Palestinians ride through the rubble of buildings
destroyed during the 50-day war between
Hamas and Israel in 2014 (AFP/Getty)At a time when the world – or at least its media and pseudo-opinion makers – would have us believe that the
Middle East is now breaking apart as a result of inter-religious hatred and warfare, it will be all the more
necessary to read the work of Ussama Makdisi – a brilliant professor of history at Rice University in the US
and, interestingly, Edward Said’s nephew – when his extraordinary and deeply penetrating study of
ecumenism and the modern Arab world is published this autumn.
Like all great histories, the very first words of his text give us his theme. “Every history of sectarianism,” he
writes, “is also a history of coexistence.” Makdisi happily concentrates on the northern and eastern part of
the Middle East (the ‘mashriq’ in Arabic) – Lebanon, Syria, the occupied Palestinian territories, Israel,
Jordan, Egypt and Iraq – rather than all the territory of the former Ottoman empire. This avoids any
analysis of the most egregious Middle Eastern but non-Arab sectarian massacre of modern times: the
genocide of a million and a half Christian Armenians by Muslim Turks (and Muslim Kurds) in 1915 and the
succeeding years, along with the aforesaid Syriac Christians.
But the story of Arab coexistence, in the last years of the Ottoman empire and the century after its collapse,
provides Makdisi with an opportunity to examine the Middle East’s common share in a global 19th-century
revolution. This “revolution”, in Makdisi’s words – and it’s good to use the word in the non-violent sense –
“introduced the profoundly important and historic principle of political equality among citizens, many of
whom had been discriminated against or classified as inferior in centuries past”. These included Jews in
Europe, blacks in the United States, and non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire. In Ottoman domains,
Makdisi suggests, this development occurred after 1860 when the Christians and Druze mercilessly
assaulted each other in Lebanon and Syria.
Shia and Sunni Muslim clerics stand on the
rubble of Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV station in
Beirut. Humanist education helped Lebanon
recover from its 15-year war (AFP/Getty)He likes to talk about the “ecumenical frame”, the scaffolding upon which the reconciliation of modern
political “solidarities” (political equality, etc) were reconciled, with the reality of religious and ethnic
differences in the region, which included a new political order which embraced both the “secularity” of
citizens and (italics: and) the necessity of religiously segregated laws which governed (and still govern)
marriage, divorce and inheritance.
When I read the page proofs of Makdisi’s admirably short book, I was immediately reminded of the comic
moment when the late President Elias Hrawi of Lebanon suggested that he would like to introduce civil
marriage to his country of freedom and coexistence. Far from applauding this magnificent attempt to bring
Lebanon into the modern world, normally argumentative bishops and priests and vicars and otherwise
suspicious Sunni and Shia imams and clerics immediately met in mutual conclaves hitherto unknown in the