Religions East

Over more than a century, fed by ambition and oil wealth, al Saud (as the royal family is known) has come from having next to nothing to ruling as absolute monarchs. Their story starts with Saudi Arabia's founder, the lowly refugee Abdul Aziz, embarking on a daring gambit to reconquer his family's ancestral home: the mud-walled city of Riyadh. And it ends with al Saud's most ambitious move yet: taking Aramco, the multinational business that has made them the wealthiest family in the world, public.

In 2013, just two years after the popular overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian military ousted the country's first democratically elected president - Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood - and subsequently led a brutal repression of the Islamist group. These bloody events echoed an older political rift: the splitting of nationalists and Islamists during the rule of Egyptian president and Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. Fawaz Gerges, one of the world's leading authorities on the Middle East, tells how the clash between pan-Arab nationalism and pan-Islamism has shaped the history of the region.

As a child, Petr Jasek watched Soviet tanks roll through the streets of his village in Czechoslovakia, taking the country by force and subjecting it to decades of Communist oppression. Petr grew up in the underground church and benefited from financial help and Bibles smuggled in to his family. As an adult living in the free Czech Republic, Petr chose to begin serving persecuted Christians. In 2015, he was arrested in Sudan, convicted as a war criminal, and sentenced to life in prison, where he was forced to share a group cell with ISIS terrorists.

Tens of thousands of men and women have left comfortable, privileged lives to join the Islamic State and kill for it. To them, its violence is beautiful and holy, and the caliphate a fulfillment of prophecy and the only place on earth where they can live and die as Muslims. The Way of the Strangers is an intimate journey into the minds of the Islamic State's true believers. From the streets of Cairo to the mosques of London, Wood interviews supporters, recruiters, and sympathizers of the group.

From an award-winning journalist, a brave and necessary immersion into the everyday struggles of Palestinian life. Over the past three years, American writer Ben Ehrenreich has been traveling to and living in the West Bank, staying with Palestinian families in its largest cities and its smallest villages. Along the way he has written major stories for American outlets, including a remarkable New York Times Magazine cover story. Now comes the powerful new work that has always been his ultimate goal, The Way to the Spring.

In Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms, former diplomat Gerard Russell ventures to the distant, nearly impassable regions where these mysterious religions still cling to survival. He lives alongside the Mandaeans and Ezidis of Iraq, the Zoroastrians of Iran, the Copts of Egypt, and others. He learns their histories, participates in their rituals, and comes to understand the threats to their communities.

Jeremy Kroeker is a Mennonite with a motorcycle. He doesn’t have a funny beard, and he’s never even driven a buggy, but his family hails from the same Mennonite community that Miriam Toews fictionalized in A Complicated Kindness. From childhood through college, Kroeker attended Christian schools where he learned to think critically back to predetermined conclusions.

Struggling to reconcile the Muslim society he was living in as a scientist and physician and the religion he was being raised in, Ali A. Rizvi eventually lost his faith. Discovering that he was not alone, he moved to North America and promised to use his new freedom of speech to represent the voices that are usually quashed before reaching the mainstream media - those of Atheist Muslims.

Profiled on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, Iranian-born scholar Vali Nasr has become one of America's leading commentators on current events in the Middle East, admired and welcomed by both media and government for his "concise and coherent" analysis (Wall Street Journal). In this "smart, clear and timely" book (Washington Post), Nasr brilliantly dissects the political and theological antagonisms within Islam. He provides a unique and objective understanding of the 1,400-year bitter struggle between Shias and Sunnis, and sheds crucial light on its modern-day consequences—from the nuclear posturing of Iran's President Ahmadinejad to the recent U.S.-enabled shift toward Shia power in Iraq and Hezbollah's continued dominance in Lebanon.

The First Crusade is one of the best-known and most written-about events in history, but in this new book Dr Peter Frankopan asks vital questions that have never been posed before. This is the only book to address the history of the First Crusade from the perspective of the East, examining the role of the Byzantine Empire and its ruler, Emperor Alexios I Komnenos.

Les empires, caractérisés par des cycles d’émergence, de conquête, de domination et de déclin, présentent des traits récurrents qui suggèrent une dimension cyclique. Dans cette perspective, il convient d’analyser les leçons historiques susceptibles d’éclairer le présent. L’historien arabe Ibn Khaldûn, actif au XIVe siècle, a élaboré des théories dont la pertinence demeure significative. Le Professeur Gabriel Martinez-Gros, agrégé d’histoire et spécialiste du monde arabe médiéval, explore la pensée d’Ibn Khaldûn et son influence persistante sur le champ historiographique contemporain.

Best-selling author and renowned religious scholar Karen Armstrong presents a concise and articulate history of Islam, the world's fastest-growing faith. Beginning with the Prophet Muhammad's flight from Medina and concluding with an examination of modern Islamic practices and concerns, Armstrong delivers an unbiased overview. She contends that no religion is more feared and misunderstood by the Western world as Islam, and firmly challenges the notion that these two civilizations are on a collision course.

"The Lord is my shepherd." Thus begins the most beloved of all Psalms - and thus begins a thousand-year journey through the Bible. Prophets, apostles, and Jesus himself took up this image from David, reshaping it, developing it, and applying it to their own situations and needs.

Ahmed Rashid, called “Pakistan’s best and bravest reporter” by Christopher Hitchens, brings the shadowy world of the Taliban and its impact on Afghanistan and the Middle East and Central Asia into sharp focus in this modern classic. Rashid offers an authoritative account of the Taliban’s rise to power, its role in oil and gas company decisions, and the effects of changing American attitudes toward the Taliban. He also describes the new face of Islamic fundamentalism and explains why Afghanistan has become the world center for international terrorism.

In January 2012, having covered a Somali pirate trial in Hamburg for Spiegel Online International, Michael Scott Moore traveled to the Horn of Africa to write about piracy and ways to end it. In a terrible twist of fate, Moore himself was kidnapped and subsequently held captive by Somali pirates for 977 days. Yet Moore’s own struggle is only part of the story: The Desert and the Sea falls at the intersection of reportage, memoir, and history.

The Convenient Terrorist is the definitive inside account of the capture, torture, and detention of Abu Zubaydah, the first “high-value target” captured by the CIA after 9/11. But was Abu Zubaydah, who is still being indefinitely held by the United States under shadowy circumstances, the blue-ribbon capture that the Bush White House claimed he was?

In 1994, the most Christianized country in Africa became the site of its worst genocide. The tragedy was in Rwanda, but what happened was a mirror reflecting the deep brokenness of the church in the West. Yet by looking at what happened and why, we can find hope for the global body of Christ.

St. Paul is known throughout the world as the first Christian writer, authoring fourteen of the twenty-seven books in the New Testament. But as Karen Armstrong demonstrates in St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate, he also exerted a more significant influence on the spread of Christianity throughout the world than any other figure in history.

The classic work of Sufi mystical thinking from 1100CE, available in audiobook for the first time. It is also known as A Niche of Lamps.

On November 20, 1979, worldwide attention was focused on Tehran, where the Iranian hostage crisis was entering its third week. The same morning, the first of a new Muslim century, hundreds of gunmen stunned the world by seizing Islam's holiest shrine, the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Armed with rifles that they had smuggled inside coffins, these men came from more than a dozen countries, launching the first operation of global jihad in modern times.