In the Name of God: The Role of Religion in the Modern World: A History of Judeo-Christian and Islamic Tolerance

by Selina O'Grady

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643135137
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	06/02/2020
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	480
File size:	22 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Timeline xi

Introduction 1

1 The Birth of Persecution: The Roman Empire Turns Christian 7

2 Muhammad's Edict of Toleration 23

3 The Price of Toleration: The Dhimmi in the Islamic Empire 48

4 Islam's Inquisition 65

5 The Problems of Assimilation: Willing Martyrs 81

6 Austerity in England and the Papal Battle for Supremacy 102

7 The Crusades: The Church Finds Its Enemy 117

8 The Moneylender 146

9 Enemies Within: The Heretic, the Leper, the Sodomite and the Jew 159

10 The Mongols and the 'Closing of the Door' 174

11 The Black Death: An Experiment in Tolerance 191

12 Inquisitions and Expulsions 201

13 The Reformation's War Against the Catholic Church 215

14 The Ghetto 231

15 The Religious Wars of Europe 245

16 Sunnis vs Shiites 254

17 The Puritan Who Fought the Puritans 266

18 America Writes God out of the Constitution 287

19 Robespierre's New Religion 303

20 Ibn Abd al-Wahhab vs the Islamic Enlightenment 318

21 Emancipation and the Failure of Tolerance 348

22 The Genocidal Century 376

Conclusion 404

Endnotes 418

Selected Bibliography 430

Acknowledgements 444

Index 445

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/20/2020

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)

Publishers Weekly

"Selina O’Grady’s In the Name of God is a tightly focused study."

Country Life (Seven astonishing books to read in 2020)

"A timely history. Sweeps through the centuries with panache."

The Sunday Times (London) - Tom Holland

"This is an important book written with an engaging zeal to try to improve our world. It encompasses a deep cultural hinterland, a vast geographical landscape and a narrative of 1,700 years... This is history with a clear mission for our own times."

The Oldie (London)

O’Grady’s work will fascinate anyone wishing to plunge into the histories of Western Christianity and Euro-proximate Islam. 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.

Booklist

"In a wide-ranging study that has urgent contemporary relevance, Selina O'Grady casts a cool eye over the battlefields of power, fanaticism, and faith that have caused so much devastation in a world of competing beliefs."

The Financial Times - Malise Ruthven

"This is a very important and highly illuminating book. Lucid, incisive and comprehensive, it raises one of the key questions of our time: in a world divided in so many ways, and most especially by religion, how are its peoples to find a way to live together? Through an examination of the history of tolerance and intolerance, and an analysis of the concept of tolerance itself, O'Grady asks whether 'tolerance' is even the right concept to use - and asks: if it is not, what is?"

A. C. Grayling

"Only an omniscient reader will fail to be informed."

Times Literary Supplement (UK)

A timely history. Sweeps through the centuries with panache.

Tom Holland - The Sunday Times (London)

In a wide-ranging study that has urgent contemporary relevance, Selina O'Grady casts a cool eye over the battlefields of power, fanaticism, and faith that have caused so much devastation in a world of competing beliefs.

Malise Ruthven - The Financial Times

O'Grady introduces a narrative that sweeps through the centuries with panache, cataloguing the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of the Christian world in unsparing detail.

The Sunday Times (London)

In a wide-ranging study that has urgent contemporary relevance, Selina O'Grady casts a cool eye over the battlefields of power, fanaticism, and faith that have caused so much devastation in a world of competing beliefs.

The Financial Times

04/17/2020

Documentary film producer O'Grady (And Man Created God) proposes that religious tolerance and intolerance are related rather than opposite human reactions, as both respond to ideas that one finds bothersome or threatening. To this, the author adds that religion and politics are inextricably linked, and no monotheistic religion brooks rivals. These themes drive this sweeping history of monotheistic religion on individual and group behavior, particularly as it relates to Christians and Muslims, and their treatment of Jews, from the first century CE to the mid-20th century. O'Grady argues that minority or disenfranchised religious groups are tolerated by the religious majority, seen as inferiors to the extent that they are considered useful. Should these groups be seen as menacing, or some social crisis occur, intolerance and persecution set in. This slide from tolerance to intolerance and back can be seen with both Christians and Muslims, contends the author. VERDICT A worthwhile read for secular liberals wishing to advocate for mutual respect and open-mindedness among various religious groups.—James Wetherbee, Wingate Univ. Libs., NC

Library Journal

2020-03-15
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)

Kirkus Reviews