A remarkable look at an understudied feature of the Iranian justice system, where forgiveness is as much a right of victims as retributionIran's criminal courts are notorious for meting out severe sentencesaccording to Amnesty International, the country has the world's highest rate of capital punishment per capita.
The forgotten story of the nineteenth-century freethinkers and twentieth-century humanists who tried to build their own secular religionIn The Church of Saint Thomas Paine, Leigh Eric Schmidt tells the surprising story of how freethinking liberals in nineteenth-century America promoted a secular religion of humanity centered on the deistic revolutionary Thomas Paine (1737-1809) and how their descendants eventually became embroiled in the culture wars of the late twentieth century.
In this classic work George Hourani deals with the history of the sea trade of the Arabs in the Indian Ocean from its obscure origins many centuries before Christ to the time of its full extension to China and East Africa in the ninth and tenth centuries.
Balancing respect for religious conviction and the values of liberal democracy is a daunting challenge for judges and lawmakers, particularly when religious groups seek exemption from laws that govern others.
The enigmatic sixteenth-century Swiss physician and natural philosopher Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus, is known for the almost superhuman energy with which he produced his innumerable writings, for his remarkable achievements in the development of science, and for his reputation as a visionary (not to mention sorcerer) and alchemist.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire straddled three continents and encompassed extraordinary ethnic and cultural diversity among the estimated thirty million people living within its borders.
Perhaps no other Western writer has more deeply probed the bitter struggle in the Muslim world between the forces of religion and law and those of violence and lawlessness as Noah Feldman.
This book will be immensely helpful to those who wish to orient themselves to what has become a very large body of literature on medieval Islamic history.
Emilio Gentile, an internationally renowned authority on fascism and totalitarianism, argues that politics over the past two centuries has often taken on the features of religion, claiming as its own the prerogative of defining the fundamental purpose and meaning of human life.
A firm grasp of Islamic fundamentalism has often eluded Western political observers, many of whom view it in relation to social and economic upheaval or explain it away as an irrational reaction to modernity.
Turkey has leapt to international prominence as an economic and political powerhouse under its elected Muslim government, and is looked on by many as a model for other Muslim countries in the wake of the Arab Spring.
Shortlisted for the Palestine Book Awards 2017 A powerful, groundbreaking history of the Occupied Territories from one of Israel's most influential historians From the author of the bestselling study of the 1948 War of Independence comes an incisive look at the Occupied Territories, picking up the story where The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine left off.
A major new history of the century-long debate over what a Jewish state should beMany Zionists who advocated the creation of a Jewish state envisioned a nation like any other.
Many Americans wish to believe that the United States, founded in religious tolerance, has gradually and naturally established a secular public sphere that is equally tolerant of all religions--or none.
With Hezbollah's entry into the Lebanese government in 2009 and forceful intervention in the Syrian civil war, the potent Shi'i political and military organization continues to play an enormous role in the Middle East.
An urgent and compelling study of Gaza from one of the region's most experienced journalists REVISED AND UPDATED EDITION ';A brilliant and incisive account of this tiny, vibrant, but embattled enclave a must-read.
Why the pursuit of state recognition by seemingly marginal religious groups in Egypt and elsewhere is a devotional practiceOver the past decade alone, religious communities around the world have demanded state recognition, exemption, accommodation, or protection.
In the steamy summer of 1787, as America's founding fathers fashioned their Constitution, they told the most powerful institution in their new nation what it must not do: "e;Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.
The final chapter in the definitive, three-volume history of the world's first known stateArchaeologist John Romer has spent a lifetime chronicling the history of Ancient Egypt, and here he tells the epic story of an era dominated by titans of the popular imagination: the radical iconoclast Akhenaten, the boy-king Tutankhamun and the all-conquering Ramesses II.
WINNER OF THE 2024 SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARDIts name means 'centre of the world', and since the dawn of history the Mediterranean Sea has formed the shared horizon of innumerable cultures.
This intensive social biography of a rural Moroccan judge discusses Islamic education, the concept of knowledge it embodies, and its communication from the early years of colonial rule in twentieth-century Morocco to the present.
A compelling book that casts the Qur'anic encounter with Jews in an entirely new lightIn this panoramic and multifaceted book, Meir Bar-Asher examines how Jews and Judaism are depicted in the Qur'an and later Islamic literature, providing needed context to those passages critical of Jews that are most often invoked to divide Muslims and Jews or to promote Islamophobia.
An illuminating look at the transformative role that rituals play in our political livesThe Politics of Ritual is a major new account of the political power of rituals.
How a nineteenth-century lawsuit over the estate of a wealthy Tunisian Jew shines new light on the history of belongingIn the winter of 1873, Nissim Shamama, a wealthy Jew from Tunisia, died suddenly in his palazzo in Livorno, Italy.
An authoritative introduction to ISIS-now expanded and revised to bring events up to the presentThe Islamic State stunned the world with its savagery, destructiveness, and military and recruiting successes.
Balancing respect for religious conviction and the values of liberal democracy is a daunting challenge for judges and lawmakers, particularly when religious groups seek exemption from laws that govern others.
Before the intifada began, Joost Hiltermann had already looked at local organizations in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and seen there the main elements that would eventually be used to mobilize the Palestinian masses.
A definitive history of the 20th century's first major genocide on its 100th anniversaryStarting in early 1915, the Ottoman Turks began deporting and killing hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the first major genocide of the twentieth century.
Workable Sisterhood is an empirical look at sixteen HIV-positive women who have a history of drug use, conflict with the law, or a history of working in the sex trade.
On November 4, 1979, when students occupied the American Embassy in Tehran and subsequently demanded that the United States return the Shah in exchange for hostages, the deposed Iranian ruler's regime became the focus of worldwide scrutiny and controversy.
The One Ill Always Remember puts the reader on the front lines and in the operating rooms to experience the dramatic impact on the military care providers who have told their stories.
