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This chapter explores the local context of the Armenian community in Egypt in relation to Armenian communities elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire. The Armenian community in Egypt enjoyed considerable autonomy in managing its own affairs, independent of the Armenian Church. Contrary to common assumptions, the Armenian patriarch in Istanbul, who was nominally in charge of all Orthodox churches within the Ottoman Empire, does not seem to have had any significant influence over the Armenian community in Egypt. In addition to its relative autonomy from the Armenian Church, the Armenian Egyptian community was well integrated with Egyptian Copts in both religious and social affairs. Thus, for example, despite the clear iconoclastic stance of the Armenian Church, Armenians did paint icons in Egypt—albeit only for Coptic churches. The Armenian community in Aleppo, on the other hand, did not engage in icon-painting; they specialized in other crafts such as sculpture and frescoes.

Chapter 3 examines the 1956 Catholicos election in Lebanon.While the excitement and success of the repatriation movement was a public relations victory for the USSR supported by local Armenian institutions and assisted by Lebanese and Syrian governments, this election became a site of contestation by Cold War powers and by their state and non-state allies and proxies in the Middle East. This analysis allows us to look at the Cold War in the Middle East not from the top down, through the eyes of Washington or Moscow (or Lebanon’s or Egypt’s state authorities, for that matter) during flash points like the 1958 U.S. intervention in Lebanon or the U.S. and Soviet reactions to the Tripartite Aggression against Egypt in 1956. Rather, in that election, Armenians made use of Cold War tensions to designate a leader of the Armenian Church who was seen to suit the community’s interests. That story also expands our understanding of Lebanon’s Armenians: from refugees and outsiders in national politics to true participants, whose own internal politics, moreover, were of interest to Lebanon’s authorities and who by now felt free to invade and use public spaces beyond their own neighborhoods to make political statements.

This chapter illustrates senior statesmen's competing visions for the social and economic roles that Armenians should play in the tsarist empire at mid-century. It also studies the shifting opposition and cooperation between the Orthodox and Armenian churches. The chapter uses first viceroy of the Caucasus, Mikhail Vorontsov, and other officials to examine the evolution of Russian perceptions of Armenian political loyalty and inspect the codification of the state's cooperation with the Armenian Church. It discusses how the autocracy continued to struggle to incorporate different sections of its internal Armenian diaspora during the reign of Tsar Nicholas when the state sought to standardize the tax laws and religion-related statutes governing its Armenian subjects. It also clarifies how the encounter between Nicholaevan Russia and Armenians confirmed the argument that imperial states operate as states of exception that vigilantly produce exceptions to their principles and exceptions to their laws.

This chapter focuses on the cleric and intellectual named Gavril Aivazovskii. It investigates how the tsarist authorities navigated internal Armenian tensions surrounding visions of national identity based on religious and secular principles. It also uncovers the government's alliance with the Armenian Church against U.S. and European proselytizers. The chapter contends that St. Petersburg continued to promote itself as the defender of Western Armenians during the Russo-Ottoman War, which confirms that the first cracks in the political symbiosis had already appeared in the mid-1870s. It examines the imperial officials' negotiation of delicate Armenian debates about their national identity, the state's continued partnership with Ejmiatsin in various international contexts, and the first signs of Russian hesitation about Armenian socio-political reliability.

The Introduction contextualizes the Armenian population in Lebanon. It distinguishes between Armenians who lived in Lebanon prior to the division of the Ottoman Empire, in the wake of the Armenian Genocide, and after the establishment of French and British mandatory rule in the Levant. In addition, it outlines the ecclesiastic, class, linguistic, and political gamut of the Armenian population in Lebanon. It analyzes how Armenians organized themselves according to the villages and centers in the Ottoman Empire that they hailed from and reformed their political ideologies, affiliations, and ecclesiastic connections resulting in the establishment of mini-enclaves within Armenian-populated neighborhoods in Lebanon. The introduction also positions the book within four fields: histories of Armenians, Lebanon, the Cold War in the Middle East, and the Diaspora Studies. The innovation of linking these fields together through the themes of identification, belonging, and articulating citizenship produces fresh readings of the time period. This intervention draws attention to experiences that established scholarship does not adequately tackle, increasing the possible ways and methods to study and approach the region, its inhabitants, and historical time frame.

In this chapter the author discusses the Anglican Communion and the Churches of the Christian East which have had a long and significant relationship both at an official level of international dialogue and at a more local level between clergy, laity, and congregations. This series of relationships has resulted in both practical assistance as well as deep theological and spiritual influence. The twentieth century saw a remarkable rapprochement between Anglicanism and Orthodoxy that left both communions changed, and this chapter outlines these general trends and focuses on two important episodes that show the depth that these relations attained. In spite of more recent developments and distance, the picture that emerges here supports the view that relations between Anglicanism and Byzantine and Oriental Orthodox communities have been formative for the respective traditions.

Chapter 1 investigates Lebanese Armenians’ triangulations and balancing acts vis-à-vis the Lebanese state, its wider Arab environment, and the Armenian Socialist Soviet Republic (ASSR) around the time of Lebanon’s independence in the mid 1940s. I pursue this inquiry by closely analyzing Armenian language newspapers published in Beirut. These often ideologically opposed newspapers, the leftist Ararad, the communist Joghovourti Tzain, the capitalist yet supporter of the Armenian Socialist Soviet Republic (ASSR) Zartonk, and the firmly right-wing nationalist Dashnak Aztag reflected the issues of interest of the day. I explore four themes. The first is Armenians’ position in and vis-à-vis the Lebanese polity as well as vis-à-vis Syria. A second concerns language, and specifically the multiple roles of Arabic and its relationship with Armenian. The next one has to do with the ambiguities of spaces relevant for Armenians in and beyond Lebanon, including the ASSR. And a last one concerns the fascinating political positioning of the church that, although conservative, felt forced to support communist Armenia and the USSR as the ASSR’s protector.

Discusses missionary activity and the creation of churches outside the boundaries of the Roman Empire during the first centuries of Christianity. The subjects covered include Armenia, Persia, the Nestorian Church in Syria, the Iberian Church in Georgia, Christianity among the Arabs, the Copts of the Nile valley, and the Church of Ethiopia. All were detached from the doctrines and customs normative in the Greek churches, but not all were Monophysite.

Focusing on the decades after the January Insurrection of 1863, this chapter shows that “religious toleration” in Russia did not extend to any manifestations of spirituality that could be considered “political.” From the state's perspective, such manifestations were utterly impermissible, since they represented both a blasphemous perversion of spiritual values and a challenge to the autocracy's monopoly on politics. The cases of Roman Catholicism (and Poles) and the Armenian Church emerge as paradigmatic in this respect. After then documenting new forms of official anticlericalism directed at all of Russia's non-Orthodox confessions, the chapter ends by considering how the entanglement of religion in ethnicity in an age of nationalism shaped discussions of toleration and religious freedom. On the whole, the analysis shows that the perceived dangers of politicized religion in the age of nationalism impeded the expansion of religious freedom in Russia.

This chapter examines an important religious dimension of Russia's Great Reforms in the 1860s. Non-Orthodox clerics and believers made use of the more open society after the death of Nicholas I (1825–55) to propose changes to Russia's religious order (especially with respect to Catholicism and Lutheranism), while developments in the Ottoman Empire made Russian statesmen more attentive to the complaints of Armenians. Statesmen also contemplated reform of the Orthodox Church itself. The figure who united these different reform efforts was interior minister Petr Valuev, who proposed a set of reforms designed to expand religious freedom in Russia. However, conservative opposition, bureaucratic inertia, and a major uprising in historic Poland in 1863 undermined his reformist efforts and left Russia with only a marginally modified religious order in the later decades of the nineteenth century. Reform efforts involving Islam and Judaism, meanwhile, had less to do with religious freedom and instead opened up space for phobias and prejudices to shape policy on in the reform era.