A Brief History of Anti-Sectarianism in the Arab World
Historian Ussama Makdisi discusses the now-obscured Arab tradition of anti-sectarianism, which promotes a cohesive and emancipated political community that transcends religious difference.
Scholars of the Middle East have long searched for what they have described as the “roots” of sectarianism. But the idea that there is a stable category of religious division treats the Arab world’s religiosity as a monolith that runs uninterrupted from the medieval to modern era. In this talk, Ussama Makdisi counters this position by drawing attention to the now-obscured Arab tradition of anti-sectarianism, an ethical stance that promotes a cohesive and emancipated political community that transcends religious difference. This tradition can be seen, Makdisi argues, in calls for unity and equality between Muslim and non-Muslim Arabs during the dramatic transformations of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, and in the twentieth-century secular Arab nationalist and socialist currents of the Middle East.
Meet the speaker
Ussama Makdisi is a professor of history and the first holder of the Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair of Arab Studies at Rice University. He completed his BA at Wesleyan University and PhD in history at Princeton University. In 2009, the Carnegie Corporation named Makdisi a Carnegie Scholar, as part of its effort to promote original…
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