The Real Arab World

Download or read book Jews and Muslims in the Arab World written by Jacob Lassner and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2007-05-30 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jews and Muslims in the Arab World highlights the effects of historical memory on the Arab-Israel conflict, demonstrating that both Jews and Arabs use stories of distant pasts to create their identities and shape their politics. Whether real or imagined, the past filtered through their collective memories has had and will continue to have enormous influence on how Jews and Arabs perceive themselves and each other. Jews and Muslims in the Arab World describes the ways in which the past is absorbed, internalized, and then processed among Jews and Arabs. The book stresses the importance of historical imagination on the current evolving political cultures, but does not claim that explanations from an ancient past shed light on every aspect of contemporary events.