Review of Ussama Makdisi, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World

Abstract

The latest book of Lebanese-American historian Ussama Makdisi, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World, published in 2019 by the University of California Press, contributes to the growing literature on non- or anti-sectarian movements and builds upon the anti-primordialist arguments he formulated in his first book. In The Culture of Sectarianism (2000), Makdisi argued that sectarianism is a distinctly modern phenomenon born largely from the politicization and instrumentalization of religious identities by imperial actors in late nineteenth century Mount Lebanon. In this latest book, he goes a step further by identifying an actual but ignored history of anti-sectarianism in the Levant, during that same time period. In line with the abundant scholarship that unpacks essentialist understandings and stereotypes about the region and its people, Makdisi’s book offers readers a nuanced articulation of the Mashriq’s modern history through the lens of religious coexistence – or what he conceptualizes as the ecumenical frame – avoiding orientalist and defeatist tropes or the romanticization of cross-sectarian dynamics.