I've had this book kicking around for a while and decided to pick it up this month for April in Arabia and Read the World 21. Pelham has one of those casually authoritative voices and I am unfamiliar enough with this topic (and this is a very condensed primer), so as a result I spent the book veering between "Oh yes, of course!" and "Does anyone else actually think this way, or is it just YOUR personal opinion?" In the end I did find it a fairly persuasive argument.

The basis of the thesis is this: the Middle East has a long history of peaceful coexistence of a number of religions, which is most stable when governments in the region took a pluralistic approach -- one religion or another may have been more in favor than others in certain times or places, but those religions or sects weren't doing the ruling. When government fuses with religion, theocracies slide into extremism and radical fundamentalism of one narrow interpretation and set of rules.

It really recommitted me to the feeling that a separation of church and state may be the best idea the founders of this country ever (mostly) agreed on.

There is a zooming through some history of the region, a tour of a lot of the present-day conflicts, and some little hopeful glimpses of pluralistic communities being built in Israel right now. So it ended with more hire that I expected. I'm glad I got around to reading this. ( )

This book has gotten quite dated. It ends with a promotion of a "milletocracy", in which religious sects rule over their adherents without regard to geography — without explaining how to get there. It brings up the taif power-sharing agreement in Lebanon as a model for coexistence — an idea that a few years later has been refuted by the disintegration of the country, probably as a result of the deep-seated corruption and patronage networks that the sectarianism there had encouraged. Otherwise, the history is interesting and pithily recounted, though perhaps magnifying some anecdotes a bit too much. ( )