modern history of the Levant – to jointly denounce Hrawi’s divisive, unpatriotic and irreligious
suggestion.
It not only encouraged what we might refer to as inter-faith marriage. Far more disastrously, it meant that
the huge income obtained from church and mosque control of divorce and problems of inheritance would
disappear, and might – horror of horrors – be retained by Christian and Muslim families. My own non-
academic journalist’s conviction is that “religious” wars are not in fact created by divergent forms of faith
but by property and money. Who holds the most land and the larger amount of treasure applies, I fear,
rather too precisely to almost any “theological” dispute – whether this takes place in lands of oil, overseas
investments or the control of real estate (as in ‘a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people’).
Makdisi notes with grim cynicism how the massacre of Christians in 1860 in Mount Lebanon and
Damascus is dismissed in Arabic literature, even today, as the “haditha”, the “event” – the same word used
by most Lebanese for their 1975-90 civil war. More perversely, as Makdidi says, this blood-letting is called
“tawshat al-nasara” – the “hubbub of the Christians”. The tragedy of Makdisi’s narrative comes, inevitably,
with the Balfour Declaration in favour of a Jewish “homeland” in Palestine when – these are my words, not
Makdidi’s – a sectarian state for Jews was introduced to the Middle East at the moment when Arabs were
(hopefully) adhering to a new model of non-sectarian secular life.
Palestinian Muslim worshippers in Jerusalem’s
Old City. The idea that one could be
simultaneously Arab and Jewish still scars the
Arab world (AFP/Getty)“The loss of a multireligious Palestine was a terrible blow that was compounded by the end of Jewish life in
most of the Arab world,” Makdisi writes. “The destruction of the idea that one could be simultaneously
Arab and Jewish still scars the Arab world.” And – again, these are my words – if Israel’s supporters object
to my own reference above to that nation’s “sectarian state” (since it contains hundreds of thousands of
Arab Muslims and Christians), Netanyahu’s support of the new law which makes Israel “the nation state of
the Jewish people” should silence them all.
Talking of words, I have to say that Makdisi’s otherwise flawless thesis is occasionally crippled by his
inability to shake off the fraudulent academic jargon which American universities now seem to inject into
their scholars. Much of the text of Age of Coexistence is mercifully free of this language. But I sighed
repeatedly when I had to negotiate “historicisin” “empathetic” (for sympathetic), “valorised”, “secularity”,
“consociational” “coevalness”, “situate” (for place), and our old enemies “posit” and “space”. These words
are the secret scripture of the clique, the little academic verbal and semantic ticks and contrivances
designed to keep the elite of academia safe from proles like us. But Makdisi’s work is too important for these
irritations to distract us. What he does is to remind us, repeatedly, of the critical declarations of secularism
which existed in the history of the Middle East.