Proposes that the Middle East and the Islamic faith--rather than Europe and Christianity--will initiate the End of Times, discussing the connections between the Bible, current world events, the Koran, and the Antichrist.

Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon's Party of God is the first thorough examination of Hezbollah’s covert activities beyond Lebanon’s borders, including its financial and logistical support networks and its criminal and terrorist operations worldwide. Hezbollah—Lebanon’s "Party of God"—is a multifaceted organization: It is a powerful political party in Lebanon, a Shia Islam religious and social movement, Lebanon’s largest militia, a close ally of Iran, and a terrorist organization. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including recently declassified government documents, court records, and personal interviews with intelligence and law enforcement officials around the world, Matthew Levitt examines Hezbollah’s beginnings, its first violent forays in Lebanon, and then its terrorist activities and criminal enterprises abroad in Europe, the Middle East, South America, Southeast Asia, Africa, and finally in North America. Levitt also describes Hezbollah’s unit dedicated to supporting Palestinian militant groups and Hezbollah’s involvement in training and supporting insurgents who fought US troops in post-Saddam Iraq. The book concludes with a look at Hezbollah’s integral, ongoing role in Iran’s shadow war with Israel and the West, including plots targeting civilians around the world. Levitt shows convincingly that Hezbollah’s willingness to use violence at home and abroad, its global reach, and its proxy-patron relationship with the Iranian regime should be of serious concern. Hezbollah is an important book for scholars, policymakers, students, and the general public interested in international security, terrorism, international criminal organizations, and Middle East studies.

Whereas most students of the Bible have long held that some form of humanism or universalist religion would catapult the Antichrist to world power, this book systematically proves the biblical case for an Islamic Antichrist.

Completely revised and updated, this new edition of Terror in the Mind of God incorporates the events of September 11, 2001 into Mark Juergensmeyer's landmark study of religious terrorism. Juergensmeyer explores the 1993 World Trade Center explosion, Hamas suicide bombings, the Tokyo subway nerve gas attack, and the killing of abortion clinic doctors in the United States. His personal interviews with 1993 World Trade Center bomber Mahmud Abouhalima, Christian Right activist Mike Bray, Hamas leaders Sheik Yassin and Abdul Azis Rantisi, and Sikh political leader Simranjit Singh Mann, among others, take us into the mindset of those who perpetrate and support violence in the name of religion.

This book examines religious conflict in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, North America, and South Asia from local-global perspectives.

A timely exploration of the links between religious faith and global violence--and how to break them.

With ramifications on geopolitics today, a vivid chronicle of the Christian and Islamic struggle to control the sacred places of Palestine and the Middle East between the seventh and thirteenth centuries. Crusade and jihad are often reckoned to have represented two sides of the same coin: each resonated on the opposing sides in the holy wars of the Middle Ages and each has been invoked during the war on terror. A chronicle of the Christian and Islamic struggle to control the sacred places of Palestine and the Middle East between the seventh and thirteenth centuries, this dynamic new history demonstrates that this simple opposition ignores crucial differences. Placing an equal emphasis on the inner histories of Christianity and Islam, the book traces the origins and development of crusade and jihad, showing for example that jihad reflected internal tensions in Islam from its beginnings. The narrative also reveals the ways in which crusade and jihad were used to disguise ambitions for power and to justify atrocity and yet also inspired acts of great chivalry and heroic achievement. The story brims with larger than life characters, among them Richard the Lionheart, Nur al-Din, Saladin, Baybars, and Ghengiz Khan. Lambert concludes by considers the long after-effects of jihad and crusade, including the role of the latter in French imperialism and of the former in the wars now afflicting the Middle East and parts of Africa. This vivid, balanced account will interest all readers who wish to understand the complexities of the medieval world and how it relates our own.