In The Name Of The City: The Formation and Role of Cultural Identity in Twelfth-Century Syria

In the Name of the City, by Scott Paulseth, is a piece of research that attempts to redraft contemporary scholarship's understanding of the cultural dynamics of medieval Syria. Utilizing literary sources and new discoveries concerning regional settlement patterns during the Middle Ages, this book offers a glimpse at the way in which the indigenous and newly arrived inhabitants of the Levant and Syrian plain interacted, on both a local and regional scale. The author seeks to impart on his audience that rather than being an environment defined by radical extremism, the medieval Middle East was typically a place where acts of political and social pragmatism were a daily occurrence and practiced by all members of the population. It was a society where modern delineators of culture, such as religion and ethnicity, while undoubtedly important, simply did not have the social significance we ascribe to them today. Although only an introduction to this discussion, In the Name of the City offers its audience a new perspective on the cultural realities of the medieval Levant, while at the same time commenting on the current perceptions of the modern Middle East.