Fragments of a Liturgical World: Secularism, Religious Allochthony, and Middle Eastern Christianity in the Netherlands

In this paper, I examine debates among Aramaic-speaking Christian refugees in the Netherlands over the fragmentation of the Syriac Orthodox liturgical tradition in diaspora. Under the pressures of Dutch integration policy and the politics of secular recognition, Syriac liturgy is rapidly losing its significance as the central axis of Syriac Orthodox social life and kinship-relations. As such, it has become the contentious site of Dutch-Syriac debates over how to be religiously, culturally, and ethnically distinct despite the narrative binary of Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East that dominates Dutch multiculturalism discourse. Every week, in the eastern Dutch cities of Enschede and Hengelo, committed groups of second-generation Dutch-Syriac women and men congregate at their churches to practice singing the weekly liturgy in classical Syriac, an ancient dialect of Aramaic, with its melodic cycle of hymns and prayers. What they sing, and how they decide to sing it, has become a site for transforming religious subjectivities and political identities, a transformation that reflects a condition of rupture, fragmentation, and the pressure to integrate into Dutch society. Dutch Syriacs contend not only with the violent disjunctures of ethnic cleansing, migration, and assimilation in diaspora, but also with the fragments of European Christianity that remain embedded in the forms of European secular modernity.  Thus, I consider Syriac Orthodox Christianity in relation to the religious sensibilities that animate Dutch secularity, and how religious identity is bound up with kinship, trauma, longing, and love.