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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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).
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.
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