Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World by Ussama Makdisi (review)

Ussama Makdisi’s The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Lebanon (University of California Press, 2001) has provided the theoretical foundation for most scholarly research on inter communal relations in the Ottoman Empire since its publication. This volume, which starts chronologically where the earlier work ended, discusses the reforms by which the Ottoman state attempted to instill in its subjects an ideal of secular nationalism following the sectarian disruptions of the middle of the 19th century. The Ottoman reformers hoped an identity grounded in civic loyalty to the dynasty (Ottomanism) would subsume rather than eradicate preexisting religious identities and lead to greater harmony in the empire’s body politic, as well as to secure the continued diplomatic support of the United Kingdom.

Makdisi argues that these Ottoman reforms provided the context for what he labels the “age of coexistence” that lasted in the Mashriq (Arab East) from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century. His characterization of the relationship as coexistence rather than tolerance is a bold one. Scholars of the history of non-Muslims in Muslim societies have grappled with the question of the limits of tolerance that characterized intercommunal relations. Makdisi comes down squarely in the middle of those debates, rejecting the idea that the Ottoman society after the Tanzimat reforms of the mid-19th century was a model of multicultural harmony and mutual respect shared by all. Rather he suggests it operated within what he labels an ecumenical frame. Makdisi defines the concept as an intellectual project that “sought to reconcile a new principle of secular political equality with the reality of an Ottoman imperial system that had privileged Muslim over non-Muslim, but that was also attempting to integrate non-Muslims as citizens” (p. 7). This ecumenical frame was not completely secular, as political discourse in the Ottoman Empire and in most of its successor Arab states still privileged Islam as the state religion in their constitutions. While these states affirmed the political equality of all their citizens in the public sphere, they proclaimed the necessity of maintaining the influence of shari‘a in their personal status laws. National law codes, as much as tradition, commanded the continuation of the endogamous segregation of the region’s inhabitants by religious community.

Makdisi argues, more importantly, that in the period of transition from empire to nation-state, there was a consensus among Arabic-speaking intellectuals that those states should be inclusive of religious differences. He contrasts this acceptance of that necessity for coexistence with the lack of tolerance for religious and ethnic minorities in both republican Turkey and the successor states to the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans. Makdisi sets up his model of the continuation of the ecumenical frame in the Arab successor states of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon to make his main point that the introduction of Zionism into the region destroyed the “age of coexistence.” This will undoubtedly be the most controversial part of his book.

Makdisi characterizes Zionism as a nation al movement based on what had been a religious identity and sees its advocates in British-mandated Palestine as starting a chain of events that led to the growing politicization of religious identity in Arab lands. The insistence of Zionists that the eventual outcome of the mandate in Palestine be a Jewish state negated the possibility of a unitary state where Jews, Muslims, and Christians would continue to coexist within the ecumenical frame. Makdisi then compares the nakba (“catastrophe”), as Palestinians name their exodus from the new Israeli state, to the ethnic cleansing that occurred in Turkey and the Balkans earlier in the century, where religious differences had become national ones (p. 195). He then links the success of the State of Israel after 1948 to the further destabilization of relations between Muslims and Jews elsewhere in Arab lands, leading to the virtual disappearance of...