Abstract
This chapter describes the tragic situation of Syria, that spurred waves of refugees beginning from 2015 onwards, and examines the data of the drastic conditions that drove these Syrians to migrate to Europe. The European host societies that accepted such refugees are challenged by their presence. To decipher the genome of “crisis” in the phrase “refugee crisis,” the best method is to use the hermeneutic tripod of identity-relationality-othering. This chapter analyses the Syrian refugee crisis in today’s European societies from the perspective of this tripod to demonstrate that a coherent perception of their sitz im leben: challenges an understanding of the nature of the situation; helps decipher the components of thought-forms about migrants; and maps and re-maps the web of meanings that underpin the conduct and behavioural patterns that are exhibited and experienced by host peoples and migrants.
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Notes
- 1.
I place these two terms between brackets hereafter due to the serious ambiguity which I believe these two nomenclatures cause by the very nature of their use in the public sphere.
- 2.
For some recent studies on the challenge of developing “identity” in the European context, see: Christophe Venet and Blandina Baranes, eds., European Identity Through Space: Space Activities and Programmes as a Tool to Reinvigorate the European Identity (Wien: Springer, 2013); Jeffrey T. Checkel and Peter J. Katzenstein, eds., European Identity (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University, 2009); Inés María Gómez-Chacón, ed., European Identity: Individual, Group and Society (Bilbao: University of Deusto, 2003); Neil Fligstein, Euro-Clash: The EU, European Identity and the Future of Europe (Oxford; New York: Oxford University, 2008).
- 3.
Jaco Kruger, “Christian Identity in an Age of Difference,” in Christian Identity, ed. Eduardus Van der Borght (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2008), 119.
- 4.
Andrés Tornos, “The Meaning of European Identity: Past, Present or Future Project,” in European Identity: Individual, Group and Society, ed. Inés María Gómez-Chacón (Bilbao: University of Deusto, 2003), 191–192, 199–202.
- 5.
Ibid., 195.
- 6.
Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). See also Sonia Lucarelli, “European Political Identity, Foreign Policy and the Others’ Image,” in The Search for a European Identity: Values, Policies and Legitimacy of the European Union, eds. F. Cerutti and S. Lucarellim (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 23–42.
- 7.
On Pan-Arabism and nationalist Arabism, see, for example, Najib George Awad, “Is Christianity from Arabia? Examining Two Contemporary Arabic Proposals on Christianity in the Pre-Islamic Period,” in Orientalische Christen und Europa Kulturbegegnung zwischen Interferenz, Partizipation und Antizipation, ed. Martin Tamcke (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2012), 33–58; P. J. Bearman et al., eds., “ʽUrūbah,” in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Vol. 10 (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 111ff., 907ff.; C. E. Dawn, “From Ottomanism to Arabism: The Origin of an Ideology,” in The Modern Middle East: A Reader, eds. A. Hourani et al. (London; New York: J. B. Tauris, 1993), 376–393; Rashid Khalidi, “Arab Nationalism: Historical Problems in the Literature,” American Historical Review 96/5 (1991): 217–244; Michael Provence, The Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism (Austin: University of Texas, 2005).
- 8.
See Adel Beshara, Syrian Nationalism: An Inquiry into the Philosophy of Antun Sa’adeh (Melbourne: iPhoenix, 2011); A. Beshara, ed., The Origin of Syrian Nationhood: Histories, Pioneers and Identity (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011); Labib Suwiyya Yamak, The Syrian Nationalist Part: An Ideological Analysis (Cambridge: Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 1966).
- 9.
One can sense this clearly among the Christian Syrians, who are very sceptical about whether the future Syria would be a suitable context for their life in the light of the strongly Islamized situation and the confessionalist and religious polarisation that permeates Syria. See Najib George Awad, “al-Masiḥiyyūnwa al-Thawrah as-Sūriyyah: ʼAyyat Makhāūif Min al-Thawrah? ʼAyu Nizāmin Sīyāsyy fi al-Mustaqbal?” in The Arabic Spring and the Christians of the Middle East, ed. Mitri Raheb (Bethlehem: Diyar, 2012), 121–126; N. G. Awad, “Massīḥiyyū Soūriyyā wa-Soū,āl ad-Daūr al-Mustaqbalī,” in http://www.asharqalarabi.org.uk/مسيحيو-سوريا-وسؤال-الدور-المستقبلي_ad-id!3457.ks#.XjnR5S0ZPLH, accessed 18 July 2017; N. G. Awad, “Lā Ufuq ll-Ḥuḍūr al-Massīḥī fī Sūriyyah,” https://www.alaraby.co.uk/opinion/2016/2/6/لا-أفق-للحضور-المسيحي-في-سورية, accessed 6 February 2016.
- 10.
Douglas Robinson, Displacement and the Somatics of Postcolonial Culture (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2013), xx. On attempts at transforming some displacement narratives of Syrian refugees into art practices and theatrical performances and how such activities are being used to foster an identity-reformation and re-creation experience in these refugees’ lives see, Monica Ruocco, “Migration and Memory: Displacement Narratives of Syrian Women Refugees on Stage,” in A Mediterranean Perspective on Migrants’ Flows in the European Union: Protection of Rights, Intercultural Encounters and Integration Policies, ed. Giuseppe Cataldi (Napoli: Editoriale Scientifica, 2016), 207–222.
- 11.
Phillipe Theron, “Devastating Grace: Justification Impii and I-Dentity,” in Christian Identity, ed. Eduardus van der Borght (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2008), 33–49. On a theological elaboration on the same idea of Deleuze see Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996).
- 12.
See Gilles Deleuze, Kleine Schriften, trans. K. D. Schacht (Berlin: Minerva, 1980); G. Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University, 2002).
- 13.
Yiannis Gabriel, “The Other and Othering, A Short Introduction,” 10 September 2012, http://www.yiannisgabriel.com/2012/09/the-other-and-othering-short.html, accessed 25 October 2016.
- 14.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 123–148.
- 15.
Richard Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality,” in On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993, eds. Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley (New York: Basic, 1993), 24.
- 16.
On this epistemic injustice’s relation to epistemic othering see André Keet, “Epistemic ‘Othering’ and the Decolonisation of Knowledge,” African Insight 44/1 (2014): 23–37; Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford; New York: Oxford University, 2007); Sune Qvotrup Jensen, “Preliminary Notes on Othering and Agency,” Sociologisk Arbejdspapir 27 (2009): 1–36.
- 17.
Kruger, “Christian Identity in an Age of Difference,” 123.
- 18.
Ibid., 124. See also Mark C. Taylor, Erring – A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1987); M. Taylor, Alterity (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1987); Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978); and J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins University, 1997).
- 19.
Maria Jesús Merinero, “Images of Europe: The Perspective of the Islamic People: From Occidentalism to Occidentology,” in European Identity: Individual, Group and Society, ed. Inés María Gómez Chacón, 256, http://www.deusto-publicaciones.es/deusto/pdfs/hnet/hnet09.pdf, accessed 25 January 2020. Merinero explains that this othering tendency reflects a common European ethnographic tradition that is “solely concerned about cataloguing, describing and assigning, and not about explaining, which has allowed Orientalists to maintain their logic of complementariness and confrontation.”
- 20.
Ibid., 257.
- 21.
Ibid., 257, 265–269. Merinero’s own proposal for facing this danger is by launching a dialogical relationship between Europe and Muslims that will transform Occidentophobia into “Occidentology,” that is, moving from fear and condemnation into a longing for understanding and knowledge from within.
- 22.
Jenny McGill, Religious Identity and Cultural Negotiation (Wipf and Stock Publishers, Jul. 22, 2016), 17.
- 23.
Ibid., 16–17. See also Steph Lawler, Identity: Sociological Perspectives (Cambridge: Polity, 2014); Richard Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity: Arguments and Explorations (London: Sage, 2008); and Luiz Carlos Susin, “A Critique of the Identity Paradigm,” in Creating Identity, eds. Hermann Häring et al. (London: SCM, 2000), 78–90.
- 24.
McGill, Religious Identity and Cultural Negotiation, 37. See also Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Interpretation of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996); Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005); Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, eds. Charles Taylor and Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University, 1994), 25–74.
- 25.
McGill, Religious Identity and Cultural Negotiation, 42; Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 65–66, 91.
- 26.
McGill, Religious Identity and Cultural Negotiation, 43. McGill refers here to ideas from A. N. Williams, “Assimilation and Otherness: The Theological Significance of Négritude,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 11/3 (2009): 248–270.
- 27.
Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 66. Volf describes this form of self-identification “duality of identity formation.”
- 28.
See Najib G. Awad, God Without a Face? On the Personal Individuation of the Holy Spirit (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 99–142; Najib G. Awad, Persons in Relation: An Essay on the Trinity and Ontology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014), 259–290; Najib G. Awad, “Is a Perichorēsis Between Theological Interpretation and Historical Criticism Possible? Toward a Balanced Hermeneutics of Scriptural Christology,” Theological Review 31/2 (2010): 152–178; Najib G. Awad, “Between Subordination and Koinonia: Toward a New Reading of the Cappadocian Theology,” Modern Theology 32/2 (2007): 181–204.
- 29.
McGill, Religious Identity and Cultural Negotiation, 47–48.
- 30.
See M. Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998); Awad, God Without a Face? 143–152, 184–206; Najib G. Awad, “Personhood as Particularity: John Zizioulas, Colin Gunton and the Trinitarian Theology of Personhood,” The Reformed Journal of Theology 4/1 (2010): 1–22.
- 31.
McGill, Religious Identity and Cultural Negotiation, 47.
- 32.
Ibid., 223.
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Awad, N.G. (2021). Deciphering the Genome of “Crisis” in the Syrian “Refugee Crisis”: Towards a Hermeneutic Tripod. In: Dias, D.J., Skira, J.Z., Attridge, M.S., Mannion, G. (eds) The Church, Migration, and Global (In)Difference. Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54226-9_10
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