Sunday Times Paperback of the Year The Ottoman Empire has long been depicted as the Islamic-Asian antithesis of the Christian-European West. But the reality was starkly different: the Ottomans' multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious domain reached deep into Europe's heart. In their breadth and versatility, the Ottoman rulers saw themselves as the new Romans. Recounting the Ottomans' remarkable rise from a frontier principality to a world empire, Marc David Baer traces their debts to their Turkish, Mongolian, Islamic and Byzantine heritage; how they used both religious toleration and conversion to integrate conquered peoples; and how, in the nineteenth century, they embraced exclusivity, leading to ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the dynasty's demise after the First World War. Upending Western concepts of the Renaissance, the Age of Exploration, the Reformation, this account challenges our understandings of sexuality, orientalism and genocide. Radically retelling their remarkable story, The Ottomans is a magisterial portrait of a dynastic power, and the first to truly capture its cross-fertilisation between East and West.

This book tells the story of the Donme, the descendents of Jews who resided in the Ottoman Empire and converted to Islam along with their messiah, Rabbi Shabbatai Tzevi, in the seventeenth century. For two centuries following their conversion, the Donme were accepted as Muslims, and by the end of the nineteenth century rose to the top of Salonikan society. The Donme helped transform Salonika into a cosmopolitan city, promoting the newest innovation in trade and finance, urban reform, and modern education. They eventually became the driving force behind the 1908 revolution that led to the overthrow of the Ottoman sultan and the establishment of a secular republic.
To their proponents, the Donme are enlightened secularists and Turkish nationalists who fought against the dark forces of superstition and religious obscurantism. To their opponents, they were simply crypto-Jews engaged in a plot to dissolve the Islamic empire. Both points of view assume the Donme were anti-religious, whether couched as critique or praise.
But it is time that we take these religious people seriously on their own terms. In the Ottoman Empire, the Donme promoted morality, ethics, spirituality, and a syncretistic religion that reflected their origins at the intersection of Jewish Kabbalah and Islamic Sufism. This is the first book to tell their story, from their origins to their near total dissolution as they became secular Turks in the mid-twentieth century.

Hugo Marcus (1880-1966) was a man of many names and many identities. Born a German Jew, he converted to Islam and took the name Hamid, becoming one of the most prominent Muslims in Germany prior to World War II. He was renamed Israel by the Nazis and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp before escaping to Switzerland. He was a gay man who never called himself gay but fought for homosexual rights and wrote queer fiction under the pen name Hans Alienus during his decades of exile. In German, Jew, Muslim, Gay, Marc David Baer uses Marcus's life and work to shed new light on a striking range of subjects, including German Jewish history and anti-Semitism, Islam in Europe, Muslim-Jewish relations, and the history of the gay rights struggle. Baer explores how Marcus created a unique synthesis of German, gay, and Muslim identity that positioned Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as an intellectual and spiritual model. Marcus's life offers a new perspective on sexuality and on competing conceptions of gay identity in the multilayered world of interwar and postwar Europe. His unconventional story reveals new aspects of the interconnected histories of Jewish and Muslim individuals and communities, including Muslim responses to Nazism and Muslim experiences of the Holocaust. An intellectual biography of an exceptional yet little-known figure, German, Jew, Muslim, Gay illuminates the complexities of twentieth-century Europe's religious, sexual, and cultural politics.

The Ottoman Empire has long been depicted as the Islamic-Asian antithesis of the Christian-European West. But the reality was starkly different: the Ottomans' multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious domain reached deep into Europe's heart. In their breadth and versatility, the Ottoman rulers saw themselves as the new Romans. Recounting the Ottomans' remarkable rise from a frontier principality to a world empire, Marc David Baer traces their debts to their Turkish, Mongolian, Islamic and Byzantine heritage; how they used both religious toleration and conversion to integrate conquered peoples; and how, in the nineteenth century, they embraced exclusivity, leading to ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the dynasty's demise after the First World War. Upending Western concepts of the Renaissance, the Age of Exploration, the Reformation, this account challenges our understandings of sexuality, orientalism and genocide. Radically retelling their remarkable story, The Ottomans is a magisterial portrait of a dynastic power, and the first to truly capture its cross-fertilisation between East and West.

This book tells the story of the Donme, the descendents of Jews who resided in the Ottoman Empire and converted to Islam along with their messiah, Rabbi Shabbatai Tzevi, in the seventeenth century. For two centuries following their conversion, the Donme were accepted as Muslims, and by the end of the nineteenth century rose to the top of Salonikan society. The Donme helped transform Salonika into a cosmopolitan city, promoting the newest innovation in trade and finance, urban reform, and modern education. They eventually became the driving force behind the 1908 revolution that led to the overthrow of the Ottoman sultan and the establishment of a secular republic.
To their proponents, the Donme are enlightened secularists and Turkish nationalists who fought against the dark forces of superstition and religious obscurantism. To their opponents, they were simply crypto-Jews engaged in a plot to dissolve the Islamic empire. Both points of view assume the Donme were anti-religious, whether couched as critique or praise.
But it is time that we take these religious people seriously on their own terms. In the Ottoman Empire, the Donme promoted morality, ethics, spirituality, and a syncretistic religion that reflected their origins at the intersection of Jewish Kabbalah and Islamic Sufism. This is the first book to tell their story, from their origins to their near total dissolution as they became secular Turks in the mid-twentieth century.

Hugo Marcus (1880-1966) was a man of many names and many identities. Born a German Jew, he converted to Islam and took the name Hamid, becoming one of the most prominent Muslims in Germany prior to World War II. He was renamed Israel by the Nazis and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp before escaping to Switzerland. He was a gay man who never called himself gay but fought for homosexual rights and wrote queer fiction under the pen name Hans Alienus during his decades of exile. In German, Jew, Muslim, Gay, Marc David Baer uses Marcus's life and work to shed new light on a striking range of subjects, including German Jewish history and anti-Semitism, Islam in Europe, Muslim-Jewish relations, and the history of the gay rights struggle. Baer explores how Marcus created a unique synthesis of German, gay, and Muslim identity that positioned Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as an intellectual and spiritual model. Marcus's life offers a new perspective on sexuality and on competing conceptions of gay identity in the multilayered world of interwar and postwar Europe. His unconventional story reveals new aspects of the interconnected histories of Jewish and Muslim individuals and communities, including Muslim responses to Nazism and Muslim experiences of the Holocaust. An intellectual biography of an exceptional yet little-known figure, German, Jew, Muslim, Gay illuminates the complexities of twentieth-century Europe's religious, sexual, and cultural politics.

What does a religious community do when confronted by a political regime determined to eliminate a religion? Under communism, Hungary's persecuted Lutheran Church tried desperately to find a strategy for survival while remaining faithful to its Christian beliefs. Appealing to the Lutheran Confessions, many argued that the church can do whatever is necessary to survive provided it does not compromise on its essential ministry, while others appealing to the witness of the confessor Bishop Lajos Ordass, argued that the church must uncompromisingly witness to the truth even if that means ecclesiological extinction. In The Struggle of Hungarian Lutherans under Communism, H. David Baer draws upon the disciplines of theology, history, ethics, and politics to provide a comprehensive analysis of the different strategies developed by the church to preserve its integrity. Relying on previously unnoted archival documents and other primary sources, Baer has made a substantial contribution to Eastern European studies. Vigorously written, his telling of the history is also a sensitive and moving account of courage and cowardice in the fact of religious persecution. This book should be of interest not only to students of religion in Eastern Europe but also to anyone concerned about the problems that arise wherever there is religious persecution. H. DAVID BAER, who holds a Ph.D. in theology from the University of Notre Dame, is an assistant professor of theology and philosophy at Texas Lutheran University. He lived in Hungary for four years.

In Recovering Christian Realism, H. David Baer interprets just war theory as political ethic concerned with the moral administration of power. He argues that contemporary just war theorists, by debating the finer points of individual criteria, have lost sight of the theory of politics that gives rise to just war thinking in the first place. Baer attempts to relocate just war theory within the tradition of Christian realism in order to develop an ethic capable of addressing the uses of power. He argues the just war criteria unfold from a description of the political act, one which harnesses power to peace and points the way toward an ethic of armed force and international relations.

In Honored by the Glory of Islam Marc David Baer proposes a novel approach to the historical record of Islamic conversions during the Ottoman age and gathers fresh insights concerning the nature of religious conversion itself. Rejecting any attempt to explain Ottoman Islamization in terms of the converts' motives, Baer instead concentrates on the proselytizers - in this case, none other than the sultan himself. Mehmed IV (1648-87) is remembered as an aloof ruler whose ineffectual governing led to the disastrous siege of Vienna. Through an integrated reading of previously unexamined Ottoman archival and literary texts, Baer reexamines Mehmed IV's failings as a ruler by underscoring the sultan's zeal for bringing converts to Islam. As an expression of his rededication to Islam, Mehmed IV actively sought to establish his reputation as a convert-maker, convincing or coercing Christian and Jewish subjects to be "honored by the glory of Islam," and Muslim subjects to turn to Islamic piety. Revising the conventional portrayal of a ruler so distracted by his passion for hunting that he neglected affairs of state, Baer shows that Mehmed IV saw his religious involvement as central to his role as sultan. He traces an ever-widening range of reform, conversion, and conquest expanding outward from the heart of Mehmed IV's empire. This account is the first to correlate the conversion of people and space in the mature Ottoman Empire, to investigate conversion from the perspective of changing Ottoman ideology, and to depict the sultan as an interventionist convert maker. The resulting insights promise to rework our understandings of the reign of a forgotten ruler, a largely neglected period in Ottoman history, the changing nature of Islam and its history in Europe, relations between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Europe, the practice of Jihad, and religious architecture in urban history.

Based on the teaching experience of author David Boers, and supported by literature and research in the field, Lost and Found shares successful ways of developing a classroom in which learning can occur to a meaningful degree. Boers offers multiple methods of establishing personal relationships for enhancing cooperation to give hope and encouragement for teachers of reluctant or discouraged learners. In the final analysis, he offers a formula for creating an environment in which both students and teachers feel comfortable, cooperative, happy, and successful.

Uncovering Black Heroes: Lesser-Known Stories of Liberty and Civil Rights is a series of stories regarding real people who are not so well known in the mainstream of American freedom and civil rights discussions. These people have made a difference by the events of their lives and by the deliberate contributions they made. In some chapters depictions of fugitive slaves create awareness of the perils of freedom runs and of the desperate, dangerous, and terrifying life of being a hunted person. In other chapters the degree of local level blockage individuals needed to confront is exposed. Still other chapters point out major efforts by diligent, but for the most part unknown, local people that result in court case settlements and state laws to advance civil rights, in particular suffrage. One chapter takes a close look at leaders in women's clubs and how those leaders defined women's roles in the Black freedom and civil rights movements. Themes stand out as they all build upon each other and are seen from one chapter to the next. In the end, a subtle evolution of ideas can be realized that forms the notion that the great and recognized Black leaders in history have their important place but that freedom and civil rights advancements are made on the backs of the local unknowns who need to be recognized for what they have contributed. This uncovering of unknown players involved in crucial events of their times in the quest for social, political, civil, and personal equality and freedom provides a unique perspective somewhat counter to mainstream thinking.

"Honored by the Glory of Islam is an important new source on the study of conversion. Much of this most informative book deals with the dual role of conversion and conquest in defining the controversial reign of Sultan Mehmed IV. Baer's innovative reading of Ottoman chronicles and his focus on the nuances of conversion within one own's religion makes this text an invaluable presentation of an exciting new area of research." --Ethel Wolper, Associate Professor of History, University of New Hampshire
"Marc Baer offers an innovative interpretation of religious conversion, especially conversion to Islam in the Ottoman age. Lacking enough evidence to speculate on the motives of the converts, he instead focuses on the agency of those who initiated the conversion process - in this case no less than the sultan himself. Baer focuses on the career of Sultan Mehmed IV (r. 1648-87), and on the people who came into direct contact with his court. In this way he sheds important new light on a critical period in the Ottoman Empire's long history. Baer also convincingly revises the character of Mehmed IV as an inept ruler whose incompetence led to the catastrophic siege of Vienna in 1683. This original study will be of great interest not only to Ottoman specialists, but to students of Islam and of religious conversion." --R.M.Eaton, Professor of History, University of Arizona
Winner of the Albert Hourani Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association of North America for the best book in Middle East Studies (2008) and short-listed for the Best First Book in the History of Religions by the American Academy of Religion (2009).