The late Ottoman period witnessed some extraordinary and lasting breaks with the past. Some were physical migrations, with hundreds of thousands of people relocating from the Middle East to discover and embrace new worlds in North and South America, Europe and Australia. Others travelled to South Asia and West Africa, flitting within and between the imperial domains of the Ottoman Empire, France and the United Kingdom. Small-scale traders, intellectuals seeking new horizons, embattled minorities: many of them setting out to reinvent themselves and discard inherited world views. Some of the most profound changes were internal, as Middle Eastern societies experienced an often turbulent evolution of both personal and collective identities, in religion, political thought, artistic expression and philosophy. For a remarkable period between 1860 and 1930, individuals from Cairo and Damascus to Smyrna and Beirut – as well as those in a global diaspora that spread from Marseille to Calgary and Boston to Buenos Aires – were faced with opportunities and challenges that resulted in true generational change, in both self-perception and the perception of outsiders.
The Moving Stories project aims to understand how this complex picture shaped relationships between and among the region’s religious groups, as evolving forms of sectarian identity – encompassing issues of religion, community, law and politics – became both a powerful force in the volatile history of a decolonising Middle East and an important factor in community development in the New World context.
