A History of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Middle East

The Contemporary Middle East

by Heather J. Sharkey

Across centuries, the Islamic Middle East hosted large populations of Christians and Jews in addition to Muslims. Today, this diversity is mostly absent. In this book, Heather J. Sharkey examines the history that Muslims, Christians, and Jews once shared against the shifting backdrop of state policies. Focusing on the Ottoman Middle East before World War I, Sharkey offers a vivid and lively analysis of everyday social contacts, dress, music, food, bathing, and more, as they brought people together or pushed them apart. Historically, Islamic traditions of statecraft and law, which the Ottoman Empire maintained and adapted, treated Christians and Jews as protected subordinates to Muslims while prescribing limits to social mixing. Sharkey shows how, amid the pivotal changes of the modern era, efforts to simultaneously preserve and dismantle these hierarchies heightened tensions along religious lines and set the stage for the twentieth-century Middle East.

Genres: History, Religion

ebook

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

Heather J. Sharkey is Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC) at the University of Pennsylvania.

She received her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University after conducting research abroad on a Fulbright-Hays fellowship. As the recipient of a Marshall scholarship from the British government, she earned an M.Phil. degree in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Durham in England. She also earned a B.A. in Anthropology, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from Yale University. Before joining the Penn faculty in 2002, she taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Trinity College in Connecticut.

In 2011 she won the Charles Ludwig Distinguished Teaching Award from the School of Arts and Sciences of the University of Pennsylvania. In 2012-2013 she was a Visiting Professor in Paris at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in the Institut d’Études de l’Islam et des Sociétés du Monde Musulman (IISMM).

Reviews

[Padma Karri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well researched, non-prejudiced work which projects in the mind of the reader, a vivid picture of intermingling among various peoples in the middle east.

[Sujit Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heather J. Sharkey's work, "A History of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Middle East" is a remarkable work of scholarship on the relations between Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Middle East before World War I. The work is part of a series titled "The Contemporary Middle East" published by Cambridge University Press. In the highly commendable Epilogue, Sharkey reflects on "history". She states, "Scholars also use 'history' to refer to the craft and process of studying the past. This craft involves methods and, more abstractly, modes of approach. Third, scholars use 'history' to mean the story about the past that one assembles." This erudite work of research is such a history. It tells the story of how Muslims, Christians and Jews interacted in the Middle East during the Ottoman Empire. Sharkey spends the first chapters introducing the religious groups, the "Islamic Foundations of Intercommunal Relations", and the Ottoman Experience. The core of Sharkey's work revolves around the Tanzimat Reforms and the ensuing success / failure of the reforms.
This work will be useful for anyone interested in history of middle east, inter religious dialogue and Ottoman Empire. It also serves as a shining example of the "task" of historical scholarship.

[Bob Mobley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heather Sharkey has written a truly fascinating and informative concise history of the clash of cultures, Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Middle East since the beginning of the Byzantine Empire. If you are interested in the legacies of history, realities and the myths that are generated by successive historians and analysts of the region, Heather Sharkey’s book is a superb starting point for undertaking a complex and always changing cultural and political environment.

Many of the historical questions the author examines are still relevant today. This is especially true of the question of violence and religious liberty in Islam and the possibility for shared public spaces and secular cultures within an Islamic society. The author very astutely invites you into an examination on the role of pluralism and diversity in world history. In doing so, she contributes a very strong and purposeful understanding of the cultural, religious, and political history of the Middle East that is still very much part and parcel of our world in the second decade of the 21st century. This is a timely book and I believe well worth reading.

[The One and Only Maddie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic! Sometimes a little tangent-y, but I great inclusion of pictures, and a great detailed picture painted without relying on vauge-ities which is my pet peeve.