EUME
2015/ 2016

Max Weiss

Affiliated EUME Fellow 2015/2016

The Hallowed Sanctuary: An Interpretive History of Modern Syria

Max Weiss is Associate Professor of History and Near Eastern Studies and Elias Boudinot Bicentennial Preceptor at Princeton University. He is the author of In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi`ism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), and the translator, most recently, of Nihad Sirees, The Silence and the Roar (London: Pushkin Press/New York: Other Press, 2013). He is also co-editor, with Jens Hanssen, of two forthcoming volumes on modern Arab intellectual history. After completing a dual BA at the University of California, Berkeley, in Molecular and Cell Biology, and History, and earning his MA and PhD in Modern Middle East History from Stanford University, he held postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton University and the Harvard Society of Fellows, and has been a visiting professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris.

The Hallowed Sanctuary: An Interpretive History of Modern Syria

While an Affiliated EUME Fellow, Weiss will be working on an interpretive history of modern Syria. Despite the incontrovertible significance of Syria to the making of the modern Middle East, there remains a noteworthy dearth of historical scholarship on the country. Rather than a conventional country study, however, The Hallowed Sanctuary will thread together three broad and essential themes that rarely get considered together: law and society; the interplay among the religious, the secular, and the sectarian; and the dialectical relationship between ideology and culture, primarily literature. Without shying away from regional and international dynamics, this book will take seriously the development of Syria as a nation-state. Struggles over the definition of nation and state, society and identity played an exceedingly important part in the shaping of Syrian political culture and intellectual life amid strikingly difficult circumstances and tumultuous times. If the book succeeds in making a contribution to Syrian and Middle East studies, one also hopes that such historical analysis of Syria’s complex and multifaceted past may hold out some hope for the reconstruction and celebration of the country both before and beyond the ongoing tragedy.