Summary
The movement of Arab Orthodox clergy and laypeople, rooted in the nineteenth century and the Nahda and extending across Ottoman Greater Syria, demanding Arabic-speaking churchmen, regional disbursement of church dues and a community say in the decisions of the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem against its domination by the Greek hierarchy (‘The House of the Priest’: A Palestinian Life (1885-1954), PDF p.19).
Details
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The fight for an Arab presence and voice within the Orthodox Church is widely acknowledged as having been closely linked to the origins of a specific Arab nationalist consciousness and movement under the Ottoman Empire and British Mandate (PDF p.20).
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Papastathis divides the Greek-Arab controversy into three stages: after the Young Turk Revolution, when the indigenous Orthodox demanded a mixed council and the Turkish Order partially fulfilled some demands without affecting Greek control; the Mandate’s formative years, when the congregation demanded reforms and the exclusion of any Greek protective right but the Administration implemented no structural reform despite its Commissions’ recommendations; and the 1930s patriarchal election, where the struggle for a new Fundamental Law failed amid the Arab Revolt, the Husseini-Nashashibi division of the Arab Orthodox camp and British hesitancy (PDF p.51-52).
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Its central demands, as articulated in Niqula Khoury and Shehadeh Khoury’s A Survey of the History of the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem (1925), reflecting the Arab Orthodox Congress in Haifa (1923): rejection of the Patriarchate’s supposed Greek character, blocking of Athenian intervention, indigenous rights over administration and financial management through a mixed council, and expanded participation of parish clergy and congregations in electing the patriarch and bishops — in the Khourys’ conclusion, an end to Greek cultural imperialism (PDF p.52, p.55).
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With Russian diplomatic and church support, the Arab Orthodox demanded the laicization of communal power structures, the gradual removal of the Greek hierarchy and the takeover of ecclesiastical power by the indigenous community (PDF p.51).
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The Greek establishment’s counter-narrative is treated in Chapter 1 §3: ‘Rum’ restricted to the Greek nation, the local Orthodox as arabophones of Greek origin, the Arab claim itself as Russian-lit phyletism, and the whole held together by Helleno-Orthodoxia — while the establishment’s official counter-strategy rested on the institution’s monastic character and Greek custodianship rights over the holy places (PDF p.60-66).
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Khoury’s Memoirs §§20–21 give the movement’s post-war organization in his telling: a mixed board with an annual budget of 30,000 French francs, embarked on in 1910 and dissolved when war was declared in 1914; the Patriarchate’s post-war refusal to re-establish it, pleading war debts; the conference in Haifa — dated July 1920 in the Memoirs, against the editors’ note that this is likely a typographical error for 1923 — which elected an executive committee and decided to write the history of the Church of Jerusalem, the task the Khoury cousins took up at their own expense (PDF p.111-112).
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The Memoirs §§24-27 and §34 give the movement’s parish-clergy wing in Khoury’s telling: the community’s insistence on his ordination against the Patriarchate’s refusal (PDF p.116-117); the Conference of Orthodox Arab Priests at Ramallah on 30th August 1932, attended by more than sixty priests from Palestine and Transjordan, whose decisions sought to strengthen the priests, reform schools, churches, waqfs and courts, and which unanimously elected Khoury secretary of its executive committee, before the Brotherhood and the lay committee broke the priests’ unity (PDF p.119-120); the editors’ note qualifies Khoury’s account of the priests’ electoral role as highly disputed and exaggerating (PDF p.120-121); and the movement’s turn outward in the 1937 Orthodox Balkan delegation (PDF p.130-131).
Related pages
‘The House of the Priest’: A Palestinian Life (1885-1954), Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre, Niqula Khoury, Shehadeh Khoury, Yaqub Farraj