The global history of sectarianism has long been neglected. This is because no project has endeavoured to connect the writings, experiences, and lives of Middle Eastern communities into a single analytical framework. Instead, the existing scholarship is fragmented and divided along linguistic, disciplinary, and scholarly lines. As a result, even the most basic questions have yet to be answered. In what ways did sectarianism express itself, or not as the case may be, in the diverse localities of the globalizing Middle East? Why did some individuals reject sectarian practices, ideas, and aspirations, while others took refuge in confessional identities even when they found themselves far from their places of origin in the Middle East? What forms of oral, written, and visual storytelling represented sectarianism, and who were the multiple publics that developed around these narratives? These are questions that naturally raise a set of wider issues at the intersection of social, political, intellectual, and even literary history.
Answering these questions requires a global approach to the study of sectarianism, one that takes seriously the transformations wrought by migration, globalization, and the circulation of literature in this period. In adopting such a framework, the Moving Stories project seeks to answer a fundamental question about the meaning, scale, and variety of sectarianism, that is, was there a core set of processes that united the diverse sectarianisms that developed in the Global Middle East?
In sum, the project seeks to set a new agenda for the historical study of sectarianism, communalism, and religious difference in the Middle East, and beyond. It has four objectives. First, it will identify, recover, and analyse a vast corpus of relevant sources in Middle Eastern and Western languages. Second, it will use these sources to write the first global history of sectarianism in the Middle East. It will do so in a way that combines the study of the circulation of sectarianism with an interpretation of its expressions in different contexts. The project’s third objective is to contribute a sophisticated methodology to the use of family papers and literary sources in Middle Eastern history. Finally, the project will provide a model for understanding how other modern sectarianisms have developed through complex shifts in identity in which émigré and diaspora communities have often played a formative role. Looking beyond the Middle East, therefore, the project seeks to open new avenues for further research into the comparative study of sectarianism among historians, social scientists, and literary scholars.
