THE MYTH OF ANCIENT HATREDS
For decades, the Middle East has been explained to the West as a place doomed by tribalism, religious fanaticism and eternal sectarian conflict. The assumption runs so deep that coexistence now feels like the anomaly.
But what if the opposite is true?
Long before Europe embraced multiculturalism, Arab societies were wrestling with the realities of pluralism, building political movements that crossed religious lines and imagining modern citizenship beyond sect or creed. Muslims, Christians and Jews did not simply tolerate one another. They helped shape a shared political world.
The real rupture came not from ancient hatreds but from recent colonialism, partition, nationalism, occupation and the modern weaponisation of identity itself.
At a moment when liberal democracies are retreating into suspicion and polarisation, historian Ussama Makdisi asks an uncomfortable set of questions: has the West fundamentally misunderstood the Middle East? And why, given the rich history of coexistence in the region, is the idea of a secular democratic state in the heart of the Middle East so threatening to so many in the West?
Ussama Makdisi [PAL/USA]
Ussama Makdisi is the inaugural May Ziadeh Chair in Palestinian and Arab Studies, Professor of History and Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California Berkeley. He previously taught at Rice University in Houston. He is currently serving as President of the Middle East Studies Association. His most recent book Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World was published in 2019 and he is the co-author of a forthcoming book, AntiPalestinianism.
We acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation - the custodians of the country on which we meet - and acknowledge their Elders, past and present.
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