Original air date: 13 September 2015 | "Sectarianism" is a a slippery term, now used to describe everything from Saudi Arabian foreign policy to the daily functioning of Lebanese politics to the rhetoric of the Islamic State. In this episode, historian Ussama Makdisi takes on the history of both the term "sectarian" and the kinds of communal political divides it is often used to describe in the late Ottoman Empire and the 20th century Middle East, reflecting on his former work and offering a preview of his forthcoming scholarship.

More at: http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2015/09/rethinking-sectarianism-in-middle-east.html

Ussama Makdisi is Professor of History and the first holder of the Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair of Arab Studies at Rice University. He is the author of Faith Misplaced: the Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820-2001 (Public Affairs, 2010), Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Cornell University Press, 2008), and the Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (University of California Press, 2000). (see faculty page)

Episode No. 200
Release Date: 13 September 2015
Location: Yeniköy, Istanbul
Editing and production by Chris Gratien
Musical excerpts from archive.org: Turnalar Turnalar - Darulelhan Heyeti; Harmandali - Recep Efendi, Cemal Efendi
Image via US Library of Congress
Bibliography courtesy of Susanna Ferguson

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Campos, Michelle. Ottoman Brothers: Muslim, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011.

Der Matossian, Bedross. Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire. 2014.

Greene, Molly. A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Makdisi, Ussama. Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.

_____. The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History and Violence in Ottoman Lebanon. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000.

Masters, Bruce Alan. Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

White, Benjamin T. The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.