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Stefan Winter : A History of the 'Alawis: From Medieval Aleppo to the Turkish Republic . xiii, 317 pp. Princeton and Oxford : Princeton University Press , 2016. £22.95. ISBN 978 069117389 4 .
Reviews: The Near and Middle East
The study of Nusayri-'Alawi history has developed significantly with the publication of recent books and articles, including those by H. Halm, M.M. Bar-Asher, A. Kofsky, and Y. Friedman. The 'Alawi minority has attracted attention in the West due to its domination of Syria and its involvement in the ongoing civil war. Stefan Winter's book sheds light on almost unknown periods in the history of the sect.
A History of the[...]Alawis contains six chapters. The first two deal with the medieval period (early Nusayri history and Mamluk rule); the subsequent two focus on the early and late Ottoman periods, and the final two address the modern period (nineteenth and twentieth centuries), up to Salih al-'Ali's revolt against the French mandate in the 1920s. While the second half of Winter's study deserves much praise, the first half suffers from several flaws.
Chapters 1 and 2 are based largely on secondary sources (Western research) and cover periods that have been addressed by previous publications. Winter judges these previous studies as "obsessed with the 'Alawi religious belief" (p. xi). His efforts to use a "widened documentary" and to create a "secular approach" (p. 2) may be appropriate for the Ottoman period, but...