Georgetown University: School of Foreign Service in Qatar

Old friends and new colleagues, Georgetown professors Jo Ann Moran Cruz and Haifaa Khalafallah are finishing work on a book that studies the use of religion to legitimize political rule. In addition to the in-depth research conducted by the authors, the book entitled “Religion and the State in the Christian and Islamic Worlds” will be a culmination of a collegiate friendship, rich classroom interactions and a supportive campus in Qatar.

As part of her doctoral research, Khalafallah compared how Islam and Christianity dealt with political thought and the state. Khalafallah discussed the research with her mentor, Moran Cruz. Interested in the topic, Moran Cruz suggested that they co-teach a course together at the Georgetown University McGhee Center of Mediterranean Studies in Alanya, Turkey. So in 2001, Moran Cruz and Khalafallah taught a course exploring the use of religion in justifying governments and states in the Mediterranean region.

“We were intrigued by the variety of misunderstandings across the two cultures on the issue of religious justifications of political authority,” Moran Cruz said.

Khalafallah recalls, “Both of us and our students started realizing how applicable the subject is today. We also saw the links between religion and political systems in Islam and Christianity. So at the end of the semester we decided to explore writing a book that summarizes our discussions and findings.”

“This kind of comparative study has never been done before; it is a demanding study, grounded in the primary sources, attentive to the secondary sources and the historiographical debates, and moving back and forth from Islam to Christianity. We hope to write it in such a way as to make it accessible to both a scholarly and a general audience,” said Moran Cruz.

The authors started working on the outline from different locations after their joint course in Alanya ended. Afterwards, Moran Cruz returned to Georgetown University in Washington, DC, while Khalafallah went to the United Kingdom. In order to proceed further, the authors needed to be in the same geographical setting – ideally somewhere in the Middle East. Opportunity presented itself in the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar where Moran Cruz and Khalafallah accepted teaching positions.

“It was so important for us to be together in the same campus. Our discussions and daily interactions at the SFS-Qatar campus were priceless for carrying out this book. The campus community of faculty, staff, and students gave us the framework and support to carry our research forward. We also benefitted from exchanging thoughts with people living in this area,” Khalafallah said.

Moran Cruz and Khalafallah were able to work through a complete outline for the book as well as to compare and link the chapters they had already written. “We advanced the book by several chapters, although we still have perhaps half of the book to write. The research grants that we have received from SFS-Qatar will be especially helpful in allowing us to meet up to work together, as well as enabling us to hire research assistants to help with the truly very large amount of material that we are going through,” said Moran Cruz.

In writing this book, Moran Cruz and Khalafallah conducted research into coinciding Islamic and Christian historical experiences by juxtaposing a variety of primary sources. In the Muslim case, the author used mainly primary sources which include historical chronicles, fiqh works, and hadith. In the western case, Moran Cruz used primary texts on the various church-state conflicts in the medieval period, the early modern religious wars and religious persecution.

“One of our discoveries this fall was the extent to which the Umayyad polity shared issues of legitimacy with the post-Roman, Germanic states in the West. In both cases, the religious authorities, using very different rhetoric and strategies, judged the political authorities to be illegitimate. This large swath of territories from Damascus through Byzantium along to Celtic England, extending from the 6th-8th centuries therefore share a common characteristic, viz. that the religious authorities of the time did not consider these governments legitimate. The strategies are different, but the final stances toward the political leaders are strikingly similar,” explained Moran Cruz.

The authors also thought more deeply with regard to the founding decades in both the Islamic and Christian traditions and the extent to which consensus, rather than hierarchy, informed both traditions.

“We want it to provide a better understanding of the common experiences, as well as differences between the Christian West and the Central lands of Islam, in the Mediterranean and its surrounds,” said Khalafallah. “We must know the history and origins of our political thought.”