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Secularity and religiosity in the modern Arab world

Christian Syrians in Damascus in an anthropological perspective

PhD fellow Andreas Bandak

Conditions for faith, secularity and doubt

With Damascus as a prism, this ethnographic project investigates how religiosity is enacted in a secular Arabic state. The central case is the movement that has gathered around the local woman, Myrna Nazzour, who since 1982 has received prophecies, experienced stigmata and witnessed oil flowing from either her hands or an icon in her home. The discussions and the veneration Myrna Nazzour is subject to, not only in the movement, but in society as such, offer a privileged vantage point for investigating the conditions for faith, secularity and doubt in a modern Arabic state, where religiosity is not given precedence.

Rethinking religiosity in the modern world

At the same time, the study of this movement allows the opportunity for analysing how local universes have to be thought of as dependent on a larger and more global reality. Myrna Nazzour is often a guest in such different countries as USA, Sweden, Austria, Slovakia, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt, and thus this project seeks to rethink how modernity makes religiosity bloom under new and different conditions - and not necessarily, as assumed earlier makes it disappear. The project takes its outset in a long term fieldwork in Damascus from August 2009 until January 2010 succeeded by follow-up visits in 2010 and 2011.