Event co-sponsored by the Buffett Institute for Global Studies
Title: "Writing a History of Sectarianism"
Speaker: Dr. Ussama Makdisi, Rice University, Professor of History &
Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair of Arab Studies
Description:
How does one write a history of sectarianism in the modern Middle East? What does sectarianism actually mean? Where does one begin a story of sectarianism?
The traditional view is that religious violence in the Middle East is an emanation of a peculiar sectarian Middle Eastern condition, that it is “age-old” and endemic and that it reflects a problem in the region’s adaptation to a secular Western modernity. Sectarianism has often been depicted as a holdover of primordial religious divisions that make up the Middle East.
In contrast, I would like to suggest that an Ottoman crisis of religious pluralism that began in the nineteenth century was itself part of a global problem in which many empires and nation-states struggled to transform explicit politics of discrimination into those of citizenship and equality.
Lunch Served
Cost: Free
Katelyn Marie Rashid
(847) 467-5314
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