Religious Minorities in the Middle East

Front matter

Religious Minorities in the Middle East

Social, Economic and

Political Studies of the

Part I: Non-muslim Minorities

1. Millets: Past and Present ....ccsssesssssessssscssesscssecscsseescsssesssssesssscensssceneass 27 Maurits H. van den Boogert

2. From the Dhimma to the Capitulations: Memory and Experience of Protection in Lebanon „..s.ssssssssssssseeseesesssssstseeeesesssssssse 47 Anh Nga Longva

3. Contemporary Muslim-Christian Relations in Egypt: Grégoire Delhaye

5. Conviviality and Conflict in Contemporary Aleppo uw... 123 Annika Rabo

6. Freedom of Religion in Sudan wc esssssssssscsseecsseessseecesssessseesseenseesss 149 Anne Sofie Roald

7. From Power to Powerlessness: Zoroastrianism in Iranian History oneen EE R N 171 Michael Stausberg vi CONTENTS PART II: MUSLIM MINORITIES

9. Shit Identity Politics in Saudi Arabia oe sssssssecssseesseeeeseeenees Laurence Louér

10. Nationalism and Confessionalism: Shi‘is, Druzes and Alawis in Syria and Lebanon ou... .essssssssssecssescneecnsseesseessseessseessesenses Kais M. Firro

Ali Çarkoğlu and Nazlı Çağın Bilgili

13. Nationalism and Religion in Contemporary Iran... esses Eliz Sanasarian

Conclusion Nation-Building and Minority Rights in the Middle Fast aroninnae nn E a vents

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Maurits H. van den Boogert is affiliated with Leiden University’s Centre for the Study of Islam and Society and its School for History, and works for Brill. His research focuses mainly on the Ottoman period. He is also the Managing Editor of the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient.

Nazlı Çağın Bilgili holds a Ph.D. in political science from Sabanci University, Istanbul. Her research is in the fields of political sociology, political culture, Islam in social and political life, and Middle Eastern politics.

Ali Çarkoğlu is professor in the Department of International Relations at Koç University, Istanbul. His research interest lies in comparative politics, voting behavior, public opinion, and party politics in Turkey.

Grégoire Delhaye is doctoral student in political science at the IEP Aix-en- Provence, and Adjunct Professor in Comparative Politics at the American University in Washington DC. His work focuses on transnational identity politics, particularly in the Egyptian Coptic community.

Kais M. Firro is professor in Middle Eastern History at the University of Haifa. He has published widely on economic history, ethnicity, and nationalism.

Bard Kartveit holds a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of Bergen. He is currently Senior Lecturer in the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo. His research areas are nationalism, sectarianism, minority-majority relations and migration in the Middle East.

Catherine Le Thomas holds a PhD in political science from Sciences Po (Paris). She is currently associate researcher at the French Institute of the Near East (IFPO) in Beirut. Her research focuses on religion and education in Lebanon and the Near East.

Anh Nga Longva is professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Kuwait, Bahrain, and viii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Lebanon. Among her topics of research are migration, ethnic relations, tribalism, sectarianism, citizenship and education.

Laurence Louér is research fellow at Sciences Po, the Centre for International Studies and Research (CERI) in Paris, France. She specializes on issues of minorities in the Arab Middle East.

Elizabeth Picard is senior researcher at the Institut de Recherches et d’Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman (IREMAM), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, in Aix-en-Provence, France. She has written extensively about security and identity politics in the Middle East.

Annika Rabo is professor in Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. She has conducted fieldwork in the Middle East, mainly in Syria, since the late 1970s focusing on a variety of topics related to state-citizens relationships.

Anne Sofie Roald is Professor in Religious Studies at Malmö University College, Sweden, and Senior Researcher and former head of the research program Politics of Faith at Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen, Norway. Her publications deal mainly with gender issues, religious conversion, multiculturalism, Islamism, and Arab media.

Eliz Sanasarian is Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern California. She is the author of The Religious Minorities in Iran (Cambridge, 2006) and has also written on gender issues in Iran.

Michael Stausberg is Professor of Religion at the University of Bergen. He has published widely about Zoroastrianism and theories of religion. He serves as the European editor of the international journal Religion.

Margit Warburg is Professor in Sociology of Religion at the University of Copenhagen. She has published widely on the Baha’i religion and has also authored works on East European Jewry and civil religion.

Preface

This volume is the result of a workshop which was held twice, the first time in 2008 in Bergen (Norway) then a year later in Aix-en-Provence (France). The papers presented in Bergen were discussed by the participants among themselves. We then decided to meet again in Aix, this time with other Middle East scholars as discussants of our works.

We extend our thanks to the University of Bergen and the Christian Michelsen Institute for funding and organizing the workshop in Norway. Alongside the Research Council of Norway both institutions have also given generous support for the publication of this volume. We also wish to thank the Institut de recherches et d’études sur le monde arabe et musulman (IREMAM). The IREMAM generously funded and hosted our second meeting in Aix-en-Provence in 2009. We are grateful to the discussants in Aix, Bernard Botiveau, Hamit Bozarslan, Christian Bromberger, and Lucette Valensi, for their inspiring comments and expert insights. Our special thanks go to Hamit Bozarslan for the continued interest he showed for our project.

The problem of transliteration, well-known to authors writing on the Middle East in Western languages, is made more acute in the case of edited volumes which deal not only with the Arab world but also with Turkish and Persian-speaking societies. The editors have solved the problem by letting each author use his or her preferred transliteration style.

DOMINATION, SELF-EMPOWERMENT, ACCOMMODATION

Religious Minorities as a Research Topic

Until recently, religious minorities in the Middle East were not the object of much scholarly interest. With the exception of a few classic works by historians on Christians and Jews, mostly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the field was dominated by literature written by activists and Western missionaries, the bulk of which deals with one specific period, the last years of the Ottoman Empire, and one specific type of event, the massacres of Christians in Eastern Anatolia. Wider scholarly interest for religious minorities in the Middle East developed in the 1980s, triggered by the Iranian revolution and the rise of Islamism in the Muslim world. The 1990s saw a series of publications on the topic, but it was in the first decade of the twenty-first century that the religious minorities in the Middle East really moved to the foreground of academic research. This is in part related to the so-called war on terror, especially the military intervention by the US and its allies in religiously plural Iraq. This intervention and the ensuing change in the sectarian balance of power led to violent retaliations exerted, by proxy as it were, against the local religious minorities. Besides these topical events, the twentieth century has been described as the century of minorities, or more precisely, the century when concern with the need to provide a legal framework to protect minorities gained unprecedented attention. The United Nations, the key forum where minority issues were debated, has contributed importantly to fostering greater awareness and mobilization among the groups concerned. By the late twentieth century, minorities no longer accepted tolerance as an ideal value; instead they were demanding the right to recognition, and there are no signs that these demands will diminish. The combined interest in minority issues and political

© ANH NGA LONGVA, 2012 | DOI:10.1163/9789004216846_002 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the cc BY-NC 4.0 license.

Islam has resulted in an increase in the number of academic publications on religious minorities in the Middle East over the past ten years.

Why do we need yet another volume on this topic? This book differs from most works on religious minorities in several ways. First of all, although it is historically informed, this is not a historical work but a study of the religious minorities in the contemporary, post-colonial context. It aims at throwing light on the minorities’ situation today. Even when the past is granted much scrutiny, as is the case with several chapters, this is done to underlie the fact that the relationship between majorities and minorities is part of a dynamic process in which both continuity and change must be taken into consideration. The analysis of the majority-minority relations and the minorities’ responses to the challenges of domination is carried out in light of some of the major political and social events which have shaped the region up to the beginning of the twenty-first century. In order to grasp this complex, multi-faceted situation, we have drawn on the expertise of researchers from various disciplines. While we may be differently positioned in terms of theories, what most of us do have in common is that our knowledge is based on extensive and repeated field studies in the societies about which we write.’

Another distinctive feature of this volume lies in its dealing with both non-Muslim and Muslim minorities. Traditionally, Muslim minorities are not included in studies of religious minorities in the Middle East. The very concept of ‘religious minorities’ tends to be used only in reference to non- Muslims. We recognize here the century-old perspective of the successive Muslim States as well as the influence of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which formalized the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and deals with the issue of religious minorities’ rights in the Republic of Turkey. Because the Treaty was signed between Turkey and major European states—the only non-European signatory was Japan—the minorities under consideration were exclusively Christian and Jewish. The exclusion of Muslims from the study of religious minorities in the Middle East since then has been a major weakness in this field of research. We are convinced that an integrated approach is more fruitful. To adopt a water-tight distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim minorities is to espouse uncritically the majorities’ premises. Such an analytical perspective almost certainly

' The possibility for doing field research on religious minorities in Iran being extremely limited, the authors on the Baha’is and the Zoroastrians, Margit Warburg and Michael Stausberg, have had to resort to other research methods.

overemphasizes the differences between the two types of minorities and blinds us to whatever commonalities may exist between the treatment to which they are subjected and their responses to this treatment. Dealing with both Muslim and non-Muslim minorities also opens up for comparative reflections. Even in the absence of explicit and systematic comparison, the mere fact of exploring case-studies from both groups within the same volume helps throw light on majority-minority relations, not as unique cases involving groups with unique doctrinal and cultural idiosyncrasies, but as universal interactional processes with comparable patterns of action and reaction. Relations between religious majorities and minorities are not only a matter of religion;? they are also shaped by factors external to religion, among them domestic and international politics, the economy, and class. This is not to say that the differences between Muslim and non- Muslim minorities are negligible, but these differences exist side by side with important non-religious, structural similarities. There are, therefore, strong arguments for treating the two groups of minorities together rather than for keeping them analytically apart.

Finally, this volume seeks to analyse the religious minorities from a dynamic perspective. The relationship between religious majorities and minorities in the Middle East is often construed in terms of a stark opposition between active domination and passive submission. Besides accepting uncritically, or overstating, the majorities’ power, such a description places emphasis on the challenges faced by the minorities while overlooking their astonishing ability to mobilize internal and external resources to meet these challenges. Religious minorities are not passive victims living under the iron rule of an all-powerful majority, even though one easily gets this impression from the literature written by activist authors. Much of this literature tends to focus exclusively on times of acute conflicts, leaving aside long periods of relatively peaceful coexistence. In times of conflict, the minorities’ margin of action is severely reduced, and their status as victims overshadows their status as social agents, active devisers and users of strategies of accommodation and self-empowerment. Yet this is an important part of their overall identity, and it must also be taken into consideration in the analysis. While it is imperative to highlight the victimization of all minorities in times of conflict, a true understanding of such conflicts requires an understanding of what goes on between minorities

2 Nor are religious differences in the Middle East, where all the faiths involved are variations on a monotheistic theme, particularly irreconcilable.

and majorities in times of relative peace as well. A literature that depicts minorities only as victims conveys the erroneous impression that they are systematically alienated from their societies. Field observation shows that this is not the case. Whether Muslim or non-Muslim, the minorities share many cultural values and practices with the majorities. They are as much part of the local societies as the majorities. Only by treating them as informed social agents can we do justice to the men and women gathered under the impersonal and insidiously disempowering rubric of ‘religious minorities’. For these groups, the problem lies precisely in that rejection comes from home, that is, from people with whom, in most cases and for most of the time, they share a common cultural script—norms, languages, ways of life. Seeing members of religious minorities as whole persons and social agents and not only as victims allows us to better understand their dilemmas and appreciate the resourcefulness they display in facing these dilemmas. We believe that an epistemology that axiomatically defines minorities as powerless calls for critical reflections; at the very least its underlying assumptions need to be made explicit. The first step is to clarify the minority concept itself.

The Concept of Minority

As seen above, in the Middle East, the phrase ‘religious minorities’ has long been used to refer only to non-Muslim populations. But even non- Muslims were not always known as minorities. The term ‘minority’ (Ar. ‘aqalliyya) was introduced to the Middle East in the last decades of the nineteenth century by the European Powers, who cited the protection of Ottoman Christians as justification for intervening in Ottoman domestic affairs. Applied to the non-Muslim population, ‘agalliyya is a substitute for the older, more common term ta ifa (‘sect’) (Shami 2009).3 ‘Aqalliyya is a quantitative term which depicts the relative size of a group, while ta ifa, which besides sect also means group, class, people, and depicts the group’s identity, in this case, its religious identity. Ta ifa can thus be used to speak of a majority as well as a minority. One could argue that this way of thinking about human groups, not in terms of relative size but in terms of identity, e.g. beliefs, practices, and other defining characteristics, is ‘pre-modern’: ta ifa refers to the supposedly primordial nature of the group, that which

3 From the nineteenth century onwards, the preferred term by the Ottomans was milla/ millet.

distinguishes it from other groups, whereas ‘minority’ does not ascribe to this group any specific, pre-ordained features. On the face of it, the use of the more neutral, quantitative term ‘minority’ implies the recognition of an essential human commonality beneath the religious differentiations. This makes ‘minority’ a decidedly modern concept, a product of the Enlightenment. In this sense, the secular term ‘agalliyya is, in theory, a better way of describing groups than taifa. In practice, however, ‘minority’ comes burdened with its own essentializing connotations, despite its purportedly being merely the description of a group’s relative size.

‘Minority’ is commonly understood as synonymous with inferiority, weakness, subordination. This semantic association is so strong that the term is often used in its extended, rather than its original, meaning, Thus, suppressed and disempowered numerical majorities are not uncommonly referred to as minorities, with or without the adjective ‘sociological’ (see below). This is why it is difficult to dissociate minority from powerlessness, even though there are plenty of instances of dominant and powerful minorities in the world, past and present. In popular usage but also in social theory, the defining characteristic of a minority is precisely its being the “object of collective discrimination” (Wirth 1945: 347). It has even been suggested that minority is merely “a sociological euphemism for oppressed groups” (Nibert in Wilkinson 2000). In this view, a powerful minority is an oxymoron: if it is powerful, it cannot be a minority, hence, the tendency to speak of powerful minorities not as minorities but as elites. A minority exists only in relation to a majority, which is assumed, also by definition, to be powerful. But as is well known, size does not always entail might. A minority can be more or less weak or more or less powerful, and so can a majority. Considering these fluctuating semantic practices and the ambivalence that characterizes ‘minority’ and ‘majority’, these terms must be used cautiously and critically. The correlation between minority and subjugation or powerlessness is a matter to be investigated, not a natural fact on which to build an analysis. The important thing to bear in mind is that relationships between majority and minority are not given and static but always processual. They are the temporary, evolving outcomes of ongoing interaction between groups under shifting political and material conditions.

Religious and Ethnic Minorities

In much of the literature on minorities in the Middle East religion is subsumed under ethnicity, and religious minorities are often studied as part of ethnic minorities (i.a. Esman and Rabinovich 1988, Bengio and Ben-Dor

1999). Ethnic groups are groups which define themselves and are defined by others in terms of ascriptive characteristics, perceived as ‘primordial’ or inherited. In fact, these characteristics range from: imperative traits, ie. traits that people are born with, such as facial features, skin colour, hair type (‘race’); to traits that are acquired, therefore can be modified, unlearnt or abandoned, such as language, customs, religion (‘culture’); to accidental and/or arbitrarily imposed characteristics such as national and territorial affiliations. According to this definition of ethnicity, religious minorities are a sub-category of ethnic minorities. While some of these minorities may also differ from the majority linguistically or racially, such differences are not granted the same importance as is religion in the societies where they live.

In this book we choose to focus on religion as the primary difference marker. As elsewhere in the world, Middle Eastern societies have a vast range of criteria for social categorization. Of these, religion is arguably the most significant, in social, legal, and political terms. The Middle East is not only the birthplace of the great monotheistic religions, it is also the first place where monotheism was adopted as state religion. In 380 CE, the Byzantine emperor Theodosius I enacted a law establishing Catholic Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. Since then religious diversity has been subject to state control and regulation, as evidenced by the relentless persecution of Christian sects declared heretic by the Byzantine State. Although much more tolerant, the Muslim States also held firm control over religious diversity. Detailed rules were devised for the incorporation, on specific conditions, of the Peoples of the Book, the only tolerated non-Muslims, into Muslim society. The basic rule of Islamic law was to uphold diversity on the basis of inequality. Today, the Constitutions of most Middle Eastern States explicitly define their religious nature. With very few exceptions, religion still provides the basis for the legislation on personal status and family relations. The absence of a universal code perpetuates the differentiation of the citizenry along religious lines, which was a characteristic feature of the Ottoman millet system. At the same time, the religious minorities’ legal autonomy has become more limited in a number of countries, as a result of reforms during the twentieth century.

The depiction of a group as a ‘religious’ or an ‘ethnic’ minority is not a constant one throughout the region: a group that is classified as a religious minority in one society can be classified as an ethnic minority in another. Thus, Kurds are an ethnic minority everywhere because their language dif-

INTRODUCTION T fers from Arabic in the Arab countries, from Turkish in Turkey, and from Persian in Iran. But while Kurds, who are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslims, are part of the religious majority in Turkey, Iraq or Syria, they are a religious minority in Iran. Conversely, the Shi‘is are the religious majority in Iran but a religious minority, sometimes in the sociological sense, elsewhere. In the Muslim Middle East, only Armenians and Jews are at the same time religious and ethnic minorities. The porous line between ‘ethnic’ and ‘religious’ categories shows that cultural traits are not the critical feature in the classification of groups in society because such traits are situationally defined. Therefore, although religion is the primary distinguishing feature of the minorities in this study, the object of our analysis is not religion per se but the use to which it is put in the production and reproduction of similarities and differences among and between groups. In other words, we are interested in the rationale and strategies of inclusion and exclusion or, to borrow from Fredrik Barth, in the “structuring of interaction which allows the persistence of cultural differences” (1994: 16) rather than in the differences themselves.

Minorities: Numerical and Sociological

Most Muslim and all non-Muslim minorities in the Middle East are numerical minorities. There has occurred a radical shift in this regard since the days of the Prophet Mohammed. At his death, large areas of the region which is now known as the Middle East were predominantly Christian. Muslims were a numerical minority until the tenth, probably even the eleventh century CE (Courbage and Fargue 1992). Today, the region is overwhelmingly Muslim. The number of Christians is rapidly decreasing, due to emigration and low birth rate. Only Egypt, Syria and Lebanon still have a substantial, but nevertheless decreasing, Christian presence. As for Jews, with the exception of Iran and Yemen which still have tiny Jewish communities, practically all have left, principally to Israel. Numbers are important as, below a certain threshold, it is difficult for a minority, whether ethnic or religious, to have a well- organized social life as a distinct group and to ensure its own social reproduction. Besides, the smaller and more dispersed a group is, the easier it is for the majority to overlook its demands and interests, even violate its rights. On the other hand, large numbers are not always a guarantee of empowerment, as is illustrated by the case of the Shi‘is in Bahrain.

Are the religious minorities in the Middle East sociological as well as numerical minorities? By sociological minorities are meant groups that are systematically discriminated against and dominated, irrespective of their number. If we take our cue from the events reported in the media, the answer to the above question is clearly yes, but we must bear in mind that the Middle East is a diverse region and the minorities’ situation is best described in terms of a continuum. Among the case-studies presented in this volume, some minorities are the object of serious and enduring discrimination, such as the Baha’is in Iran. For others, the situation is more fluctuating and ambivalent. Claims of discrimination have been frequently reported and documented by all minorities, and they must be taken seriously. As students of ethnic and religious relations, meanwhile, we know that perceptions of discrimination are not only based on the individual’s or the group’s actual experience of ongoing interaction. They also derive from the group’s collective memory of minority-majority relations over time, and from the enduring impact of power asymmetry on groups’ self-perception. Nonetheless, discrimination is not merely a matter of perceptions; it is also a social practice that can be observed and recorded. The most important signal of discrimination is denial of the rights enjoyed by the rest of the society.

Minorities and Rights

Experts in international law distinguish between two major categories of rights: civil and political rights, and social and economic rights. Civil and political rights are commonly known as ‘first generation rights’, as they were historically the first to be recognized and codified. Among these rights are the guarantee of integrity of person and property, freedom from arbitrary arrest, the right to due process and fair trial, and the right to seek redress. Social and economic rights are more recent, hence ‘second generation rights’, yet denial of these rights—e.g. the right to found a family, to own property and to work, and access to education and health assistance—is the most effective weapon of domination and disempowerment. Most of the minorities in this volume have experienced or are experiencing denial of some rights, both first and second generations, either as a result of direct discrimination or because of a general absence of justice, law and order in their society; being often the weakest members, they also tend to be the prime victims.

All human rights, both ‘first generation’ (civil and political) and ‘second generation’ (social and economic), are individual rights. In the 1990s, the

United Nations, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and the Council of Europe promulgated minority rights instruments. As defined in these documents, minorities’ rights are also individual, insofar as they are given to persons belonging to minorities and not to the minority group itself (Gilbert 2005).* But to consider the minority group simply as the context for the exercise of the individual members’ rights is highly unsatisfactory. A vast debate is ongoing as to who should be the minority rights-holder, the individual or the group. This in turn leads to asking what the relationship between the individual member's rights and the rights, if any, of the minority group should be, and what is the role of the state vis avis both individual members of the group and the group itself (ibid.: 140). The present volume does not deal with this legal debate, which takes particularly place in forums concerned with matters of ethnic indigeneity. But since the concept of ‘nativism’ (indigeneity) is raised in one chapter (chapter 9), and since this topic is of potential relevance to several religious minorities in the Middle East, a brief mention of the status of native or indigenous people is called for. The term ‘indigenous people’ is widely used to refer to a variety of ethnic minorities the world over, but so far it has not been applied to religious minorities, even though this category is regularly included in most minority rights documents. In the Middle East, some of the Christian autochthonous inhabitants, whose presence in the region dates back to the pre-Islamic era, have claimed the indigenous status. Copts in Egypt and, more recently, Chaldo-Assyrians in Iraq (through their diasporic representatives in the USA) are two examples. Among the Muslim minorities, the Baharna Shi‘is of Bahrain have also claimed to be indigenous, not in relation to Islam but in relation to the ruling Sunni minority of the island kingdom (Louér 2006). The Shi‘is in Saudi Arabia are making use of the same strategy (Louér, this volume).5 Of crucial importance among

4 This is for instance, the view propounded in the UN Covenant on Civil and Political rights. Article 27 defines cultural rights as follows: “In those States in which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities exist, persons belonging to such minorities shall not be denied the right, in community with the other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to use their own language” (emphasis added).

5 All these groups satisfy the requirement of long-term presence which is a crucial component in the definition of an indigenous people by international organizations. The 1989 Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, Art. 1 (b) gives the following definition of indigenous peoples: “Peoples in independent countries who are regarded as indigenous on account of their descent from the populations which inhabited the country, or a geographical region to which the country belongs, at the time of conquest or colonisation or the establishment of present state boundaries and who, irrespective of their legal status, retain some or all of their own social, economic, cultural and political institutions”. That the status of indigenous people is not applied to the religious minorities in the Middle East is possibly due to the the minority rights is the right to self-determination. Because the notion of self-determination often raises the spectre of secession, even the UN, in whose Charter this principle is embodied, has so far been reluctant to recognize any further extension of this right beyond the traditional context of decolonization. In the context of minorities, however, self-determination means the right to define themselves rather than being defined by the majority, to represent themselves rather than being represented, to write their own histories, and to see their children taught their own, and not the majority’s, religion at school. Self-determination here is, in Alfredsson’s words (2005: 164) “about keeping groups happy within States”; hence, it is ultimately about preventing or reducing the likelihood of state dismemberment (ibid.). The exercise of the above rights presupposes a certain type of social organization, and this is only possible with the consent of the state, which means that cultural rights belong to both the social and the political fields. Minority rights are those the power-holders are most prone to ignore and reject. For them, to acknowledge the presence of minorities within the nation-state is to jeopardize the national project. Therefore many states’ policy towards minorities consists in either neglect or repression. A more positive solution is an attempt at integration. In the Middle East, nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s could be seen as one such attempt, as far as most, though not all, religious minorities are concerned.

Religious Minorities in the Age of Nationalism

In the Arab world, Arab nationalism or pan-Arabism became the dominant ideology after the revolution in Egypt put an end to the monarchy and eventually brought Nasser to power. The 1950s and 1960s, the heyday of Arab nationalism, were decades of hope for many religious minorities in the Arab countries. Being a secular ideology, Arab nationalism downplayed the importance of religious affiliation while elevating ethnic (Arab) identity. The key criterion for citizenship in an Arab country was the bearers’ Arabness, irrespective of their creed. Arab nationalism glorified understanding of the term ‘indigenous’ as implying a way of life “closely interwoven with land, including the links of traditional economies to the land, such as for fishing, gathering, herding and hunting” (Alfredsson 2005: 169). Besides, although religion is mentioned, in reality language and way of life are the key criteria in the definition. For example: in the country report The Rights of Indigenous People: Egypt by the International Labour Organization and African Commission on Human & Peoples’ Rights 2009, the indigenous peoples discussed are the Bedouin nomads and the Nubians. There is no mention of Copts.