Youssef Ben Ismail

In​ 2012 the 96-year-old Bernard Lewis went on American radio to promote his book Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian. Neal Conan, the host of NPR’s Talk of the Nation, introduced him as a man unafraid of sensitive subjects and invited listeners to call in with questions about ‘taboos’ in Middle Eastern history. Conan asked whether race and slavery...

In the summer​ of 1860, an unprecedented wave of sectarian violence swept across Greater Syria. Druze militias sacked Maronite Christian villages, killing eleven thousand people. Muslim mobs killed more than a tenth of Damascus’s Christian population in a matter of days. Churches and monasteries were burned to the ground, monks and priests were slaughtered, Christian women were...