Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World pdf

Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World

The Roots of Sectarianism

Bruce Masters

CHRISTIANS AND JEWS IN THE OTTOMAN ARAB WORLD

Book Introduction

The question of the conditions under which Jews and Christians lived in

premodern Islamic societies remains contested. It is unfortunately not solely an issue of arcane academic interest. History, or more often only a half-remembered myth, informs nationalist ideologies prevalent in the successor states to now-vanished Muslim empires across Eurasia from Sarajevo to New Delhi.

 The dispute over the writing of the past is perhaps the most strident in the territories of the former Ottoman Empire where competing, endogenously selective memories of former defeats and atrocities serve to validate violence directed at those deemed to be outside the boundaries of the “nation.”

Political activists who seek a return to an Islamic golden age add further urgency to the debate with their call for the establishment of authentically Muslim governments in nation-states that are also home to non-Muslin minorities.

The Islamists promise to their non-Muslim fellow citizens the same levels of security and justice they assert were present in the political community (umma) founded by the Prophet Muhammad.’

That such a call for the return to an idealized past can provoke fears in one religious community and fervent optimism in another is testimony to the stark difference with which a common history can be remembered by Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Recent Western scholarship on the Ottoman past has not been helpful in clearing up the ambiguities surrounding the historical experience of the empire’s ethnic and religious minorities.

Historical revisionists – and who does not seek to be a revisionist when it comes to the writing of history have generally avoided topics that serve to segregate the peoples of the Ottoman Empire into monolithic, vertically constructed, sectarian communities.

The impulse comes in partial response to the political manipulation of religious identities by the Western powers in the Ottoman ancien régime,