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Summary
Summary
A landmark biography by the New York Times bestselling author of Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World that reveals how Genghis harnessed the power of religion to rule the largest empire the world has ever known.
Throughout history the world's greatest conquerors have made their mark not just on the battlefield, but in the societies they have transformed. Genghis Khan conquered by arms and bravery, but he ruled by commerce and religion. He created the world's greatest trading network and drastically lowered taxes for merchants, but he knew that if his empire was going to last, he would need something stronger and more binding than trade. He needed religion. And so, unlike the Christian, Taoist and Muslim conquerors who came before him, he gave his subjects freedom of religion. Genghis lived in the 13th century, but he struggled with many of the same problems we face today: How should one balance religious freedom with the need to reign in fanatics? Can one compel rival religions - driven by deep seated hatred--to live together in peace?
A celebrated anthropologist whose bestselling Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World radically transformed our understanding of the Mongols and their legacy, Jack Weatherford has spent eighteen years exploring areas of Mongolia closed until the fall of the Soviet Union and researching The Secret History of the Mongols, an astonishing document written in code that was only recently discovered. He pored through archives and found groundbreaking evidence of Genghis's influence on the founding fathers and his essential impact on Thomas Jefferson. Genghis Khan and the Quest for God is a masterpiece of erudition and insight, his most personal and resonant work.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Weatherford (Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World), former professor of anthropology at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., focuses on the religious life of Genghis Khan (1162-1227), repeating some biographical material from his earlier book. Weatherford is an engaging storyteller who has done broad research and is passionate about Khan and his impact, but this passion is the source of the book's major weaknesses. First, Weatherford frequently presents unsupported speculation about Khan's personal psychology as knowable facts, perhaps to make history accessible for a popular readership. Second, in rehabilitating Khan's reputation as a bloodthirsty conqueror, Weatherford often misbalances and overstates his own theses, portraying Khan instead as a model of ideal justice and wisdom and the potential origin of modern religious freedom. Third, Weatherford meanders, touching on, for instance, Khan's own spiritual life; the laws and taxes for adherents of various religions in his empire; and a review of connections between Mongolia and Tibet. This is an interesting overview of some of the religious dynamics of the Mongolian empire in the 13th century but will leave readers looking for in-depth analysis wanting. Agent: Robin Straus, Robin Straus Agency (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Even historys most famous conqueror had a soft side.An acclaimed expert on Mongolia, Weatherford (The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire, 2010, etc.) introduces readers to a Genghis Khan (c. 1162-1227) not discussed in most history books. Though he was unquestionably a ruthless and violent conqueror, the author wants readers to see his subject as a thoughtful leader marked by extraordinary forethought and wisdom, paired with a religious personality. Among Weatherfords most startling revelations is that, centuries before John Locke and similar thinkers, Genghis Khan believed in and promoted religious tolerance within his great empire. Early in the book, the author does an admirable job explaining the physically harsh and brutal life into which Temujinthe name of the future Khanwas born and raised. Readers may grow to feel empathy for the young and unlikely future ruler, until fratricide and other acts of violence quickly taint his image. Founding the nation of Mongolia in 1206 with 1 million followers, Genghis Khan showed early wisdom in deciding to bring the written word to his empire, and he set about having scribes put the Mongolian spoken language into writing. Military success led to vastly increased landholding, and his empire grew. Weatherford details his conquest of China and then of Muslim lands to the west. Throughout, Genghis Khan considered himself the whip of heaven, chosen to bring order and justice to a troubled world. This included a solemn religious duty: As heavens representative on earth, he felt it was his duty to examine the religions of the people he had conquered to determine what they were doing incorrectly and to correct their errors. As he aged, however, Genghis Khan transformed from judge to student, as he spent more time learning about the religions of his conquered lands and incorporating their finest points into his administration and lawmaking. An intriguing, eye-opening spiritual biography. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Weatherford's third revisionist history of the great Mongol Empire frames a biography of its builder within the fascinating argument that that monarch's policy concerning religion anticipates those of the U.S. and subsequent secular nations. Genghis Khan made no establishment of religion, allowing his subjects the unfettered practice of their faiths throughout the largest state in history. He professed no faith himself, though he did habitually refresh himself spiritually at the sacred mountain in whose shadow he was born. He relished learning about religions, however, especially Christianity and Taoism. He knew enough about Confucianism to consider it not a religion but a bureaucratic regime inimical to the adventurousness necessary for empire-building. The spiritual value he most valued was loyalty, the betrayal of which he implacably punished with death. Weatherford proposes that Genghis, regarding religion as a disruptive force, wanted it kept far from the councils of state. Several founding fathers Jefferson chief among them knew of Genghis' separation of church and state and saw to it that the Constitution essentially mandated it. Waterford bases some of his interpretations on the most recently discovered imperial Mongol documents, including one that offers a view of Genghis' encounter with a great Taoist leader that is very different from the other eyewitness account of it. An engrossing history that sheds further light on a figure the West has long regarded as the ultimate barbarian.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THIRTY-ONE YEARS AGO, while on a railway journey between London and Hong Kong, I stopped off in Mongolia and to a briefly illustrative encounter. At the time the British had the sole Western embassy in Ulan Bator - at 30 Peace Street, if I remember - and I thought I might interview the ambassador and present him, as it was early December and he was said to cut a lonesome and homesick figure, with a Christmas plum pudding. I rang the mission's doorbell and must have looked faintly taken aback when it was opened by a young man of evidently Caribbean origin. "Don't be startled," he said cheerfully, in a broad Welsh accent. "I'm Trevor Jones, first secretary. From Cardiff. I think I'm the only black man in the diplomatic service, and look see, they pack me off to bloody Ulan Bator!" Back in 1985 that set the tone. Mongolia. Utterly out there. Grass. Ponies. Wrestling. Forgotten. Of no importance. Genghis Khan maybe. A brute. Otherwise, a place consigned to geographical oblivion in the minds of most. That was then. Now, thanks in large part to the restored reputation of Genghis and the many successor Khans - a restoration achieved in no small part thanks to the literary diligence of Jack Weatherford - Mongolia has come roaring back, being currently a highly modish place to visit (tourism has tripled in the last decade), a place to revere, be amazed by and in awe of. As a minuscule country that for a few shining centuries - rather like Britain, six hundred years later - expanded and held sway around a goodly part of the globe, from Vietnam, Burma and China to Hungary, Thrace and Poland. Weatherford (an anthropologist whose fathomless wellsprings of curiosity once led him to clerk in a Capitol Hill porn store to write a book that remains discreetly unlisted on the Also By page here) would like us to believe that those centuries of Mongol rule did indeed shine, and were, as far as imperial adventures go, among the best of their kind. It was in an earlier best-selling volume that Weatherford persuasively argued that the 25-year blitzkrieg mounted by Genghis and his cavalries - who, in "the most extensive war in world history" beginning in 1206, swept mercilessly and unstoppably over the Altai Mountains to their west and the Gobi Desert to their south - brought civilization, fairness, meritocracy and avuncular kindliness to legions of undeserving satrapies across Eurasia. Those who believed Genghis to be a tyrant of monstrous heartlessness have thus lately come to think otherwise: Weatherford's writings present us revisionist history on a grand scale, but one as scrupulously well researched (with ample endnotes) as such an intellectual overhaul needs to be. Now, with "Genghis Khan and the Quest for God" he has taken his thesis still further, arguing with equal fervor and conviction that the Khan, though godless himself, favored total religious freedom for his subjugated millions. While his empire encompassed "Muslims, Buddhists, Taoists, Confucians, Zoroastrians, Manichaeans, Hindus, Jews, Christians and animists of different types" (Weatherford's passions for lists can sometimes seem like stylistic overkill), he was eager that all should "live together in a cohesive society under one government." No walls to be built, no immigration bans, no spiritual examinations. To be reminded of such secular civility is one thing; but what is most remarkable about this fine and fascinating book is Weatherford's central claim that the Great Khan's ecumenism has as its legacy the very same rigid separation of church and state that underpins no less than the American idea itself. The United States Constitution's First Amendment is, at its root, an originally Mongol notion. Many might think this eccentric in the extreme, until we learn that a runaway 18th-century best seller in the American colonies was in fact a history of "Genghizcan the Great," by a Frenchman, Pétis de la Croix, and that it was a book devoured by both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Moreover, the quoted rubric of the Mongol and United States laws is uncannily similar: Among other passages, Mongol law forbids anyone to "disturb or molest any person on account of religion," and Jefferson, after reading its strictures, went on to suggest in his Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, a precursor of the First Amendment, that "no man shall . . . suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief." The link between Genghis and Jefferson may seem tenuous to the point of absurdity; but Weatherford argues his case very well - and in doing so offers further amplification of the notion that so many of the West's claimed achievements in fact have their true origins in the East, and that countries like Mongolia, far from being, as those hapless British diplomats once believed, at the utter ends of the earth, are very much more central than most of us nowadays like to imagine. In a sense we are all Mongols; we are all one. Thomas Jefferson had an unexpected model for our founding documents. SIMON WINCHESTER is the author, most recently, of "Pacific."
Choice Review
Anthropologist Weatherford (formerly, Macalester College) investigates the origin of the US concept of religious freedom. As the title suggests, Weatherford argues that this idea, particularly religious freedom, may have originated with Chinggis Khan, as he is more properly known. After a preface that explains the origin of the book's premise, Weatherford explores the religious history of the Mongol Empire with keen anthropological insight. Here, he works through the native and personal beliefs of Chinggis Khan and the various tribes of Mongolia as well as Chinggis Khan's interactions with various religious leaders. Weatherford is a gifted writer, and it is not difficult to become absorbed in the narrative he weaves. He presents tantalizing evidence but often become overly exuberant in his conclusions. It is clear that a straight line from Chinggis Khan to the US Constitution does not exist. Nonetheless, the author provides an intriguing argument that the Mongol Empire may have indirectly influenced the concept of religious toleration and freedom as envisioned by Thomas Jefferson or rather how 17th- and 18th-century scholars envisioned the Mongol Empire's policies toward religion. This book will generate discussion. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General, public, and undergraduate libraries. --Timothy M. May, University of North Georgia
Library Journal Review
With this latest work, Weatherford (Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World) exhaustively explores the nontraditional philosophy of Genghis Khan (1162-1227). Instead of instituting a more traditional ruler-sanctioned model, Khan allowed his conquered subjects (nomadic tribes in Central Asia and the Caucasus) the freedom to continue practicing their own religion. This is a truly distinct worldview, as Weatherford asserts, given the religious fervidness of the Middle Ages. The author then suggests a link between Khan's ideas and those in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which pertains to freedom of religion. Weatherford uses the discovery of books about Khan in Thomas Jefferson's personal library as a launching point to suggest that Jefferson was directly influenced by Khan's thinking while he drafted the U.S. Constitution. Perhaps, as Weatherford suggests, we can learn a lot from this ancient despot. -VERDICT This sound examination of Khan, his methods of rule, and his views on religious tolerance presents a valid and welcome addition to scholarship on the subject. [See Prepub Alert, 4/25/16.]-Brian Renvall, -Mesalands Community Coll., Tucumcari, NM © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.