While there exists no evidence to date that the indigenous inhabitants of Arabia knew of holy war prior to Islam, holy war ideas and behaviors appear already among Muslims during the first generation.
The al-Qaeda Franchise asks why al-Qaeda adopted a branching-out strategy, introducing seven franchises spread over the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.
'The experience of insecurity, it turned out, would shape one of the most remarkable monarchs in England's history' In the popular imagination, as in her portraits, Elizabeth I is the image of monarchical power.
From Cullen Murphy, editor at large of Vanity Fair, God's Jury is a chilling and powerful account of how the techniques used by the Spanish Inquisition created our modern world.
After the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars of south-west France in 1208, a Spanish monk - later canonized as St Dominic - took up the cudgels by establishing a kind of secret police to ferret out heresy - thus began the infamous Inquisition.
For nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, the Italian Renaissance was nothing less than the beginning of the modern world - a world in which flourishing individualism and the competition for fame radically transformed science, the arts, and politics.
A new investigation that shows how conversionary preaching to Jews was essential to the early modern Catholic Church and the Roman religious landscapeStarting in the sixteenth century, Jews in Rome were forced, every Saturday, to attend a hostile sermon aimed at their conversion.
Christians are the world's most widely persecuted religious group, according to studies by the Pew Research Center, Newsweek, and the Economist, among others.
Why "e;the Muslim question"e; is really about the West and its own anxieties-not IslamIn the post-9/11 West, there is no shortage of strident voices telling us that Islam is a threat to the security, values, way of life, and even existence of the United States and Europe.
This scholarly biography and collection of writings by and about an early leader of the Hutterites, a pacifist communal Anabaptist group, sheds light on a persecuted religious minority during the Reformation.
The first book in English to examine Leon Battista Alberti's major literary works in Latin and Italian, which are often overshadowed by his achievements in architectureLeon Battista Alberti (14041472) was one of the most prolific and original writers of the Italian Renaissancea fact often eclipsed by his more celebrated achievements as an art theorist and architect, and by Jacob Burckhardt's mythologizing of Alberti as a Renaissance or Universal Man.
A uniquely personal account of the life and enduring legacy of the Renaissance libraryWith the advent of print in the fifteenth century, Europe's cultural elite assembled personal libraries as refuges from persecutions and pandemics.
Maxims and Reflections - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Throughout his long, hectic and astonishingly varied life, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) would jot down his passing thoughts on theatre programmes, visiting cards, draft manuscripts and even bills .
On August 4, 1578, in an ill-conceived attempt to wrest Morocco back from the hands of the infidel Moors, King Sebastian of Portugal led his troops to slaughter and was himself slain.
Between the catastrophic flood of the Tiber River in 1557 and the death of the "e;engineering pope"e; Sixtus V in 1590, the city of Rome was transformed by intense activity involving building construction and engineering projects of all kinds.
An exploration of the censorship of medical books from their proliferation in print through the prohibitions placed on them during the Counter-Reformation.
