James Traub: Is there a place for Christians in the new Middle East?

James Traub is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a fellow of the Center on International Cooperation. "Terms of Engagement," his column for ForeignPolicy.com, runs weekly.

...We tend to forget that it was the Middle East that taught the world how the three Abrahamic faiths could get along with one another. In his masterful new book, The Great Sea, historian David Abulafia recounts how a polyglot Mediterranean culture of Jews, Muslims, Greek Orthodox Christians, and Catholics arose in the coastal cities of Constantinople, Salonika, Tunis, Jaffa, and Alexandria. This last, in the 1920s, had 25,000 Jews in a population of about 500,000, as well as Greeks, Italians, Maltese, and others. Abulafia writes that Omar Toussoon, a leading member of the Egyptian royal family, patronized all these groups equally while working hard to improve the economic fortunes of the city's Muslim masses.

Virtually the entire region now experiencing the convulsion of the Arab Spring lived inside the very large tent of the Ottoman Empire until World War I. Ottoman rulers welcomed the Jews who fled the Inquisition. In great Ottoman capitals like Aleppo, in modern Syria, Jews, Christians, Kurds, and Sunni Muslims lived in the same neighborhoods. "Inter-communal residential mixing" was the norm across the Ottoman empire, according to Donald Quataert, a scholar of the Ottoman period. If it all unraveled in the 20th century, Quataert writes, it is not because of "inherent animosities of an alleged racial or ethnic nature."

Quataert argues that the collapse of pluralism was not an inevitable consequence of seething inter-group resentment, but rather the work of nationalists who agitated for the creation of states, whether in Turkey, Bulgaria, or the Maghreb, and who then exploited and encouraged nationalist sentiment in order to consolidate power. Political choices, in other words, poisoned the atmosphere of pluralism -- as they later would in the Balkans, the Ottoman heartland, as well. Populist rulers can accommodate diversity, as they have largely done in today's Turkey, or they can unleash the forces of sectarianism, as they have in Iraq, where Shiites and Sunnis kill one another and both kill Christians. Older Iraqis will tell you that no one ever spoke of "Sunni" and "Shiite" when they were young; but whether in Bosnia or Iraq, sectarianism, once provoked, has a very long half life. There is no more volatile substance in the modern nation-state....