Teaching on the Green Line: Dominique de Menil, André Scrima, Augustin Dupré La Tour, and the Making of the Institut d’études islamo-chrétiennes in Beirut: The Evidence of Their Unpublished Correspondence (1975–1991)

Abstract

At the onset of the Lebanese civil war, within a Jesuit-run university in Beirut beside the demarcation line later known as the Green Line, the first academic programme devoted exclusively to Islamic-Christian studies was created in defiance of the surrounding violence. The Département—later to be known as the Institut—d’études islamo-chrétiennes at the Université Saint-Joseph was unique in its commitment to fostering reciprocal understanding between Muslim and Christian scholars. This initiative, spearheaded by a collaborative faculty of two religious traditions, sought to establish an unparalleled level of institutional integration within a Middle Eastern curriculum. The present article is based on four collections of unpublished sources, namely the correspondence of Dominique de Menil with André Scrima (CPS.MEN 1–70) and of Augustin Dupré La Tour with de Menil (CPS.DLT 1–17), the minutes of the governing councils (1977–1988), and the Dupré La Tour–Scrima correspondence (1976–1998). The article employs this material to reconstruct the project’s educational and conceptual architecture, its financing through the Menil Foundation and the Rothko Chapel, and the wartime logistics of couriers and money transfers that sustained it. This article argues that the initiative was a private, spiritually grounded counterpart to the public human-rights diplomacy of the Carter presidency. This convergence was later institutionalised in the Carter–Menil Human Rights Foundation, even as the initiative itself remained critically independent of that public diplomacy, as Scrima’s caustic assessments of “droits de l’homme” rhetoric demonstrate.

1. Introduction

On 30 January 1979, André Scrima, a Romanian Orthodox monk, was compelled to suspend his regular teaching activities in Beirut due to incessant shelling and kidnappings. In a concise and telegraphic style, Scrima conveyed to his American correspondent an assessment of the state of the enterprise they had collaboratively established: “Département islamo-chrétien. Oui, à l’évidence, on a visé juste en le créant: on est même allé au-devant de l’événement. (L’Islam, aujourd’hui-demain…)” [Islamic-Christian Department. Yes, evidently, we aimed true in creating it: we even went out ahead of the event. (Islam, today-tomorrow…)]1. The “event” ahead of which the founders believed they had moved was the return of Islam to the centre of world politics. This period was marked by the Iranian revolution, which was in its climactic weeks at the time. The correspondent was Dominique de Menil (1908–1997), the Houston collector, patron, and founder of the Rothko Chapel. Her financial support, encouragement, and personal presence had made the Beirut experiment possible.

The institution under discussion, the Département d’études islamo-chrétiennes of the Université Saint-Joseph (USJ) in Beirut, was inaugurated in November 1977 and was erected in 1980–1981 as the Institut d’études islamo-chrétiennes (IEIC). It represented the inaugural academic undertaking in the Middle East dedicated exclusively to the study of Islamic-Christian subjects. The curriculum was designed and delivered in strict confessional parity by paired Muslim and Christian professors before a deliberately mixed audience. Its founding team joined two Sunni Muslim scholars—Yusuf Ibish, then professor at the American University of Beirut (AUB), and Hisham Nashabé, director of the educational institutions of the Makassed Foundation—with two Christian ones: André Scrima (1925–2000), archimandrite of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, former representative of Patriarch Athenagoras at the Second Vatican Council and spiritual inspirer of the monastery of Deir el-Harf, then professor at the USJ; and the Jesuit Augustin Dupré La Tour (1927–2020), dean of the USJ’s Faculté de sciences religieuses.2

The present article constitutes a study of how this institution was imagined, funded, and sustained through the Lebanese civil war, based overwhelmingly on unpublished sources. These include the correspondence between Dominique de Menil and André Scrima, the letters of Augustin Dupré La Tour to Dominique de Menil, the typescript minutes of the governing bodies of the Département/Institut, and the parallel correspondence between Dupré La Tour and Scrima. The following documents, which are described in detail below, have never been edited or systematically exploited. For the first time, they allow for a documentary reconstruction of three orders of fact that the printed record leaves almost entirely in the dark. These are the educational and conceptual choices that defined the programme; the financial mechanisms—cashier’s checks smuggled through wartime postal relays, an annual Rothko Chapel subvention with a personal allocation for Scrima, German mission agencies covering deficits—that sustained it; and the dense logistics of travel, couriers, and bank transfers binding Beirut to Paris and Houston.

A fourth order of fact is proposed to provide a framework for the remaining three. The decade of the project’s founding and consolidation coincided with the period in which human rights became, in Samuel Moyn’s phrase, “the last utopia” of Western politics (Moyn 2010), and in which a US president made them, for a time, the declared soul of United States foreign policy. Dominique de Menil’s involvement in Beirut was consistent with the human rights mission she was concurrently undertaking at the Rothko Chapel. This mission would subsequently intersect with Jimmy Carter’s post-presidential endeavours in the Carter-Menil Human Rights Foundation (1986). Concurrently, the Carter Doctrine of January 1980, which redefined the broader Persian Gulf region as a zone of vital American interest to be defended “by any means necessary, including military force”, delineated the state-political context against which this private, spiritual diplomacy must be interpreted. The present study examines the correspondence between de Menil and Scrima in order to observe how the protagonists negotiated the specified horizon at the level of individual letters. In this regard, de Menil adopted a hopeful approach, while Scrima employed a corrosive irony towards the “slogan fort maniable des ‘droits de l’Homme’”. His irony did not, however, prevent him from documenting, at first hand and at real risk, the condition of Palestinian internees in South Lebanon. The argument is structured in seven steps. Following a presentation of the sources (Section 2), the article undertakes a reconstruction of the genesis of the “projet islamo-chrétien” between Houston and Beirut (Section 3), the founding and pedagogical constitution of the Département (Section 4), the funding mechanisms (Section 5), and the wartime logistics of communication and travel (Section 6). The subsequent analysis examines the institution’s transformation and near-strangulation along the demarcation line (Section 7), followed by an exploration of the conceptual horizon—encompassing Jerusalem, Palestine, and human rights—that is shared and disputed by the correspondents (Section 8). The final section (Section 9) delves into the relationship between Dominique de Menil and Jimmy Carter as it emerges from the Beirut vantage point.

2. The Sources: Four Unpublished Ensembles

The documentary basis of this study consists of four archival ensembles, all of which remain unpublished. These were brought together by three research missions to Beirut and by work in the André Scrima papers in Bucharest. The most substantial and comprehensive is the series of letters exchanged between André Scrima and Dominique de Menil, amounting to seventy items and covering the period from January 1975 to April 1991. These letters have been catalogued under the designation CPS.MEN 1–70. The originals are held in the Menil Archives at The Menil Collection in Houston; a set of copies, from which the present transcription was established, was deposited in the Fond André Scrima at the New Europe College in Bucharest (“Donație André Scrima”), the institution to which Scrima’s papers were donated after his return to Romania. With the exception of a small number of English-language pieces from de Menil’s secretariat, the letters are autograph and in French. These documents, on both sides of the correspondence, are of an uncommon literary and spiritual density. Scrima’s war letters and de Menil’s meditations on the Rothko Chapel’s vocation belong as much to the history of twentieth-century religious sensibility as to institutional history.

The second ensemble comprises the seventeen letters of Augustin Dupré La Tour to Dominique de Menil (CPS.DLT 1–17). These were written from Beirut between 13 December 1978 and 30 January 1995 on the letterheads of the Faculté de sciences religieuses and, subsequently, of the Institut d’études islamo-chrétiennes. Most of these letters bear the Institute’s protocol numbers. Scrima’s letters provide the project with its theological and geopolitical registers, while Dupré La Tour’s offer an administrative perspective, including enrolment figures, course schedules, budgets, publicity, and the continually renegotiated geographical division of a university split between East and West Beirut.

The third ensemble comprises the typescript minutes (“comptes-rendus”) of the governing bodies of the programme. The documentation under review comprises ten meetings of the Comité directeur du Département islamo-chrétien, held between 22 September 1977 and 14 May 1978, and twenty-two meetings of the Conseil de l’Institut d’études islamo-chrétiennes, held between 26 February 1981 and 21 July 1988. These minutes are preserved in the archives of the USJ. These minutes constitute the institutional framework of the narrative, meticulously documenting, meeting by meeting, the curriculum, the confessional balance of the teaching faculty, student numbers, the subvention’s arrival in tranches, and the war’s progressive strangulation of all activities.

The fourth ensemble is the correspondence between Dupré La Tour and Scrima, comprising thirty-one letters from 3 December 1976 to 21 May 1998, along with financial and commemorative documents, which are preserved primarily in the Fond André Scrima in Bucharest. This series contains, inter alia, the key to the entire financial dossier: the letter of 4 May 1983 by which Dupré La Tour instructed the USJ’s comptroller on the disposition of the Rothko Chapel subvention (Section 5 below). The value of these ensembles must be articulated explicitly, as it is methodological and not merely additive. The extant documentary record of the IEIC’s origins consists of brief institutional notices and a small scholarly literature that has established the founders’ names and the fact of Menil funding. All other aspects—the amounts, the channels, the tranches, the decision to route the subvention through the Rothko Chapel rather than the Menil Foundation, the pedagogical debates, the audience figures, the repeated displacements of teaching across the demarcation line, the Carter proposal of 1985 as seen from the de Menil side—exist nowhere but in these unpublished papers. In the strictest sense, they are the only sources from which the history of the first Islamic-Christian studies programme in the Middle East can currently be written. Furthermore, this documentation of history is not retrospective but occurs in real time, amidst the challenges and adversities of war, with the datelines serving as irrefutable evidence of the events as they unfold.

3. From Houston to Beirut: The Genesis of the “Projet Islamo-Chrétien” (1973–1977)

The Beirut project emerged at the intersection of two itineraries that had intersected prior to the onset of hostilities. The first of these was the Rothko Chapel, which was dedicated in Houston in February 1971 as a broadly ecumenical sanctuary (on the Rothko Chapel and the de Menils’ patronage, see Barnes 1989; Smart 2010; Middleton 2018; and Cohen-Solal and Rosen 2024). In July 1973, it hosted its first international colloquium, entitled “Traditional Modes of Contemplation and Action”, which brought together scholars specialising in Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Among the prominent figures involved in this initiative was Yusuf Ibish, who served as the editor for the colloquium’s proceedings (Ibish and Wilson 1977; Ibish and Mărculescu 1978). Ibish would subsequently become a pivotal figure in the Beirut programme, serving as a crucial link between the Houston and Beirut teams. Scrima himself served as Dominique de Menil’s scientific advisor for the chapel’s interreligious activities, and de Menil’s letters of 1976–1977 discuss the colloquium volume’s editing as a shared responsibility of the same small circle—Ibish as chief editor, the Romanian émigré philosopher Ileana Mărculescu preparing the abridged version—that was simultaneously imagining the Beirut initiative.

The second itinerary was of a Lebanese nature. Scrima had been employed as a member of faculty at the USJ since 1971; Dupré La Tour, acting in the capacity of dean, was undertaking a major reorganization of the Faculté de sciences religieuses. Dominique de Menil visited Beirut in December 1974, months before the outbreak of the war. Scrima’s initial correspondence, dated 15–16 January 1975, offers a retrospective view on a period characterised by regular interactions and anticipates forthcoming encounters.3 When the “événements” began in April 1975, the correspondence became a war chronicle4. In October 1975, drawing a provisional balance—“6000 morts, 18,000 blessés, 4 milliards dollars US de dégâts” [6000 dead, 18,000 wounded, four billion US dollars of damage]—Scrima formulated the interpretative refusal on which the future programme would rest:5

Faut-il préciser […] que l’alibi simpliste d’une “guerre confessionnelle islamo-chrétienne” n’est nullement fondé, à aucun niveau de ce qui se passe ? Ce serait même une sorte de “malhonnêteté objective”, à mon avis, que de donner cette interprétation à un état de choses autrement complexe et inavouable où se noue et se dénoue cette nouvelle “Question d’Orient”.

[Need it be specified […] that the simplistic alibi of an “Islamic-Christian confessional war” is in no way founded, at any level of what is happening? It would even be a kind of “objective dishonesty,” in my view, to give that interpretation to a state of affairs that is otherwise complex and unavowable, in which this new “Eastern Question” is being tied and untied.]6

To found a chair of Islamic-Christian studies in the middle of what the world insisted on calling an Islamic-Christian war was thus, in its founders’ minds, not a paradox but a demonstration. Days after a fraternity march of some twenty thousand Muslims and Christians through Beirut was followed, within the half hour, by gunfire, Scrima wrote: “C’est le Proche-Orient, c’est le Liban aujourd’hui: je ne regrette nullement de m’y trouver” [This is the Near East, this is Lebanon today: I do not in the least regret being here].7

The decisive planning phase can be followed almost week by week. In January 1977 Scrima travelled to the United States and continued to Houston “en compagnie de Madame Dominique de Ménil […] pour des contacts de travail, rencontres, etc.” [in the company of Madame Dominique de Menil … for working contacts, meetings, etc.]; from Paris he tried to reach Ibish by telephone in London, “J’aurais voulu tâtonner un peu le terrain en vue de notre projet: mais verra-t-il le jour ?” [I wanted to sound out the ground a little with a view to our project: but will it ever see the light of day?]8. By June 1977 Dupré La Tour could write to Scrima the sentence that settles the question of intellectual paternity: “Je voudrais vous dire encore toute ma reconnaissance pour votre collaboration dans ce nouveau travail que nous entreprenons. Vraiment vous savez que c’est grâce à vous que tout va naître” [I want to tell you once more all my gratitude for your collaboration in this new work we are undertaking. Truly, you know that it is thanks to you that everything is about to be born].9

On 23 August 1977, Dominique de Menil established the financial framework of the project in a letter that has been preserved in the documentation through Dupré La Tour’s subsequent reference to it: an annual contribution of thirty thousand dollars, of which twelve hundred dollars per month were specifically allocated to Scrima (Section 5).10 Three weeks later, on a single day—18 September 1977—the two ends of the axis wrote to each other simultaneously. From Houston, de Menil reported that she wished the project to become an activity of the Rothko Chapel, “afin que nous n’arrivions pas les mains vides quand nous aborderons des musulmans” [so that we do not arrive empty-handed when we approach Muslims], and that through Nabila Drooby, the Syrian American educator who was her indispensable intermediary with the Muslim world, she had begun meeting Houston’s Islamic colony. From Beirut, Scrima announced:11

Nous, on avance résolument vers la mise en œuvre du projet islamo-chrétien. (Inutile de vous redire combien vos petites lettres de la Fondation ont ouvert les horizons et rapproché le possible du réel). […] Je vous ai parlé, au téléphone, de la réaction du Président de la République “lui-même” nous octroyant une franchise de 200 kgrs. de livres transportables par avion […] L’ouverture reste toujours prévue—insh’Allah!—pour la première quinzaine de novembre.

[We are advancing resolutely toward the implementation of the Islamic-Christian project. (Needless to tell you again how much your little letters from the Foundation have opened horizons and brought the possible closer to the real.) … I told you on the telephone of the reaction of the President of the Republic “himself,” granting us duty-free carriage of 200 kg of books by air … The opening is still planned—insh’Allah!—for the first fortnight of November.]12

The synchronised receipt of the two letters, composed on the same day despite the geographical separation of the authors, serves as a symbol of the entire correspondence. The project was conceived in a stereophonic manner, incorporating elements from both the Houston and Beirut registers, which are inextricably intertwined.

4. “Un Amphithéâtre Presque Plein”: Founding and Pedagogy (1977–1981)

The prevailing emphasis is now on the institutional record. On 22 September 1977, the founding committee (the Comité directeur du Département islamo-chrétien) convened for its inaugural meeting, at which the composition of the committee was established, as it would be at every subsequent meeting, in explicitly paritarian terms. The following individuals were in attendance from the Christian side: Dupré La Tour attended as dean, whilst Scrima and John Donohue, director of the USJ’s Centre d’études pour le monde arabe moderne, were also in attendance. The following individuals were in attendance on behalf of the Muslim side: the USJ vice-rector Zakaria Nsouli, Ibish, and Nashabé. The committee’s minutes from the autumn of 1977 document a university start-up that was conducted as though the city around it were not at war. This endeavour encompassed the creation of a trilingual prospectus by Ibish and Scrima, the dissemination of press announcements in both French and Arabic newspapers, and the distribution of informational materials to cultural embassies, the World Council of Churches, and al-Azhar. A support committee was also established, comprising prominent lay members from various religious affiliations. Prominent laymen of the different confessions were approached to serve on it, among them Henri Pharaon and former president Charles Hélou.13

Dominique de Menil came to Beirut in person for the founding. Her visit at the beginning of November 1977—she wrote to Scrima on Bristol Hotel letterhead on 2 November14—included an informal meeting attended by the USJ rector Jean Ducruet, which the committee recorded as proof “de l’engagement de l’Université à l’égard du projet qui est en train de se réaliser” [of the University’s commitment to the project now being realised]. On 16 November 1977 the rector himself inaugurated the courses in a war-damaged amphitheatre on the medical campus, before an audience of about fifty; attendance held at forty-five for the Ibish–Scrima course and twenty-five for the Nashabé–Dupré La Tour course—“on peut s’estimer fort satisfait pour un début” [we may consider ourselves highly satisfied for a beginning]15. Two days later, from Paris, de Menil answered the news with the sentence that gives this article its emblem: “…vous dire ma joie de savoir que ce premier cours islamo-chrétien s’est déroulé dans un amphithéâtre presque plein. Il y a donc un public—un début de public” […to tell you my joy at learning that this first Islamic-Christian course took place in a nearly full amphitheatre. So there is a public—the beginning of a public].16

The pedagogical conception that these documents reveal merits close analysis, for it is the programme’s most original feature and the core of what the founders themselves regarded as its transformative potential. Its elements can be itemised from the minutes.

First, the two-voice principle. Each ordinary course was taught collaboratively by a Muslim and a Christian professor, on a single theme, before a shared audience of Christian or Muslim students or auditors. This formula would subsequently be defined by the council as “l’activité principale de l’Institut” [the Institute’s principal activity], in light of the war that had rendered this collaboration impossible. Each session incorporated a forty-five-minute exposition with fifteen to twenty minutes of discussion; quotations from the Qur’an were to be given in Arabic irrespective of the language of instruction.17

Second, curricular integrity rather than comparativism. In January 1978, Ibish presented a proposal entitled “un projet couvrant tous les thèmes d’un programme complet permettant une connaissance de l’Islam” [a project covering all the themes of a complete programme permitting a knowledge of Islam]. In response, Scrima and Dupré La Tour presented a counter-proposal entitled “un programme parallèle visant à une connaissance de la religion chrétienne” [a parallel programme aiming at a knowledge of the Christian religion]. Subsequently, the committee conducted a thorough review of the two projects, culminating in the formulation of a unified methodological approach. By May 1978, the committee had outlined a comprehensive licence of seventy-two credits, forty-eight of which were to be obtained within the department, incorporating paired blocks such as “Le Coran et ses sciences—L’Écriture Sainte chrétienne” and “Hadith et Suna, la Sirah du prophète—le langage de la foi chrétienne (Tradition et Concile).”18

Third, the primacy of research over vulgarisation. From the outset, the committee insisted that “l’enseignement du département n’est pas seulement pour une connaissance pure et simple, à un niveau scolaire, mais doit s’orienter vers la recherche” [the department’s teaching is not merely for knowledge pure and simple, at a schoolroom level, but must be oriented toward research]. This orientation subsequently materialised in the form of the collaborative research seminar in “analyse rhétorique”, which employed Roland Meynet’s methodology of rhetorical analysis concurrently with Biblical texts and hadith—a genuinely binational, biconfessional research object whose published outcome the founders regarded as the proof of concept of the entire enterprise.19

Fourth, and most distinctively, a spiritual anthropology of the encounter. The most perspicuous formulation is that of Dominique de Menil, as set out in the programme-letter she wrote as the courses were being prepared in September 1977:

Mais l’amour exige le respect de la personne, donc aucune arrière-pensée de prosélytisme, aucune tentation de synchrétisme. Respect absolu de l’autre et loyauté à l’égard de sa propre tradition. Les deux ne font qu’un. Le contact ne doit pas tendre vers une dilution mais être l’occasion d’un approfondissement. […] Qu’au contact des uns des autres, le juif devienne plus juif, le musulman plus musulman, l’Hindou plus Hindou et le chrétien plus chrétien. Sur ce terrain très ferme, on peut se rencontrer sans crainte. En pleine liberté.

[But love demands respect for the person, hence no ulterior motive of proselytism, no temptation of syncretism. Absolute respect for the other and loyalty toward one’s own tradition. The two are one. Contact must not tend toward dilution but be the occasion of a deepening. … May the Jew, in contact with the others, become more Jewish, the Muslim more Muslim, the Hindu more Hindu, and the Christian more Christian. On this very firm ground one can meet without fear. In full freedom.]20

Dupré La Tour’s version of the same conviction, written to Scrima in 1978, is institutional rather than mystical, and remarkable for its psychological realism: “au-delà de cet enseignement, nous voudrions faire de ce Département une sorte de forum de rencontres, sorte de psychodrame, qui permettrait à chaque groupe de se rencontrer et de s’affronter!” [beyond this teaching, we should like to make of this Department a kind of forum of encounters, a kind of psychodrama, which would allow each group to meet and to confront one another!]21. Two decades later, his anniversary text would provide the founding perception with its definitive form: the war’s cruelty had shown “à quel point les communautés libanaises, musulmane et chrétienne […] pouvaient s’ignorer” [to what degree the Lebanese communities, Muslim and Christian, could be ignorant of one another], and it was “la prise de conscience de cette incompréhension sanglante” [the realisation of this bloody incomprehension] that inspired the team to establish “dans un cadre universitaire, un contact loyal et vrai en vue d’une connaissance réciproque authentique” [within a university framework, a loyal and true contact with a view to an authentic reciprocal knowledge]—with the corollary, decisive for the programme’s ethos, that the professors taught as believers: “Car la foi même de l’enseignant fait partie de l’authenticité de son enseignement” [For the very faith of the teacher is part of the authenticity of his teaching].22

De Menil’s contribution to the pedagogy was not confined to principles. In her letter dated 18 November 1977, she expounded on the evolution of media in teaching, particularly the transition from oral to written communication. She proposed a concrete editorial approach, emphasising the transcription of taped courses in a meticulous manner, with each lecture transcribed in its entirety by an individual who brought a genuine enthusiasm to the task. This approach aims to cultivate a written corpus that transcends the limitations of spoken dialogue, thereby reaching “des couches où l’on ne parle plus le français ni l’anglais” [strata where French and English are no longer spoken]. The minutes of the meetings reveal the adoption of the device by January 1978. Dupré La Tour’s courses were distributed in polycopy, Scrima’s were being transcribed by a student and returned to him for correction, and a student team had taken charge of Ibish’s and Nashabé’s.23

The erection of the Département into an autonomous Institut, attached directly to the university rather than to a faculty, was announced by Dupré La Tour to de Menil in January 1980—“nous avons accueilli avec jpie [joie] l’indépendance de ce département et son érection en Institut […] Voici donc des structures nouvelles acquises” [we welcomed with joy the independence of this department and its erection as an Institute … Here, then, are new structures acquired]24—with the official statutes enclosed; the first Conseil d’Institut met on 26 February 1981 under the rector’s presidency, elected Dupré La Tour director25, and confirmed as “membres attitrés” the six teachers of the ordinary courses, in strict parity: Ibish, Nashabé, and Marwan Kabbani; Scrima, Marcel Hélou, and Dupré La Tour. The paritarian principle was thus written into the statutes themselves—and the council policed it: when Scrima proposed in 1983 a course on “Icônes et Arabesques” for which Ibish was unavailable, the council reminded him “que soit respectée la tradition de l’Institut selon laquelle un chrétien et un musulman sont invités à présenter leurs traditions respectives” [that the Institute’s tradition be respected, according to which a Christian and a Muslim are invited to present their respective traditions].26

5. Money for Dialogue: The Funding Mechanisms (1976–1991)

The financing of the project is the aspect of the project which is most thoroughly concealed from the printed record and most thoroughly recoverable from the unpublished papers. The reconstruction of the dossier is possible through the convergence of all four ensembles, and the arithmetic is exact.

The origins of the funding can be traced back to a humanitarian context. In September 1976, with the Beirut postal service having collapsed, de Menil was compelled to devise alternative means of transferring funds to Scrima. She employed improvised channels for this purpose, resorting to the use of a telegram to announce that “NABILA [is] FORWARDING YOU CASHIER CHECK THROUGH COMMON FRIEND. I AM MAILING THIS ADDRESS SMALLER ONE TODAY”, and her secretary confirmed the receipt of a cashier’s check for 250 dollars. The larger check, for 1200 dollars, was transferred to Nabila Drooby, while the smaller was dispatched to a Jesuit relay address in Rhodes “pour voir si cela passait” [to see if it would get through]. These wartime relief cheques, although on a reduced scale, served to rehearse the routes and intermediaries that the institutional funding would utilise.27

The founding grant itself was established in Dominique de Menil’s letter of 23 August 1977. The document is known through the letter in which Dupré La Tour, six years later, instructed the USJ’s comptroller general, Joseph Hobeika, on its terms—a text that merits quotation in full because it constitutes the financial charter of the entire enterprise:

Lorsque Madame Dominique de Ménil, intéressée par le travail de l’Institut, a offert la contribution de la Fondation de la Rothko Chapel dont elle est la présidente du Conseil d’Administration, elle a demandé expressément que, sur le montant de cette contribution (30.000 dollars US par an), soit réservée une somme de 1.200 dollars par mois pour le P. André Scrima, professeur à l’Institut. Cf sa lettre du 23 août 1977 que je tiens éventuellement à la disposition du P. Recteur.

[When Madame Dominique de Menil, interested in the Institute’s work, offered the contribution of the Foundation of the Rothko Chapel, of whose Board of Trustees she is the president, she asked expressly that, out of the amount of this contribution (30,000 US dollars per year), a sum of 1200 dollars per month be reserved for Fr. André Scrima, professor at the Institute. Cf. her letter of 23 August 1977, which I hold at the disposal of the Fr. Rector should it be needed.]28

The arithmetic of this document is pivotal in ensuring the coherence of the financial dossier as a whole. The Institute’s council, taking leave of the subvention in December 1985, recorded that “De 1977 à 1983 la Rothko Chapel avait aimablement assuré chaque année une subvention de 15.600 dollars,” sufficient “pour les dépenses ordinaires de l’Institut” [From 1977 to 1983 the Rothko Chapel had kindly provided each year a subvention of 15,600 dollars … for the Institute’s ordinary expenses]29. Thirty thousand dollars minus Scrima’s reserved allocation of 14,400 (1200 × 12) is precisely 15,600: the two figures, recorded eight years and two documentary series apart, confirm each other exactly. Dupré La Tour’s letter of June 1984 to Scrima supplies the third confirmation, mentioning “le premier tiers de la contribution pour l’année 1982–1983 (soit 10.000 dollars)” [the first third of the contribution for 1982–1983 (i.e., 10,000 dollars)].30

The institutional channel of the grant was itself an object of deliberation, and the minutes preserve a decision of considerable interest for the history of the Rothko Chapel: in October 1977, on Nabila Drooby’s suggestion, de Menil proposed “de faire dépendre les subventions non pas de la Ménil Foundation, mais de la ROTHKO CHAPEL […] Concrètement, ce changement n’affecte en rien la subvention” [to make the subventions depend not on the Menil Foundation but on the ROTHKO CHAPEL … Concretely, this change in no way affects the subvention]31. The change was anything but cosmetic: it made the Beirut programme formally an activity of the interfaith chapel—exactly the configuration de Menil had wished for in her letter of 18 September 1977—and thereby inscribed it within the chapel’s emerging human-rights and interreligious mission (Section 9). The money arrived in tranches, whose rhythm the minutes register: “La première tranche de la subvention de la ROTHKO CHAPEL est arrivée. La seconde arrivera en Janvier et la troisième en Avril.”32

The correspondence pertaining to the core subvention evinces an intricate network of supplementary funding. The German Catholic agencies MISSIO (Aachen) and MISEREOR provided project-bound grants. In 1978, Misereor provided an assurance of 50,000 DM, and in 1982, an unspent balance of 36,500 DM was recorded. Scholarship schemes were initiated with the Rothko Chapel, MISSIO, and the Saeb Salam Foundation for Muslim students. Dupré La Tour pursued, without documented success, “un grand financier syro-séoudien,” expressing the opinion that “ce serait merveilleux si nous pouvions compter désormais un musulman parmi nos ‘bienfaiteurs’” [it would be marvellous if we could henceforth count a Muslim among our “benefactors”]. Personal funds were circulated along the same channels as institutional money: de Menil reimbursed Scrima’s hotel expenses via the Foundation, expressing concern in a letter when the war cut the funds he was due to draw from Dupré La Tour, and had her secretary process his expense accounts “à la Fondation ou à la Chapelle.”33

Two subsequent episodes are instrumental in completing the financial arc, with both episodes offering illuminating insights into the personal dimension of patronage. The first is Scrima’s renunciation. In March 1983, in the postscript of his great letter on post-invasion Lebanon, he asked de Menil “que je ne figure plus (et donc, ne reçoive plus les montants y prévus) dans les allocations expédiées à titre de l’Institut Islamo-chrétien de l’Université. (Ceci sans préjuger, en rien, bien sûr, de la continuation de la formule établie entre la Rothko Chapel et l’Institut lui-même)” [that I no longer figure (and hence no longer receive the amounts there provided) in the allocations sent on account of the University’s Islamic-Christian Institute. (This without prejudging, in any way, of course, the continuation of the formula established between the Rothko Chapel and the Institute itself)]34. The second is the subvention’s end and partial resurrection. In late 1985 the chapel, reorienting its programmes and observing that war had suspended the mixed teaching that was the grant’s raison d’être, announced the subvention’s suppression, softened by a final gift of 4000 dollars; the council minuted its gratitude in terms that carefully distinguished the institution from the person: “Il remercie tout spécialement Madame Dominique de Ménil qui s’est intéressée de très près à son but et à sa marche” [It thanks most especially Madame Dominique de Menil, who took the closest interest in its purpose and its progress]35. Six months later the same minutes could record that “sur la demande instante de Madame Dominique de Ménil, la Rothko Chapel a accepté de reprendre en partie ses subventions” [at the insistent request of Madame Dominique de Menil, the Rothko Chapel has agreed to resume its subventions in part]36. The grant, in other words, had always been personal in substance and institutional only in form; when the institution withdrew, the person overrode it. Payments—now channelled through Nabila Drooby, cheque by cheque—are still traceable in the correspondence into 1994: “je voudrais vous remercier de votre geste généreux […] en nous envoyant un chèque par l’intermédiaire de Ms Drooby” [I should like to thank you for your generous gesture … in sending us a cheque through Ms Drooby].37

Finally, the patronage extended beyond the Institute to individuals in its orbit. From 1985, the Menil side funded a personal research grant, proposed by Scrima at 16,800 dollars a year (1400 per month), for the Beirut art critic Joseph Tarrab; de Menil’s assent situates it within a deliberate strategy of “actions en profondeur” [actions in depth] preferred to costly public events—and within the constraints of a foundation now under legal discipline: “nos avocats sont toujours sur mon dos pour que tout se fasse selon les règles. Je suis soumise à des contrôles et je ne peux pas me laisser aller à ma fantaisie” [our lawyers are forever on my back so that everything is done by the rules. I am subject to controls and cannot give free rein to my fancy].38

6. Letters Under Fire: Travel, Couriers, and Wartime Logistics

If the funding dossier demonstrates the impact of the war on financial resources, the logistical dossier illuminates the consequences for communication, highlighting the remarkable ingenuity, courage, and social capital necessary to maintain correspondence between Houston and Beirut. The physical archive itself is the primary witness, with the envelopes preserved with the letters displaying postmarks from Vienna, Brussels, Paris, Rouen, London, and Oakland, California—indicative of the international distribution of the letters. Scrima named the system himself: “Ces lignes seront postées de Paris par un prochain partant: courrier mi-artisanal, mi-officiel” [These lines will be posted from Paris by someone leaving shortly: a half-artisanal, half-official mail]39. In 1976, fifteen months without leaving Lebanon and with millions of letters blocked at the post, he transmitted a relay address of Jesuit invention—“E 300 (Compagnie de Jésus)/Air Mail of Lebanon/Rhodos/Grèce”—later replaced by a Cyprus routing “à travers les Kataeb” [through the Kataeb]40, the Phalangist party’s own mail service: even the postal workarounds were confessionally coloured. In May 1977, sender and recipient ran a controlled experiment, the “lettre-test” posted through the ordinary Lebanese mail, which reached Houston in six days and was triumphantly annotated “Arrived May 23rd.”41 The telephone was no safer: Dupré La Tour warned Scrima in 1978 that international calls were monitored, “A la suite d’une de vos conversations avec le professeur Ibish, celui-ci a été rappelé au téléphone et interrogé sur son correspondant” [Following one of your conversations with Professor Ibish, he was called back and questioned about his correspondent]. By 1985 urgency had found a modern channel—de Menil sent the letter discussing the Carter proposal by DHL (Section 9)—and by 1991 the fax: Scrima’s “premier message direct de l’Inde” reached San Felipe Road from the India International Centre in New Delhi.42

The travel was meticulously planned, combining a precise approach with the flexibility to adapt to unexpected circumstances. The documentation of this journey meticulously captures the choreography of the journey in its entirety. Scrima’s itineraries wove together Beirut, Rome, Paris, New York and Houston into a single circuit, with de Menil’s houses functioning as fixed points. In reference to the rue Las Cases apartment in Paris, de Menil’s secretary wrote, “Votre chambre à l’appartement vous attend” [Your room at the apartment awaits you]. For years, Scrima’s correspondence would be addressed to this address in Paris: “c/o Mme de Ménil”.43 The scheduling was both geopolitical and personal. In May 1977, Scrima cancelled a planned reconnaissance in Israel pending “la conclusion de l’actuelle période politico-diplomatique (élections israéliennes, visites diplomatiques, tournée de Cyrus Vance au Proche-Orient en juillet prochain)” [the conclusion of the present politico-diplomatic period (Israeli elections, diplomatic visits, Cyrus Vance’s Near East tour next July)]. This sentence reveals an intersection between the private travel diary of a monk and the diary of the new Carter administration’s first Middle East shuttle.44

De Menil’s own journeys were acts of patronage in themselves. The founding voyage of October–November 1977 was planned as a tour of the Muslim world: “Notre voyage en pays musulmans ne se limitera pas au Liban. Nous irons au Caire reprendre contact avec les quelques personnes que nous avions rencontré […] au nombre desquels figuraient le chef de Al Azar” [Our journey in Muslim lands will not be limited to Lebanon. We shall go to Cairo to renew contact with the few people we had met … among whom figured the head of al-Azhar]45, with Istanbul on the route and Nabila Drooby as companion. In December 1978 and again in December 1979 she travelled to Konya for the commemoration of Rumi, and her letters from Bursa—“Je reviens allégée, lavée, heureuse de Konya […] il [le sema] fut bouleversant de beauté profonde” [I return lightened, washed, happy from Konya … the sema was overwhelming in its profound beauty]46—belong to the spiritual documentation of her Islamic turn. The most delicate journey in the file, however, is Scrima’s: in September 1980 he announced to de Menil, under seal of confidence, a two-week reconnaissance in Jerusalem, via Rome and Tel Aviv, to prospect “formules et possibilités de rencontres, réunions, ‘colloques’ dans la tradition (déjà!) de la Rothko Chapel” [formulas and possibilities of encounters, meetings, “colloquia” in the (already!) tradition of the Rothko Chapel]—adding: “ici, à Beyrouth, je n’en ai rien dit à personne, et pour cause…” [here in Beirut I have said nothing of it to anyone, and for good reason…]. The episode under scrutiny here presents the Rothko Chapel model as being carried, in the minds of the founders, towards what is arguably the most contested sacred geography of all. It is further demonstrated that the logistics of this milieu cannot be separated from its ideas, and that travelling from Beirut to Jerusalem in 1980 was itself a theological-political statement that had to be kept secret from one’s own city.47

7. From Department to Institute: Surviving the Green Line (1978–1991)

The war is not merely a backdrop to this history; rather, it assumes a role as one of its primary protagonists. The sources meticulously document the pressure exerted on the programme, thus offering a valuable contribution to the field by providing a comprehensive explanation of the institutional mutations that occurred during the period under study.

The onset of violence at the university occurred within months of the project’s conception. On the morning of 29 March 1977, the office of the USJ rector was dynamited. On the same day, Scrima reported this incident in a postscript and subsequently analysed it on 3 April as a strike by the “droite chrétienne” against a campus that had refused to comply with a general strike ordered by the Phalangists.48 The initial academic year concluded with “la suspense des cours à différentes reprises” [the suspension of courses on multiple occasions]. During the winter of 1978–1979, the faculty’s area witnessed instances of shelling, gunfire, and kidnappings, which led to the complete cessation of teaching. Consequently, the courses were relocated to West Beirut, in proximity to the AUB and the Near East School of Theology, which offered its Protestant facilities. This displacement was advised by Dupré La Tour and Ibish to be conducted with discretion, with the objective being to “ne pas susciter les soupçons et la vindicte des ‘chrétiens’ d’Achrafieh” [not to arouse the suspicions and vindictiveness of the “Christians” of Achrafieh]. Subsequently, the programme’s addresses evoke a cartographic representation of the city’s fissures: the medical campus “à la frontière même des deux zones” [at the very frontier of the two zones]; the Carmel Saint-Joseph in the rue Verdun in West Beirut; the premises of Nashabé’s Makassed institute; and, from 1982, rooms near the Bibliothèque Orientale in the East.49

The minutes of the mid-1980s record the strangulation of the founding formula itself. In January 1984: “Les cours d’Introduction Générale et les cours sur la Prière ont dû être stoppés, les étudiants de l’une et l’autre communautés hésitant à traverser la fameuse ligne de démarcation, une fois la nuit tombée” [The General Introduction courses and the courses on Prayer had to be stopped, the students of both communities hesitating to cross the famous demarcation line after nightfall]50. In July 1984, the council itself could no longer meet as one body and convened “en deux étapes: à l’Ouest en fin de matinée avec le Dr Hisham Nashabeh et Melle Nayla Farouki; à l’Est pendant la soirée avec le P. John Donohue et le P. Louis Pouzet. Le P. Dupré la Tour faisant l’union entre les deux groupes!” [in two stages: in the West at the end of the morning with Dr Hisham Nashabeh and Miss Nayla Farouki; in the East during the evening with Fr. John Donohue and Fr. Louis Pouzet. Fr. Dupré la Tour making the union between the two groups!]51. By February 1987, the balance sheet was explicit: “voici bientôt deux ans que pratiquement toute possibilité de passage entre les deux zones de Beyrouth nous est interdite […] En particulier nous avons dû renoncer, une fois encore, aux cours ordinaires […] Cet enseignement représentait l’activité principale de l’Institut” [it is now nearly two years that practically every possibility of passage between the two zones of Beirut has been denied us … In particular we have had, once again, to renounce the ordinary courses … That teaching represented the Institute’s principal activity]52. Dupré La Tour’s letters to Houston translate the same facts into human terms: “jamais, au cours de ces neuf ans de guerre, nous n’avons senti une telle fatigue et une telle anxiété […] Hier encore, j’ai pu rencontrer Hisham Nashabeh […] Il me disait avec tristesse: ‘vous êtes le seul chrétien avec lequel je suis encore en contact!’” [never, in these nine years of war, have we felt such fatigue and such anxiety … Only yesterday I was able to meet Hisham Nashabeh … He said to me with sadness: “you are the only Christian with whom I am still in contact!”].53

What did not stop is as instructive as what did. In the event of total blockage of the mixed formula, the Institute was redeployed along three lines that the minutes refer to as “un travail nécessitant des contacts plus espacés” [work requiring more widely spaced contacts]: single-voice teaching delivered across communal lines (a Maronite priest teaching Christian doctrine to the Muslim students of the Makassed institute; the Sunni sheikh Khalil al-Mayss, director of Azhar-Liban, lecturing on Islam’s attitude to the People of the Book before an audience of Maronite, Greek Catholic, and Armenian priests and bishops in a Phalangist quarter of East Beirut); research towards publication (the rhetorical-analysis volume; the corpus of joint Islamic-Christian declarations, eventually some forty documents, published as Dupré la Tour et al. 1995–1997); and professional-ethics courses for nurses, structured as three-voice encounters of physician, Christian, and Muslim. The near-scandal of this period provides compelling evidence of the enterprise’s modus operandi. When a Catholic press notice misrepresented al-Mayss’s lectures and exposed him to his co-religionists’ censure, the council’s response was a policy of deliberate self-effacement. As Dupré La Tour reported to Houston, the incident “n’a fait que sceller davantage notre confiance mutuelle” [only sealed our mutual confidence further].54

The Institute’s tenth anniversary, in 1987, was not marked by any formal celebrations: “Il est à craindre que la situation actuelle du Liban […] ne constitue un obstacle insurmontable pour marquer, de quelque façon que ce soit, cet anniversaire. Mais l’important est de continuer l’effort entrepris” [It is to be feared that Lebanon’s present situation … constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to marking this anniversary in any way whatever. But the important thing is to continue the effort undertaken]55. Yet the same years produced the council’s most moving act of institutional self-understanding, occasioned by Ibish’s departure and Scrima’s increasing absence: the council asked that Scrima be given a free-standing lecture series, praised “la richesse et l’originalité de la pensée du P. Scrima,” and declared that “Dans une période si délicate pour l’Institut, celui-ci ressent le besoin de serrer les rangs autour de ses ‘Pères fondateurs’” [In so delicate a period for the Institute, it feels the need to close ranks around its “Founding Fathers”]56. Following the cessation of hostilities, a reunion of teaching staff and former auditors was convened on 27 April 1991, with the objective of reinstating the courses. Dupré La Tour’s correspondence provides a record of both the new amphitheatre of 1992 (“l’Institut reprend ses activités, après une période de catacombes due à la guerre” [The Institute resumes its activities, after a period of catacombs due to the war]) and the persistent afterlife of the divide: Makassed students enrolled in the joint courses still refused, into 1994, “de traverser la fameuse ligne verte qui sépare les deux zones de Beyrouth” [to cross the famous green line that separates the two zones of Beirut].57

What, then, did these efforts achieve? The question of effectiveness must be posed at three levels—attendance, institutional outcomes, and mutual perception—and the sources permit an answer at each, provided their limits are stated. At the level of attendance, the documentation is precise: an opening audience of about fifty in a war-damaged amphitheatre; forty-five auditors held by the Ibish–Scrima course and twenty-five by the Nashabé–Dupré La Tour course in the first term; courses circulated in polycopy when shelling emptied the halls; a full licence of seventy-two credits designed by May 1978. These are small numbers by the standards of peacetime universities and remarkable ones by those of a city at war: the minutes measure demand not in enrolments alone but in the repeated decisions of mixed audiences to cross, or to attempt to cross, the demarcation line in order to attend.58

At the institutional level, the outcomes are tangible. The programme produced the first paritarian curriculum of Islamic-Christian studies in the region; a joint research practice whose published results—the rhetorical-analysis seminar, the corpus of some forty joint Islamic-Christian declarations—outlived the war; the three-voice professional-ethics courses for nurses; and, above all, an institution durable enough to be re-founded: the reunion of 27 April 1991, the new amphitheatre of 1992, and the Institut’s continued existence at the Université Saint-Joseph to this day. In a conflict that destroyed most of the country’s mixed institutions, survival followed by reproduction is itself a measurable form of impact.

The third level—whether the courses contributed to “a greater understanding of, or sensitivity towards, religious otherness”—is the hardest to document, and it would exceed the sources to claim a transformation of mass perception: the students of both communities who, in 1984 as in 1994, still hesitated to cross the “fameuse ligne verte” are the honest measure of what a university programme could not undo. What the papers do document, consistently and from several sides, is transformation within the circle that the programme created and trained. Nashabé’s confession to Dupré La Tour in 1984—“vous êtes le seul chrétien avec lequel je suis encore en contact!”—identifies the Institute as the last functioning bridge of an entire social world; al-Mayss’s decision to continue lecturing to Maronite clergy after a press incident that had exposed him to his co-religionists’ censure, and Dupré La Tour’s report that the incident “n’a fait que sceller davantage notre confiance mutuelle”, show trust deepening under stress—not despite the war but through the shared management of its risks; Bilani’s motion joining post-conciliar Christian openness and Islamic “bienveillance”, and the council’s decision to “serrer les rangs” around its founders, register the same cohesion in institutional language.

Judged against the sociology of the war—a country held in a “balance of weakness” by the wars of others (Hanf 1993, p. 184)—this is what effectiveness could mean: not the conversion of public opinion, for which no wartime institution possessed the means, but the formation and preservation of a bi-confessional milieu in which, in the words of Dupré La Tour’s anniversary text, “un contact loyal et vrai” remained possible and teachers taught as believers before mixed audiences. Under the conditions of the Green Line, the two-voice course was not a preparation for a dialogue to be held elsewhere; it was the dialogue, enacted session by session before a registered audience. Its impact is legible less in numbers than in reproduction: the model survived its own impossibility, resumed in 1991, and remains the charter of the Institut’s teaching.

8. Jerusalem, Palestine, and the Critique of “Human Rights”

The proposal that formed the basis of this research inquired into the elements of the teaching that constituted a transformative basis—that is, a significant change in mutual perception—and the ideological orientations, moderate on both the Muslim and the Christian side, that underpinned it. The correspondence provides an answer that is more nuanced than any programme statement: the founders’ politics were a politics of perception, organised around two symbolic causes, Jerusalem and the Palestinians, and articulated in a register that kept its distance from the official language of human rights even while acting on its substance. Jerusalem first. Scrima’s most concentrated geopolitical meditation, in October 1975, joined the city to the century’s two “signes du temps”:59

…je considérais les deux seuls “signes du temps” de notre siècle: la constitution de l’état d’Israël, fin d’une “dispersion” dans le temps; l’apparition de la “dispersion” atomique, fin de la stabilité de l’être dans l’espace. Et si les deux se rejoindraient en cette fin de cycle ? L’armement atomique—Pershing ou autre—est déjà aux portes de Jérusalem.

[…I considered the only two “signs of the times” of our century: the constitution of the state of Israel, the end of a “dispersion” in time; the appearance of the atomic “dispersion,” the end of the stability of being in space. And what if the two were to meet at this end of a cycle? Atomic weaponry—Pershing or other—is already at the gates of Jerusalem.]60

The concept of Jerusalem as a city that no single sovereignty could exhaust—“unique et universelle”—was first publicly articulated in Scrima’s article of 1980 in Concilium (Scrima 1980); the correspondence provides its practical corollary, the confidential 1980 reconnaissance for Rothko-style encounters in the city (Section 6). De Menil’s contribution to the discourse on Israel and the Palestinians is a small theology of history in itself, written in November 1976: “Si les chrétiens avaient aimé les juifs, si ceux-ci s’étaient sentis vraiment aimés, comme on se sentait aimé par Jean XXIII, le problème d’Israël n’existerait pas et les Palestiniens seraient toujours chez eux. Je crois qu’il n’est jamais trop tard et que des décombres, la vie surgit” [If Christians had loved the Jews, if the Jews had felt truly loved, as one felt loved by John XXIII, the problem of Israel would not exist, and the Palestinians would still be in their homes. I believe it is never too late, and that from the rubble life springs up].61

The Palestinian cause becomes a central theme in the correspondence following the Israeli invasion of June 1982 and the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Scrima’s letter of 18 March 1983—the longest and darkest of the series—is a first-hand testimony whose evidentiary value must be emphasised. In order to enter the internment camps between Saida and Tyre, he required Red Cross friends and papers “confectionnés ad hoc”:62

Ne croyez pas que, après les sommets de Sabra et Chatila, le “processus” s’est arrêté. Palestiniens (tous âges et sexe confondus) et leurs amis sont chaque jour traqués, chassés, massacrés: leur sang sèche sous le ciel nu. On le sait, mais à l’heure opaque où la parole se détourne si aisément de la vérité, les cris eux-mêmes s’engourdissent. (On ne pénètre d’ailleurs, pratiquement pas dans les camps d’internement entre Saïda et Tyr: moi-même je dois aux amis de la Croix-Rouge et à des papiers confectionnés ad hoc, d’avoir pu y entrer et voir).

[Do not believe that, after the summits of Sabra and Chatila, the “process” has stopped. Palestinians (all ages and sexes together) and their friends are every day hunted, driven out, massacred: their blood dries under the naked sky. It is known; but at the opaque hour when speech turns so easily away from truth, the cries themselves grow numb. (One practically cannot enter the internment camps between Saida and Tyre: I myself owe it to friends of the Red Cross and to papers confected ad hoc that I was able to enter and see.)]63

In this same letter, Scrima delivers his most severe judgement on the juridical-political idiom of the age, denouncing the retrospective moral bookkeeping of the West. He employs the term “grâce à la mise en jeu de ce pâle artefact juridico-politique, les ‘droits de l’homme’” [thanks to the deployment of that pale juridico-political artefact, “human rights”]. The paradox is only apparent. Scrima’s objective was not the substance of human dignity—his actions in Saida and Tyre are irrefutable evidence of this—but rather the conversion of that substance into a slogan; his alternative idiom was theological (“les géodésiques secrets de la souffrance, ce tracé vrai à la surface de la terre” [the secret geodesics of suffering, that true tracing on the surface of the earth]).64 De Menil’s idiom, by contrast, was precisely the one Scrima distrusted—the Rothko Chapel had celebrated the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights every 10 December since the mid-1970s, “Fidèle à la pensée de Dom Helder [Camara]” [Faithful to the thought of Dom Hélder (Câmara)]65—and yet the two idioms worked in tandem for fifteen years. The correspondence thus documents, within a single friendship, the very tension that historians have identified at the heart of the 1970s human-rights moment (Moyn 2010; Keys 2014): between rights as minimalist political programme and older, thicker languages of suffering, witness, and redemption.

With regard to the “moderate elites” of the proposal’s hypothesis, the sources provide concrete examples of this category rather than offering a theoretical framework: Nashabé maintained contact across the line at real personal cost. In addition, al-Mayss delivered a lecture in a robe and turban to Maronite priests, and he continued to do so despite a press incident that could have resulted in severe repercussions for him. Furthermore, the Muslim president of the council, Bachir Bilani, articulated both post-conciliar Christian openness (Second Vatican Council 1965) and Islamic “bienveillance” in a single motion.66 Dupré La Tour emphasised to Scrima that the Institute must never devolve into a mere “entreprise d’islamologie” [an enterprise of Islamology]—that is, into Orientalist study of the other, rather than a paritarian encounter with him.67 The human infrastructure, rather than any explicit declaration, constituted the “transformative basis” of the proposal under discussion. The sources precisely locate its formation in the practice of the two-voice courses and their enforced successors.

9. Houston, Beirut, and the Carter Doctrine: Private Diplomacy and Public Policy

The final task of this article is to situate the Beirut–Houston axis within the American political conjuncture that framed it—the arc from Jimmy Carter’s human-rights diplomacy of 1977–1978 to the Carter Doctrine of 1980, and onward to the post-presidential partnership between Carter and Dominique de Menil.68

The chronological coincidences are striking, and the unpublished sources allow them to be stated with precision. The Département inaugurated its course offerings in November 1977, a mere ten months into the presidency, during which the President had delivered a speech at Notre Dame proclaiming “America’s commitment to human rights as a fundamental tenet of our foreign policy” (Carter 1977). The institution’s inaugural full academic year coincided with the Camp David Conference, at which the Framework for Peace was adopted by the signatories, who thereby committed themselves to recognise “the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and their just requirements” (Carter 1978a). And its erection as an autonomous Institut was announced to Houston in Dupré La Tour’s letter of 21 January 198069—written, as it happens, two days before the State of the Union address in which Carter, responding to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage crisis, declared that “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force” (Carter 1980). The juxtaposition of these elements does not merely represent a matter of curiosity. The Carter Doctrine represented a pivotal moment in the evolution of the administration’s Middle East policy, which had previously been structured around rhetorical principles of rights and peace-making, transitioning towards a foundation rooted in security for the Gulf region. Nevertheless, the State of the Union address maintained the earlier discourse, asserting that “our support for human rights in other countries is in our own national interest as well as part of our own national character” (Carter 1980). The doctrine, as previously outlined, held together two registers—securitarian and moral—in tension. However, these two registers have now been transposed, resulting in an alternative configuration. This new configuration can be observed in the private correspondence, where the geopolitics that Scrima analysed with cold lucidity and the ethics of encounter that de Menil funded have become intertwined. The Beirut programme was, in this precise sense, a private-sector experiment in the second register conducted inside the geography claimed by the first: an attempt to constitute, by educational rather than military means, the “moderate” Muslim-Christian intellectual elite whose absence the decade’s crises—Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan—had made spectacular. The protagonists were aware of the American horizon, and their reactions were characteristically distinct. Scrima’s January 1979 letter reads the Iranian revolution and the papacy’s response to it in the same breath as Carter’s “slogan”; the irony has already been quoted. De Menil’s engagement ran deeper and issued, in the mid-1980s, in an institutional partnership with Carter himself. The essential unpublished document is her letter of 21 March 1985, sent to Beirut by DHL so that Scrima could be consulted “avant votre départ”—the fullest surviving snapshot of the deliberations that preceded the Carter–Menil Human Rights Foundation.

How independent, then, was the Beirut initiative of the American foreign-policy horizon that framed it? The question is best approached through the historiography of the war itself. Theodor Hanf has described the Lebanese conflict as a struggle in which, at every phase, elements of civil war were intermingled with those of a “war by proxy”—an international conflict “fought out on the soil of a third country; disguised as conflict over an internal issue of that country” (Hanf 1993, pp. 180–81)—and Lebanon as a country held, by the strategies of its external patrons, in what he calls a “balance of weakness” that no internal actor could break (Hanf 1993, p. 184; cf. Traboulsi 2007). What is remarkable is that the founders’ own reading of the war anticipated precisely this interpretation. Scrima’s refusal, in October 1975, of the “alibi simpliste d’une ‘guerre confessionnelle islamo-chrétienne’” was not a pious denial but an analytical claim: the violence was not, at bottom, a war of religions, and to found a chair of Islamic-Christian studies on the demarcation line was to wager publicly on that diagnosis.70 In this first and fundamental sense the initiative was independent of the American reading of the region: it was built against the confessional interpretation of the conflict that Western commentary—and, after 1979–1980, the securitarian framing of the Carter Doctrine—took for granted.

Its independence was, second, structural. No public money, American or otherwise, ever entered the dossier: the programme lived on the private patronage of the Menil Foundation and the Rothko Chapel, on German mission agencies, and on the search—never successful, but revealing—for a Muslim “bienfaiteur”; and the deliberate routing of the subvention through the interfaith chapel rather than the family foundation was made, in de Menil’s words, so as not to arrive “les mains vides quand nous aborderons des musulmans”—a calculation about credibility before Muslim partners, not about alignment with any Western agenda.71 The same logic governed conduct on the ground: the paritarian statutes policed by the council; the policy of deliberate self-effacement—“éviter toute publicité”—adopted after the al-Mayss incident; the discretion imposed on the 1979 relocation to West Beirut; the secrecy surrounding Scrima’s Jerusalem reconnaissance of 1980. An arm of public diplomacy seeks visibility; this enterprise survived by renouncing it.

Agency, finally, is most visible precisely where the pressure of the American horizon was strongest. When the Carter Doctrine redefined the region as an object of military security, the Institute’s answer—recorded in the same weeks in Dupré La Tour’s letter of 21 January 1980—was to deepen its academic autonomy, erecting the Département into an Institut attached directly to the university. When official rhetoric made “human rights” the moral currency of the moment, Scrima documented the internment camps of Saida and Tyre at first hand while refusing the “pâle artefact juridico-politique” in which that documentation was expected to be phrased. And when convergence with the public channel finally presented itself, in the form of Carter’s 1985 offer, the direction of the deliberation is itself the proof of autonomy: the circle around the chapel weighed “les dangers possibles d’une association”—the risk of politicising, or Americanising, an authority grounded precisely in its independence—and de Menil’s urgent need was to consult a Romanian monk in besieged Beirut before deciding.72 The initiative, in short, chose its convergences. It could do so because its resources, its legitimacy, and its criteria of judgement were its own: a micro-actor practising coexistence within the “balance of weakness”, on terms that the Carter Doctrine neither dictated nor could revoke.

Karen Dalton était ici hier soir et nous avons longuement parlé de l’offre de Carter. Elle voit, bien sûr, les dangers possibles d’une association mais insiste sur les potentialités d’une telle offre. […] Parlé longuement avec Walter Hopps. Il est très clairvoyant en politique—avant tout “anti-impérialiste”. Lui aussi pense qu’il faut ne pas négliger l’offre mais l’étudier sérieusement. Tom Shannon intéressé aussi. À son avis beaucoup de gens […] ont de gros moyens, voudraient faire des dons généreux pour les Human Rights, la lutte contre la faim etc… mais ne savent où se trouver et donneraient à un Centre qui aurait l’aval de Carter et la Rothko Chapel […] Voilà je vous envoie ce mot par DHL pour pouvoir discuter de la proposition Carter avant votre départ—[…] We need you—73

[Karen Dalton was here last night and we spoke at length about Carter’s offer. She sees, of course, the possible dangers of an association, but insists on the potentialities of such an offer. … Spoke at length with Walter Hopps. He is very clear-sighted in politics—above all “anti-imperialist.” He too thinks the offer must not be neglected but studied seriously. Tom Shannon is interested as well. In his view many people … have large means, would like to make generous gifts for Human Rights, the fight against hunger, etc., but do not know where to turn, and would give to a Centre that had the endorsement of Carter and the Rothko Chapel … So I send you this word by DHL so that we can discuss the Carter proposal before your departure—… We need you—]

It is imperative to note that three features of this letter are of particular significance for the historical record. Firstly, the date is of significance. It indicates the “offre de Carter” under discussion in the de Menil circle a full year before the establishment of the Carter–Menil Human Rights Foundation in 1986, with its 100,000-dollar prize awarded from 1986 to 1994. Secondly, the direction of consultation: on a matter concerning her association with a former president of the United States, Dominique de Menil’s urgent need was to reach a Romanian monk in besieged Beirut—“We need you”—which measures better than any other document Scrima’s standing as her counsellor. Third, its vocabulary of caution: the phrase “les dangers possibles d’une association” [the possible dangers of an association] is Karen Dalton’s, reported by de Menil, while Hopps is described as the “anti-impérialiste.” The circle surrounding the chapel was acutely aware of the risk that the presidential association would politicise, or Americanise, an enterprise whose authority was precisely rooted in its independence. Nonetheless, the foundation that emerged carried the chapel’s interfaith DNA into the human rights arena, and by that time, the Beirut Institute was part of that DNA. As early as 1988, Nashabé proposed formally that the Rothko Chapel in Houston host an Islamic-Christian conference, the animation of which would be provided by the Beirut Institute, the minutes recalling in the same breath that it was the chapel’s subventions “qui nous ont permis de démarrer” [that allowed us to start].74 The convergence of the two lines—Carter’s and de Menil’s—was witnessed by Scrima in December 1991, and his eyewitness account, written to Dupré La Tour ten days later, forms the natural conclusion of this dossier:

Ce jour-là, en effet, 20ème anniversaire de la Rothko Chapel et « Fête universelle des droits de l’homme », on a accordé—ensemble avec le Président Carter et la Carter Foundation—des prix spéciaux et récompenses pour ceux qui se sont distingué—ou en ont eu à souffrir—dans ce domaine. Parmi ceux, un prix exceptionnel a été attribué, à titre posthume, aux 6 jésuites tués à l’Université de San Salvador: moments intenses, en la présence du nouveau recteur, de nombreux professeurs et de toute la « hiérarchie » jésuite d’Amérique Latine. L’invité de marque fut, cette année, Nelson Mandela qui suscita beaucoup de sympathie, voire de ferveur.

[That day, indeed, the 20th anniversary of the Rothko Chapel and the “universal Feast of human rights,” special prizes and awards were conferred—together with President Carter and the Carter Foundation—on those who have distinguished themselves, or have had to suffer, in this domain. Among them, an exceptional prize was awarded posthumously to the 6 Jesuits killed at the University of San Salvador: intense moments, in the presence of the new rector, numerous professors, and the whole Jesuit “hierarchy” of Latin America. The guest of honour this year was Nelson Mandela, who aroused much sympathy, indeed fervour.]75

The fact that a letter between the two Christian founders of the Beirut Institute should close on Carter, Mandela, and the martyred Jesuits of San Salvador cannot be attributed merely to the random selection of epistolary miscellany. The text makes an observation that, by 1991, the world of the Institute—characterised by interfaith encounters grounded in worship, sustained by a single woman’s patronage and averse to publicity—had been brought into conjunction with the world of official human rights advocacy. This amalgamation was represented in a single institutional constellation, with the Carter-Menil Prize serving as its public face. The private diplomacy documented in these letters had anticipated the public one by a decade; and it had done so from Beirut, on the very terrain that the Carter Doctrine had meanwhile redefined as an object of military security.

10. Conclusions

The present study arrives at three conclusions. These conclusions are based on the first systematic exploitation of the de Menil–Scrima and de Menil–Dupré La Tour correspondences, as well as the institutional records of the IEIC.

Firstly, the subject of origins will be addressed. The Institut d’études islamo-chrétiennes was not the product of a local initiative on the part of a Jesuit faculty that happened to find an American patron; nor was it an American project implanted in Beirut. The sources show a genuinely bipolar genesis—“votre et notre projet,” in de Menil’s self-correcting phrase76—in which the Rothko Chapel’s 1973 colloquium supplied the network (Ibish above all), Scrima supplied the conception and the mediation (“c’est grâce à vous que tout va naître”), Dupré La Tour supplied the institutional labour and continuity, and Dominique de Menil supplied not only the money but a fully articulated theology of encounter—no proselytism, no syncretism, each believer made more deeply himself by contact with the other—that is recognisably the chapel’s charism translated into curriculum. The twin letters of 18 September 1977 are the emblem of this stereophony.

Secondly, the material history of the object is considered. The utilisation of unpublished sources serves to reinstate the financial and logistical elements that are often obscured by hagiographic accounts within the historical discourse of interreligious dialogue. The annual financial contribution of 30,000 dollars, as stipulated on 23 August 1977, was allocated to the Institute’s ordinary budget (15,600 dollars) and Scrima’s personal allocation (14,400 dollars). The transfer of this contribution from the Menil Foundation to the Rothko Chapel was initiated by Nabila Drooby. The contribution was received in instalments via channels disrupted by war and was suppressed in 1985 before being revived by de Menil in 1986. The cashier’s checks issued in 1976, the Rhodes and Larnaca relays, the “partants” who posted letters in Vienna and Brussels, the monitored telephones, the DHL envelope of 1985, and the faxes of 1991 all contribute to the intricate texture of this narrative. This granular texture is not merely an ancillary element; it is the very condition of the existence of these ideas. These papers insist that a dialogue of civilisations is also a problem in wartime banking and postal engineering.

Thirdly, within the context of the political framework. A close examination of the period from 1977 to 1980 reveals that the Beirut experiment can be viewed as a private and spiritual counterpart to public policy. It is characterised by a commitment to the same causes that were proclaimed during that decade, including Palestinian dignity, the establishment of a shared Jerusalem, and the formation of moderate elites across the Muslim-Christian divide. However, the Beirut experiment also expressed a dissent, as articulated by Scrima, regarding the reduction of these causes to a “pâle artefact juridico-politique.” The eventual Carter–de Menil partnership, deliberated in the letter of March 1985 and consummated at the chapel’s twentieth anniversary in December 1991, shows the two channels flowing together; the Institute’s survival on the Green Line shows what the private channel could do that the public one could not. Scrima’s retrospective verdict of 1997 may stand as the epigraph of any future history of the institution: “Votre Institut Islamo-Chrétien demeure la réalisation la plus riche de sens et d’invocation d’avenir parmi tout ce qu’on a fait là-bas depuis les débuts” [Your Islamic-Christian Institute remains the realisation richest in meaning and in invocation of the future among all that has been done there since the beginnings].77

A word on method is owed, finally, to the reader. This article has practised a documentary micro-history in real time: its claims rest on the triangulation of four independent archival series—correspondence in both directions, governing minutes, administrative files—whose convergence, as in the exact arithmetic of the subvention, has served throughout as the test of reliability. The same method defines the limits of what can be asserted. Institutional archives document practice and self-understanding; they do not give direct access to what the auditors of the two-voice courses took away with them, for which no student records or surveys survive. The assessment of the academic encounters offered in Section 4 and Section 7—attendance held under fire, a paritarian curriculum and its publications, a network whose trust deepened under stress—is therefore built from convergent indirect indicators rather than from any single measure; and it is offered as a first sounding, which the systematic edition of the four ensembles, now in preparation, will allow others to check, refine, and contest.

The four documentary ensembles examined here have only been partially edited, and pieces known to have existed—beginning with Dominique de Menil’s founding letter of 23 August 1977—remain to be located in the Menil Archives in Houston and the archives of the Université Saint-Joseph. The systematic edition to be published in the future will provide a significant case study on the history of Islamic-Christian dialogue. The school, erected on a battle line, was financed by a chapel and sustained, letter by letter, across a fractured world.