When religion offers an incentive to perform violent acts, killing and death appear as ultimately meaningful.

Violence, in these circumstances, becomes an affirmation of identity, that is, a confession of faith and belonging. When there exists, at the same time, a lack of faith in a viable political project, violence can become the ultimate act of self-affirmation through killings and, possibly, self­immolation.

The war in Syria in the 2010s, has been an extremely violent phenomenon. A civil war with various changing domestic fronts, it has become, since its beginning in 2011, the scene of an international struggle involving the main regional and global powers. Together with neighbouring Iraq, Syria at war has displayed a new and deep Sunni-Shiite divide and given room to an extremist eschatological experience of a self-declared Islamic state. Turkey, the Western powers' NATO partner, has turned to domestic authoritarian­ism under the dominant AKP party (the Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi or Justice and Development Party, is led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan), and to a political

I would like to thank the editor Philip Dwyer and the copy-editor Janice Shaw as well as colleagues Eric Weitz, Stephan Astourian and Amir Rezapourmoghadammiyandabi for feedback, and the Australian Research Council for my Future Fellowship (FT130100481, 2014-19).

Sunni Islam tinged by neo-Ottomanism. Since 2016, it teaches the virtues of jihad in its schools. Such neo-imperial confessionalism has determined AKP Turkey's active partisanship at the side of Islamist forces during the war.

Thus, the Levant and the world have become considerably different since and because of these recent violent events. Fundamental historical rethink­ings have to take these core lands into account and to concede that religion has a real place and power in history, and that this was the case during the whole modern era. The modern Levant's most violent period was the last Ottoman decade (1912-22), which included the Balkan Wars, the First World War, genocide, internationalised civil wars and massive refugee issues, many of them consequences of deliberate ethno-religious cleansing. Analogous violent patterns continued to haunt the region in various guises after former violence was implicitly endorsed by the Lausanne Treaty of 1923, the diplo­matic foundation of a precarious post-Ottoman order in the Middle East and the supposed solution of the Eastern Question.

This chapter concentrates on two related aspects: domestic jihad in late Ottoman and post-Ottoman times; and the more general connection between public violence, religion and eschatology. Since the late eighteenth century, public violence in the midst of society, committed along religious lines, has been a remarkable feature in the modern Levant. In the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was still a giant, stretching from Anatolia and the Balkans to the South Caucasus, Iraq, greater Syria, the Arabic peninsula and North Africa. In contrast to contemporary states in or originating in Europe, or to Russia (its most feared and most hated adversary), the Ottoman Empire lost territory, and could not expand continentally or through colonies or frontiers. In religious, ethnic and linguistic terms, it was more diverse in its core lands than any other contemporary empire. Factors such as the con­centration of ethno-religious diversity, a unique depth of thousands of years of written history, monotheist eschatology on the revelation of final futures in a biblical, Koranic, Sunni and Shiite Hadithic geography, and ideologies like Islamism and Zionism have made the late and post-Ottoman world a modern global hot spot of unresolved conflicts and produced a theatre of violence with global ramifications.

This chapter argues that modern coexistence among different groups is not viable without social contracts. However, stark communitarian and eschato­logical traditions have particularly prevailed in the modern Levant, aborting any sustained efforts at establishing such contracts being based on egalitarian relations. Even those states and movements that sidelined political Islam, like Kemalism (the founding ideology of the Republic of Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk), could do so only for restricted periods of time, without achieving societal peace. Divisive Muslim, Christian and Jewish eschatologies provide religious visions of an ultimate future, thus adding to the sense of incommensurate existence - although the pragmatics of life call for a decent, contracted coexistence. Yet successful pragmatics depends upon viable tenets of faith in political philosophy, theology and eschatology.

The chapter starts with a general introduction, followed by sections on public violence and eschatology; the Eastern Question as interrelated with violence against Ottoman Christians; and a close focus on the Levant's most violent decade - the 1910s - followed by the Kemalist era. Kemalism per­formed an incomplete, temporary secular handling of politico-religious dynamics. These have again, but in a stronger sectarian and eschatological shape, come to the fore in the Levant, including in Turkey and Israel, in the early twenty-first century.