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Secular Nationalism and Citizenship in Muslim Countries: Arab Christians in the Levant, edited by Kail C. Ellis. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 226 pages. $129.
Reviewed by Paul S. Rowe
This wide-ranging set of essays addresses various topics related to the status of Christian communities in the Middle East amid recent crises. The overall theme deals with secular nationalism as a means of guaranteeing citizenship for minority communities in general and Christians specifically. The collection arose out of a conference convened in December 2016 at Villanova University, where editor Kail Ellis is associate professor of political science and assistant to the president.
The contributors to this volume feature an array of distinguished experts in the status of Christian communities, international affairs, and the foreign policy of the United States. Their essays describe the significance and variety of Christian organizations and contributions to civil society in the Middle East as well as the permutations of regional politics and US foreign policy.
The collection is organized under three rubrics. The first section, by far the most substantive, gives credit to the long history of Christian contributions to the larger cultural life of the Islamic Middle East. Distinguished historian Sidney Griffith traces the centrality of Christians to medieval intellectual life in the Middle East during the centuries in which they remained the majority. He concludes that Christians adapted nimbly to the interactions with their Muslim compatriots following the Islamic conquest. Anthony O'Mahony, a doyen of studies of Middle Eastern Christianity, provides a bird's eye view of Christianity throughout the region. Palestinian sociologist Bernard Sabella celebrates the contributions of cultural contacts facilitated by Christians during the late 19th and early 20th...