Some quotes

I'm listing a few quotes I obtained from "The Culture of Sectarianism", by Usama Makdisi (if anyone has read it, tell me how you found it), which I found interesting.

1 - He discusses how people, such as the Europeans, were "all consumed with the idea that religion was the single most important political identification of each villager",
2 - and how they "tried to reorganize physical and cultural space in accordance with a sectarian vision of the past",
3 - while noting that "they exhibited a newly instilled fear of and a willingness to be segregated from their Islamic surroundings".
4 - An American missionary is quoted to have writting the following in 1860: "They have everything to lose and nothing to gain by a war, and if there is a civil war, it will be waged by the people without the concurrence of their leaders".
5 - Some parties had a "sectarian vision of liberation", and
6 - part of the reason of the book is to "unsettle the pretension of homogeneity and solidity of communal identity that the term sectarianism implies".
7 - "In the aftermath of 1860, a culture of sectarianism developed in the sense that all sectors of society, public and private, recognized that the war and the massacres marked the beginning of a new age - an age defined by the raw intrusion of sectarian consciousness into modern life ... The culture depended, and still depends, in a myth of communal homogeneity - that there is such a thing as a Maronite or a Drize nation that can or should be represented - ...this culture reproduces and justifies itself as a balance of communities ... it encompasses, beyond the eye of state surveillance, a range of aspirations, fears, and beliefs that as often contradict sectarianism ... a series of pamphlets ... stresses the need ... to punish perpetrators and thereby bring a sense of closure and healing for the victims, but at the same time recognize the underlying causes for conflict and remedy them ... makes the point that man is not sectarian by nature or impulse but by education and socialization ... however, there are others that refuse or are unable to accept that there is such a thing as a good Muslim or Druze or Christian. These are men and women who 'remember' the harrowing stories of their grandparents ... There has never been pure sectarianism, only narratives about its purity."

posted by Lazarus, 2:13 AM