Citation
Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (University of California Press, 2000),
Book Review
The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon by Ussama Makdisi is a complex work intended to answer the question of “how religion became a crucial component of national expression.” (174) In order to answer this question, Makdisi takes his reader on an eight chapter plus epilogue chronological telling of how “modern sectarian identity in Ottoman Mount Lebanon, which provided the stage on which the cataclysmic violence in 1860 was enacted.” (2) Meaning for Makdisi how modern sectarian identity came to be, allows for a greater analysis of the violence that surrounds it.
In doing so Makdisi is working against a lot of scholars. Here he contends that modern sectarianism is “a practice that developed out of, and must be understood in the context of, nineteenth-century Ottoman reform.” It is also a “discourse that is scripted as the Other to various competing Ottoman, European, and Lebanese narratives of modernization.” (6) In a nutshell, through the utilization of his definition of sectarianism the author demonstrates throughout the work how sectarianism as the world understands it today is an expression of modernity. Illustrating that the sectarian violence the world has come to associate with Lebanon, for example, is not an age-old thing nor something from colonialism but rather the recent development of an in-between time brought about by the combination of peoples in the region; breaking from the arguments that sectarianism was an imposition by foreign powers and that it contained a homogenous nature in the region.
Moreover, the book is entirely for the scholar. Drawing upon a good deal of theory in subaltern studies, postcolonial studies, a bit of critical theory, and some social history to tell his tale, Makdisi means for his audience to genuinely understand that “sectarianism can be narrated only by continually acknowledging and referring to both indigenous and imperial histories, which interaction — both collided and collaborated — to produce a new historical imagination.” (2) It does make the work quite complex. Nonetheless, this complexity highlights Makdisi’s skill and a strength of the work in the utilization of a variety of sources, local, Ottoman, and those of various European powers, to read against the grain and make his argument persuasive.
Nevertheless, the main strength is Makdisi’s ability to consistently return agency and human contingency to the events he analyzes. In pushing back on other scholars telling of these events, Makdisi charges that modern sectarianism was not some inevitable thing but rather the creation of the violent events orchestrated by human hands. This is abundantly clear for example in his chapters on the partition of Mount Lebanon along religious lines (chapter 5) as well as how violence redefined the social order and boundaries (chapter 7). A weakness of the work then, is that the author is very rigid in his telling; Makdisi does not leave much room for a flexible interpretation of his evidence. While not necessarily a bad thing it does leave the author open to criticism in his interpretations.