Arab Orthodox Christians Under the Ottomans 1516–1831

Description

Over the past two decades, society’s
attention has increasingly returned to the forgotten world of the Christian
East—the whole constellation of bright and now nearly endangered cultures of the
Christian peoples of Southwest Asia and Northeast Africa.

                                                                       
                      -From the Introduction           

Over the past several decades, the world’s attention has been drawn to
the presence of significant minority religious groups within the predominantly
Islamic Middle East. Of these minorities Christians are by far the largest,
comprising over 10% of the population in Syria and as much as 40% in Lebanon.
The largest single group of Christians are the Arabic-speaking Orthodox. This
work fills a gap in the scholarship of wider Christian history and more
specifically that of lived religion within the Ottoman empire. Beginning with a
survey of the Christian community during the first nine hundred years of Muslim
rule, the author traces the evolution of Arab Orthodox Christian society from
its roots in the Hellenistic culture of the Byzantine Empire to a distinctly
Syro-Palestinian identity. There follows a detailed examination of this
multi-faceted community, from the Ottoman conquest of Syria, Palestine and Egypt
in 1516 to the Egyptian invasion of Syria in 1831. The author draws on
archaeological evidence and previously unpublished primary sources uncovered in
Russian archives and Middle Eastern monastic libraries to present a vivid and
compelling account of this vital but little-known spiritual and political
culture, situating it within a complex network of relations reaching throughout
the Mediterranean, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe. The work is made more
accessible to a non-specialist reader by the addition of a glossary, whilst the
scholar will benefit from a detailed bibliography of both primary and secondary
sources. 

“This manuscript fills an important lacuna in the wider
history of the Christian Church as it unfolds the presence and extent of
indigenous Arabic-speaking believers in the Levant…These are matters of great
complexity and a fuller understanding of them will help to shape our
understanding of the takfirism against which we now
struggle.”    

 – from the Foreword by His Beatitude Patriarch John X of Antioch and
All the East