Minorities in the Middle East: A History of Struggle and Self-Expression (Paperback)

by Mordechai Nisan (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal
The Middle East is a kaleidoscope of competing ethnic groups. This informative volume by a scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem seeks to examine the struggle for self-determination by many of these ethnic groups in the region. The strength of the book lies in the breadth of its coverage of minorities in the Middle East. Individual chapters describe the condition of such Muslim minorities as the Kurds, Berbers, Baluchis, Druzes, and Alawites. The author also explains the history of Christian minorities, such as the Copts, Assyrians, Armenians, Maronites, and the Sudanese Christians. However, Nisan's occasional gratuitous attacks on the Arabs and Islam detract from the book's objectivity. Useful for informed readers and scholars of ethnicity and Middle Eastern studies.
- Nader Entessar, Spring Hill Coll., Mobile, Ala.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
"An invaluable and timely resource" -- Against the Grain

"Impressive" -- Choice

"Informative...useful" -- Library Journal

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 351 pages
• Publisher: McFarland & Company; 2 edition (September 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786413751
• ISBN-13: 978-0786413751
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,104,553 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Alive but Oppressed, March 3, 2003

By A Customer

By Bat Yeor

To the average observer, the Middle East appears to be a homogeneous,
gigantic Arab-Muslim continent. Under this heavy blanket of uniformity,
however, the remnants of colonized, extinguished nations, crushed and
dispossessed by imperialism, survive in pain and anguish. These peoples -
Kurds, Alawites, Copts, Jews, and others - have withstood jihad, genocides,
persecutions, and continual sociopolitical repression. Yet their hearts
still beat, inspired by the hope of freedom and survival.
It is their history that Mordechai Nisan tells, combining clear scholarship
with a perspicacious sensibility. Who are these peoples? In his subtle
analysis, Nisan demonstrates that they represent diverse ethnic groups, with
unique historical experiences. The author constructs a fascinating mosaic of
peoples, beliefs, and intertwined histories. This work expands upon a 1991
study, with much new material.
Nisan begins by specifying the characteristics these people share in their
diversity. What inner forces of cohesion shaped their resistance to the Arab
and Islamic onslaught on their lands and civilizations from East Persia to
North Africa? The factors promoting survival are neither fixed nor stable.
Throughout the political dynamism of historical events, each of these
peoples has preserved a collective self-consciousness that spans millennia.
"The crux of a minority struggle," writes Nisan, "often revolved around the
ability to define identity from within as a matter of group
self-articulation, and not be the victims of a superimposed identity from
without." Crushed by cultural and religious Arab-Islamic imperialism, the
group's identity and cohesion is a testimony to its indigenous uniqueness.
But can this human and cultural diversity of the Middle East survive after
millennia of hardship, unforeseen challenges, and resistance?
One discovers, for instance, beneath the uniformity of Arabism a
substructure of living, resistant, minority peoples cultivating their
pre-Arab and pre-Islamic native languages, cultures, and religions. Nisan
organizes the groups into four main categories: (1) the Islamized peoples
who resisted Arab/Muslim colonialism and kept their own culture and
languages, like the Kurds (Iraq, Syria, Iran, Turkey), the Berbers (Algeria,
Tunisia, Morocco), and the Baluch (Pakistan); (2) the heterodox Muslim
minorities who were Arabized but resisted Islamization by keeping their
ancestral beliefs and customs under a Muslim veneer, like the Druzes
(Levant) and the Alawites (Syria); (3) the Christian minorities: Armenians,
Assyrians, Copts, Maronites, and Sudanese; and (4) the Jews, the only
minority who succeeded in liberating a part of their historical land from
Arab-Islamic imperialism.
Nisan describes the rich history of each group and the inevitable tensions
that accompany cultural, linguistic, and religious resistance to
Islamization. Their histories include the difficulties entailed in
maintaining the history and culture of the group, the processes of survival
they adopted, the modalities of adaptation, and the compromises employed to
save a modicum of freedom without disappearing. This analytical survey
carries us through several levels of understanding, from the policy of
conquest and domination that included spoliation, slavery, deportation, and
genocide to the various mechanisms of survival adopted by each crushed,
humiliated, oppressed, or tolerated community. Not every group developed the
same self-consciousness of its history, culture, and ethnic characteristics,
but all resisted.
The political and social tensions highlighted by Nisan are most urgent and
topical for the West. In our age of multiculturalism, which has seen the
recent development in the West of large immigrant communities, what does
integration mean? Can some groups integrate more easily than others? Can
integration succeed when fundamental values clash? Nisan's sober and
scholarly analysis of the conflict between territorial ethnicity and
religious imperialism is of great relevance to the West.
In history, chance is a fugitive fairy that rarely passes twice. The light
of freedom sparkled for the oppressed Christian minorities in the Middle
East after World War I. It was quickly extinguished by France and Britain in
their eagerness to appease Muslim hostility in their Arab colonial
dominions. Sacrificed were the legitimate aspirations of the Armenians,
Kurds, Assyrians, and Copts.
Their ancestral homelands were arbitrarily lumped into enormous Arab-Islamic
entities, while concessions to Islamic demands violated their rights. Some,
like the Armenians, Assyrians, and Jacobites, were simply abandoned to
bloody reprisals, while the promises they had been given were broken. Only
the Maronites and the Jews were given a chance; even for these, it was a
delusion and a snare. British pro-Arab policy in the 1930s in Palestine, the

gestation of the Shoah in Europe, and the closure of all routes of escape
for the Jews at the Evian Conference in 1938 seemed to have delivered the
last blow to the Zionist dream of national liberation. The Maronites had to
wait a generation to experience the bitterness of world abandonment and the
betrayal of their friends. Hence, among all the dhimmi peoples, only Israel
survived the lethal Euro-Arab alliance against the indigenous Middle Eastern
minorities.
This history of blood, hope, and massacres that Nisan recalls in a masterly
way is not over. The martyrdom perpetrated on the Lebanese Christians by the
Palestinians and their Muslim allies, generalized jihad, the slavery and
butchery inflicted on the rebellious non-Muslim Sudanese populations, the
oppression of the Copts and the Assyrians, the massacres of the Kurds, the
negation of the Berber's cultural rights, the jihad Intifada against Israel
- all are ignored or explained away by European governments and the media.
Do these ancient and courageous peoples still have a chance to deliver
themselves from the shackle of dhimmitude, and the manipulations of Eurabia
<http://www.dhimmitude.org/d_today_jihad.php>? Now that a new Middle East is
being projected, in spite of old Europe's lethal alliance with the most
repressive regimes, maybe the good-luck fairy will pass a second time, to
console and redress the cynical injustice inflicted on vulnerable and
martyred peoples. Nisan's book is invaluable for a fuller understanding of
Middle East history, past and present.
In the mid 19th century, the French Turcophile writer Abdolonyme Ubicini
(translation from The Decline of Eastern Christianity
</redirect/amazon.asp?j=0838636780>) described the subjected dhimmis of the
Ottoman Empire - Christians and Jews - awaiting liberation despite centuries
of oppression:
The history of enslaved peoples is the same everywhere, or rather,
they have no history. The years, the centuries pass without bringing any
change to their situation. Generations come and go in silence. One might
think they are afraid to awaken their masters, asleep alongside them.
However, if you examine them closely you discover that this immobility is
only superficial. A silent and constant agitation grips them. Life has
entirely withdrawn into the heart. They resemble those rivers which have
disappeared underground: if you put your ear to the earth, you can hear the
muffled sound of their waters; then they emerge intact a few leagues away.
Such is the state of the Christian populations of Turkey under Ottoman rule.
Will his observations prove relevant today for the Christian and other
ethnic minorities of the Arab-Muslim dominions?
- Bat Yeor <http://www.dhimmitude.org> is the author of three books on jihad
and dhimmitude. Her latest study Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations
Collide

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars in depth account of middle eastern minorities, March 4, 2003

By A Customer

This book is an in depth account of middle eastern minorities betrayed by European colonizers. Very relevant to today's problems in the Middle East.