For nearly a century of scholarship, uncertainties and paradoxes have beleaguered interpretations of the origins and meaning of Salafism (al-salafiyya). Although academics and journalists alike are well aware of the various definitions and conflicting narratives of Salafism, relieving some of the confusion that beclouds the term continues to prove difficult. Given that concepts are fluid and relational, this state of affairs may seem inevitable. Yet there are reasons to believe that the current confusion surrounding Salafism is in part attributable to faulty scholarship and that consequently the substance and history of this religious orientation will remain unnecessarily puzzling so long as the production of knowledge about Salafism goes unexamined. In that sense, recent scholarly efforts to remedy the situation by providing deeper insights into the intellectual, geographical, and political diversity of Salafism have produced mixed results, for they have largely overlooked two of the most persistent epistemological problems that are at the root of much of the present-day ambiguity.

International fairs—the “folk-festivals of capitalism”—have long been a favorite topic of historians studying quintessential phenomena of modernity such as the celebration of industrial productivity, the construction of national identities, and the valorization of bourgeois leisure and consumption in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. To date, however, such spectacles occurring in the modern Middle East remain largely unexamined. This article, an analysis of the discourse surrounding the first Damascus International Exposition in 1954, is conceived in part as a preliminary effort to redress this historiographic imbalance.

I begin with a pair of narratives:

What does it mean to “integrate” a complex and multifaceted tradition such as Islam into a transnational space as heterogeneous as that of modern Europe? And what kind of a project is precisely that of a “European Islam,” increasingly invoked today across the continent by a wide range of state and nonstate actors, including many Muslims? At a time dominated by variants of the clash of civilizations thesis, the project appears rather equivocal. What conceptions of Europe as a political space, and of Islam as a religious tradition, underlie the endeavor?

For several months after the September 2005 publication of twelve cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, the debate was largely confined to a Danish context. Early international protests of the cartoons were voiced by government officials in several countries, including Pakistan, Iran, and Egypt. However, until late December 2005, in what I will call phase one of the controversy, Danish Muslims fought a primarily domestic battle for some kind of recognition from the newspaper and the Danish government that the cartoons had hurt religious feelings. In October 2005 an ad hoc coalition of Danish Muslim organizations, with The Community of Islamic Faith (Det Islamiske Trossamfund) and its affiliated imams at the lead, tried to put pressure on the Danish government through ambassadors from Muslim countries posted in Denmark. The ambassadors' request for a meeting with the Danish prime minister was turned down, as were other attempts by Danish Muslims to raise claims with the government.

Eastern Christians and Christianity have been elided from Middle Eastern studies. The purpose of this roundtable is to bring their stories back into scholarly focus through the interventions of five scholars: Febe Armanios, Bernard Heyberger, Fiona McCallum, Paul Rowe, and Nelly van Doorn-Harder.

The greatest accomplishment of the past ten to twenty years of scholarship on Christian groups in Middle Eastern states is the way scholars have recognized the agency of a population long objectified in both academic and polemical circles. Christians have long been viewed as the object of other actors. For some, they were mere products of Muslim societies that imposed upon them the debatably restricted or protected status of ahl al-dhimma. For others, they were the appendages of external forces determined to use them as devices of their interests. The concerns of such external forces only contributed to Christians' portrayal as vehicles of imperialism. Although these tropes persist, over the last several years many scholars have begun to explore the ways in which Arab and other Middle Eastern Christians operate as subjects in their own right.

When I was preparing my PhD in 1993, the subject “Eastern Christians” or “Christians in the Islamic World” was almost nonexistent in the mass media or in scholarly works. In fact, I prepared my thesis not under the supervision of a specialist in the Middle East but rather under that of a specialist in European Catholicism during the early modern era.

Research on the Copts of Egypt has developed especially rapidly in new directions during the past twenty years. Having started as a corollary of Egyptology, it is advancing from the study of the early Christian centuries to include medieval, early modern, and contemporary Coptic Studies. Concurrently, Coptic issues are being inserted into studies of Egypt in general. Publications on the 19th century mostly ignored Copts, but they were given stereotypical cameo appearances in the prolific research on the profound transformations in 20th-century Egyptian society.

The study of Coptic history usually brings to mind gnostic texts, remote monastic enclaves, archeological ruins, conflicts with Byzantium, or a long-forgotten language. Until recently, a disproportionate focus on early Christianity has bound Copts to an ancient and seemingly timeless heritage, which explains the dearth of critical examinations on Coptic life from the Islamic conquests to the early modern period. In general, Coptic experiences after 641 have been overshadowed by other themes in Egyptian history writing, in particular political and military changes. Although the latter are as relevant for a better understanding of the Coptic past, they have been predominately examined from the perspective of the Muslim majority, exclusive of Coptic concerns, perspectives, and beliefs. Only in recent years has scholarship on Copts begun to expand. Scholars have drawn from fields such as papyrology, gender studies, art history, and law in pursuit of a more comprehensive historical narrative. We are increasingly encouraged to evaluate the Coptic experience not only as a missing cog in Egyptian historiography but also as one that complicates canonical studies of postconquest Egypt and enriches our understanding of Middle Eastern history in general.

The topic of Christians in the Middle East appears to be enjoying a growing vitality within Middle East studies. This is not to say that scholarship ignored the subject in the past, but it was rarely seen as an independent area of study. Works tended to focus on the historical origins, faith, and rites of the different churches within Eastern Christianity. Those that looked specifically at Christian communities tended to concentrate on their relations with other groups, especially in the context of a minority framework. Some interdisciplinary volumes such as those edited by Andrea Pacini and Anthony O'Mahony moved beyond this limited approach to cover a wider range of issues, but several of the contributions retained this descriptive tendency rather than relating directly to theoretical debates within different disciplines.

Historians of Europe often declare that Spain is “different.” This distinctiveness of the Iberian peninsula has many faces and is frequently seen as rooted in its Islamic past. In the field of Islamic history, too, al-Andalus is somewhat different. It has its own specialists, research traditions, controversies, and trends. One of the salient features of historical studies of al-Andalus as well as of its popular image is the great interest in its interreligious dimension. In 2002, María Rosa Menocal published The Ornament of the World, one of the rare books on Islamic history written by an academic that enjoyed and still enjoys a tremendous popularity among nonspecialist readers. The book surveys intersections of Islamic, Jewish, and Christian elite culture, mostly in Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin literature and in architecture, from the Muslim conquest of the Iberian peninsula in 711 to the fall of Granada in 1492. Menocal presents the religious diversity commonly referred to as convivencia as one of the defining features of Andalusi intellectual and artistic productivity. She also argues that the narrow-minded forces that brought about its end were external, pointing to the Almoravids and Almohads from North Africa and Christians from north of the peninsula as responsible. The book's subtitle, How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, conjures the community of Abrahamic faiths. It reflects the optimism of those who identify in Andalusi history a model for a constructive relationship between “Islam” and “the West” that in the age of the “war on terror” many are desperate to find.