‘Now My Life in Syria Is Finished’: Case Studies on Religious Identity and Sectarianism in Narratives of Syrian Christian Refugees in Austria

ABSTRACT

Using semi-structured life story interviews with Syrian Christian refugees in Austria, this article investigates the impact on identity of the conflict in Syria and the resulting act of seeking refuge outside Syria. It suggests that the sectarian dynamics of the war affect religious minorities in particular, and the method of using biographical case studies allows an analysis of how the sectarianization discourse is used by interviewees to construct their autobiographical narratives of life as refugees. The results, taken from four case studies, show that in each case, religion is a strong marker, providing a framework for self-interpretation in a period of change and/or disruption. In most cases, post-flight identity as a matter of ‘translocational’ positioning is constructed within the framework of sectarianism. The argument of the article is twofold: first, sectarianism provides a setting for Syrian Christians that is appropriated through diverse biographical patterns. Second, sectarianism as a narrative strategy is modelled by and responds to contexts in the host society. The results of this study aim to offer important suggestions for understanding the particular experience of Christian refugees settling in the European diaspora.

KEYWORDS:

• Identity
• narrative interviews
• refugees
• Syrian Christians
• Syriac Orthodox Christians
• sectarianism

Acknowledgements

A first draft of this paper was presented at the Annual Conference of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) held at the London School of Economics and Political Science, 23–26 June 2015. My thanks are due to Lise Paulsen Galal for important comments on a first version of this article, the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, to my interviewees and numerous other anonymous people from the Syriac Orthodox Church in Vienna for helping me with my fieldwork.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCiD

Andreas Schmoller http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6830-2246

Notes

1. One might argue that the patriarch will tend not to set the estimations of Christian emigrants too high because he is one of the remaining representatives in Syria who retains his political leadership, which is symbolically dependent on the number of the group he represents.

2. Because I do not have language skills in Arabic and Aramaic, the interviews were conducted in English and in one case partly in German. The decision not to use a translator was based on the methodological approach of having open autobiographical interviews where most of my questions were not prepared but generated in the process. Understanding the interviewee was thus essential to me. The interviewees were aged between 19 and 35 years. Refugees older than that were often open to be interviewed but did not have sufficient proficiency in English, French or German. Being fully aware that autobiographical interviews would benefit from being conducted in one's mother tongue, conducting the interviews in a Western language is compatible with the chosen approach of translocational positionality.

3. All quotations from Schütze in this article have been translated into English by myself.

Additional information

Funding

This work was accomplished within the funded project ‘Narratives of Diaspora: Oriental Christians from the Middle East in Austria’, which was supported by the Oesterreichische Nationalbank, Anniversary Fund [grant number 15.825].