Minorities in the Arab Heartland

The story of minorities in the contemporary Arab world is not an especially happy one. It is useful to begin a survey of them with Lebanon, if only because this small country was once perceived both as a refuge for minorities and as an alternative model for inter-communal relations in the region. Some seventeen sects, comprising a population of 3.5 million, lived here together in relative though sometimes precarious accord until civil war devastated the “Lebanese way of life” in the mid-1970s. An array of regional factors intruded then, exacerbating Lebanon’s weaknesses and upsetting a delicate religious and ethnic balance. Thus ended a singular form of Mideast democracy, one that had lasted some three decades and contr...