2024-01-22
Quoting from introduction:
More fundamentally, I dispute an entire way of looking at the Middle East, and the Arab world in particular, as some kind of pathological place consumed by the disease of sectarianism. Sectarianism is a real problem, but it is no more real, and no less subject to change over time, than are analogous problems of racism in the West and caste politics and communalism in South Asia. There is a key difference between orientalizing the Middle East (thinking of it as strange, aberrant, and dangerously different) and historicizing it (putting it in context and in dialogue with analogous experiences in other parts of the world). Once we understand this, we can, I believe, study the history of coexistence in the Middle East without defensiveness and without the misplaced paternalism that so often dogs pronouncements about the region.