Recent Perspectives on Christianity in the Modern Arab World

Although Christians constitute large and important communities in much of the modern Arab world, scholars have long tended to overlook their histories, viewing them as little more than pawns of Western interests or victims of Muslim overlords. Recently, however, a body of new scholarship has sought to explore the modern experience of Christians in the Arab world. This historiographical article examines the past reluctance to deal with the modern history of Christianity in the Arab world; investigates the reasons for its recent emergence as a topic of interest to historians; analyzes the approaches and contributions of the new scholarship; and suggests some possibilities for future directions.