About the Author

Itzchak Weismann is lecturer at the Department of Middle Eastern History, the University of Haifa, Israel. His research interests encompass modern Sufi, fundamentalist and radical Islamic movements. He is the author of 'Taste of Modernity - Sufism, Salafiyya, and Arabism in Late Ottoman Damascus'. Fruma Zachs is lecturer at the Department of Middle Eastern History, the University of Haifa, Israel. Her research interests focus on eighteenth and nineteenth century Ottoman Syria, especially Christian Arab intellectuals and the construction of their self-identity. She is the author of 'The Rise of the Syrian Identity: Intellectuals and Merchants in Nineteenth Century Beirut'.