Culture of Sectarianism
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A01=Ussama Makdisi
Author_Ussama Makdisi
Category=GTM
Category=JHM
Category=NHG
Category=QRAM9
christian salvation
colonialism
economic inequality
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
european colonialism
european presence
imperialism
islam
islamic despotism
lebanese social order
middle east
middle eastern history
modernism
modernity
muslim
national development
orientalism
ottoman lebanon
ottoman reform movement
politics
religion
religious differences
religious identity
religious studies
religious violence
sectarian massacre
sectarian mobilization
sectarian violence
sectarianism
social inequality
westernization
Product details
- ISBN 9780520218468
- Weight: 408g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 19 Jul 2000
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Focusing on Ottoman Lebanon, Ussama Makdisi shows how sectarianism was a manifestation of modernity that transcended the physical boundaries of a particular country. His study challenges those who have viewed sectarian violence as an Islamic response to westernization or simply as a product of social and economic inequities among religious groups. The religious violence of the nineteenth century, which culminated in sectarian mobilizations and massacres in 1860, was a complex, multilayered, subaltern expression of modernization, he says, not a primordial reaction to it. Makdisi argues that sectarianism represented a deliberate mobilization of religious identities for political and social purposes. The Ottoman reform movement launched in 1839 and the growing European presence in the Middle East contributed to the disintegration of the traditional Lebanese social order based on a hierarchy that bridged religious differences.
Makdisi highlights how European colonialism and Orientalism, with their emphasis on Christian salvation and Islamic despotism, and Ottoman and local nationalisms each created and used narratives of sectarianism as foils to their own visions of modernity and to their own projects of colonial, imperial, and national development. Makdisi's book is important to our understanding of Lebanese society today, but it also makes a significant contribution to the discussion of the importance of religious discourse in the formation and dissolution of social and national identities in the modern world.
Ussama Makdisi is Assistant Professor of History at Rice University.
