This new edition of "Byzantium and the Crusades" provides a fully-revised and updated version of Jonathan Harris's landmark text in the field of Byzantine and crusader history.The book offers a chronological exploration of Byzantium and the outlook of its rulers during the time of the Crusades. It argues that one of the main keys to Byzantine interaction with Western Europe, the Crusades and the crusader states can be found in the nature of the Byzantine Empire and the ideology which underpinned it, rather than in any generalised hostility between the peoples.Taking recent scholarship into account, this new edition includes an updated notes section and bibliography, as well as significant new additions to the text: - New material on the role of religious differences after 1100- A detailed discussion of economic, social and religious changes that took place in 12th-century Byzantine relations with the west- In-depth coverage of Byzantium and the Crusades during the 13th century- New maps, illustrations, genealogical tables and a timeline of key dates"Byzantium and the Crusades" is an important contribution to the historiography by a major scholar in the field that should be read by anyone interested in Byzantine and crusader history.

From India to Iraq, from London to Lahore, the relationship between religion and violence is one of the most bitterly contested and casually misrepresented issues of our times. This groundbreaking volume brings together expert perspectives from a variety of fields to probe it. It seeks to shift analytical focus on to the contexts in which violence is expressed, enacted and reported. Ranging from Islam to Buddhism to new religious movements in the West, "Dying for Faith" offers a comprehensive and highly original account of a complex phenomenon that has so far attracted sensational media coverage but scant academic attention.

Looking at topics across the spectrum of America's wars, religious groups, personalities, and ideas, this volume shows that even in an increasingly secular society, religious roots and values run deep throughout American society and are elevated in times of war. There is a long and deep relationship between religion, politics, and war in U.S. history. While there is a constitutional and legal separation of religion and the state in American society, religion has been and remains a potent force in American culture and politics affecting many aspects of life, including perspectives on war and peace and the experience of war in U.S. history. From the American Revolution to the wars of the 21st century, religious values have informed and influenced American attitudes toward war and peace and have provided rationale for support and non-support of American participation in conflicts. An overview essay surveys the background and significance of religion in American culture and provides historical context for discussions of contemporary topics. A timeline highlights key events related to wars and conflicts. The volume then includes more than 50 topical essays that discuss specific wars as well as religious themes within culture and politics, ultimately providing a detailed overview of the intersection of religion, war, and politics in contemporary America. Features roughly 50 alphabetically arranged reference entries that provide objective, fundamental information about topics related to religion and war, with an emphasis on modern society Includes entry bibliographies that direct users to specific sources with additional information Features a timeline that identifies key developments related to conflicts throughout American history Emphasizes that there is not a single or unified perspective on religion and war in the United States.

Religion and Terrorism: The Use of Violence in Abrahamic Monotheism provides theoretical analysis of the nature of religious terrorism and religious martyrdom and also delves deeply into terrorist groups and beliefs in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Religious terrorism is found in all three of the great monotheistic faiths, and while the public is most aware of Islamic terrorism, Jewish and Christian faiths have extremist groups that warp their teaching -in ways unrecognizable to most adherents- to support terrorism. This work will be of interest to scholars in religious studies, political science, and sociology.

In this book Norman Housley, one of the most distinguished historians of the medieval period, provides an introduction to the complex history of crusading.

Steers readers through the key debates in this popular area of medieval history.
Draws on the author's 30 years' experience of crusading scholarship.
Issues addressed range from the definition of 'crusade', through the motivation and intentions of the crusaders, to the consequences of the crusades for European society

Nearly four decades after a revolution, experiencing one of the longest wars in contemporary history, facing political and ideological threats by regional radicals such as ISIS and the Taliban, and having succeeded in negotiations with six world powers over her nuclear program, Iran appears as an experienced Muslim country seeking to build bridges with its Sunni neighbours as well as with the West. Ethics of War and Peace in Iran and Shi'i Islam explores the wide spectrum of theoretical approaches and practical attitudes concerning the justifications, causes and conduct of war in Iranian-Shi'i culture. By examining primary and secondary sources, and investigating longer lasting factors and questions over circumstantial ones, Mohammed Jafar Amir Mahallati seeks to understand modern Iranian responses to war and peace. His work is the first in its field to look into the ethics of war and peace in Iran and Shi'i Islam. It provides a prism through which the binary source of the Iranian national and religious identity informs Iranian response to modernity. By doing so, the author reveals that a syncretic and civilization-conscious soul in modern Iran is re-emerging.

A child's wish melds the soul of a kind-hearted simpleton to a toy BEAR. Secret for three generations the GUARDIAN wakes in time of need. Surviving the sinking of the TITANIC the BEAR passes into the hands of the JEWISH community. Aboard the rescue ship CARPATHIA it travels on...to the gas chambers of AUSCHWITZ. The BEAR brings with it...A HISTORY OF FEAR.

One of the most traumatic experiences of Late Antique Christians was the Great Persecution, begun by Emperor Diocletian and his Tetrarchic colleagues in 303 CE. Here Aaltje Hidding unites research of traditional memory studies with work done by cognitive scientists to examine how they remembered the Persecution. The resulting methodological framework, the 'cognitive ecology', systemically studies all what can be covered by this term - social surroundings, cognitive artefacts and the physical environment - and bridges the gap between individual and collective memory. The author analyses the remembrance of the Persecution in three different regions along the Nile river. In Oxyrhynchus, the thousands of papyrus fragments found at the city's rubbish dump give a vivid image of the martyrs in the daily lives of the Oxyrhynchites. In Antinoopolis, known for the cult of the physician saint Colluthus, she zooms in on the rituals and practices at a martyr's sanctuary. Finally, in Dandara, the rich hagiographical dossier of the anchorite Paphnutius shows how old memories of the Persecution became mixed with new monastic experiences. The Bohairic and Greek Passion of Paphnutius appear in their first complete English translations.

This edited volume examines the implications for international development actors of new kinds of terrorism taking place in civil conflicts. The threat from terrorism and violent extremism has never been greater - at least in the global South where the vast majority of violent extremist attacks take place. Some of the most violent extremist groups are also parties to civil conflicts in regions such as the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. But are these groups - especially the violent Islamists which constitute the greatest current threat - qualitatively different from other conflict actors? If they are, what are the implications for development practitioners working in war zones and fragile or poverty-afflicted countries? This study aims to answer these questions through a combination of theoretical enquiry and the investigation of three case studies - Kenya, Nigeria, and Iraq/Syria. It aims to illuminate the differences between violent Islamists and other types of conflict actor, to identify the challenges these groups pose to development practice, and to propose a way forward for meeting these challenges.

Several view of martyrdom co-existed in the early Church. The orthodox position, generally accepted by scholars, was that a Christian should choose martyrdom rather than deny the Faith, but should not, on any account, court death. Although it has been recognised that some in the early Church did seek a glorified death, by giving themselves over to arrest, most scholars have dismissed such acts as differing from the accepted attitude to martyrdom in the early Church. Therefore, instances of volitional, or radical martyrdom, have been largely overlooked or sidelined in scholarly investigations into the theology and origins of Christian martyrdom. Paul Middleton argues that, far from being a deviant strand of early Christianity, radical martyrdom was a significant, and widely held idealised form of devotion in the late first to early third centuries. Christian martyrdom is placed within the heritage of Jewish War tradition, with each martyr making an important contribution to the cosmic conflict between Satan and God. Radical Martyrdom re-examines the presentation, theology, and origins of Christian martyrdom up to the beginning of the Decian persecutions in the light of new perspectives on the subject.

This is the first study to bring space into conversation with religious competition, conflict and violence in the contemporary world. Lily Kong and Orlando Woods argue that because space is both a medium and an outcome of religious activity, it is integral to understanding processes of religious competition, conflict and violence. The book explores how religious groups make claims to both religious and secular spaces, and examines how such claims are managed, negotiated and contested by the state and by other secular and religious agencies. It also examines how globalisation has given rise to new forms of religious competition, and how religious groups strengthen themselves through the development of social resilience, as well as contribute to resilient societies. Throughout the book, case studies from around the world are used to examine how religious competition and conflict intersect with space. The case studies include topical issues such as competing claims to the Temple Mount/Haram el-Sharif in Jerusalem, opposition to the "Ground Zero mosque" in New York City, and the regulation of religious conversion in India and Sri Lanka. By helping readers develop new perspectives on how religion works in and through space, Religion and Space: Competition, Conflict and Violence in the Contemporary World is an innovative contribution to the study of religion.

By setting the Irish religious conflict in a wide comparative perspective, this book offers fresh insights into the causes of religious conflicts, and potential means of resolving them. The collection mounts a challenge to widely held views of 'Irish exceptionalism' and points to significant historical and contemporary commonalities across the Western European and North Atlantic worlds.

The interdisciplinary study investigates the relationship between Norse and Saami peoples in the medieval period and focuses on the multifaceted portrayal of Saami peoples in medieval texts. The investigative analysis is anchored in postcolonial methodologies and argues for the inherent need to decolonise the medieval source-material as well as recent historiography. This is achieved by presenting the historiographic and political background of research into Norse-Saami relations, before introducing an overview of textual sources discussing Saami peoples from the classical period to the late 1400s, an analysis of the textual motifs associated with the Saami in medieval literature (their relevance and prevalence), geo-political affairs, trading relations, personal relations and Saami presence in the south. By using decolonising tools to read Norse-Saami relations in medieval texts, influenced by archaeological material and postcolonial frameworks, the study challenges lingering colonial assumptions about the role of the Saami in Norse society. The current research episteme is re-adjusted to offer alternative readings of Saami characters and emphasis is put on agency, fluidity and the dynamic realities of the Saami medieval pasts.

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.

Experiencing the dimension that lies beyond our empirical grasp of the world has always been a challenge for human beings, for it can expose the limitations of our agency. Such experience, while potentially terrifying, can also furnish a basis for religious faith or hope of a better future. The intercultural essays in this volume analyze ways of dealing with the beyond, including magic, religion, myth, and all-promising utopias.

In this illuminating study of a vital but long overlooked aspect of Chinese religious life, Jimmy Yu reveals that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, self-inflicted violence was an essential and sanctioned part of Chinese culture. He examines a wide range of practices, including blood writing, filial body-slicing, chastity mutilations and suicides, ritual exposure, and self-immolation, arguing that each practice was public, scripted, and a signal of certain cultural expectations. Yu shows how individuals engaged in acts of self-inflicted violence to exercise power and to affect society, by articulating moral values, reinstituting order, forging new social relations, and protecting against the threat of moral ambiguity. Self-inflicted violence was intelligible both to the person doing the act and to those who viewed and interpreted it, regardless of the various religions of the period: Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and other religions. Self-inflicted violence as a category reveals scholarly biases that tend to marginalize or exaggerate certain phenomena in Chinese culture. Yu offers a groundbreaking contribution to scholarship on bodily practices in late imperial China, challenging preconceived ideas about analytic categories of religion, culture, and ritual in the study of Chinese religions.

This volume explores theoretical discourses in which religion is used to legitimize political violence. It examines the ways in which Christianity and Islam are utilized for political ends, in particular how violence is used (or abused) as an expedient to justify political action. This research focuses on premodern as well as contemporary discourses in the Middle East and Latin America, identifying patterns frequently used to justify the deployment of violence in both hegemonic and anti-hegemonic discourses. In addition, it explores how premodern arguments and authorities are utilized and transformed in order to legitimize contemporary violence as well as the ways in which the use of religion as a means to justify violence alters the nature of conflicts that are not otherwise explicitly religious. It argues that most past and present conflicts, even if the discourses about them are conducted in religious terms, have origins other than religion and/or blend religion with other causes, namely socio-economic and political injustice and inequality. Understanding the use and abuse of religion to justify violence is a prerequisite to discerning the nature of a conflict and might thus contribute to conflict resolution.

John Foxe's ground-breaking chronicle of Christian saints and martyrs put to death over centuries remains a landmark text of religious history. The persecution of Christians was for centuries a fact of living in Europe. Adherence to the faith was a great personal risk, with the Roman Empire leading the first of such persecutions against early Christian believers. Many were crucified, put to the sword, or burned alive - gruesome forms of death designed to terrify and discourage others from following the same beliefs. Appearing in 1563, Foxe's chronicle of Christian suffering proved a great success among Protestants. It gave literate Christians the ability to discover and read about brave believers who died for expressing their religion, much as did Jesus Christ. Perhaps in foretelling, the final chapter of the book focuses upon the earliest Christian missions abroad: these, to the Americas, Asia and other locales, would indeed see many more martyrs put to death by the local populations.

"Klein's excellent survey of these realities and dynamics will remain an important brief for decision-makers in the future."--"The Journal of Israeli History"

"A book of considerable weight and an important contribution to the growing genre of political studies in Jerusalem."
-- Michael Dumper," Journal of Palestine Studies"

Jerusalem, which means "city of peace," is one of the most bitterly contested territories on earth. Claimed by two peoples and sacred to three faiths, for the last three decades the city has been associated with violent struggle and civil unrest. As the peace negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis reach their conclusion, the final, and most difficult issue is the status of Jerusalem. How and to what extent will these two nations share this city? How will Christians, Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem and around the world redefine their relationship to Jerusalem when the dust settles on the final agreement? Will the Israelis and Palestinians even be able to reach an agreement at all?

Menachem Klein, one of the leading experts on the history and politics of Jerusalem, cuts through the rhetoric on all sides to explain the actual policies of the Israelis and Palestinians toward the city. He describes the "facts on the ground" that make their competing claims so fraught with tension and difficult to reconcile. He shows how Palestinian national institutions have operated clandestinely since the Israelis occupied the eastern half of the city, and how the Israelis have tried to suppress them. Ultimately, he points the way toward a compromise solution but insists that the struggle for power and cultural recognition will likely continue to be apermanent feature of life in this complicated, multi-cultural city.