best felicitations for this heroic resolution which you have undertaken in the service of God and your own sanctification.” Then he informs the abidāt that he had located a piece of land halfway between “our monastery in Zuq Mikhail and that of the Jesuit Fathers in ʿAyntoura.”Footnote ⁷⁴

Positive reactions aside, the spatial and spiritual ambiguity belying an inherent tension continued in subsequent correspondence. On one hand, the ʿabidāt appeared willing to subsume themselves and their proposed convent to the authority of the newly established Melkite religious order. In a letter to Father al-Sayigh, they wrote, “In return for your troubles and labors in building the convent, we vow to you before God and man that we will dedicate ourselves to God in this convent, and we will place our religious life under the administration, direction and governance of you reverend Father and your holy Congregation.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The Melkite monks of Dayr Mar Yuhanna al-Shuwayr and their superiors agreed to support the construction of the convent with the understanding that it would be part of their religious order, that it would be exclusively for Melkite women, that the nuns would follow the same Eastern rite Saint Antonius Rule, and that their spiritual direction would be undertaken by someone from the ranks of Melkite monks.

However, the women's initial letters either neglect the issue of spiritual direction and religious rule or allude to them in a rather misty fashion. In reality, with the support/instigation of Jesuit missionaries, a majority of nuns thought to follow the Rule of Saint Francis de Sales (a far less demanding rule than the Basilian Eastern rite), to undertake their religious life under the spiritual direction of a Jesuit missionary, and perhaps most importantly to be independent from indigenous male supervision.

These divergent expectations first came to the forefront in 1736, when the Aleppan devotees signed four letters in Arabic addressed to the papal legate to the 1736 Maronite Synod, Monseigneur al-Simʿani, to the Propaganda Fide, to Cardinal Belluga, and to the general of the Society of Jesus. In the missive to the Propaganda Fide, the ʿabidāt wrote that as “feeble women we beg of you to take us under your protection . . . and to assign us a Jesuit priest who can direct us according to the spirit of the Salesian [St. Francis de Sales] Rule that we have chosen and adopted.”Footnote ⁷⁶ The three other letters are in substance making similar requests in language equally obsequious, employing the trope of the weak and dependent woman. Once news of the letters, the intentions of the ʿabidāt, and the machinations of the two Jesuits, Père Fromage and Marc-Antoine Séguran, became known to the Melkite monks and community in Aleppo, a storm of protest erupted.

In the ensuing months the Jesuit missionaries proclaimed their innocence and laid the blame for the idea at the feet of Monseigneur al-Simʿani, who in turn pointed to the Jesuits as the initiators of this blatant attempt at taking control of the convent. Amidst all of this, Maria Qari and the other nuns proclaimed innocence through ignorance. Their defense was that the Jesuits had (mis)informed them that the Vatican opposed establishment of any new religious orders in Mount Lebanon and that they could fulfill their religious vocation only by subsuming their proposed religious institution directly to the authority of Rome. Finally, they claimed that they were not allowed to read the letters and that the explication by Père Francois-Xavier Petitqueux of Aleppo (who was delegated by Père Fromage to convince the ʿabidāt of the new plan) was incomprehensible because “he is a stranger to the Arabic language.”Footnote ⁷⁷ At this stage, when the convent had not been completed, the devotees used the trope of feeble and ignorant women to enlist any and all support they needed to complete their project. Abandoning their Jesuit allies at that moment of crisis was perhaps a disingenuous survival tactic in a circumstance where local patriarchal authority was still paramount.

The crisis subsided only after Maria Qari and her fellow devotees signed four new letters addressed to the same correspondents but disavowing their previous letters; they proclaim themselves faithful to their original intent of becoming part of the Melkite religious order.Footnote ⁷⁸ To recommence the construction, the devotees collectively signed a contract with the Melkite monks of Dayr Mar Yuhanna al-Shuwayr stating that the convent would be jointly owned by the monks, who supplied the labor, and the nuns and their parents, both of whom supplied the capital. This contractual agreement and letters of apology to the superior general of the Melkite Shuwayrite order, Father Niqula al-Sayigh, to Bishop Athnasius Dahhan, and to ʿAbdallah Zakher appear to have been sufficient, and building the convent resumed. However, the amplitude of the protests and magnitude of the crisis unleashed by the original four letters imply a deep-seated problem that was not going to dissipate so easily.

By September 1737 the ʿabidāt began arriving at the convent, which was consecrated as Dayr al-Bishara (Convent of the Annunciation). For eight months after their arrival, things seemed normal. Underlying this superficial calm, however, was an issue left unresolved in all the various correspondence leading to the prior resolution: the religious rule. This set of regulations by which nun and monks abide in their religious houses was the hallmark of the modern monastic movement.

When Sofia Qari arrived with the second group of devotees at the convent in October 1737, she brought a letter from Père Fromage to her cousin Maria. He exhorts Maria to insist upon following the Salesian rule because it is more suitable “to their condition and to the modern times.”Footnote ⁷⁹ However, it was not simply at the instigation of the Jesuits that the devotees began asking to be allowed to use this rule. Indeed, the very premise of the Salesian rule was free will and independence from legalistic and irrational constraints and by extension from arbitrary hierarchical authority. It was an ideology meant to unfetter the individual from any communal obligation or limitation in order to pursue a relationship with God. For instance, Francois de Sales wrote in 1617 to Saint Jane de Chantal, the cofounder of the Visitation Congregation: “DO ALL THROUGH LOVE, NOTHING THROUGH CONSTRAINT; LOVE OBEDIENCE MORE THAN YOU FEAR DISOBEDIENCE. I want you to have a spirit of liberty, not the kind that excludes obedience, (this is freedom of the flesh), but the liberty that excludes constraint, scruples and anxiety.”Footnote ⁸⁰ It is unclear how much Maria Qari and the other devotees had read of the writings of Francois de Sales; however, there is no doubt that their rejection of Melkite ecclesiastical authority echoed the words quoted previously. Regardless of the source of ideas, the religious space opened up by tension between the Latin missionary and local modernization projects, as well as the audacity/courage of these nuns, allowed them an increasingly louder and more insistent collective exclamation of independence.

Beyond this liberationist ideology, devotees who had grown up in the luxury of elite Aleppan households struggled with the physical rigors and difficulties caused by the strict Basilian rule and the rural environment of the convent in Mount Lebanon. Maria Qari wrote to Bishop Athnasius to complain that all the nuns had fallen ill because of the harsh Eastern rites that demanded absolute abstention from meat. In a following letter to Bishop Dahhan—penned on 10 June 1738—she adds that the Eastern rites of Mar Yuhanna are simply too harsh; the nuns are not accustomed to following its strictures in dress (wearing the same rough habit day and night) and prayer (prolonged and numerous sessions).Footnote ⁸¹ Of most significance, Qari argues in her letter that contrary to Bishop Dahhan's assertions, deprivation and abstinence were not the essence of monastic life in the “East.” She adds that strict and harsh monastic rules have alienated the current nuns and scared away potential ones. (This echoes earlier complaints by Melkite authorities who claimed that many of their parishioners were abandoning the faith and adopting Islam because of the hard sequence of fasts and abstention from meat and dairy.Footnote ⁸²) In her estimation these rules were obstacles keeping the religious from seeking and attaining the love of Christ, which after all—for the ʿabidāt—was the whole premise of monastic life.

In this manner, she shifts from complaining of particular difficulties to questioning the very basis of monastic Christianity as stipulated by the Melkite cleric. Her knowledge of an alternative vision of monastic life (Salesian), as well as the existence of an alternative, Latin, and self-avowedly superior source of religious learning, allowed the ʿabidāt to raise fundamental questions about the newly established Melkite monastic order. In questioning the Melkite tradition, Qari and the devotees were proposing a new interpretation of religion that rejected blind imitation of an invented past for a reasoned adjustment to new realities that would serve the higher purpose of individual love for Christ and for each other.

Bishop Dahhan, Abdallhah Zakher, and Father Sayigh rejected the demands of the nuns with equal vehemence. Bishop Dahhan wrote on 13 June 1738, “The Rule of which you speak [St. Francis de Sales] is diametrically opposed to our Eastern rites and customs . . . To allow you to eat meat would be to go against all the rules that govern the religious institutions of the East.”Footnote ⁸³ In this self-conscious formulation, meat becomes the dividing line between two different Catholicisms that are historically, culturally, religiously, and institutionally separate. This same issue was also a point of contention and contrast between the new Shuwayrite monastic order—organized around rigorous rules, apostolic, and independent from church hierarchy—and the older Melkite monastic movement. Moreover, for Zakher, Dahhan, and Sayigh, the real culprits behind the fitna were the Jesuit missionaries who were aiming to control the convent and to undermine Eastern rites among Christians in the Levant in their unrelenting attempts to Latinize Middle Eastern Christianity.

However, neither the prohibition nor the attempt to shift the blame—and take the authority away from the nuns—dissuaded the devotees from their position. In fact, Maria Qari refused to accept the letter (and thus instructions) of Bishop Dahhan; she insisted that they would continue to follow the Salesian Rule and take confession and even sacrament with the Jesuit fathers. Finally, she informed the bishop that she would bring the case to the attention of the Apostolic See for arbitration.

With that declaration the case went from being a local affair to a far larger question on the authority of the Melkite church and clerics vis-à-vis that of Latin missionaries. Equally, it tested the extent to which a bishop can oblige nuns to submit to his will and how much independence the latter could exercise. Finally, referring the matter to the Vatican on the presumption that it is the ultimate church authority subsumed the local Melkite church to Rome, thus tying it closer to a European-centered conceptualization of Catholicism. Bishop Dahhan was obliged to accept Rome's authority because the Greek Catholic Melkites had relied on that same authority in proclaiming their independence from the Melkite Orthodox Church in Syria just a decade before.

Nonetheless, Dahhan simultaneously sought to assert his authority as a male Levantine Christian cleric until the moment a decision was handed down from the Propaganda Fide. In September he wrote to the devotees: “We—in deference to the Sacred Council and to your weakness [as females]—allow you to wait . . . until you receive the answer. Since you cannot behave according to your whims nor to live as seculars . . . you are obliged by regulations like obligatory prayers . . . abstention from eating meat.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Maria Qari's response was to take off the novice's habit. Despite the pleas of Bishop Dahhan, Maria Qari and Maryam Niʿmatallah remained determined, and the other ʿabidāt supported them by refusing to take the sacrament from any Melkite priest appointed by the bishop.

Something unusual was taking place. A group of women was publicly flaunting every conceivable set of patriarchal rules (religious and secular) that was supposed to govern their behavior and interaction with men. The flustered reaction of their male counterparts—and presumably superiors—testifies that this was a historical moment of great flux, when transgressions of gender role were conceivable and their repercussions critical. In part, the social, economic, and religious transformations of Aleppo during the 17th and early 18th centuries account for this. In equal part, the relative infancy of the modern monastic movement in Bilad al-Sham created much uncertainty within the religious spaces of the region. The idea and practice of a monastic life defined by very detailed and strict religious rules was a novelty that demanded a great deal from nuns and monks and led to widespread tensions within the monasteries and convents of Mount Lebanon.Footnote ⁸⁵ Moreover, the 1724 split of the Melkite church into competing Greek Catholic and Greek Orthodox wings not only unsettled the hierarchy of authority but also the link to an established historical tradition. The ability of the devotees to appeal to the Vatican as well as the introduction of alternative forms of Christianity allowed them to effectively challenge the authority of the Melkite male hierarchy in a manner leading to great tumult.

These latter factors, in fact, escalated the crisis further. Père Marc Séguran, director of the Jesuit mission in Syria, intervened more openly than ever before. In the preceding months he and Père Fromage had sent the devotees secret letters exhorting them to remain steadfast in their demand for the Salesian rule. However, by November 1738 he decided to appeal directly to the patriarch of the Melkite church for fear that the Vatican's decision would be long in coming; in the intervening time, the devotees might succumb to the authority of Bishop Dahhan, especially since three of them had already broken with the rest of the ʿabidāt and declared their allegiance to the bishop. Since the patriarch had been at odds with the Shuwayrite order because of its refusal to subsume itself to his ecclesiastical authority, Séguran hoped that the patriarch would side with the devotees.

His expectation was fulfilled. The patriarch penned four letters: one to the devotees expressing his sorrow at their suffering at the hands of the bishop, two to the bishop stripping him under threat of excommunication of any authority to manage the spiritual affairs of the devotees or interfere with them, and a fourth providing Père Seguran with full authority to oversee Dayr al-Bishara. Subsequently, the affair of the devotees became the focal point of a tug-of-war between the nuns, Patriarch Kirallis, and the Jesuits on the one hand and the Shuwayrite monks on the other hand. The standoff necessitated asking an outsider—Maronite Bishop Qarʿali, the only Christian judge in the eastern Mediterranean—to adjudicate between the two parties, which he did in favor of the devotees. Long and detailed reports sent out by each of the protagonists to the Propaganda Fide pressed their claim not only regarding this issue but also in terms of the extent and limits of ecclesiastical authority.

Ultimately, the Propaganda Fide issued its final decision in the matter in 1743. That final report decrees that the devotees must adopt the Basilian Rule because “that is the Rule of monks and nuns in the four Eastern Patriarchates. However, since some of the devotees wish to adopt the Augustinian Rule and the Salesian ordinances . . . then some spiritual exercises and Salesian ordinances may be added to Saint Basil's basic Rule that would be in accordance with the Eastern rites and the circumstances of the country.” In addition, the report concludes that the Jesuits do not have the authority to pass the sacrament to the devotees without the permission of the bishop of the diocese, and the spiritual direction of the convent must be left in the hands of the Shuwayrite order.Footnote ⁸⁶

For a variety of reasons, the implementation of this judgment took another four years. When it was finally applied in April 1746, “Maria Qari and her party refused to submit to the authority of the [Shuwayrite] order and abide by the Basilian Rule. Thus, they immediately left the convent and went to the Maronite convent of Mar Hrash.”Footnote ⁸⁷

Although this concluding archival statement makes the decision appear ordinary and final, the reality must have been far more wrenching. These seven religious women left not only an edifice they built with their money and efforts, but also a project based on their desire to nurture and fulfill their vocation. To move from their religious home to a small hovel outside the convent of Mar Hrash must have been difficult on many levels. That they preferred that recourse to submitting to the verdict of the Vatican and the will of the Shuwayrite monks is an indication of how committed they were to safeguarding their agency. That they were able to do so is a mark of a change in the topography of religious patriarchal power and authority.

ONE ENDING, NEW BEGINNINGS

Their exit was not a final act. In 1752 sixteen Maronite nuns from the convent of ʿAintoura in Kisrawan wrote Pope Benedict XIV to complain that the Maronite patriarch was trying to force them to completely abstain from meat and to abandon the Salesian Rule. Moreover, they wrote that instead of the Jesuit confessors, with whom they were very pleased, the patriarch had installed a Maronite monk “who knows nothing of spiritual matters as if he has never studied . . . He only knows how to plough the land.”Footnote ⁸⁸

The ʿabidāt were also connected, at a personal and historical level, to Hindiyya al-ʿUjaimi, a Maronite visionary from Aleppo who traveled to Mount Lebanon and lived with the self-exiled nuns in the monastery of Mar Hrash. She occupied the center of an even larger religious maelstrom involving the Vatican, Latin missionaries, and the Maronite church and community between 1750 and 1798, as she sought to supersede Latin religious textual authority with her mystical knowledge and to interject a feminine voice into public religiosity.Footnote ⁸⁹ The story of the devotees, then, is one of the threads from which modern Christianity in the Levant was woven. To exclude this and other stories of religious women is to have a threadbare history of Christianity—and religion—in the eastern Mediterranean. It is also to misplace and misconstrue modernity.

The project initiated by the ʿabidāt of Aleppo to establish a convent in Mount Lebanon could only have been undertaken because of the confluence of two simultaneous historical dynamics. These were the rise of a prosperous mercantile elite and the construction of an invigorated “modern” Christianity. Maria Qari and the other devotees embodied the impact of these two forces. They were all daughters of affluent and religious families (with but one exception, the servant of one the devotees). They grew up in a materially comfortable environment that afforded them the luxury of choosing the contemplative life. They had the physical space in their larger homes to read, reflect, and pray in relative solitude; they had servants who freed them from labor for survival; and they had the financial security of significant dowries that obviated the need for marriage. At the same time, they grew up in a period when Latin missionaries were introducing the discourse and practice of a Christianity that promoted and stoked individuals' search for a relationship with Christ outside the boundaries of local communal practices. In addition, the spread of literacy and accessibility of religious literature and iconography provided Maria Qari and others (who were literate) with some ability to develop their own corpus of religious knowledge and to locate new models of female religious behavior.

These two factors allowed the ʿabidāt to assert their will in matters pertaining to their religious life. From taking leave of family and city to specifying the size and layout of their convent, these religious women took control of their project to establish a religious order. More significantly, they challenged the authority of their own church to dictate the terms under which they were to take their solemn vows as nuns. They wrote defiant letters to a host of clerical leaders, rejecting the Basilian rule and on at least two occasions scandalized their society by prohibiting the bishop and his representatives from entering the convent. The ʿabidāt went even further by seeking to redefine the boundaries of ecclesiastical authority and questioning the foundational principles of the Eastern rites as elucidated in the discourse of the Melkite church—all the while affirming that they remained Melkite and would never abandon their faith. Jesuit missionaries certainly played a part in the conflict between the devotees and the Shuwayrite order—perhaps, as Abdallah Zakher asserted, in the hope of extending their own religious sway. However, the ʿabidāt were hardly pawns in this drama. They found in the Jesuit missionaries support for their attempts to transform monastic life in a manner that better fit their circumstances as Aleppan elite women.

Rather than simply accept the existing model of monastic life, these Aleppan religious thought it reasonable and preferable for female monastic life to accommodate the realities and needs of the 18th century. The rule of Saint Frances de Sales—an accommodation of medieval European rules to the “modernity” of late 17th-century France—provided substance for this counternarrative. The debate that raged among the various parties forced the Shuwayrite monks to articulate and defend what were presumed to be the “natural” and eternal ways of Eastern monastic life and to do so in a manner not needed before the ʿabidāt posed an alternative reading of the past. This very process changed the Melkite order. In the smallest of measures perhaps, a precedent was set for challenging the ordinance dictating abstention from meat, and fifty years later that rule was changed, as were restrictive codes of dress for nuns and ultimately their cloistering.

In this historical instance, elements of religious thought were self-consciously constructed by a new generation of monks and nuns as a rational, textual, and socially and individually transformative ideology. Shunning the hermit existence of earlier monastics and the “superstitious” and conservative nature of previous religious customs, these men and women practiced an extroverted, apostolic religion the purpose of which was to Christianize society in novel ways. Although these interpretations were not always congruent, they all claimed the authority to define a new type of religion and by extension a new society. For the Shuwayrite Catholic monks, this was a “modern” faith and church legitimated by cloaking them—flimsily one might add—in the trappings of “tradition.” For the ʿabidāt these “traditions” had no appeal and were clearly recent artifices that they rejected while embracing new religious traditions without reservation or too many backward glances. In either case, the new Catholic ideas and practices constituted a religious “modernity” that, in its arguments and tensions, presaged the secular modernity of the 19th century.