Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism (review)

One problem with books about religious minorities in the Middle East is that they focus on religious minorities. Books about Christians in the Middle East, for example, often point out that they were supposed to wear distinctive clothing, were not allowed to wear certain colors, or were not allowed to ride horses. What is missed in this litany of discrimination is that everyone was supposed to wear distinctive clothing based on job, gender, social status, and sect, and no one was supposed to ride horses in cities except the military/political elite, not even the social elite. Such rules were sometimes enshrined in law, sometimes practiced as custom, and sometimes not enforced at all. The "sectarianness" of such practices is thus only a part, and perhaps only a small part, of the story. The trick is to find out to what extent and in what ways religious identity, displayed and known to all, shaped, and was shaped by, the exercise of power over time.

Masters knows that focusing on minorities is problematical. "Beyond the fear of the potential for contributing to ongoing polemics, there is the nagging doubt that an emphasis on religion as a social category in the historical discourse might distort our understanding of the Ottoman past" (5). He is also well aware that the meanings of social categories change over time.

His work is largely descriptive and follows a standard narrative trajectory. He starts by locating the various religious communities, their beliefs, and their relationships with the Ottoman government. After moving through the increased European interest and involvement in sectarian affairs during the eighteenth century, he ends with the nineteenth-century "millet wars," the political struggles within religious groups over leadership and recognition by the Ottomans that set the stage for the emergence of ethnic identity as a politically meaningful social category. He relies largely on secondary sources for information outside of Aleppo where he researched his first book. ¹

"There is no question that religion, as a signifier of identity, had become more overtly political in the nineteenth century than it had been" (133), and European manipulation of sectarian groups played a large part in this development. Yet, religion is less important as a signifier than for what it signifies, which is always in flux. An analogy with gender makes the point clearer. Gender always signifies something, but what it signifies, what responses it elicits, and who controls what it signifies go through many changes. This dance among social categories and their contents, and the impact on them of political struggle, though implicit in Masters' work, gets lost in the details of doctrinal belief and internal struggle for the control of religious offices. A recent book by Makdisi on nineteenth-century Lebanon presents a plausible picture of how politics and religious identity worked before the latter became overtly political and contains a better analysis of what happened thereafter, during the sectarian crises of the nineteenth century. ²