ANR PredicMO (2024-2028)

Le programme conçoit le Moyen-Orient comme un espace d’élaboration mais aussi de circulation, d’importation ou d’exportation de modes de prédication. Les territoires concernés par l’enquête (Égypte, Israël, Palestine, Jordanie, Liban, Syrie, Irak) ont tous connu ce phénomène d’ampleur. PredicMO se concentre sur ses réinventions, ses redéfinitions et sur son rôle dans la (re)configuration des environnements religieux et politiques du Moyen-Orient depuis la fin du XIX^e siècle.  Le programme envisage les influences, émulations et concurrences présentes dans les discours de prédication et leurs stratégies spatiales, avec une attention particulière aux trajectoires transnationales des acteurs, des flux financiers et des idées, aux médias et à la circulation de modèles.

L’équipe de PredicMO se compose de 25 membres d’horizon disciplinaires variés (histoire, anthropologie, science politique, islamologie) et émane d’un partenariat entre trois institutions l’IREMAM, l’École française de Rome (EFR) et l’Institut français du Proche-Orient (Ifpo) en collaboration avec le Mucem. Le programme de recherche se structure autour de 3 axes :
- Modèles et lexiques de la prédication (coord. N. Neveu).
- Cartographie de la prédication et des prédicateurs : circulation et réseaux transnationaux (coord. K. Sanchez Summerer).
- Mise en scène de la prédication (coord. M-L Boursin et S. Mervin).

Les trois axes s’articulent autour d’une même préoccupation méthodologique : celle d’une approche décloisonnée de l’étude des trois religions monothéistes, par l’intermédiaire d’un objet commun : la prédication, et via l’objectif d’établir une « grammaire » de ce dispositif. PredicMO, au-delà des apports théoriques centraux à l’étude du fait religieux contemporain qu’est l’étude de la prédication, est un espace d’évaluation critique et de réflexion méthodologique. Outre ses apports théoriques, les publications et la valorisation scientifiques, PredicMO aboutira à la mise en ligne d’un dictionnaire des mots de la prédication, d’un catalogue en ligne de ses sources et d’une cartographie des itinéraires des prédicateurs. La collaboration avec le Mucem conduira à l’intégration de certaines pièces de la recherche-collecte aux collections du musée mais également à l’élaboration d’une exposition itinérante.

27-29 mars 2024, Mucem, Marseille : colloque de lancement de l'ANR PredicMO, "Les grammaires de la prédication. Lexique, cartographie, mise en scène (Moyen-Orient, XIX^e-XX^Ie siècles)" / International Conference 'Grammars of Preaching: lexis, mapping, staging (Middle East, 19th-21st centuries)'. En partenariat avec l'Ifpo (Institut français du Proche-Orient) le Mucem et l'École française de Rome.

14 mai 2024, 14h-16h, CET, MMSH, Aix-en-Provence et en ligne : première séance du séminaire mensuel 2024-2025 « Collecter pour la cartographie et le dictionnaire ».

24 juin 2024, 14h-16h, CET, MMSH, Aix-en-Provence et en ligne : seconde séance du séminaire mensuel 2024-2025 « Enquête-collecte et outils partagés ».

24 septembre 2024, 13h30-15h30, médiathèque de la MMSH, salle Seurat, Aix-en-Provence et en ligne. Pour cette troisième séance de son séminaire mensuel, PredicMo accueille Matthew Kuiper, historien de l’islam et spécialiste de la da’wa. Sa présentation intitulée "Missionary Preaching in Islam: A Global and Historical Perspective" analysera les différents mécanismes par lesquels l’islam est devenu une religion mondiale, en soulignant l’émergence de mouvements missionnaires modernes. 

22 octobre 2024, 13h00-15h00, médiathèque de la MMSH, salle Seurat, Aix-en-Provence et en ligne. Séminaire mensuel : « Cartographie de la prédication et des prédicateurs : défis, outils et résultats visuels potentiels ». La séance portera sur le phénomène de cartographie de la prédication et des prêcheurs, ses buts, les enjeux méthodologiques de la collecte des données et les potentiels outils visuels pour traduire ces phénomènes cartographiques. Elle accueillera (en ligne) Pim van Bree (Digital Humanities, Lab1100, La Haye) et Geert Kessels (Historien, Lab1100, La Haye), et présentera les différentes traductions visuelles potentielles pour différentes configurations.

27 novembre 2024, 9h00-17h45, MucemLab, Marseille. Journée enquête-collecte PredicMO

9 décembre 2024, 13h-16h, médiathèque de la MMSH, salle Seurat, Aix-en-Provence et en ligne. Séminaire mensuel, la séance s’articulera autour de deux temps : un atelier au cours duquel les membres du programme discuteront des enjeux de la cartographie de la prédication à partir de leurs terrains et objets de recherche : que peut-on cartographier ? Quels sont les enjeux de la cartographie pour nos questionnements de recherche ? Ensuite, Thomas Pierret (CNRS, AMU, IREMAM) animera une discussion autour de l'article de Jamal Malik "Fiqh al-Da'wa: the Emerging Standardization of Islamic Proselytism", paru dans Die Welt des Islams, en 2018.

13 janvier 2025, formation et séminaire, 10h-15h30, médiathèque de la MMSH, salle Seurat, Aix-en-Provence et en ligne.
- 10h à 12h : formation à Zotero concernant l’usage collaboratif pour l’ANR, animée par Véronique Ginouvès (CNRS, MMSH), Charlotte Gasc (IDEAS) et Annalaura Turiano (IREMAM).

- 13h à 15h30, deux temps d’échange :
1/ Une réflexion sur les objets de la prédication et leur (éventuelle) collecte à partir de nos terrains et objets de recherche.  
2/ Une discussion autour de deux articles portant sur les liens entre espace et prédication, qui sera animée par Emir Mahieddin (CéSor).

10 février 2025, 13h-15h, médiathèque de la MMSH, salle Seurat et en ligne. Séminaire mensuel : Collaborations entre les programmes ANR et perspectives de travail : la deuxième séance du séminaire PredicMO 2025 est consacrée à une présentation du programme ANR Liv-rel par Anouk Cohen (CNRS, LESC) et Emir Mahieddin (CNRS, CéSor), ainsi que du programme ANR SHS Religis par Norig Neveu (CNRS, IREMAM). Ceci nous permettra de réfléchir aux collaborations potentielles qui pourraient être établies avec PredicMO sous la forme, par exemple, d'ateliers de recherche partagés. Ces présentations seront suivies d'une discussion sur l'article de Adam S. Ferziger, Beyond Bais Ya’akov: Orthodox Outreach and the Emergence of Haredi Women as Religious Leaders (2015) animée par Lisa Antéby-Yémini (CNRS, IDEAS).

13 mars 2025, 15h-17h, médiathèque de la MMSH, salle Seurat, Aix-en-Provence et en ligne. Séminaire mensuel. La séance s'articulera autour de deux temps : une présentation de Febe Armanios, (Professeure d’histoire au Middlebury College) autour de ses travaux sur le télévangélisme chrétien au Proche-Orient (résumé et bio en anglais ci-dessous) ; une lecture croisée de trois articles portant sur le « tournant matériel » dans l’étude des religions animée par Annalaura Turiano (IREMAM). 

"Salvation through the Screen: The Birth of Arab Christian Televangelism in the Middle East".

This presentation is based on Febe Armanios’s forthcoming book, Satellite Ministries: The Rise of Christian Television in the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2025). It examines the pioneers of Arab Christian televangelism in the Middle East: Elias Malki (1931-2015) and Nizar Shaheen. During the 1980s, both men preached and broadcast shows on Middle East Television (METV), the region’s first Christian channel established in Israeli-occupied South Lebanon by American evangelical George Otis (1918-2007) and later managed by media mogul Pat Robertson (1930-2023). As a Lebanese-American Pentecostal preacher, Malki introduced American-style televangelism through “The Good News,” a show that offered dramatic faith healing through television screens. Meanwhile, Shaheen, of Palestinian Arab Israeli Christian background, created “Light for All Nations,” which focused on biblical studies and Christian history. Despite their different backgrounds, the two shared similar paths: encounters with Western missionaries led to their “born-again” conversion, and time in North America enhanced their media skills and ties to Western evangelical networks. Though scholarly accounts of religious television in the region often overlook these pioneers, the two men established enduring models that shaped subsequent Christian and Islamic televangelism across the Middle East.

Febe Armanios is Professor of History at Middlebury College. She specializes in the history of Christian communities in the Middle East, especially of Egypt’s Copts, in the study of comparative religious practices, as well as food history and media studies. Armanios is the author of Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt (Oxford UP, 2011) and co-author with Boğaç Ergene of Halal Food: A History (Oxford UP, 2018). She’s now completing a book-length project on the history of Christian television (terrestrial and satellite) in the Middle East (ca. 1981-present) and has also begun research for another book project, which looks at the history of Christian food practices in Ottoman and post-Ottoman regions, including in Egypt, Cyprus, Lebanon, Greece, and Turkey.

15 avril 2025, 14h-16h, médiathèque de la MMSH, salle Seurat, Aix-en-Provence et en visioconférence. Séminaire mensuel avec : Yanwar Pribadi (Indonesian International Islamic University) et Stéphane Lacroix (Sciences Po CERI) présenteront leurs recherches en cours sur le thème "Dynamiques de la prédication islamique : regards comparés depuis l'Indonésie". La présentation sera suivie par la discussion d’un article sur les objets religieux dans les musées animée par Marie-Laure Boursin (IDEAS).

Indonesia has long been regarded as a region peripheral to Muslim communities compared to the Middle East, often seen as the ‘center’ of Islam. One possible cause of this neglect is the fact that Indonesia has for centuries seen syncretic manifestations of Islamic rituals, which do not correspond to the ‘standard’ image of Islam. Nevertheless, things have changed, firstly after the global Islamic revivalist period of the 1970s and secondly since the collapse of the authoritarian New Order administration in 1998. These periods have caused some Muslims in Indonesia to embrace more conservative and (in their view) ‘purer’ interpretations of Islam. Religious diversity in today’s Indonesia is frequently set against the background that some Indonesian Muslims have become more self-consciously Islamic – an Islamization that is both momentous and ongoing. This process has come along with a widening and fortification of religious observance.
Our presentation will attempt to address issues from the Indonesian case that seem relevant to the Predicmo project. Stéphane Lacroix will make initial comparative remarks, reflecting on his previous studies on the Middle East and his current work on Indonesia. Yanwar Pribadi will then more specifically address the ongoing transformations of Indonesian urban and rural religiosity, through a study of the pengajian - Islamic study groups that have become a prime preaching venue across the country. 

Yanwar Pribadi is a professor of anthropology of religion at Indonesian International Islamic University (UIII) and at UIN Sultan Maulana Hasanuddin Banten, Indonesia. He graduated from Leiden University (MA and PhD). Yanwar Pribadi is the author of Islam, State and Society in Indonesia: Local Politics in Madura (Routledge, 2018) and of numerous articles in edited volumes, encyclopaedias, and journals. His research interests include Muslim politics and expressions, religious networks, contemporary Islamic history, and citizenship.
 
Stéphane Lacroix is an associate professor of political science at Sciences Po, a senior researcher at Sciences Po’s Centre de Recherches Internationales (CERI) and the co-director of Sciences Po's Chair for the study of religion. His work deals with religion and politics, with a focus on the Gulf and Egypt. He is now starting a new project on Indonesia. He is the author of Awakening Islam: The Politics of Religious Dissent in Contemporary Saudi Arabia (Harvard University Press, 2011), Saudi Arabia in Transition: Insights on Social, Political, Economic and Religious Change (Cambridge University Press, 2015, with B.Haykel and T. Hegghammer), Revisiting the Arab Uprisings: The Politics of a Revolutionary Moment (Oxford University Press, 2018, with Jean-Pierre Filiu) and more recently Le crépuscule des saints: histoire et politique du salafisme en Egypte (CNRS Editions, 2024, forthcoming in English with Columbia University Press).

10 juin 2025, 13h30-16h, médiathèque de la MMSH, salle Seurat, Aix-en-Provence et en visioconférence. Lien Zoom / ID de réunion : 925 6227 6408 / Code secret : 786614

Séminaire mensuel - “Questions of truth: Comparing within and across religious missions” - Mathijs Pelkmans, London School of Economics and Political Science.

La présentation sera suivie par la discussion d'un chapitre issu de l'ouvrage collectif Digital Judaism: Jewish Negociations with Digital Media and Cultures (Routledge, 2015), animée par Sébastien Tank-Storper (CéSor).

In this paper I draw on fieldwork I carried out in the Caucasus and Central Asia, where I studied Orthodox Christian, Tablighi Muslim, and Evangelical missions, and the dynamics of religious conversion and renewal propelled by them. But instead of focusing on my empirical findings, I will use this paper to explore possibilities of comparison within and across religious missions, starting by acknowledging the formidable obstacles involved. This includes the contested nature of concepts and terms on which such comparative work could be built. My interlocutors in Kyrgyzstan and Georgia rejected the notion of ‘religion’, balked at the idea of ‘conversion’, and denied that they were ‘missionaries’. But while such terms are clearly problematic, adopting my interlocutors’ preferred alternatives would create its own problems, such as potentially confirming ‘Christian truth’ over ‘Muslim corruption’ or vice versa. But instead of attempting to solve this conundrum by developing more ‘neutral’ terms, I will instead allow the explore the biases and disagreements themselves. By tracing disagreement and dissonance in relation to such terms, I hope to illuminate the ideas of truth that speak through them and shed light on the possibilities and impossibilities of comparison within and across religious missions. 

Mathijs Pelkmans is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. A specialist of the Caucasus and Central Asia, his work explores specifically the intersection of power, knowledge, and difference. This is true of his first monograph Defending the Border: Identity, Religion, and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia (2006) which traced the social biography of the Iron Curtain, as well as his second monograph Fragile Conviction: Changing Ideological Landscapes in Urban Kyrgyzstan (2017) which explored the fate of religious and secular ideologies in contexts of intense uncertainty. His interest in the shadowy sides of knowledge is especially visible in the edited collections Ethnographies of Doubt (2013), ‘Wilful Blindness’ (2020, with J. Bovensiepen), and How People Compare (2022, with H. Walker), and is central in his ongoing work on suspicion and conspiracy theorising.

May 26–27, 2025, Institut Français in Amman, Jordan. International Conference - Crises and Preaching: Lexis, framing, timings, 19th‒21st century in the Middle East

Liste de diffusion : predicmo[at]services.cnrs.fr

PredicMO - Grammars of preaching: lexis, mapping, staging (Middle East, 19th-21st centuries)

PI: Norig Neveu (IREMAM)

Core team: Marie-Laure Boursin (IDEAS), Sabrina Mervin (IREMAM), Laura Pettinaroli (EFR), Karène Sanchez Summerer (Université de Groningue), Raphael Bories (Mucem), Matthieu Rey (Ifpo).

PredicMO (2024-2028) argues that preaching is a common element between the three Abrahamic religions, but nevertheless remains understudied in its connected and dynamic dimensions. The project seeks to establish a common ‘grammar’ of preaching, understood as a set of principles, rules, strategies, and models, along with their variations studied closely in the texts and fields. Whereas Judaism refutes its universal vocation, Islam and Christianity have placed preaching at the heart of their doctrine. Different and often competing actors and models of preaching have been deployed. The driving force behind "making people believe", preaching is understood as a mechanism embodied in the presence of an individual or a group in a given territory in order to build or consolidate a community of believers. Adopting a Weberian perspective, the programme focuses on preaching, which, with the aim of convincing, develops in a context of religious crisis, and not strictly on the cure of souls. Since the end of the nineteenth century, preaching as an internal and external device constitutive of faith experiences has been constantly remodelled. PredicMO focuses on its contemporary reinventions and redefinitions.

The programme sees the Middle East as a place where modes of preaching are not only developed but also circulated, imported and exported. The territories covered by the study (Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq) have all experienced this widespread phenomenon. PredicMO focuses on its reinventions, redefinitions and role in the (re)configuration of religious and political environments in the Middle East since the end of the nineteenth century. The programme considers the influences, emulations and competitions present in preaching discourses and their spatial strategies, with particular attention to the transnational trajectories of actors, financial flows and ideas, the media and the circulation of models.

The PredicMO team consists of 25 members, with a multidiscipliary background (history, anthropology, political science, Islamology) and partner of three institutions: IREMAM, the École française de Rome (EFR) and the Institut français du Proche-Orient (Ifpo). It collaborates with the Mucem museum. The research programme is structured around 3 subprojects:
- Models and lexis of preaching (coord. N. Neveu).
- Mapping preaching and preachers: transnational circulation and networks (coord. K. Sanchez Summerer).
- Staging preaching (coord. M-L Boursin et S. Mervin).

The three subprojects share the same methodological concern: a decompartmentalised approach to the study of the three monotheistic religions, via a common object: preaching, Its objective is to establish a 'grammar' of preaching. In addition to the theoretical contributions that the study of preaching makes to the study of contemporary religion, PredicMO provides a forum for critical evaluation and methodological reflection.

Its outputs will be a theoretical contribution to the study of preaching, publications and social impact, PredicMO will result in the online publication of a dictionary of the words used in preaching, an online catalogue of its sources and a mapping of preachers' itineraries. The collaboration with the Mucem will result into the integration of certain items from the research-collection into the museum's collections, as well as the development of a travelling exhibition.

27-29 March 2024, Mucem, Marseille: ANR PredicMO launch conference, "Les grammaires de la prédication. Lexique, cartographie, mise en scène (Moyen-Orient, XIX^e-XXI^e siècles)" / International Conference 'Grammars of Preaching: lexis, mapping, staging (Middle East, 19th-21st centuries)'. In partnership with Ifpo (Institut français du Proche-Orient), Mucem and the École française de Rome.

14 May 2024, 2pm-4pm, CET, MMSH, Aix-en-Provence and Online: first session of the 2024-2025 monthly seminar 'Collecting for mapping and for the establishment of the dictionary of preaching'.

26 June 2024, 2pm-4pm, CET, MMSH, Aix-en-Provence and Online: second session of the 2024-2025 monthly seminar "Collecting surveys and shared tools".

24 September 2024, 1:30 p.m.-3:30 p.m., MMSH media library, Seurat room, Aix-en-Provence and Online. For this third session of its monthly seminar, PredicMo welcomes Matthew Kuiper, historian of Islam and specialist in da’wa. His presentation entitled “Preaching in context: Multidisciplinary and connected approaches” will analyze the different mechanisms by which Islam became a global religion, highlighting the emergence of modern missionary movements.

22 October 2024, 1pm-3pm, MMSH, Aix-en-Provence and Online. "Mapping Preaching and Preachers: challenges, tools and potential visual output". The session will look at the phenomenon of mapping preaching and preachers, its goals, the methodological challenges of collecting data and the potential visual tools for translating these cartographic phenomena. It will welcome (online) Pim van Bree (Digital Humanities, Lab1100, The Hague) and Geert Kessels (Historian, Lab1100, The Hague), and will present the various potential visual translations for different settings.

Mailing list: predicmo[at]services.cnrs.fr