Not a Simple Story

The 1860 massacre resists every attempt to flatten it into a single sectarian narrative. This file develops the point: the rescuers as well as the killers, the limits of the violence, the political inflation of the memory, and the danger — for the Church above all — of turning the martyrdom of the Damascus Christians into an indictment of Islam or a weapon in a modern quarrel.

Tradition: Antiochian Orthodox (Arab New-Martyr of the Patriarchate of Antioch)

“A Genocidal Moment, but Not a Genocide”

The most careful recent judgment on the Damascus events comes from Eugene Rogan, and it is worth stating exactly. Rogan calls the massacre “a genocidal moment, but not a genocide” — a phrase that holds two truths together (Eugene Rogan, The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 2024, as reported in the reviews of the book). On one side, the killing was real, targeted, and terrible: thousands of Christians were slaughtered because they were Christians. On the other side, it was neither total nor systematically eliminationist: Christians outside the walls were largely protected by their Muslim neighbors; influential Muslim notables acted to stop the carnage; and the violence, for all its horror, was bounded — it did not become the extermination of the Christians of Syria (Rogan, The Damascus Events, 2024). To say this is not to minimize the martyrdom; it is to describe it accurately, and accuracy is the first duty owed to the dead.

The Rescuers Are Part of the Record

The decisive fact against a simple story is the rescuers. As the previous file records, the Algerian exile Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri and his men saved thousands of Christians — sheltering them under his roof, escorting them to the citadel, confronting the mob under arms — and he was not alone: other Muslim notables, neighbors, and householders hid and defended Christians at grave personal risk (Rogan, The Damascus Events, 2024; “1860 civil conflict in Mount Lebanon and Damascus,” Wikipedia; see Causes and the Historical Debate). Any account that names only the killers and omits the rescuers is not a shorter version of the truth but a falsification of it. The same city, the same faith, the same days produced both the mob and al-Jaza’iri. The martyrs of Damascus were killed by some of their Muslim neighbors and saved by others; both belong to the story the Church tells.

This is why the collection insists, with the historians, on the fuller picture. A martyr is honored by the truth, not by a serviceable simplification. To reduce 1860 to “Muslims massacred Christians” is to erase the Muslims who died protecting Christians, to flatten the tangle of feudal, agrarian, economic, and political causes into a lie about religion, and to conscript the martyrs into a modern polemic they never chose (on the causes, see Causes and the Historical Debate).

Against Retrospective Simplification

There is a further reason for care: the memory of 1860 has itself been a political instrument. From the moment of the massacre, the various parties — Ottoman, European, sectarian — shaped the account for their own ends, inflating or deflating the numbers, assigning or deflecting blame (Leila Tarazi Fawaz, An Occasion for War, 1994, on the contested and politicized reporting of the events; on the modern construction of sectarian narratives, Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon, Berkeley, 2000). In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the events have continued to be pressed into service — as a charter of Christian victimhood, as a European justification for intervention, as ammunition in contemporary religious antagonism. Makdisi’s whole argument is a warning against reading nineteenth-century violence through the lens of a supposedly timeless sectarian hatred; sectarianism, he shows, has a history, and to project a modern, essentialized “Muslim–Christian conflict” back onto 1860 is to misunderstand it (Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism, 2000).

For a Christian compendium the danger is specific and must be named. It would be easy, and it would be wrong, to use the Damascus Martyrs as a stick against Islam or against Muslims — to let the veneration of the martyrs curdle into contempt for their neighbors’ faith. The martyrs themselves point the other way. Joseph of Damascus lived his life in daily intellectual and social commerce with Muslims — he learned Arabic letters from a Muslim scholar, Muhammad al-Attar (see Priest, Scholar, and Preacher) — and the community he died with was saved, in part, by Muslim hands. To venerate him as a weapon against the people among whom he lived and taught would be a betrayal of the man.

What the Martyrdom Does and Does Not Assert

The martyrdom asserts something real and permanent: that these Christians, and their priest, held to Christ unto death, and that the Church receives them as martyrs. It does not assert a verdict on Islam, on the Muslims of Damascus, or on the modern politics of the Middle East. The Church’s confession is Christological and doxological — these died for Christ, and Christ is glorified in them — not a historical or communal indictment (on the martyrological meaning, see Martyrdom and Arab Christian Identity). The Damascus Martyrs are honored most truly when their martyrdom is told whole: the killing and the rescue, the hatred and the heroism, the tangle of causes and the single fidelity of the dead. A simple story would be easier to tell and easier to weaponize; it would also be false, and falsehood is no fit monument for martyrs.

The Wound and the Witness

Finally, the events of 1860 remain a wound in the shared memory of Syria and Lebanon — a trauma in the history of coexistence, remembered differently by different communities, and still capable of being reopened. The most honest voices, Christian and Muslim alike, have read it not as a charter for renewed enmity but as a warning about how quickly a plural society can collapse into slaughter, and about the ordinary decency and courage — al-Jaza’iri’s and others’ — that can resist it (on the events as a lesson for coexistence, cf. the framing of the recent scholarship and its reception, e.g., Rogan, The Damascus Events, 2024, and the public discussion of the book). The Church’s veneration of the martyrs can stand within that reading. To honor Joseph and the Damascus Martyrs is to remember the cost of hatred and the worth of fidelity — and to refuse, in their name, to add to the hatred that killed them.

See Also

References

  • Rogan, Eugene. The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East. New York: Basic Books / London: Allen Lane, 2024. (“A genocidal moment, but not a genocide”; the bounded character of the violence; the Muslim rescuers; al-Jaza’iri; the events as a lesson for coexistence.)
  • Fawaz, Leila Tarazi. An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860. London: I.B. Tauris, 1994. (The contested and politicized reporting; the multi-causal reality against a single sectarian story.)
  • Makdisi, Ussama. The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. (Sectarianism as a modern formation; the warning against projecting a timeless hatred onto 1860.)
  • “1860 civil conflict in Mount Lebanon and Damascus.” Wikipedia. (The Muslim rescuers and al-Jaza’iri; the limits of the violence.)