Miami University

Miami professor author of two books on religion

10/22/1998

b>OXFORD, Ohio -- Thomas Idinopulos, professor of religion at Miami

University, is the author of two new books.

The New York Times (Sept. 13, 1998) speaks of Weathered by Miracles:

A History of Palestine from Bonaparte and Muhammad Ali to Ben-Gurion and the

Mufti, Idinopulos's book on historic Palestine, as

"elegant...charming...refreshingly unmarred by the partisanship that has so

marked much writing about the subject.

Together with his previous work, Jerusalem, the new book brings to

culmination 25 years of research in the history, politics and communal

relations of Muslims, Jews and Christians of the Holy Land.

Weathered by Miracles is a study of Palestine's history that began with

Napoleon's invasion of the Middle East in 1798 and concluded with the founding

of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948. The confrontation of world empires for

possession and profit, the clash of Islam with the Christian West and the

pioneering zeal of explorers and excavators, diplomats, merchants and

missionaries marked the last days of Turkish and European imperialisms and the

first breaths of Arab and Jewish nationalism.

All these events were played out against the backdrop of a diseased and wasted

land that experienced an extraordinary reclamation. Ironically that

reclamation would plant the seed for the larger and bloodier conflict between

Arabs and Jews that would follow in the second half of the 20th century.

Idinopulos explains this movement of events as an explosive combination of

politics and religion that has characterized the Holy Land and the Middle East

for centuries until the present day.

An anthology of new essays, The Sacred and Its Scholars, was conceived

by Idinopulos and co-edited with Professor Edward Yonan of Millikin

University.

A number of scholars from Finland, Israel, Canada and the United States

collaborated with Idinopulos and Yonan to analyze the sacred, one of the most

vexing ideas in the methodology of religious studies.

Idinopulos's recent publications are among the more than 140 articles, reviews

and books he has written since coming to Miami in 1966.