Jews, Muslims, and Christians in the Twilight of the Ottoman Empire

It is a longstanding frustration of mine that suitable textbooks for my undergrads are hard to come by when studying the history of relations between Muslims and Eastern Christians. Thus I take a special interest in a new book by Heather Sharkey, published this spring, which I'm looking forward to reading: A History of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2017), 394pp.

About this book we are told:

Across centuries, the Islamic Middle East hosted large populations of Christians and Jews in addition to Muslims. Today, this diversity is mostly absent. In this book, Heather J. Sharkey examines the history that Muslims, Christians, and Jews once shared against the shifting backdrop of state policies. Focusing on the Ottoman Middle East before World War I, Sharkey offers a vivid and lively analysis of everyday social contacts, dress, music, food, bathing, and more, as they brought people together or pushed them apart. Historically, Islamic traditions of statecraft and law, which the Ottoman Empire maintained and adapted, treated Christians and Jews as protected subordinates to Muslims while prescribing limits to social mixing. Sharkey shows how, amid the pivotal changes of the modern era, efforts to simultaneously preserve and dismantle these hierarchies heightened tensions along religious lines and set the stage for the twentieth-century Middle East.