Most of my career has been spent as a scholar of interfaith relations, understanding how people understand each other and develop dialogue. This laid the background for my book, while I also understood the need for looking at not just how people get on during the good times, but what happens when religious communities and non-religious groups end up in antagonism or even violent confrontation.
As a Professor of Interreligious Studies, Religious Hatred is one of fifteen books I have written in a career that has seen me teach at universities on three continents, as well as being an advisor and trainer to governments, media, NGOs, and various faith-based organisations and communities.
Nirenberg’s book is not short, but it is a book you will have no trouble working your way through.
It is, I believe, the definitive study of antisemitism through history. If you want to know not just where such a prejudice comes from but also how it changes as society and people’s values change, this is the book for you.
Better than anyone else, Nirenberg shows how an older “religious” prejudice became, as European societies started to become secular in the Enlightenment period, a modern and “secularised” prejudice.
Often, the same tropes remain, but they were just reframed from a religious to a non-religious form. Some people argue for a radical break from a religious “Judeo-phobia” to a modern and racial “antisemitism,” but this is too simplistic.
In this magisterial history, David Nirenberg explores anti-Judaism from antiquity to the present, from the Ancient Egyptians who resented their Jewish neighbours to the ideas of Voltaire and Marx, thereby revealing it to be a mode of thought deeply embedded in the Western tradition.
With intolerance and racism on the rise across the West, the central argument of David Nirenberg's groundbreaking study - that to imagine anti-Judaism to be confined to the margins of our society is to be dangerously complacent - is as urgent and as timely as it has ever been.
One problem with recommending books on this topic is that there are so many good ones, so what makes this one stand out? Beydoun talks directly from his own personal experience as a human being and his expertise in law.
While he only addresses the USA, much that Khaled says has far wider resonances, which make it worthwhile reading for everyone. What really stays in my mind from this book is Beydoun’s legal scholarship.
Sometimes discussion about prejudice is quite abstract and about an ethos of prejudice. What he details are point-by-point legal cases where judges make decisions based on perceptions of skin colour, ethnicity, and presumed religion to decide what rights people have, what citizenship they can have, and where they can live.
On Forbes list of "10 Books To Help You Foster A More Diverse And Inclusive Workplace" How law, policy, and official state rhetoric have fueled the resurgence of Islamophobia-with a call to action on how to combat it.
"I remember the four words that repeatedly scrolled across my mind after the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City. 'Please don't be Muslims, please don't be Muslims.' The four words I whispered to myself on 9/11 reverberated through the mind of every Muslim American that day and every day after.... Our fear, and the collective breath…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
This choice might be idiosyncratic, but it is one that deeply matters to how I think about the wider question of religious hatred.
In short, if we want to understand any form of prejudice, or the reasons why one group of people hates another group of people, why one group of people is disadvantaged in society compared to others, then we need to understand the question of how different types of prejudice relate to each other.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western societies often spoke of a “Jewish question” (or problem). In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this has become a “Muslim question” (or problem). Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference except the group the enmity is directed against, but it’s often both.
This is the first book to examine the relationship between European antisemitism and Islamophobia from the Crusades until the twenty-first century in the principal flashpoints of the two racisms. With case studies ranging from the Balkans to the UK, the contributors take the debate away from politicised polemics about whether or not Muslims are the new Jews. Much previous scholarship and public discussion has focused on comparing European ideas about Jews and Judaism in the past with contemporary attitudes towards Muslims and Islam. This volume rejects this approach. Instead, it interrogates how the dynamic relationship between antisemitism and Islamophobia has…
Something links the other books that I am recommending, and this is that they are all focused on Western societies. This book, however, will take us to India and understanding mob violence against Muslims.
As a psychologist, Kakir draws on his clinical expertise and tells people’s stories compellingly and with insight. In some ways it’s not a book about Islamophobia, it’s about what hatred is, what this does to people, both those hated and those who hate, and the social impact of this.
Above all, it helps us see that violence, as the title says, may have colours.
For decades India has been the scene of outbursts of religious violence, thrusting many ordinary Hindus and Muslims into bloody conflict. This work analyzes the psychological roots of Hindu-Muslim violence and examines the subjective experience of religious hatred in the author's native land. Sudhir Kakar discusses the profoundly enigmatic relations that link individual egos to cultural moralities and religious violence. His psychological approach offers a framework for understanding the kind of ethnic-religious conflict that characterizes the turmoil in India. Using case studies, he explores cultural stereotypes, religious antagonisms, ethnocentric histories and episodic violence to trace the development of both Hindu…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
If the name Deborah Lipstadt seems familiar to you, it probably is, as she is almost certainly the most famous scholar of antisemitism.
This book will tell the story of why she became famous, which was dramatized in the Hollywood film Denial starring Rachel Weisz as Lipstadt.
I could have recommended many of Lipstadt’s books, but this one has both the compelling story of how she was sued for libel by the Nazi sympathiser and Holocaust denier David Irving, while also providing a solid introduction to what has been one of her main areas of research, which is documenting and understanding Holocaust denial.
This is the only book from the perspective of the defendant who emerged victorious. It features reviews on book pages of national newspapers, and in history magazines. Deborah Lipstadt chronicles her five-year legal battle with David Irving that culminated in a sensational trial in 2000. In her acclaimed 1993 book "Denying the Holocaust", Deborah Lipstadt called David Irving, a prolific writer of books on World War II, "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial", a conclusion she reached after closely examining his books, speeches, interviews, and other copious records. The following year, after Lipstadt's book was published in…
I wrote this book because I saw a lot of books on Islamophobia, on antisemitism, and on prejudice, but few showing the connections. If we want to understand these prejudices and combat them, then we need to understand them. Discussing how humans form groups, how violence can become genocide, and ways to counteract prejudice, the book takes this on in a global context.
Combining theory, history, and contemporary case studies, the book takes readers on the journey from how early Christians separated themselves from Jews and ended up persecuting them to how Western antagonism to Islam was transported, via colonialism, to Buddhists halfway around the world, and much else besides.
