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Augustin Dupré La Tour, and the Making of the Institut d’études islamo-chrétiennes in Beirut: The Evidence of Their Unpublished Correspondence (1975–1991)

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 The present article is based on four collections of unpublished sources, namely the correspondence of Dominique de Menil with André Scrima (CPS.MEN 1–70) and of Augustin Dupré La Tour with de Menil (CPS.DLT 1–17), the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.