Souvenirs, legacies and a little town called Bethlehem

Souvenirs, legacies and a little town called Bethlehem. The Christmas story is celebrated in carols and nativity plays throughout the Christian world. But following that first Christmas, what happened to Bethlehem, the ancient Palestinian settlement revered as the birthplace of Jesus Christ, and what is life like there today? University of Sussex historian Dr Jacob Norris offers new insights into the "little town" with a global reputation in the cover story for the December issue of magazine History Today . Dr Norris's research into Bethlehem's (Bayt Lahm in Arabic) shifting fortunes under successive imperial governments reveals an Arab town that capitalised on and prospered from its associations with the birth of Christianity - and explains how it was able to do so through tolerance and through the special relationship that Arab traders cultivated with the Roman Catholic Church. Christian worship at the birthplace of Christ (venerated also in Islam)was permitted to survive and thrive after the city was conquered by Umar ibn al-Khattab's Muslim forces in the 7^th century. Umar preserved the Church of the Nativity as a place of Christian worship and built a mosque nearby so that the church would not become an exclusively Muslim shrine. His actions led to a society where Christians and Muslims co-existed side by side as Arabs.