num_pages: 470
description: Levant is a book of cities. It describes three former centers of great wealth pleasure and freedomSmyrna Alexandria and Beirutcities 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.
language: English
title: Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean
publisher: Yale University Press