In the Name of God : the role of religion in the modern world : a history of Judeo-Christian and Islamic tolerance /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A groundbreaking book on the history of religious tolerance and intolerance that offers an essential narrative to understanding Islam and the West today.

Never has this book been more timely. Religious intolerance, the resurgence of fundamentalism, hate crimes, repressive laws, and mass shootings are pervasive in today's world. Selina O'Grady asks how and why our societies came to be as tolerant or intolerant as they are; whether tolerance can be expected to heal today's festering wound between Islam and the post-Christian West; or whether something deeper than tolerance is needed.

From Umar, the seventh century Islamic caliph who led what became the greatest empire the world has ever known, to King John (of Magna Carta fame) who almost converted to Islam; from Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who created the religious-military alliance with the House of Saud that still survives today, to the bloody Thirty Years' War that cured Europe of murderous intra-Christian violence (but probably killed God in the process), Selina O'Grady takes the reader through the intertwined histories of the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish faiths.

In the Name of God is an original and thought-provoking history of monotheistic religions and their ever-shifting relationship with each other.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• List of Illustrations (p. ix)
• Timeline (p. xi)
• Introduction (p. 1)
• 1 The Birth of Persecution: The Roman Empire Turns Christian (p. 7)
• 2 Muhammad's Edict of Toleration (p. 23)
• 3 The Price of Toleration: The Dhimmi in the Islamic Empire (p. 48)
• 4 Islam's Inquisition (p. 65)
• 5 The Problems of Assimilation: Willing Martyrs (p. 81)
• 6 Austerity in England and the Papal Battle for Supremacy (p. 102)
• 7 The Crusades: The Church Finds Its Enemy (p. 117)
• 8 The Moneylender (p. 146)
• 9 Enemies Within: The Heretic, the Leper, the Sodomite and the Jew (p. 159)
• 10 The Mongols and the 'Closing of the Door' (p. 174)
• 11 The Black Death: An Experiment in Tolerance (p. 191)
• 12 Inquisitions and Expulsions (p. 201)
• 13 The Reformation's War Against the Catholic Church (p. 215)
• 14 The Ghetto (p. 231)
• 15 The Religious Wars of Europe (p. 245)
• 16 Sunnis vs Shiites (p. 254)
• 17 The Puritan Who Fought the Puritans (p. 266)
• 18 America Writes God out of the Constitution (p. 287)
• 19 Robespierre's New Religion (p. 303)
• 20 Ibn Abd al-Wahhab vs the Islamic Enlightenment (p. 318)
• 21 Emancipation and the Failure of Tolerance (p. 348)
• 22 The Genocidal Century (p. 376)
• Conclusion (p. 404)
• Endnotes (p. 418)
• Selected Bibliography (p. 430)
• Acknowledgements (p. 444)
• Index (p. 445)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Documentary producer O'Grady (And Man Created God) presents a dazzling, lucid history of evolving, tenuous religious toleration. Starting with the Roman Empire and the beginnings of Islam, O'Grady shows how toleration was a pragmatic decision to consolidate power among diverse populations and conquered territories but collapsed when the subordinated began to threaten those in power. Tension between religious empires or nation states pervaded the Middle Ages as both Christians and Muslims fought heresy and launched holy wars against each other. Throughout the Dark Ages, O'Grady highlights how Muslims tended to be more tolerant of Jews, while Christians vacillated between relying on Jews for financing and violently massacring or expelling them, notably following the Black Death. The Reformation's wars and the 16th-century Sunni-Shiite conflict show how both faiths fractured and struggled with toleration. After discussing the diminished and reshaped role of God in politics during the American and French Revolutions, O'Grady describes the rapid, chaos-inducing Islamic Enlightenment and modernization sparked by the French invasion of Egypt in 1798. She ends with the rise of nationalism instead of religion as a unifier, arguing that the the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust were largely a product of this realignment. This perceptive, masterly history will change how many readers think about toleration and the supposed clash between Christian and Muslim worlds. (June)

Booklist Review

O'Grady's work will fascinate anyone wishing to plunge into the histories of Western Christianity and Euro-proximate Islam. Her focus is religious intolerance as performed by followers of both religions, and the idea that what all parties want is not tolerance, but equality. Tolerance, as she defines it, involves one party with more power that practices tolerance over the other, weaker party. Equality dissolves that power imbalance. With this in mind, she traces the histories of both concepts (in semi-broad strokes) from the Roman Empire to the twentieth century, ending just after WWII. She treads the narrow path between being mired in minutiae and grandly sweeping through events, and instead provides enlightening, entertaining stories while including key events for both Christianity and Islam. Roger Williams, the American founder of Rhode Island, walks across the same pages as Shah Ismail I and Robespierre. While its density might make casual readers quail, fans of history, religion, or ideas will revel in the comparative study of these two faiths, long kept apart in history books, whose pasts are inextricably intertwined.

Kirkus Book Review

Eye-opening journey through the history of persecution among the Abrahamic religions. In this sprawling examination of "the histories of tolerance and equality, from the time when the Roman Empire became Christian to the genocides of the twentieth century," writer and documentarian O'Grady walks readers through numerous bloody centuries and guilty civilizations. Though the author, who admittedly approaches her subject from a Western liberal perspective, purports to write a history of tolerance, it is clear that tolerance has always been lacking in the joint history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In some ways, however, that serves O'Grady's overarching point, which is that tolerance itself is no virtue. "No one wants to be tolerated," she writes. "What we all want is not to be tolerated but to be treated as equals." As the author chronicles, tolerance has turned to hate in many frightening ways. In each of the roughly chronological chapters (beginning with an account of Diocletian, who reigned from 284 to 305 and was "pagan Rome's most savage prosecutor of Christians"), O'Grady showcases one example of persecution after another: the formation of suppressed groups in early Islam, the Crusades, the Christian persecution of heretics, the Inquisition and expulsion of the Jews, the Jewish Ghettos, the Protestant-Catholic wars of religion, Sunni and Shiite conflict, and on and on. Many of the chapters could be books of their own, but O'Grady does a good job of keeping the narrative tight. Though the author makes clear that no religious group has innocent hands, she does take pains to suggest that Muslims have had the most tolerant history when compared to Christians--and Jews have rarely had the opportunity to show tolerance at all. Ultimately, she writes, humanity should stop valuing tolerance because tolerance is still a reflection of superiority. Instead, we must strive for the virtues of "liberty, equality, and solidarity." A depressing yet thought-provoking look at faith's many great failures. (16 pages of color photos, timeline) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Selina O'Grady was a documentary film producer at BBC Television for many years. She is the author of And Man Created God and has written for the Guardian , and the Literary Review in Britain. She lives in London.