Arab Orthodox Christians Under the Ottomans 1516?1831

Over the past two decades, society’s attention has increasingly returned to the forgotten world of the Christian East—the whole constellation of bright and now nearly endangered cultures of the Christian peoples of Southwest Asia and Northeast Africa.                                                                                               -From the Introduction            Over the past several decades, 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 gap in the scholarship of wider Christian history and more specifically that of lived religion within the Ottoman empire. Beginning with a survey of the Christian community during the first nine hundred years of Muslim rule, the author traces the evolution of Arab Orthodox Christian society from its roots in the Hellenistic culture of the Byzantine Empire to a distinctly Syro-Palestinian identity. There follows a detailed examination of this multi-faceted community, from the Ottoman conquest of Syria, Palestine and Egypt in 1516 to the Egyptian i
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