This book brings together and subjects to critical scrutiny the core controversies connected to the so-called "War on Terror": When is it legitimate and prudent to use force? Is torture ever justified? Do we need to suspend human rights in order to fight terrorism? Is multi-culturalism the answer to communal conflict? Is Israel's treatment of the Palestinians illegal and immoral, an accelerator of terrorism, or legitimately defensive and largely irrelevant to the terrorism problem? Are terrorists responding to concrete U.S. policies or do they simply hate and wish to destroy Western societies? Liberal intellectuals and political leaders have been slow to articulate a grand strategy informed by liberal values for confronting these issues surrounding global terrorism. The book outlines the framework of a liberal strategy, and exposes the costs of the neo-conservative alternative that has driven US foreign policy since 9/11.

This book brings together and subjects to critical scrutiny the core controversies connected to the so-called "War on Terror": When is it legitimate and prudent to use force? Is torture ever justified? Do we need to suspend human rights in order to fight terrorism? Is multi-culturalism the answer to communal conflict? Is Israel's treatment of the Palestinians illegal and immoral, an accelerator of terrorism, or legitimately defensive and largely irrelevant to the terrorism problem? Are terrorists responding to concrete U.S. policies or do they simply hate and wish to destroy Western societies? Liberal intellectuals and political leaders have been slow to articulate a grand strategy informed by liberal values for confronting these issues surrounding global terrorism. The book outlines the framework of a liberal strategy, and exposes the costs of the neo-conservative alternative that has driven US foreign policy since 9/11.

This book tells the story of Holocaust survivor and prominent banker Marcel Goldman, born in Krakow in 1926. Goldman started his studies in economics in Krakow and completed them in Israel, where he became a respected banker. In telling his story, this book analyzes Israel's social and economic development, its causes and circumstances. Following Goldman as our main character, we take a close look at the birth of the private banking sector and the building of modern economy in Israel. The book also describes the life of Polish Jews in Israel in general, the way in which they settled there, and built the prosperity of the state. The story of Marcel Goldman is an example of how Israel's success is the sum of its citizens' successes.

The early twenty-first century has been defined by a rise in Islamist radicalisation and a concurrent rise in far right extremism. This book explores the interaction between the 'new' far right and Islamist extremists and considers the consequences for the global terror threat. Julia Ebner argues that far right and Islamist extremist narratives - 'The West is at war with Islam' and 'Muslims are at war with the West' - complement each other perfectly, making the two extremes rhetorical allies and building a spiralling torrent of hatred - 'The Rage'. By looking at extremist movements both online and offline, she shows how far right and Islamist extremists have succeeded in penetrating each other's echo chambers as a result of their mutually useful messages. Based on first-hand interviews, this book introduces readers to the world of reciprocal radicalisation and the hotbeds of extremism that have developed - with potentially disastrous consequences - in the UK, Europe and the US. With a new foreword, this new edition discusses the events of recent years, and how the phenomenon of reciprocal radicalisation - the interplay between Islamist and far-right extremism - has become more pronounced and, sadly, more dangerous.

In 1095 Pope Urban II granted absolution to anyone who would fight to reclaim the Holy Land. With God at their backs, the first Christian crusaders embarked on an unprecedented religious war. While addressing the contribution of flamboyant characters like Saladin and Richard the Lionheart, Malcolm Billings also looks at the experiences of the peasants, knights and fighting monks who took the cross for Christendom and the Holy Warriors of Islam who, after battle on battle, emerged victorious. He analyses the ebb and flow of crusade and counter-crusade and details the shifting structures of government in the Levant, which became the perennial battleground of East and West.

Crusades covers seven hundred years from the First Crusade (1095-1102) to the fall of Malta (1798) and draws together scholars working on theatres of war, their home fronts and settlements from the Baltic to Africa and from Spain to the Near East and on theology, law, literature, art, numismatics and economic, social, political and military history. Routledge publishes this journal for The Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East. Particular attention is given to the publication of historical sources in all relevant languages - narrative, homiletic and documentary - in trustworthy editions, but studies and interpretative essays are welcomed too. Crusades appears in both print and online editions. Peter W. Edbury again features in an issue of Crusades, this time with his piece on The French translation of William of Tyre's Historia: the manuscript tradition.

Branded as "the new Falun Gong" by local authorities, The Church of Almighty God is the most persecuted religious movement in China today. Thousands of police officers are deployed full time to identify and arrest its members. Hundreds of thousands of its devotees are in jail. Authorities claim, perhaps hyperbolically, that it has some four million members and accuse the group of serious crimes. Yet, the movement continues to grow. In this ground-breaking study, Massimo Introvigne offers an inside look at this once-elusive movement, sharing interviews with hundreds of members and the Chinese police officers who hunt them down. The story of The Church of Almighty God is one of rapid growth, dramatic persecution, and the struggle of believers to seek asylum in countries around the world. In his telling of the story, Introvigne reconstructs the Church's idiosyncratic theology, centered in the belief that Jesus Christ has returned in our time in the shape of a Chinese woman, worshipped as Almighty God, to eradicate the sinful nature of humans, and that we have entered the third and final time period in the history of humanity: the Age of Kingdom. A major book from one of the world's leading scholars of new religious movements, Inside The Church of Almighty God is a critical addition to the scholarship of Chinese religion.

By examining Jewish experiences between the American Civil War and the African American Civil Rights Revolution, this book focuses on citizens who usually spent their daily lives in Black and white "peoplehoods." Some of the white ones, commanding the nation's "public square," structured a segregated republic and capitalist economy that would experience WWII and the news about the Holocaust that murdered millions of Jews. This political economy sustained a hierarchy of privatized ethnic groups whose race and religion, in their norms of "ethnicking," was used to deprive them of legal and equal collective standing. This Was America is a book about those privatized identities that the years of the Civil Rights Revolution would bring into the republic's public square.

A look at the developing conflicts in Christian-Muslim relations during late antiquity and the early Islamic era How did the medieval Middle East transform from a majority-Christian world to a majority-Muslim world, and what role did violence play in this process? Christian Martyrs under Islam explains how Christians across the early Islamic caliphate slowly converted to the faith of the Arab conquerors and how small groups of individuals rejected this faith through dramatic acts of resistance, including apostasy and blasphemy. Using previously untapped sources in a range of Middle Eastern languages, Christian Sahner introduces an unknown group of martyrs who were executed at the hands of Muslim officials between the seventh and ninth centuries CE. Found in places as diverse as Syria, Spain, Egypt, and Armenia, they include an alleged descendant of Muhammad who converted to Christianity, high-ranking Christian secretaries of the Muslim state who viciously insulted the Prophet, and the children of mixed marriages between Muslims and Christians. Sahner argues that Christians never experienced systematic persecution under the early caliphs, and indeed, they remained the largest portion of the population in the greater Middle East for centuries after the Arab conquest. Still, episodes of ferocious violence contributed to the spread of Islam within Christian societies, and memories of this bloodshed played a key role in shaping Christian identity in the new Islamic empire. Christian Martyrs under Islam examines how violence against Christians ended the age of porous religious boundaries and laid the foundations for more antagonistic Muslim-Christian relations in the centuries to come.

This is the first English translation of Robert the Monk's Historia Iherosolimitana, a Latin prose chronicle describing the First Crusade. In addition to providing new and unique information on the Crusade (Robert claims to have been an eyewitness of the Council of Clermont in 1095), its particular interest lies in the great popularity it enjoyed in the Middle Ages. The text has close links with the vernacular literary tradition and is written in a racy style which would not disgrace a modern tabloid journalist. Its reflection of contemporary legends and anecdotes gives us insights into perceptions of the Crusade at that time and opens up interesting perspectives onto the relationship of history and fiction in the twelfth century. The introduction discusses what we know about Robert, his importance as a historical source and his place in the literary tradition of the First Crusade.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. This book provides the first overview of the history and development of Islam in Afghanistan. Written by leading international experts, chapters cover every era from the conversion of Afghanistan through the medieval period to the present day. Based on primary sources in Arabic, Persian, Pashto, Uzbek, and Urdu, its depth of coverage is unrivalled in providing a developmental picture of Afghanistan's Islam, including such issues as the rise of Sufism, women's religiosity, state religious policies, and transnational Islamism. Looking beyond the unifying rhetoric of theology, the book reveals the disparate and contested forms of Afghanistan's Islam.

Published to mark the 25th anniversary of Terry Waite's release from captivity in November 1991

A comprehensive study of religious violence and aggression in Nigeria, notably its causes, consequences, and the options for conflict resolution. Violence in Nigeria is the most comprehensive study of religious violence and aggression in Nigeria, notably its causes, consequences, and the options for conflict resolution. After an analysis of the links between religionand politics, the book elaborates on all the major cases of violence in the 1980s and 90s, including the Maitatsine, Kano, Bauchi, Kaduna, and Katsina riots. Zones of religious tensions are identified, as well as general characteristics of violence in Nigeria; and issues in inter and intra-religious relations, relious organizations, and the states, and the main actors in the conflicts are explored in great detail. A product of extensive primary research,Violence in Nigeria makes a contribution to contemporary social and political history that no previous study has attempted, and it is written to appeal to specialists and non-specialists alike. Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author or editor of over a dozen books dealing with the history of Nigeria, its people, their religion and politics.

A history of mainline Protestant responses to immigrants and refugees during the twentieth century Open Hearts, Closed Doors uncovers the largely overlooked role that liberal Protestants played in fostering cultural diversity in America and pushing for new immigration laws during the forty years following the passage of the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924. These efforts resulted in the complete reshaping of the US cultural and religious landscape. During this period, mainline Protestants contributed to the national debate over immigration policy and joined the charge for immigration reform, advocating for a more diverse pool of newcomers. They were successful in their efforts, and in 1965 the quota system based on race and national origin was abolished. But their activism had unintended consequences, because the liberal immigration policies they supported helped to end over three centuries of white Protestant dominance in American society. Yet, Pruitt argues, in losing their cultural supremacy, mainline Protestants were able to reassess their mission. They rolled back more strident forms of xenophobia, substantively altering the face of mainline Protestantism and laying foundations for their responses to today's immigration debates. More than just a historical portrait, this volume is a timely reminder of the power of religious influence in political matters.

Women's role in crusades and crusading examined through a close investigation of the narratives in which they appear. Narratives of crusading have often been overlooked as a source for the history of women because of their focus on martial events, and perceptions about women inhibiting the recruitment and progress of crusading armies. Yet women consistently appeared in the histories of crusade and settlement, performing a variety of roles. While some were vilified as "useless mouths" or prostitutes, others undertook menial tasks for the army, went on crusade with retinuesof their own knights, and rose to political prominence in the Levant and and the West. This book compares perceptions of women from a wide range of historical narratives including those eyewitness accounts, lay histories andmonastic chronicles that pertained to major crusade expeditions and the settler society in the Holy Land. It addresses how authors used events involving women and stereotypes based on gender, family role, and social status in writing their histories: how they blended historia and fabula, speculated on women's motivations, and occasionally granted them a literary voice in order to connect with their audience, impart moral advice, and justify the crusade ideal. NATASHA HODGSON is Lecturer in Medieval History at Nottingham Trent University..

This fascinating study examines the customs, legal codes, and socioeconomic mechanisms that evolved from the initial Christian-Muslim encounter on Crusader battlefields. It pinpoints changes in European mentality, and conduct of war, tracing acculturation processes in Frankish society in the Levant. These changes emerged from the need to redeem captives, making payment of ransom to the infidel conceivable and acceptable. The book pays special attention to the story of the vanquished, to the situation of women, to the behavior of the Military Orders toward captives, and to the image of the captive in Crusader literature, in the context of making war and peace.

Do you find the violence in the Old Testament a problem? Does it get in the way of reading the Bible - and of faith itself? While acknowledging that there are no easy answers, in God of Violence Yesterday, God of Love Today?, Helen Paynter faces the questions head-on and offers a fresh, accessible approach to a significant issue. For all those seeking to engage with the Bible and gain confidence in the God it portrays, she provides tools for reading and interpreting biblical texts, and points to ways of dealing with the overall trajectories of violence. 'In lucid prose Helen Paynter argues that violence featured in the biblical canon should not be ignored or denied but acknowledged and faced honestly. While history is played out in a broken and often violent world the author shows how the movement of scripture is toward God's creative intention for healing and wholeness. Without providing final answers Paynter offers ways of interpreting even the most violent passages so that we may hear God's word for today.' John Meredith, Editor of Word & Worship 'A rigorous yet accessible exploration of Old Testament violence ideal for individuals or groups wishing to engage with these troubling texts and the issues they raise. I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone interested in the questions it explores. If you are new to the subject, it offers a comprehensive introduction and the reassurance that you are being guided by a capable and safe pair of hands as you begin to engage with challenging and important issues.' Peter King, Diocese of Chichester

Fawaz Gerges book on al Qaeda and the jihadist movement has become a classic in the field since it was published in 2005. Here he argued that far from being an Islamist front united in armed struggle, or jihad against the Christian West, as many misguided political commentators and politicians opined, al Qaeda represented a small faction within the jihadist movement, criticized by other groups who preferred to concentrate on changing the Muslim world, rather than attacking the Far Enemy and making the fight global. In the intervening years, with the advance of the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq, much has changed and, just as Gerges showed, al Qaeda s fortunes have taken a significant downturn. Revisiting The Far Enemy in this new edition, Gerges demonstrates that not only have the jihadists split ranks, but that voices from within the ultra-religious right, those that previously supported al Qaeda, are condemning its tactics as violent, unethical, and out of accord with the true meaning of jihad. In fact, millions of Muslims worldwide have rejected al-Qaeda s ideology and strategies and blame Osama bin Laden and his cohorts for the havoc the organisation has wrecked on their communities. Al-Qaeda is now in the wilderness suffering massive erosion of authority and legitimacy in Muslim eyes and facing a fierce revolt from within. As Gerges warns, the next US administration would do well to use political and socio-economic strategies rather than military means to ensure that it stays there.

Since the 1970s, the Egyptian state has embarked on a far-reaching and destabilizing project of economic liberalization, reneging on its commitments to social welfare. Despite widespread socioeconomic grievances stemming from these policies, class politics and battles over wealth redistribution have largely been sidelined from elite-led national politics. Instead, conflicts over identity have raged, as Islamist movements became increasingly prominent political players. Classless Politics offers a counterintuitive account of the relationship between neoliberal economics and Islamist politics in Egypt that sheds new light on the worldwide trend of "more identity, less class." Hesham Sallam examines why Islamist movements have gained support at the expense of the left, even amid conflicts over the costs of economic reforms. Rather than highlighting the stagnancy of the left or the agility of Islamists, he pinpoints the historical legacies of authoritarian survival strategies. As the regime resorted to economic liberalization in the 1970s, it tacitly opened political space for Islamist movements to marginalize its leftist opponents. In the long run, this policy led to the fragmentation of opponents of economic reform, the increased salience of cultural conflicts within the left, and the restructuring of political life around questions of national and religious identity. Historically rich and theoretically insightful, this book demonstrates how the participation of Islamist groups shapes the politics of neoliberal reform and addresses why economic liberalization since the 1970s has contributed to the surge in culture wars around the world today.

This book constitutes a journey into the obscure field of sectarian-guided discourses of radical Islamist groups. It provides new insights into the ideological mechanisms utilized by such organizations to incite sectarian conflicts and recruit local and foreign guardians to their alleged cause. This book examines diverse aspects and dimensions of the discourses of Sunni-based ISIS and Shia-based al-Hashd al-Shaabi and explores manipulative and ideological discursive strategies utilized by media outlets associated with these groups. It delves into linguistic and contextual activities, implicit and explicit messages within the discourses of various media outlets operating in the heart of the Middle East. It also scrutinizes and explains aspects of politicization, religionization and sectarianization within the media discourse of terrorist groups in the digital era.

Kindheit und Erziehung ruckten nach 1900 in den Mittelpunkt gesellschaftlicher Selbstverstandigung. Die Formung neuer Menschen war ein wichtiges Ziel der politischen Massenbewegungen und Regime im fruhen 20. Jahrhundert. Dies gilt auch fur den spanischen Katholizismus. Till Kossler verfolgt die widerspruchliche Dynamik katholischer Gesellschaftspolitik im Spannungsfeld von Demokratie und totalitarer Diktatur und fragt nach ihrem Wechselspiel mit der urbanen Gesellschaft und Kultur Madrids. In einem breiten historischen Zugriff zeichnet er das Portrat einer Gesellschaft zwischen uberschwanglichen Reformhoffnungen und politischen Enttauschungen und liefert damit einen innovativen Beitrag zur Geschichte der klassischen Moderne in einer bisher weniger beachteten Region Europas."

*THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER* *SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE* *A TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES AND BBC HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR* 'A bona fide historical classic' Sunday Times 'Simply one of the best history books I have ever read' BBC History In the frontier town of Springfield in 1651, peculiar things begin to happen. Precious food spoils, livestock ails and property vanishes. People suffer fits and are plagued by strange visions and dreams. Children sicken and die. As tensions rise, rumours spread of witches and heretics, and the community becomes tangled in a web of spite, distrust and denunciation. The finger of suspicion falls on a young couple struggling to make a home and feed their children: Hugh Parsons the irascible brickmaker and his troubled wife, Mary. It will be their downfall. The Ruin of All Witches tells the dark, real-life folktale of witch-hunting in a remote Massachusetts plantation. These were the turbulent beginnings of colonial America, when English settlers' dreams of love and liberty, of founding a 'city on a hill', gave way to paranoia and terror, enmity and rage. Drawing on uniquely rich, previously neglected source material, Malcolm Gaskill brings to life a New World existence steeped in the divine and the diabolic, in curses and enchantments, and precariously balanced between life and death. Through the gripping micro-history of a family tragedy, we glimpse an entire society caught in agonized transition between supernatural obsessions and the age of enlightenment. We see, in short, the birth of the modern world. 'Gaskill tells this deeply tragic story with immense empathy and compassion, as well as historical depth' The Guardian 'As compelling as a campfire story ... Gaskill brings this sinister past vividly to life' Erica Wagner, Financial Times