Stefan Winter is associate professor of history at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal (UQAM). He is the author of The Shiites of Lebanon under Ottoman Rule.
Winter has produced a timely and informative history of the Alawis, an important religious minority located in today's Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey. . . . Unlike most existing literature, Winter uses the vast and largely untouched sources from the Ottoman period to show the existence of a normalized rapport between the state and the Alawis. --Choice Winter sets out to expose, through systematic study of the Ottoman archives, the myth of `Alawi persecution by Sunnis across the past ten centuries, and shed much-needed light on Syria's current tragedy. --Diana Darke, Times Literary Supplement