Author: Matthew Carr File Type: epub In April 1609, King Philip III of Spain signed an edict denouncing the Muslim inhabitants of Spain as heretics, traitors, and apostates. Later that year, the entire Muslim population of Spain was given three days to leave Spanish territory, on threat of death. In a brutal and traumatic exodus, entire families and communities were obliged to abandon homes and villages where they had lived for generations, leaving their property in the hands of their Christian neighbors. In Aragon and Catalonia, Muslims were escorted by government commissioners who forced them to pay whenever they drank water from a river or took refuge in the shade. For five years the expulsion continued to grind on, until an estimated 300,000 Muslims had been removed from Spanish territory, nearly 5 percent of the total population. By 1614 Spain had successfully implemented what was then the largest act of ethnic cleansing in European history, and Muslim Spain had effectively ceased to exist. Blood and Faith is celebrated journalist Matthew Carrs riveting chronicle of this virtually unknown episode, set against the vivid historical backdrop of the history of Muslim Spain. Here is a remarkable window onto a little-known period in modern Europea rich and complex tale of competing faiths and beliefs, of cultural oppression and resistance against overwhelming odds.**From Publishers WeeklyThe expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 is a well-known tragedy. Less well-known is the later expulsion in 1609 of the descendants of the Moors, who had ruled Spain for centuries. Carr (The Infernal Machine A History of Terrorism) examines the uneasy coexistence of Christians and Muslims beginning in 1492, when Spain was united under the Christian Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. Over the next century, Christian leaders grew less and less tolerant of Iberian Muslims, requiring them to convert to Catholicism. In April 1609, this growing intolerance culminated in an edict accusing these converts, known as Moriscos, of heresy and apostasy and decreeing their expulsion. Over the next five years, an estimated 350,000 Muslims were forced to abandon their homes many died on the journey to the ships that would take them to North Africa, and many others were terrorized, raped, robbed and killed by forces that were supposed to protect them. Carr deftly narrates the complex events leading up to this little-known but horrific episode as a warning against religious intolerance and xenophobia. (Sept.) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. Review Without demonizing Christian or Muslim, Matthew Carr depicts the events that culminated in mass purges in 17th century Spain.--New York Times The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 is a well-known tragedy. Less well-known is the later expulsion in 1609 of the descendants of the Moors, who had ruled Spain for centuries. Carr (The Infernal Machine A History of Terrorism) examines the uneasy coexistence of Christians and Muslims beginning in 1492, when Spain was united under the Christian Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. Over the next century, Christian leaders grew less and less tolerant of Iberian Muslims, requiring them to convert to Catholicism. In April 1609, this growing intolerance culminated in an edict accusing these converts, known as Moriscos, of heresy and apostasy and decreeing their expulsion. Over the next five years, an estimated 350,000 Muslims were forced to abandon their homes many died on the journey to the ships that would take them to North Africa, and many others were terrorized, raped, robbed and killed by forces that were supposed to protect them. Carr deftly narrates the complex events leading up to this little-known but horrific episode as a warning against religious intolerance and xenophobia. Publishers Weekly In this first comprehensive appreciation in many decades of the Muslim expulsion from Spain, Blood and Faith meticulously recaptures the fateful self-mutilation of a society that might have become Europes first multicultural nation and offers a grim lesson about religious and racial repression in our contemporary age of contested faiths. - David Levering Lewis, Professor of History, NYU and author of Gods Crucible Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 Blood and Faith is a fascinating account of perhaps the first major episode of European ethnic cleansing and, just as importantly, the story of the beginning of the conviction that blood matters more than belief a conviction that led, in the end, to modern racism. In an age when so may people, on both sides, believe we face an historic confrontation between Christendom and Islam, it is essential to place the relations between these two global Abrahamic religions in a wider historical framework. This book does that eloquently and judiciously. -Kwame Anthony Appiah, Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University

Author: Stuart Peterfreund File Type: pdf Ambitious in its scope, Shelley among Others The Play of the Intertext and the Idea of Language is a comprehensive reading of Shelleys oeuvre through the lens of recent developments in literary and psychoanalytic theory. Stuart Peterfreund not only provides thought-provoking readings of well-known works but also explores less familiar pieces to illuminate their relationship to Shelleys continually evolving conceptions of language, power, and the role of poetry in society.Peterfreund proposes that there is an intimate connection between Shelleys sophisticated understanding of metaphor and his radical politics, and that this connection animates his entire poetic career, making possible a comprehensive exegesis of his work and development. In masterful close readings, he contextualizes this understanding as a dialogue (intertext) that Shelley carries on with precursors and contemporaries, both in his theoretical writings (with Vico and Rousseau, for instance) and his poetry (with Wordsworth, Milton, and Shakespeare, among others). The political dimension of Shelleys thought is grounded through often startling connections between his poems and the debates, events, and personalities of the time, and Peterfreund takes care to connect the theory of language which Shelleys work articulates with present-day literary theory, particularly in the writings of Lacan and Kristeva. **