Event co-sponsored by The Program in Comparative Literary Studies

Topic: Sectarianism in the Middle East 

Speaker: Dr. Ussama Makdisi, Rice University, Professor of History &
Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair of Arab Studies

Description:

How does one write a history of sectarianism in the modern Middle East? What does sectarianism actually mean? Where does one begin a story of sectarianism?

The traditional view is that religious violence in the Middle East is an emanation of a peculiar sectarian Middle Eastern condition, that it is “age-old” and endemic 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, I would like to suggest that an Ottoman crisis of religious pluralism that began in the nineteenth century was itself part of a global problem in which many empires and nation-states struggled to transform explicit politics of discrimination into those of citizenship and equality.

Lunch Served