Islamophobia and the Law is a foundational volume of critical scholarship on the emerging form of bigotry widely known as Islamophobia. This book brings together leading legal scholars to explore the emergence and rise of Islamophobia after the 9/11 terror attacks, particularly how the law brings about state-sponsored Islamophobia and acts as a dynamic catalyst of private Islamophobia and vigilante violence against Muslims. The first book of its kind, it is a critical read for scholars and practitioners, advocates and students interested in deepening their knowledge of the subject matter. This collection addresses Islamophobia in race, immigration and citizenship, criminal law and national security, in the use of courts to advance anti-Muslim projects and in law and society.

The Idea of Semitic Monotheism examines some major aspects of the scholarly study of religion in the long nineteenth century-from the Enlightenment to the First World War. It aims to understand the new status of Judaism and Islam in the formative period of the new discipline. Guy G. Stroumsa focuses on the concept of Semitic monotheism, a concept developed by Ernest Renan around the mid-nineteenth century on the basis of the postulated and highly problematic contradistinction between Aryan and Semitic families of peoples, cultures, and religions. This contradistinction grew from the Western discovery of Sanskrit and its relationship with European languages, at the time of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Together with the rise of scholarly Orientalism, this discovery offered new perspectives on the East, as a consequence of which the Near East was demoted from its traditional status as the locus of the Biblical revelations. This innovative work studies a central issue in the modern study of religion. Doing so, however, it emphasizes the new dualistic taxonomy of religions had major consequences and sheds new light on the roots of European attitudes to Jews and Muslims in the twentieth century, up to the present day.

Though many scholars and commentators have predicted the death of religion, the world is more religious today than ever before. And yet, despite the persistence of religion, it remains a woefully understudied phenomenon. With Objective Religion, Baylor University Press and Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion have combined forces to gather select articles from the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion that not only highlight the journal's wide-ranging and diverse scope, but also advance the field through a careful arrangement of topics with ongoing relevance, all treated with scientific objectivity and the respect warranted by matters of faith. This multivolume project seeks to advance our understanding of religion and spirituality in general as well as particular religious beliefs and practices. The volume thereby serves as a catalyst for future studies of religion from diverse disciplines and fields of inquiry including sociology, psychology, political science, demography, economics, philosophy, ethics, history, medicine, population health, epidemiology, and theology. The articles in this volume, Competition, Tension, and Perseverance, document the pervasiveness of religion and demonstrate the complex ways faith, spirituality, and religious matters are consequential for individuals as well as societies across the world. Together these essays demonstrate the resilience of religion.

The first complete account of Catholic Europe's onslaught on "unbelievers" in the 12th century The Second Crusade (1145-1149) was an extraordinarily bold attempt to overcome unbelievers on no less than three fronts. Crusader armies set out to defeat Muslims in the Holy Land and in Iberia as well as pagans in northeastern Europe. But, to the shock and dismay of a society raised on the triumphant legacy of the First Crusade, only in Iberia did they achieve any success. This book, the first in 140 years devoted to the Second Crusade, fills a major gap in our understanding of the Crusades and their importance in medieval European history. Historian Jonathan Phillips draws on the latest developments in Crusade studies to cast new light on the origins, planning, and execution of the Second Crusade, some of its more radical intentions, and its unprecedented ambition. With original insights into the legacy of the First Crusade and the roles of Pope Eugenius III and King Conrad III of Germany, Phillips offers the definitive work on this neglected Crusade that, despite its failed objectives, exerted a profound impact across Europe and the eastern Mediterranean.

Born into a Jewish family in Lvov, Poland in the early 1930s, Nelly Ben-Or was to experience, at a very young age, the trauma of the Holocaust. This narrative of her life's journey describes the survival of Nelly, her mother and her older sister. With help from family and friends, Nelly and her mother were smuggled out of the Ghetto in Lvov and escaped to Warsaw with false identity papers where they were under constant threat of discovery. Miraculously, they survived being taken on a train to Auschwitz, deported not, in fact, because they were Jews, but as citizens of Warsaw following the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis. After the end of the war, Nelly's musical talent was free to flourish, at first in Poland and then in the recently-created State of Israel, where Nelly completed her musical studies as a scholarship student at the Music Academy in Jerusalem. Following her move to England she carried out a full concert career and also discovered the Alexander Technique for piano playing, which had a profound influence on her. Today Nelly Ben-Or is internationally regarded as the leading exponent of the application of principles of the Alexander Technique - she teaches in the keyboard department of London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama, runs Alexander Technique masterclasses and regularly gives talks about her Holocaust experience. This unique memoir is testimony to an extraordinary life and illustrates the strength of the human condition when faced with adversity.