The waning of diversity in the Middle East goes back more than a century, to the bouts of ethnic and religious cleansing that took place during the Ottoman Empire, including the murder and displacement of 1.5 million Armenian and Syriac Christians in eastern Anatolia. After the empire’s collapse in 1918, the rise of Arab nationalism placed Arabic language and culture at the center of political identity, thereby disenfranchising many non-Arab ethnic groups, including Kurds, Jews, and Syriacs.