Books > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history
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Levant - Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean (Paperback)
Loot Price: R617
Discovery Miles 6 170
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Levant - Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean (Paperback)
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Levant is a book of cities. It describes three former centers of
great wealth, pleasure, and freedom-Smyrna, Alexandria, and
Beirut-cities of the Levant region along the eastern coast of the
Mediterranean. In these key ports at the crossroads of East and
West, against all expectations, cosmopolitanism and nationalism
flourished simultaneously. People freely switched identities and
languages, released from the prisons of religion and nationality.
Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived and worshipped as neighbors.
Distinguished historian Philip Mansel is the first to recount the
colorful, contradictory histories of Smyrna, Alexandria, and Beirut
in the modern age. He begins in the early days of the French
alliance with the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century and
continues through the cities' mid-twentieth-century fates: Smyrna
burned; Alexandria Egyptianized; Beirut lacerated by civil war.
Mansel looks back to discern what these remarkable Levantine cities
were like, how they differed from other cities, why they shone
forth as cultural beacons. He also embarks on a quest: to discover
whether, as often claimed, these cities were truly cosmopolitan,
possessing the elixir of coexistence between Muslims, Christians,
and Jews for which the world yearns. Or, below the glittering
surface, were they volcanoes waiting to erupt, as the catastrophes
of the twentieth century suggest? In the pages of the past, Mansel
finds important messages for the fractured world of today.
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