{"id":37658,"date":"2026-09-06T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pluriel.fuce.eu\/teaching-green-line-founding-ieic-beirut-dumbrava\/"},"modified":"2026-09-06T08:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T07:00:00","slug":"teaching-green-line-founding-ieic-beirut-dumbrava","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pluriel.fuce.eu\/en\/teaching-green-line-founding-ieic-beirut-dumbrava\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching on the Green Line: The Founding of the Institute of Islamic-Christian Studies in Beirut, by Daniela Dumbrav\u0103"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In an open-access article published on 6 September 2026 in the journal Religions<\/em> (MDPI), Daniela Dumbrav\u0103, a researcher at the Institute for the History of Religions of the Romanian Academy (Bucharest), traces the founding of the Institute of Islamic-Christian Studies<\/strong><\/a> (IEIC) at Saint Joseph University of Beirut<\/strong><\/a> (USJ), now directed by Roula Talhouk<\/strong><\/a>. The article draws on previously unpublished sources: Dominique de Menil’s correspondence with Andr\u00e9 Scrima and with Augustin Dupr\u00e9 La Tour, the letters exchanged between the latter two, and the minutes of the Institute’s governing councils (1977\u20131988).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the outset of the Lebanese civil war, close to the demarcation line that would come to be known as the Green Line, USJ opened a Department of Islamic-Christian Studies in November 1977, which became an Institute in 1980\u20131981: the first university programme in the Middle East devoted exclusively to Islamic-Christian studies. Courses were taught on a strictly equal footing by pairs of Muslim and Christian professors, before a deliberately mixed audience. The founding team brought together two Sunni Muslim scholars, Yusuf Ibish (American University of Beirut) and Hisham Nashab\u00e9 (Makassed Foundation), and two Christians, the Romanian Orthodox archimandrite Andr\u00e9 Scrima and the Jesuit Augustin Dupr\u00e9 La Tour, then a dean at USJ. The collector and patron Dominique de Menil, founder of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, funded the project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The article reconstructs the project’s educational architecture, its funding by the Menil Foundation and later by the Rothko Chapel (30,000 dollars a year from 1977), and the logistics that carried it through the war: money transfers, letters entrusted to travellers, relays through Rhodes and Larnaca. The author sees it as a private, spiritually grounded counterpart to the human-rights diplomacy of the Carter presidency, a convergence later institutionalised in the Carter\u2013Menil Human Rights Foundation (1986), while stressing the initiative’s critical independence, evident in Scrima’s caustic remarks on “human rights” rhetoric. The theology of encounter formulated by Dominique de Menil can be summed up in one line: neither proselytism nor syncretism, with each believer becoming more fully themselves through contact with the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Built on the cross-checking of four series of archives, this “documentary microhistory”, as the author calls it, is offered as a first survey, which the systematic edition of these documents, now in preparation, will make it possible to verify and take further.<\/p>\n\n\n\n