An award-winning scholar’s account of an ancient city’s descent into unprecedented communal violence—an event that would mark the end of the old Ottoman order and the beginning of the modern Middle East
On July 9, 1860, a violent mob swept through the Christian quarters of Damascus. For eight days, violence raged, leaving five thousand Christians dead, thousands of shops looted, and churches, houses, and monasteries razed. The sudden and ferocious outbreak shocked the world, leaving Syrian Christians vulnerable and fearing renewed violence.
Drawn from never-before-seen eyewitness accounts of the Damascus Events, eminent Middle East historian Eugene Rogan tells the story of how a peaceful multicultural city came to be engulfed in slaughter. He traces how rising tensions between Muslim and Christian communities led some to regard extermination as a reasonable solution. Rogan also narrates the wake of this disaster, and how the Ottoman government moved quickly to retake control of the city, end the violence, and reintegrate Christians into the community. These efforts to rebuild Damascus proved successful, preserving peace for the next 150 years until 2011.
The Damascus Events offers a vivid history, one that masterfully uncovers the outbreak of violence that unmade a great city and examines the possibility, even after searing conflict and unimaginable tragedy, of repair.
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Rogan’s book is a much-needed addition to the Middle East library, covering the monumental events of 1860 whose repercussions can be directly linked first to the Lebanese civil war that erupted in 1975 and then to the Syrian conflict that started in 2011. The events of 1860 wiped out an entire neighborhood in Damascus and killed over 5,000 Christians; creating a new Muslim elite for Damascus; and triggering a series of upheavals that accumulated with the Great Revolt of 1916, which eventually brought down Ottoman rule in Syria by the end of World War I. Although the 1860 massacres have been studied before by both Western and Arab academics, this is the first book that delves into the papers and dispatches of Mikhayil Mishaka, a firsthand survivor who was a practicing doctor also serving as the US vice-consul in Damascus in 1860. The last serious approach in English at understanding what happened in Damascus in 1860 is now thirty years old, making it academically outdated. And it doesn’t delve into the US archives, concentrating mainly on dispatches from European consulates and nineteenth-century memoirs of Syrian eyewitnesses. This is what makes Rogan’s book fresh, balanced, and thought-provoking; a must-read for historians, scholars, and Syriatologists.
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Sami Moubayed, chairman, the Damascus History Foundation