Embracing the Divine: Passion and Politics in the Christian Middle East by Akram Fouad Khater (review)

The eighteenth century was a period of decisive changes for the Maronites of Mount Lebanon, mainly as a result of the intensified contacts with the Roman Catholic Church. In 1736 a council was held in Mount Lebanon with the aim of reorganizing the Maronite Church according to the instructions of the Holy See. The proposed reforms included a major reorganization of the clerical offices, affecting the authority of the bishops and the patriarch, and a limitation of the influence of lay notables on church affairs.

The Lebanese council did not immediately bring about the desired results, but rather inaugurated a period of severe power struggles in the Maronite community. In the midst of these turbulences, a young girl named Hindiyya emerged in the Maronite community in Aleppo, claiming to have visions of Jesus that evolved into conversations and eventually physical “union.” According to Hindiyya, Jesus assigned her the task to found her own confraternity, and to this end she moved to Mount Lebanon in 1750. From the onset, Hindiyya, who had received a thorough religious education from the Latin missionaries, was put under the tutelage of the Jesuits, but she dissociated herself from them after her arrival in Mount Lebanon. The Jesuits started a fierce campaign against her, denouncing her as a fraud and a threat to Church orthodoxy, but Maronite clerics—especially Patriarch Yusuf Istifan—took her under their wing. With the help of the leading Maronite notables, they enabled her to found her own monastic community in Bkerki.

Rome rather grudgingly accepted the foundation of Hindiyya’s Order of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, but the death of two girls in the 1770s attributed to irregularities in the convent led to an investigation. The case caused great controversies in the Maronite community, ultimately resulting in the punishment of Hindiyya and the dissolution of her order. This intervention showed the power of the Holy See to impose its will on the Maronites, but it also revealed the fragmentation of the Maronite community that was experiencing a painful process of transformation.

The Hindiyya affair has been studied by Bernard Heyberger in his meticulous Hindiyya; mystique et criminelle 1720–1798 (Paris, 2001). Now this new study has appeared in English by Akram Fouad Khater. This book, too, closely unravels the events of the Hindiyya affair, the many intrigues surrounding Hindiyya, and the texts written by her. Khater situates the events in two broader perspectives that should provide a framework for interpretation: the process of reform instigated by the Holy See and the Maronite clergy, and the impact of gender relations within the Maronite community.

Although these two aspects certainly played an important role in the unfolding of the affair, it seems that they are rather broad to give an adequate insight into the course of events. For instance, the process of reform and the interaction among the Maronites, the Holy See, and the Latin missionaries brought forth a new form of religiosity, which gave Hindiyya the opportunity to develop her own visionary spirituality and shape it into a religious order. Still, her emergence can be seen both as a result of this process of reform and as an expression of resistance against the efforts of Rome and the missionaries to impose their rationalized, institutionalized form of religiosity and to support a local, Maronite form of religiosity.

To explain Hindiyya’s rise as an expression of female emancipation is at first sight plausible, especially since her typical feminine way of presenting her visionary experiences aroused typical masculine fears in church institutions. However, Hindiyya’s escape from social constraints in Aleppo can hardly be seen as a form of social liberation, since from the start she was put under male surveillance. In Mount Lebanon she was not only supervised but also protected and supported by the representatives of...