A Brief History of Anti Sectarianism in the Arab World

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 worlds 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 nowobscured Arab tradition of antisectarianism, 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 nonMuslim Arabs during the dramatic transformations of the nineteenthcentury Ottoman Empire, and in the twentiethcentury secular Arab nationalist and socialist currents of the Middle East.