We would like to invite you for a lecture and discussion with the historian Ussama Makdisi (Rice University, Houston) on "Coexistence in an Age of Genocide: The Arab Renaissance in the Late Ottoman Empire".
The lecture will take place on Wednesday, October 2, 2013 at 4 pm at the new premises of the Forum Transregionale Studien, Wallotstr. 14, 14193 Berlin.

Abstract:
Donald Bloxham describes the history of the late Ottoman empire as the setting for a “great game of genocide.” Bloxham is concerned specifically with the annihilation of Armenians in Anatolia in 1915. The “great game of genocide” also haunted the Greek Orthodox, and to a lesser extent the Kurdish populations of Anatolia. However, it largely bypassed the Christian Arabs, who enjoyed a belle époque at more or less the same time as Armenian Christians had to endure a series of pogroms culminating in genocide. Neither Arab Christians or Arabic-speaking Jews in cities such as Baghdad faced an existential threat in any way comparable to the upheavals endured by Muslim populations in the Balkans, or Christians in Anatolia, and by some Muslims in Anatolia. Ethnic cleansing and nationalism was the rule in Anatolia and the Balkans. In the Levant, coexistence flourished in a manner scarcely conceivable a century earlier in Syria or Egypt, and essentially, as the fate of the Armenians and Greeks in Anatolia demonstrates, impossible in late nineteenth-century Anatolia or Istanbul. My lecture explores this great divergence in the Ottoman empire. It focuses on the paradoxes and ironies of the Arab nahda or renaissance and its implications for the study of sectarianism in the post-Ottoman Arab world.

Ussama Makdisi is Professor of History at Rice University, Houston. His major publications include Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820 – 2001 (Public Affairs, 2010) and Artillery of heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Cornell University Press, 2008). He is widely known for his groundbreaking study The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (University of California Press, 2000). In 2012/13, he was a research fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
The lecture given by Ussama Makdisi is part of 'Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe' (EUME), a research program at the Forum Transregionale Studien.
Please leave a note via email, if you will be able to attend, until September 30, 2013 (eume@trafo-berlin.de).