the past and today. Focusing on the Arab world and on Turkey, the book shows how Christianity and Judaism survived and at times even prospered in the region, thus modifying the view of Islam as an inevitably unbending and radical religion. It also demonstrates that the position of the minorities was badly affected in the wake of confrontations with the Christian West--at the time of the Crusades, after the first victories of the Spanish Reconquista, with the humiliations meted out to the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and North Africa, and once again with the creation of the state of Israel.

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