LECTURE: Sectarianism in the Middle East in an Age of Western Hegemony, 1860-1948

Date: Monday July 20, 2015
Time: 15:00
Place: Boğaziçi University South Campus, Rectorate Conference Hall 

Sectarianism in the Middle East in an Age of Western Hegemony, 1860-1948 

Ussama S. Makdisi
Professor of History Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair of Arab Studies
Rice University

The conventional view of sectarianism in the Middle East is that it reflects age-old, endemic religious tensions, and that it reflects a problem in the region's adaptation to a secular Western modernity. Sectarianism has often been depicted as a holdover of primordial religious divisions that make up the Middle East. In contrast, this talk suggests that the sectarian crisis in the Middle East has its roots in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire crisis of religious pluralism that has important parallels in both Europe and the United States.

Ussama Makdisi is the author of The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (2000), Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (2008), and Faith Misplaced: the Broken Promise of U.S. -Arab Relations, 1820-2001 (2010).