Americans don’t typically think of Syria or Damascus, its capital since ancient times, as being “Mediterranean.” The modern country’s coastline is only 110 miles long. And most importantly, its recent decades of anti-American leadership and now civil war make it an unlikely choice for the family vacation. The inland city of Damascus isn’t top-of-mind these days to most people outside Syria itself.

But to Oxford University historian Eugene Rogan, Damascus offers not only a now-little-known historical event but a potential key to understanding the modern Middle East, a part of the world that thousands, if not millions, of people gave up on understanding years ago. And if you wonder why Syria might matter, just ponder that its long-shifting borders took in today’s Lebanon and Israel, as well of parts of Turkey to the north. As I learned on a visit to that corner of Turkey a couple decades ago, the French-inflected, once-Syrian city known as Antakya was once one of several long ago named Antioch. In this Antioch, followers of a puny, last-gasp Jewish sect driven out of Jerusalem were first called Christians.

Rogan, who besides his professorship in Modern Middle Eastern History serves as director of Oxford’s Middle East Center, chooses to write his latest book about the “Damascus Events” of 1860. By that year, the United States was already focused on the issues that became its Civil War, not any balance that might keep the peace among Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Syrian capital. I believe that reading Rogan’s narrative of events before, during and after the slaughter of thousands of Christians by Muslims carries the trembling echoes of all the bloodshed ever since.

Damascus being part of the Middle East, and at that time a significant city in the Ottoman Empire ruled from Constantinople (Istanbul), things do get complicated. It is a credit to Rogan the teacher of history – and a British one at that – that he doesn’t assume we know much. This is a book for general readers, not experts, after all. Among many important strokes in these 312 pages of engaging text, he makes it clear that none of the religions involved were, by definition, the “bad guys.”

The Jews of Syria had nothing to do with the 1860 massacre, except to say they suffered with the destruction of their city and its cultural/financial life. Along those lines, the vast majority of Muslim citizens did not become cold-blooded murderers in the streets that tragic July, though there is some recognition that many more Muslims supported (and benefitted from) the attacks than took part in them. Still, from the book, we gather that most of the Christians who survived were rescued, hidden and protected from roving Muslim gangs by their Muslim friends.

Seen a certain way, the Christians of Damascus present the most complex picture. As they would later in the newly formed country of Lebanon, the Christian sects were not above vicious fighting with each other when they weren’t banding together to rule the majority Muslims living all around them. Damascene (I love that word) Christians also had generations of backing and sentiment from European powers, including the French pushing the Catholic cause, the Russians pushing the Orthodox and a loose-knit gathering of the British, Americans and others pushing the Protestant. Even among Christians, at times, no Muslims or Jews were needed to start a civil war.

The Muslim attacks on Christians in 1860 began in what is now Lebanon but, after several Christian towns were destroyed, arrived full-force in Damascus. In the course of less than two weeks, every Christian man or boy the mobs could find was killed, the women and girls raped and dragged away, many to never be seen again. And since the financial system in place in Syria strongly favored Christians, there was a lot of wealth to steal, so it was stolen, pretty much emptying the comfortable homes, sometimes mansions, of the Christian neighborhoods. Finally, all these neighborhoods were burned to the ground.

This dramatic scene, as handled by Rogan, makes the Civil War burning of Atlanta seem like a pep-rally bonfire, with or without Scarlett and Rhett. Still, in some ways the book’s most fascinating details emerge through the reconstruction period after the 1860 violence. Much of the city had to be rebuilt, the worst among the guilty had to be found, prosecuted with real evidence and eyewitness testimony, and punished. There were many executions. And since the Ottoman Empire didn’t have anywhere near enough cash to do these things, it had to be taxed from the city’s Muslim population.

Somehow, everyone in Damascus and with the Ottoman leadership in Istanbul understood: the future of the city had to include a balance of its three religious faiths. The reconstruction was completed, almost miraculously, though no one left the bargaining table entirely satisfied. The modern world arrived in Damascus piece by piece, turning an area not much better connected to the world than it had been 10,000 years earlier, into a hub of roads, secular public schools, telegraph lines and railways. There were villains and heroes along the way, of course, and there was corruption. But…

For a very long time after the Damascus Events of 1860, Rogan shows us, Muslims, Christians and Jews did indeed work side-by-side to build a better city, a better life for their children and grandchildren. Even (or especially) with the current Syrian civil war, the long history of sectarian violence in Lebanon next door and the crisis in Gaza, the God of Abraham that all three religions profess to believe in ought to be proud of them for that.

The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Eugene Rogan. Basic Books, $33.