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ABSTRACT
The article sheds light on the intellectual biography and theology of Khrīsṭufūrus Jibāra (d. 1901), a Christian Eastern Orthodox archimandrite who had a falling out with the church because of his controversial beliefs. Jibāra was born in Damascus and lived in Beirut, Cairo, Moscow, New York and Boston. He believed that harmonization between Christianity, Judaism and Islam would provide a remedy for religious conflicts and was a precondition for peace. Living in the second half of the nineteenth century, Jibāra developed a unique political theology that was shaped against a background of religious conflicts in Greater Syria, the Ottoman state policy of Pan-Islamism, and the global religious reaction to secularism. Influenced by ancient anti-Trinitarian Christian traditions and by contemporary puritan Unitarian theology, he developed a doctrine that he called ‘the straight path’, which challenged traditional Islam, traditional Christianity and secularism. His unique views shed light on the transreligious postulations of the reformist Islamic movement and present an exceptional attempt to reform Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Riḍā, ‘Khrīsṭufūrus Jibāra’.
2 All translations from Arabic are my own.
3 Riḍā, Tārīkh Muḥammad ʿAbduh, 1: 828
4 Riḍā, ‘Khrīsṭufūrus Jibāra’, 480.
5 In her words, ‘the scholar (ʿālim) and/or the man of letters (adīb) morphed into the journalist (ṣiḥāfī) and/or the public writer (kātib ʿāmm)’. See Hamzah, ‘Making of the Arab Intellectual’, 1.
6 Although Jibāra repeatedly indicated his intention to include Judaism in his harmonization of monotheism, he focused primarily on Islam and Christianity.
7 Such as Hourani, Arabic Thought; Sharabi, Arab Intellectuals; Khadduri, Political Trends; Hanssen and Weiss, Arabic Thought; Makdisi, Age of Coexistence; Hill, Utopia and Civilization. The only published work that acknowledges Jibāra's intellectual contribution did so in the context of discussing influences on Muḥammad ʿAbduh. See Kateman, Muḥammad ʿAbduh, 93–95.
8 Khuri-Makdisi, Eastern Mediterranean, 15–34; Fahrenthold, Between the Ottomans and the Entente, 14–30.
9 For discussion on theories of nationalism in the context of the Middle East, see Suleiman, Arabic Language, 16–37.
10 I use ‘secularism’ as a heuristic device to indicate all ideologies that adopt nonreligious ideas in their construction of the social and the political. I use the adjective ‘secular’ to depict all scholars who adopt a nonreligious orientation in imagining the social and the political.
11 Maʿlūf, Dawānī al-Quṭūff, 528.
12 Houghton, Neely's History, 700; Wahrmund, Lesebuch in neu-arabischer Sprache, 20; Maʿluf, Dawānī al-Quṭūff, 528; de Tarrazi, Tāʾrīkh al-ṣiḥāfa al-ʿArabiyya, 4:168–169.
13 Guetté, Kitāb ḥaqāʾiq al-urthūdhuksiyya; Jibāra, Taʿlīm wajīz.
14 Guetté, Kitāb ḥaqāʾiq al-urthūdhuksiyya, introduction.
15 Jibāra, Taʿlīm wajīz, 11.
16 Yūsuf al-ʿArbīlī and Jibāra were acquainted with the same missionaries who helped the al-ʿArbīlī family emigrate to the United States. On the history of this family, see Jacobs, ‘Arbeely Family Album’.
17 Maʿluf, Dawānī al-Quṭūff, 528; Orfalea, Arab Americans, 3–4.
18 Anṭūn, ‘Khrīsṭufūrus Jibāra’; Casiday, Orthodox Christian World, 339; Orthodox History, ‘History of the Antiochian Representation Church’.
19 Jibāra, Wifāq al-adyān, app. 2–3.
20 For the theological debates that erupted in the late nineteenth century between Protestants, Orthodox and Catholics in Syria, see Womack, Protestants, 85–142.
21 Jibāra, Wifāq al-adyān, app. 3
22 Ibid., app. 3–4.
23 It is worth noting that this argument is very similar to the argument that Protestant missionaries were making during this period.
24 Ibid., app. 6–7.
25 Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, 1–26.
26 Jabara, ‘Ghrīghūriyūs Jibāra muṭrān Ḥamā’.
27 For more details on modern Arianism and Unitarianism, see Wilbur, History of Unitarianism, 316–466; Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, 62–181; for select sources on the activity of Protestant missionaries in the Middle East, see Grafton, Piety, Politics, and Power, 59–106; Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven, 51–102.
28 Jibāra, Wifāq al-adyān, app. 16.
29 It is not clear whether his recall from Russia was related to his ideas. A year before his death, Jibāra indicated that he had been called back because of a letter he had written to clerics in Syria, in which he asked for an Arab to be appointed patriarch instead of the Greek patriarch who had been appointed to the position. The Greek patriarch read the letter, called Jibāra back, and accused him of financial mismanagement, leaving him without an important position. See Anṭūn, ‘Khrīsṭufūrus Jibāra’.
30 Jibāra, Wifāq al-adyān, app. 22–23.
31 All these three intellectuals were progressive journalists from Greater Syria who were critical of traditional churches. For more details about their intellectual biographies, see Hourani, Arabic Thought, 99–102, 195–196; Abu-ʿUksa, ‘Fransis al-Marrash’,
32 Nafīr Sūriyā has been published recently in English translation. See al-Bustānī, Nafīr Sūriyā; idem, Clarion of Syria. For textual and contextual analysis of al-Bustānī's discourse in Nafīr Sūriyā, see Sheehi, ‘Inscribing the Arab Self’; Makdisi, ‘After 1860’.
33 Houghton, Neely's History, 700.
34 Jibāra indicated that he had already completed ‘most’ of this treatise in 1876, and he published it in February 1895. See Jibāra, Wifāq al-adyān, 31.
35 Jibāra, Wifāq al-adyān, 9.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., 7–9.
38 Ibid., 23–24.
39 Ibid., 15. For the English translation of qur’anic verses, I use al-Hilali and Khani, The Noble Quran.
40 New Testament verses are quoted from Moffatt 1913.
41 Jibāra, Wifāq al-adyān, 16–17, app. 21.
42 Ibid., 34–35.
43 Ibid., 39.
44 Ibid., 39–43.
45 Ibid., 49–55.
46 Ibid., 4–7.
47 Ibid., 10, 14.
48 Ibid., 15.
49 Aydin, Idea of the Muslim World, 65–98.
50 For discussion on the influence of new technology on the concepts of space and time in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and Egypt, see Davison, Essays, 133–165; Khuri-Makdisi, Eastern Mediterranean, 35–93; Barak, On Time, 21–52; Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks, 45–65; Ayalon, Arabic Print Revolution, 18–32.
51 Jibāra, Unity in Faiths.
52 Dial, ‘Bibliography’.
53 Hollinger, ‘”Wonderful True Visions”’, 214.
54 Barrows, ‘Preface’, vii–ix.
55 Barrows, World's Parliament of Religions, 1: 110
56 For the reception of this affair in the United States, see Biblical World, ‘Comparative-Religion Notes’.
57 Kitagawa, ‘1893 World's Parliament of Religions’, 175.
58 Al-Afghānī, Fī ibṭal madhhab al-dahriyyīn.
59 Al-Bashīr, 22 July 1886.
60 See his collection: Jones, Chorus of Faith.
61 Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, ‘Jenkin Lloyd Jones’; Historical Dictionary, 531–532.
62 Barrows, World's Parliament of Religions, 1: 137.
63 Ibid., 137–138; Seager, ‘Eastern Orthodox Delegation’, 201.
64 Seager, ‘Eastern Orthodox Delegation’, 178.
65 Houghton, Neely's History, 699.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid., 700.
68 Trumbull, ‘Parliament of Religions’, 352.
69 Jibāra, ‘This Is the Reply’, 32.
70 Jibāra, ‘Syrian Patriarch’, 1893b
71 For a comparison between the English and Arabic versions, see Houghton, Neely's History, 699; also Jibāra, Unity in Faiths, 32; Jibāra, ‘This Is the Reply’, 31.
72 Anṭūn, ‘Khrīsṭufūrus Jibāra’, 103.
73 Houghton, Neely's History, 700.
74 Abu-Laban, Olive Branch, 131; Namee, ‘Fr. Christopher Jabara’; idem, ‘First Antiochian Chapel’.
75 Namee, ‘Fr. Christopher Jabara’.
76 Barrows, World-Pilgrimage, 299.
77 Ibid.
78 Ḥabīb, Al-suyūf al-battāra, 5–6.
79 Ibid., 19.
80 Ibid., 6, 17.
81 In Shahādat al-Ḥaqq, Jibāra repeated the same contentions he had raised in his treatise. See, for example, Jibāra, ‘Ayna al-Injīl’. Christian clerics also responded defensively, as in the case of the bishop of Beirut, Gerassimos Messara, who reacted to a letter Jibāra sent to the patriarch of Alexandria in 1901 (Kateman, Muḥammad ʿAbduh, 95).
82 Ḥabīb, Al-suyūf al-battāra, 33; Jibāra, Shahādat al-Ḥaqq.
83 Ḥabīb, Al-suyūf al-battāra, 34, 65.
84 Ibid., 35.
85 Ibid., 73.
86 Jibāra, Wifāq al-adyān, app. 17–18.
87 Ṣarrūf and Nimr, ‘Al-tasāhul al-dīnī’, 275.
88 Ṣarrūf and Nimr, ‘Barāʾat al-Injīl’.
89 See al-Rīhanī, Al-Rīḥāniyyāt, 232–246.
90 Jibāra, ‘Al-tawfīq bayn aṣḥāb al-adyān’, 366–367.
91 Ṣarrūf and Nimr, ‘Al-Muqtaṭaf’.
92 Al-Rīhanī, ‘Al-tasāhul al-dīnī’.
93 For Anṭūn's intellectual biography, see Reid, Odyssey; Hourani, Arabic Thought, 245–259.
94 Anṭūn, ‘Khrīsṭufūrus Jibāra’, 104.
95 Ibid., 105.
96 The debate took place on the pages of Anṭūn's journal, Al-Jāmiʿa, and on the pages of Al-Manār. The articles were collected and published in two collections: Anṭūn, Ibn Rushd, 85–227; ʿAbduh, ‘Al-iḍṭihād’. For an English translation see Anṭūn, ‘Meaning of “Tolerance”’.
97 Jibāra, Wifāq al-adyān, 55–56.
98 Kateman, Muḥammad ʿAbduh, 93–95, 243–244.
99 Riḍā, ‘Khrīsṭufūrus Jibāra’, 480.
100 Antūn, ‘Khrīsṭufūrus Jibāra’, 106.
101 Riḍā, ‘Khrīsṭufūrus Jibāra’, 480.
102 Anṭūn, ‘Khrīsṭufūrus Jibāra’, 106.
103 Schmitt, Political Theology, 36.