Scott here with another episode of the History and Plug Podcast.

There's only one town in America that we know for sure is named after a Muslim.

That's El-Kater, Iowa, Ambassador Emir Abdel Kadir, an Algerian military and religious leader

who became internationally famous when he saved the lives of thousands of Christians during a massacre

in Damascus in 1860.

He received a commendation from Abraham Lincoln and a pair of inlaid pistols and is remembered

for carving out a slice of safety and security in what most people thought was an otherwise

endlessly chaotic part of the world. But the Damascus riots are far more

significant than providing the background for this notable figure. When it happened,

the city's Shiite Muslim population killed over 3,000 Native Christians.

The two communities had more or less co-existed for centuries, but due to a number of internal

and external changes in Ottoman Syria, tensions between the two communities kept growing until they finally

erupted.

But what's most significant is what happened afterwards.

The Ottoman Empire worked to rebuild the Christian community, and largely for the next century

and a half, the different religious groups

were able to live side by side again and cooperate on a number of reform projects.

Arab nationalism was born in Ottoman Syria in the 19th century, the idea that Arab identity was not based on religion or language, but on ethnicity,

and included Christians, Muslims, Jews, and it was essentially the binding ideological glue of that nation for the next century or so.

So how did this happen? In today's episode I'm speaking to

Eugene Rogin, author of the Damascus events, the 1860 massacre in the making of the modern

Middle East. We look at why the event happens, why murderous violence could erupt between two communities

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