Children of Abraham: The 1,400-Year History of Jewish-Muslim Relations

Name: Children of Abraham: The 1,400-Year History of Jewish-Muslim Relations
Brand: Basic Books
SKU: 9781541606593
Price: 42.00 USD
Availability: InStock

$42.00

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"Dazzling and dizzying ... a sweeping yet nuanced book."

-- BBC History Magazine

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"admirably even-handed"

-- Church Times

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"A valuable and important study that offers powerful correctives to myths of perpetual antagonism and utopian coexistence across 1400 years of Jewish-Muslim relations. Professor Baer looks past the inequities of contemporary Palestine to root an awareness of encounters between Muslims and Jews in a historical context that, for the most part, shifted along a spectrum of mutual respect between tolerance and embrace. Drawing conclusions from the last century of violent confrontation, he pleads for a return to those half-forgotten legacies of understanding."-- Matthew Teller, author of Nine Quarters of Jerusalem

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"A superb book that reminds us of the forgotten history of Jewish-Muslim collaborations, protections, alliances, and symbiosis going back hundreds of years. The common beliefs and similar rituals of Jews and Muslims makes them kissing cousins. A timely and urgent reminder for our battle-scarred times."-- Ziauddin Sardar, author of Mecca: The Sacred City

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"This excellent history is illuminating and important--a revelatory picture of both coexistence and conflict of Muslims and Jews over a thousand years, a story so little known and totally relevant to our world today."-- Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Jerusalem: The Biography

Biographical Note:
Marc David Baer is professor and head of the international history department at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of six books, including The Ottomans, which was shortlisted for the Wolfson Prize, and Honored by the Glory of Islam, which won the Albert Hourani Prize. He lives in London.

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"This analysis reveals a complex history of coexistence, conflict and exchange that continues to influence global politics today." -- Financial Times

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"Unraveling a relationship that desperately needs unraveling. ... Illuminating."-- Kirkus

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"Marc David Baer debunks pre-vail-ing myths regard-ing Jew-ish - Mus-lim rela-tions... Draw-ing on exten-sive research, Baer offers a more nuanced account."

-- Jewish Book Council

Publisher Marketing:
From the prize-winning author of The Ottomans, a myth-busting history of Muslim-Jewish relations, tracing fourteen centuries of cooperation and conflict.

"A revelatory picture of both coexistence and conflict." --Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Jerusalem: The Biography

Today, the dominant narrative of the relationship between Jewish and Muslim peoples assumes a long history of violent hostility. In Children of Abraham, historian Marc David Baer lays this myth to rest, showing how Jews and Muslims lived together in the Middle East and Europe, more often in cooperation than in conflict, for more than a millennium. When Islam emerged in the seventh century, Muslims and Jews were bound by shared religious tenets and common cultural practices, and for centuries afterward, they were often allies.

Baer introduces readers to Muslim warriors fighting for a medieval Turkish Jewish kingdom on the Caspian Sea, Jewish viziers leading the Muslim sultan's troops in Spain, and Jewish literary lights and political party leaders in modern Egypt and Iraq. But Baer resists the alluring fable that Jews and Muslims ever lived in interfaith utopia, and he shows how European colonization and nationalism fed the emergence of modern antisemitism and Islamophobia and helped to drive these two peoples further and further apart.

Traversing the full spectrum of Jewish-Muslim relations, this is an urgent, essential history for understanding today's unending conflicts in the Middle East and beyond.

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