Arabs and Ottomans

Sam Noble continues the absolutely vital work of making Arab Christian history better known. Fresh off his edited collection with Sasha Treiger (read my interview with them here), Noble has collaborated with Constantin Alexandrovich Panchenko on Arab Orthodox Christians Under the Ottomans 1516–-1831 (Holy Trinity Publications, 2016), 676pp.

About this book we are told:

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 major lacuna in the scholarship of wider Christian history and more specifically that of lived religion within the Ottoman empire. The author draws on archaeological evidence and previously unpublished primary sources uncovered in Russian archives and Middle Eastern monastic libraries to present a vivid and compelling account of this vital but little-known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.