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The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East. The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria Ethnic and religious minorities – and concomitant majorities – do not just exist sui generis. They have to be constructed or invented. It is not self-evident who is included in which category and who is excluded. It is only once these categories are accepted and used by people that they appear as natural and even eternal. This basic argument in White’s book is not new or startling for readers familiar with today’s mainstream research on ethnicity and social classifications. None the less, it is an argument well worth reiterating, not least because of its contemporary relevance for politics in the post-Ottoman empire in general and in Syria in particular. White does this by investigating the actual emergence of concepts such a ‘minorities’ and ‘majority’ during the French mandate in Syria. White’s initial research plan was to study minorities in Syria during the French mandate and the way they were used – and even created - by the mandate power in order to understand the mutual confrontation between imperialism and nationalism. Most historical research on this period in Syria – the period when Syria was both fragmented into various smaller parts and finally united – underlines the complex interplay between the French mandate power, the Syrian nationalists, and the ‘minorities.’ This research, Whites argues, uses terms like ‘minorities’ and ‘majority’ not as broad descriptive terms, but as terms with analytical force. White, however, noticed that in texts produced during the mandate the term ‘minority’ was not frequently used until the 1930s. With this realization his whole project took a different turn. How did the term emerge? White, like others, argues that the classificatory scheme majority-minority/minorities is closely linked to nationalism with the founding idea of one people with a common and shared culture through a common language, religion and history. World War I brought about the final dismantling of the multi-national, multi-religious and multi-linguistic Habsburg and Ottoman Empires in Europe and in the Near and the Middle East. With the creating of nation states linguistic, religious, or ethnic minorities were created as well. Borders in Central and Eastern Europe, on the Balkans, in Anatolia and the Middle East created people who found themselves stuck in the ‘wrong’ national territory, or were left no national territory at all, and who then became ‘minorities.’ The newly formed League of Nations was assigned to oversee that new states protected ‘the minorities’ found on their territories. When the French and the British were awarded mandates over respectively today’s Lebanon and Syria, Iraq and Palestine by the League of Nations in 1920 they had an obligation to develop these territories into functioning states. France directly set about subdividing its mandate into smaller units and by separating Lebanon from the rest of the territory. Today’s Syria was divided into the State of Damascus, the State of Aleppo and the Alawite state. In 1922, the Jabal Druze was detached from the State of Damascus. The Sanjak of Alexandretta/Hatay was an autonomous part of the State of Aleppo and the Syrian dessert was under direct French military rule. There was considerable resistance among the nationalists against the French policy of territorial division. In 1924 Damascus and Aleppo were joined and in 1936 Jabal Druze and the Alawite state. In the process of state formations there was great political turmoil in the border regions of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey leading to a considerable influx of Kurds and Christians into northeast Syria. In 1939 this region – the Jazira – was placed under direct French control. France was obliged as a mandate power to develop Syria as a state but followed policies to thwart national unification. French mandate administrators not only underlined the diversity of the population but also, as has been amply shown by historians of the Syrian mandate, created religious and ethnic divisions in Syria. White uses French archival sources and newspapers and journals in French and Arabic from the mandate period to trace how the French administrators, opinion makers and politicians start to see religious, linguistic and ethnic differences as linked to issues of ‘majority’ and ‘minorities.’ This material shows that gradually the French came to legitimate their role in Syria as one of protecting the Christian ‘minorities.’ The millets of the late Ottoman empire were recast into ‘minority’ Christians ones where the Sunni Muslim came to be regarded as a majority from which the minorities needed to be protected. White also shows how the leading Christian clergy not only accepted this categorization but also used it to further their own interests. This transformation of the classification system of the Ottoman’s system was met with resistance by many who argued that ‘minorities’ were best protected by having no special status in the new state. All citizens should be equal and treated equally. But when the French in 1939 tried to reform personal status law, dealing with marriage, divorce and custody of children, the majority-minorities dichotomy was already accepted by large segments of the Syrian elite. There was uproar from the Sunni Muslim Ulama and anti-French nationalists when Sunni Muslims were to be treated just like any other religious sect when they were, in fact ‘the majority.’ The French were defeated by their ambivalent policies and as a consequence Syrian personal status law became the most important legal domain in which religious identities became firmly embedded. Until today, personal status law divide Syrians into a ‘majority’ following a mainly Hanafi based jurisprudence and ‘minorities’ of more than eleven recognized Christians sects following their own law. The ‘majority’ law is the law of the Syrian republic. No ‘Muslim’ minorities are recognized except that the Druze have certain exceptions from the ‘majority’ personal status law. This book is a very valuable addition to the history of the mandate period in Syria. The author himself sees it as a contribution to the comparative study of minorities. It is not, however, a book for readers without any prior knowledge of the region or the historical period in question. The argument of the book could have been strengthened by making the relationship between French minority-majority policies in Lebanon and Syria more lucid, and perhaps by a short comparison with the policies of the British in the region. But all in all, the book is highly relevant for providing a historical background to contemporary debates about states, ‘minorities’ and foreign intervention in Turkey and the Middle East.