Twilight of the Saints: Everyday Religion in Ottoman Syria and Palestine

ISBN-13: 9780190619145 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 360 str.

James Grehan

Opis

In this study of everyday religious culture in early modern Syria and Palestine, James Grehan offers a social history
that looks beyond conventional ways of thinking about religion in the Middle East. The most common narratives about the region introduce us to the separate traditions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, highlighting how each one has created its own distinctive traditions and communities. Twilight of the Saints offers a reinterpretation of religious and cultural history in a region which is today associated with division and violence. Exploring the religious habits of ordinary people, from the late seventeenth to the end of the nineteenth century, when the region was part of the Ottoman Empire, Grehan shows that members of different religious groups participated in a common, overarching religious culture that was still visible at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Most evident in the countryside, though present everywhere, this religious mainstream thrived in a society in which few people had access to formal religious teachings. This older, folk religious culture was steeped in notions and rituals that the modern world, with its mainly theological conception of religion, has utterly repudiated. Indeed, the people of Syria and Palestine today would hardly recognize religion as it was experienced in the not-so-distant past. Only by uncovering this lost lived religion, argues Grehan, can we appreciate the largely unacknowledged revolution in religion that has taken place in the region over the last century.

Recenzje

Grehan provides an important corrective to earlier scholarly biases, such as describing folk customs in terms of their deviance from textual norms, and he recognizes that urban elites repeatedly joined in supposedly rural practices, whether venerating saints or appeasing ghosts. The author's careful appraisal of the evidence demonstrates that there is less of a gap between countryside and cityscape as much as there is a gulf between premodern and modern ways of enacting religion. A major benefit comes from how Grehan reads Muslim, Jewish, and Christian sources all together, emphasizing shared practices and common presumptions.

O autorze

James Grehan is Associate Professor of history at Portland State University. He received his doctoral degree in history from the University of Texas at Austin. He currently lives in Portland with his wife and son.