Conflicted Community – Eugene Rogan Interview: What do the 1860 ‘Damascus Events’ mean for the Middle East today?
12:33 Share

Hello, dearest listeners. Welcome back to another episode for the Conflicted Community. Thomas Small here without Eamon for the first time on this feed. The mysterious Eamon Dean is off who knows where, giving his expert intelligence to God knows whom. He'll be back with us next time.

So no Amon, but I am not alone. I am extremely glad and indeed honored to be joined today by a hugely eminent historian, professor of modern Middle Eastern history and a fellow of St. Anthony's College at the University of Oxford,

Eugene Rogin is here to talk about his special area of expertise, the late Ottoman Empire. Eugene is a true scholar of the Middle East, someone I have admired for a long time. Eugene, welcome to the show. Thomas, after that kind of introduction, I feel very welcome indeed. Well, you are very welcome, Eugene. Your latest book has just come out entitled The Damascus Events, the 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World. Excellent.

expertly narrating, I might say, a tragic but fascinating and indeed illuminating episode, which in many ways continues to reverberate today, informing the culture and politics of the Levant. I cannot wait to discuss your book with you, Eugene, and the history behind it all. Let's jump right in. ♪

Eugene, I was so pleased to learn that, like me, you're a Southern California boy. How did a kid go from the Hollywood studio-saturated city of Burbank to becoming professor, no less, at

at Oxford University. And for non-British listeners, in the UK, they don't just hand out professorships to any Johnny-come-lately. You have to work for it. Oh, I think you have to work pretty hard for it in America, too. The link to the Middle East is thanks to my parents. My father worked in the aerospace industry, and we left Burbank when I was six years old to move to Paris, then Rome, then Beirut, then Cairo.

I reached the Middle East when I was 11 years old, and I finished the remainder of my schooling right through high school in an Arab world that was at full boil. I got to witness firsthand the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, the breakout of the Lebanese Civil War. Anwar Sadat hopped on an airplane and flew to address the Knesset in Jerusalem while I was a high school student in Cairo.

You know, Thomas, there was nothing that was to capture my interest more deeply than the Middle East after that childhood spent between Beirut and Cairo. I bet.

If I'm not mistaken, you spent some time in Damascus 25 years ago and were there during 9/11. Is that right? Well, Damascus is a city I've been going to since the early 1970s. My mom loved the city and I got to credit my mom now deep into her 90s, a wonderful woman who first took me to the city. But yeah, I've been going back and forth to Damascus since then and I was doing research in the archives in Syria for this book.

which, as you know, is something that's been long in gestation and was called

by one of the librarian's assistants to a little miniature television in her office to see this strange spectacle of airliners flying into the World Trade Center. And I knew that the world was changing and it was probably time for me to leave Damascus. So yes, there's been a kind of shadow of 9/11 that's cast over this project from that moment in the French Research Institute in Damascus. Well, hasn't the shadow of 9/11 cast itself over the whole Middle East for the last 25 years?

Now, moving on to the book itself, it's entitled The Damascus Events. This is how terrible tragedy that took place in Damascus in 1860 is remembered, The Damascus Events.

We will, in the second half of this podcast episode, talk specifically about that tragedy. We will narrate it. For now, I just want to say, you know, you evocatively describe it as a genocidal moment in which the extermination of Syrian Christians seemed a reasonable solution. A genocidal moment.

Of course, we see now genocidal moments today. So there is a relevance to this story, isn't there? There is a relevance. And at the time of writing, of course, I wasn't thinking about current affairs. I was thinking about the number of genocidal moments that have occurred just in my lifetime.

I look back on the Cambodian genocide, the events in Rwanda, the whole kind of breakup of Yugoslavia and the kind of mass murders that accompanied that, what happened to Yazidis, the Darfurian people in Sudan. There'd been a lot. Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. And what you realize is that

genocidal moments have been occurring in every continent, in every society, in every religious community, in every culture, right through the late 20th and 21st century. You can't pinpoint this to something we have distance on. Oh, that happened in the distant past, but we've moved on since then. And I think

What I was trying to pinpoint is there is a moment where in a complex society, one group identifies another as an existential threat. Doesn't happen quickly, builds up slowly. When that existential threat becomes acute enough, then extermination comes to be seen as a reasonable solution. That to me is like the defining feature of what will take a society that is formerly known cohabitation

to the point where if we were to think of your own street, Thomas, imagine everyone on your side of the street deciding that the people on the other side of the street were their enemy and got out the kitchen knives to actually go hand to hand and kill them. Unthinkable horror. But this is something that has been part of human history right through down to the present day.

And it happened in Damascus in 1860. Yeah, as you say, you know, people, one community, possibly a majority community, feeling it's under existential threat from a minority community and deciding that extermination is a reasonable solution. But that happens, and your book, man, does your book not paint this picture so vividly? That happens often, if not always, in a context of profound social, economic, and political change.

And your book, talking about the Damascus events of 1860, is very much centered on a period of Ottoman history that was undergoing extraordinary change. Would you just describe a bit what the mid-19th century Ottoman Empire world was like? You know, it was a very different time. In fact...

literally a different time. Yeah. I mean, in so many ways, I had to kind of introduce the reader at the very beginning of the book to just different ways in which time and distance are conceived of by 19th century Ottomans and Damascenes. It is a different world. And I think, you know, it was changes taking place over three decades that I wind up drawing on to try and explain the breakdown in order in Damascus. If you look at Damascus of 1830,

You're dealing with a city of 140,000 to 150,000 inhabitants, of which the overwhelming majority, 80% or so, was Sunni Muslim, with a Christian minority of a wide range of denominations of about 15%, and then a Jewish population of 4% or 5%. And there was a distinct social hierarchy in which the Sunni Muslim elite dominated the city, but where Christians and Jews were respected,

protected, but distinctly second-class citizens. And what happens in the course of the 1830s, 40s, and 50s are a series of changes in the economy and in the diplomatic world and in society that challenge the predominance of the Sunni Muslim majority in a kind of zero-sum game where one community's gain is at the expense of another.

And I mean, I'd start with the economic changes of changing trade patterns that were being accelerated by the advent of steam shipping.

that sees more and more steamships plying the ways across the Mediterranean, dumping more and more industrial goods from Europe that are cheaper to produce and are competing directly with, let's say, the fabric production of Damascus, a really important artisanal industry in Syria itself, and then siphoning off lots of raw materials, raw cotton, raw wool, raw silk, to feed the mills of Lancashire or of Lyon. And in the process...

Christians are the only beneficiaries because they're the middlemen for these European traders. They're getting rich at the expense of their Muslim neighbors. Those changes are beginning to bite, and you can see it hurts. The book is particularly good, Eugene, at narrating just how destabilizing... If you're hearing this message, it's because you are not signed up to our subscriber-conflicted community feed.

To hear the rest of this episode, gain access to future bonus episodes, join our Discord chat hub, and for ad-free listening, go to the link in our show notes and sign up now. ♪