Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 July 2010
When I was preparing my PhD in 1993, the subject “Eastern Christians” or “Christians in the Islamic World” was almost nonexistent in the mass media or in scholarly works. In fact, I prepared my thesis not under the supervision of a specialist in the Middle East but rather under that of a specialist in European Catholicism during the early modern era.
1 Heyberger, Bernard, Les chrétiens du Proche-Orient au temps de la Réforme catholique (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, Bibliothèque des Ecoles Françaises d'Athènes et de Rome, 1994), 284Google Scholar.
2 Braude, Benjamin and Lewis, Bernard, eds., Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, 2 vols. (New York/London: Holmes & Meier, 1982)Google Scholar.
3 See, for instance, Deringil, Selim, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876–1909 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998)Google Scholar; and Makdisi, Ussama, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000)Google Scholar.
4 Heyberger, Bernard, Hindiyya (1720–1798), mystique et criminelle (Paris: Aubier, Collection historique, 2001)Google Scholar. Khater, Akram, Embracing the Divine: Passion, Politics and Gender in the Christian Middle East, 1720–1798 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University PressGoogle Scholar, forthcoming).
5 About the cultural context of Eastern Christianity in the first centuries of Islam, see Griffith, Sidney H., The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.
6 In a similar vein, Fernand Braudel, speaking about “highland liberty” in the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon Mountains, in his famous Méditerranée, sees there only “Kurds, Druzes, and Metwalis,” ignoring completely the Christians. Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II, 5th ed., vol. 1 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1982), 35.
7 Ricoeur, Paul, La mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli (Paris: Seuil, 2003)Google Scholar.