E-raamat: Future of Religious Minorities in the Middle East

For more than a century, the delicate fabric of inter-communal relations in the Middle East has been unraveling, at the expense of religious and ethnic minorities. Multiple causes usually involve some combination of strident nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism. While in recent years, Western eyes have understandably been focused primarily on the threat that jihadist terrorism poses to their societies, but the ongoing existential threat to deep-rooted Christian communities and other religious and ethnic minorities is often ignored or accepted as inevitable. This collection of closely argued essays drawn from a cross-section of top-shelf scholars, journalists, human rights activists, and political practitioners highlights both the historical and contemporary dynamics that have placed Christian communities, in particular, under siege. It should serve as a wakeup call to all those who care about religious freedom, political pluralism, and human rights. -- Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, Tel Aviv University Under the capable editorship of John Eibner, this book is a vivid historical document written with precision and passion by twenty scholars about Islam's war against Christians, and other non-Muslims, in the Middle East. Offering penetrating political analyses and a keen sense of moral urgency, the authors detail Christianity's decline and disappearance in Syria and Iraq, Lebanon and Egypt, and elsewhere. A truly must read for anyone concerned about The Future of Religious Minorities in the Middle East. -- Mordechai Nisan, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem This truly international collection (from Zürich, Geneva, Bern, Oxford, Boston) of papers, delivered by twenty prominent scholars in Near-Eastern studies, looks at situational developments in the persecution of religious minorities in predominantly Islamic religions. The papers here present, based both on scholarship and on their personal experiences, a properly varied set of perspectives on what is going wrong. This volume looks religious cleansing in the face, calls it for what it is, and attempts to point most thoughtfully to the factors that may lead to working successfully against the forceful suppression of religious pluralism, even in the heart of an important but troubled region of our world which we can otherwise only ruefully watch coming apart at the seams. -- M.J. Connolly, Boston College