ISRME Research Grants
The Institute for the Study of Religion in the Middle East (ISRME) offers small grants to individuals to support research projects focused on minority, emergent or endangered religious communities in the Middle East, Turkey or Pakistan and the relations between such communities and majority religious traditions. ISRME research grants are offered, in accordance with the core mission of the Institute, to advance scholarship on Middle Eastern religious communities, to better disseminate such scholarship, and to encourage connections between scholars and institutions working in this field.
Instructions and Eligibility Criteria
Extraordinary challenges faced by many minority religious communities in the region make this a critical time to support scholars and to disseminate knowledge about minority religious communities. We welcome proposals from any discipline relevant to the understanding of such religious communities, and we are especially eager to support interdisciplinary work. Proposals must involve fieldwork in the MENA region, Turkey or Pakistan and must engage scholars and institutions in the region.
The number and size of ISRME Research Grants is contingent on funding for the program. Grants will support direct costs for field research incurred or anticipated in 2023 or 2024. We expect most grants to be $1500 or less.
Applicants must have demonstrated significant experience and scholarly engagement with minority religious communities, and should expect to do fieldwork in the region in 2023 or 2024. Students engaged in doctoral research are especially encouraged to apply.
How to Apply:
Applicants should apply by completing the online Application for Research Support. Supporting documents should include (1) a brief cover letter summarizing the request, (2) the applicant’s c.v., and (3) a research proposal of no more than two pages including details of expenses for which support is required. There is no application deadline. Applications will be considered as they are received, and grants will be awarded when funding is available. Ordinarily we will make a determination within six weeks of receiving a completed application. We will not acknowledge incomplete or ineligible applications.
Supported Projects
Archive Digitization Project: The Emergence of New Turkish Protestant Churches
A multi-year project to collect and digitally preserve documents related to the emergence of new Protestant churches in Turkey since 1980. The project will also preserves documentary records related to key religious freedom developments during last four decades.
The Latin Catholic Church at risk: the appropriation and conversion of ecclesiastical properties during the post-Tanẓimāt and Republican eras
This project aims to determine the current legal position and status of the Latin Catholic Church in Turkey while contextualising it through an historical lens in which Church–state relations from the post-Tanẓimāt period (post-1876) into the Turkish Republican era are explored through case studies of church confiscation and conversion. Since the Ottoman conquests, Latin Catholic ecclesiastical properties have been vulnerable to expropriation and conversion into Islamic places of worship and religious spaces. These…
National Pasts and Religious Futures: Turkish Protestants and the Negotiation of Christianity in Uncertain Times
This research considers how varied and changing understandings of time– as a religious, historic, and political category – shape how TurkishProtestants practice their faith, understand who they are, and imaginewho they will be as Turkish citizens and as Christians during a periodof change and uncertainty in Turkey. The ways that TurkishProtestants, who straddle national and religious histories,speculative political futures, as well as Christian notions of change,transformation, and the end of human history, respond…
Changing Religious Landscape: Jordan 2018
One of the most remarkable hubs of contemporary religious communities in the Middle East, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is currently home to over one and a half million refugees and economic migrants from all over the Middle East. While migrants are a force of change that impacts economy and infrastructure they are also affecting Jordan’s religious and cultural landscapes. Looking closely at the Christian communities this project asks how Jordan’s religious landscape…
Christian Formation and Modes of Belonging among Turkish Protestants
This research project explores cultural formation, with special reference to modes of belonging, for three Turkish Protestant congregations in Istanbul, Turkey. Using empirical research the project will investigate how these Protestant believers with a Muslim background experience modes of belonging in everyday life and how religious and congregational practice foster Christian formation and a sense of belonging in their new context as Christians. Furthermore, how believers construct, combine and negotiate different modes of…
Sharing Abraham? Narrative Worldview, Biblical and Qur’anic Interpretation, & Comparative Theology in Turkey
While Abraham is often seen as a common starting point for dialogue among monotheistic faith communities, many approaches to “Abrahamic dialogue” do not grapple with the Abrahamic texts of Genesis and the Qur’an in enough detail for meaningful comparison. This work introduces a model for comparing particular Biblical and Qur’anic narratives, along with their use by Christians and Muslims respectively. Bristow builds on the tight connection between narrative and worldview to enable theological comparison…
Qur’anists
Since the late Nineteenth Century the idea that the Qurʾan should serve as the sole source of Islamic faith and practice has been articulated by a variety of Muslim thinkers in a variety of places. The idea itself is easily summarized: If the Qurʾan stands alone as the pure revelation of God, perfect and incomparable both in origins and transmission, then it must be the exclusive source of guidance for the faith and…
They That Remain: Syrian and Iraqi Christian Communities amid the Syria Conflict and the Rise of the Islamic State
The past decade has inaugurated a devastating new reality for the Christian minorities of Iraq and Syria. The survival of these vulnerable communities has bee jeopardized by a deadly triad composed of the security vacuum resulting from the U.S.-led war in Iraq, Islamist violence, and the consequences of despotic power. This chapter presents the current status of Christian communites in Iraq and Syria, providing brief historical background and then focusing on the…
Endangered Iraqi Religious Communities
As the Islamic State has advanced in Northern Iraq, the on-going destruction of Christian communities in Mosul has been widely publicized. Recent advances by the ID into Kurdish territory now endanger another ancient religious community, the Yazidis. In this post on Syria Comment, Matthew Barber, whose research on the Yazidis is partially supported by the ISRME, details the humanitarian tragedy and cultural destruction unfolding in the Yazidi homelands. Below is a link to…
