The Levant, also sometimes referred to as Greater Syria, could be called a rich tapestry of ethnic and religious diversity. Various Christian sects, Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, Druze, and Alawites all call the region home as do Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, and Circassians. Until the last century, even a significant number of Jews called its urban centers home. Instead the region is more often portrayed as a simmering cauldron of ethnic and religious tensions, blood feuds, and sectarian hatreds frequently boiling over into massacres, killings, and discrimination. When reporting on sectarian violence, like the recent events in Syria, the media often resorts to simplistic narratives of sectarian violence that often place the causes in primordial hatreds of difference. On a very surface level sectarian violence is easy to explain, but its root causes are often more convoluted and complex than they appear.