Source: Arab Orthodoxy
May 3, 2016
Over the past two decades, society’s attention
has increasingly returned to the forgotten world of the
Christian East—the whole constellation of bright and
now nearly endangered cultures of the Christian peoples of
Southwest Asia and Northeast Africa.
-From the Introduction
Following the so called "Arab Spring" the
world's attention has been drawn to the presence of
significant minority religious groups within the
predominantly Islamic Middle East. Of these minorities
Christians are by far the largest, comprising over 10% of
the population in Syria and as much as 40% in Lebanon. The
largest single group of Christians are the Arabic-speaking
Orthodox. This work fills a gap in the scholarship of
wider Christian history and more specifically that of
lived religion within the Ottoman empire. Beginning with a
survey of the Christian community during the first nine
hundred years of Muslim rule, the author traces the
evolution of Arab Orthodox Christian society from its
roots in the Hellenistic culture of the Byzantine Empire
to a distinctly Syro-Palestinian identity. There follows a
detailed examination of this multi-faceted community, from
the Ottoman conquest of Syria, Palestine and Egypt in 1516
to the Egyptian invasion of Syria in 1831. The author
draws on archaeological evidence and previously
unpublished primary sources uncovered in Russian archives
and Middle Eastern monastic libraries to present a vivid
and compelling account of this vital but little-known
spiritual and political culture, situating it within a
complex network of relations reaching throughout the
Mediterranean, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe. The work
is made more accessible to a non-specialist reader by the
addition of a glossary, whilst the scholar will benefit
from a detailed bibliography of both primary and secondary
sources.
"This manuscript fills an important lacuna in the
wider history of the Christian Church as it unfolds the
presence and extent of indigenous Arabic-speaking
believers in the Levant...These are matters of great
complexity and a fuller understanding of them will help to
shape our understanding of the takfirism against which we
now struggle."
- from the Foreword by His Beatitude Patriarch John X of
Antioch and All the East
Now available from Holy Trinity Seminary Press here.
