Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths » (REPRINT)

Karen Armstrong, author, scholar, and journalist, is among the world's foremost commentators on religious history and culture. Her books include the bestselling A History of God and The Battle for God, as well as Buddha and Islam: A Short History.

Jerusalem, the Holy City, venerated for centuries by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike; no other city has remained the center of such conflict for so long. Now Karen Armstrong, author of the best-selling and widely acclaimed A History of God, explains how this came to be as she unravels the meaning of a "holy city" and shows how Jerusalem has become deeply rooted in the identities of all three religions of Abraham.

Throughout, Armstrong helps us understand the mythic nature of Jerusalem's holiness as she explores the "primitive ideal of a sacred space," an ideal that continues to arouse powerful emotions. She describes Jerusalem's richly woven history, tracing its battles, archaeology, and ever-changing topography which is often designed to reflect a people's inner world.

Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths tells the fascinating story of Jerusalem from its earliest beginnings during the third millennium BCE to the present-day, explaining why Jerusalem is still a vibrant, sometimes violent political issue in the Middle East.

Publishers Weekly

British religious scholar Armstrong (A History of God) has written a provocative, splendid historical portrait of Jerusalem that will reward those seeking to fathom a strife-torn city. Her overarching theme, that Jerusalem has been central to the experience and "sacred geography" of Jews, Muslims and Christians and thus has led to deadly struggles for dominance, is a familiar one, yet she brings to her sweeping, profusely illustrated narrative a grasp of sociopolitical conditions seldom found in other books. Armstrong spares none of the three monotheisms in her critique of intolerant policies as she ponders the supreme irony that the Holy City, revered by the faithful as symbol and site of harmony and integration, has been a contentious place where the faiths have fought constantly, not only with one another but within themselves, in bitter factions. Her condemnation of Israel's 1967 annexation of the Old City and East Jerusalem in the Six-Day War ("It was impossible for Israelis to see the matter objectively, since at the [Western Wall] they had encountered the Jewish soul"), however, pushes too far her theme of sacred geography as the physical embodiment of motivating myths and legends. (May)