In 1995 Ayman al-Zawahiri, a prominent terrorist figure recently associated with Al Queda and al-Jihad, issued a bounty against Dr. Nasr Abu Zaid, a respected Islamic scholar at Cairo University. What was Zaid's offense? Arguing that Islam's holy texts should be interpreted in the historical and linguistic context of their time, and that new interpretations should account for social change. His controversial claim that the Qur'an be interpreted metaphorically rather than literally further enraged fundamentalists. Labeled an apostate by the Cairo court of appeals, his life was threatened and he was forced to flee to the Netherlands with his wife. A professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at Leiden University in his adopted country, this progressive Islamic scholar insists that change is still possible and that new understandings of Islam can be accepted and advanced. Forgoing claims that Islam is a violent religion, Zaid shows us that, above all, justice and obedience lies at the heart of the Qur'an. At the outset of this book, we find Zaid growing up in Quhafa, a village in northern Egypt. Islam gives meaning and definition to his life. As he matures, we see him sorting through Egypt's various political developments and upheavals. Zaid carefully weaves such developments into the events of his own life—his father's death, raising his younger siblings, attending Cairo University, his study abroad, his marriages, the events leading to his exile, and his visit to Egypt after a seven-year absence. Through it all, we see him advancing in his academic career and applying new skills to his study and interpretation of the Qur'an. He wrestles with subjects such as polygamy, wife beating, inheritance, and the practice of usury in Islamic cultures. He asserts and illustrates that Islam must be separate from the State in order to protect the religion from political manipulation. Zaid's personal story and academic pursuits, reflecting the social reality of the broader culture, offer new perspectives on Islam and provide hope to Muslims who feel their religion has been misrepresented and misunderstood.

Professor Brueggemann here examines the literature and experience of an era in which Israel's prophets faced the pastoral responsibility of helping people to enter into exile, to be in exile, and to depart out of exile. He addresses three major prophetic traditions: Jeremiah (the pathos of God), Ezekiel (the holiness of God), and 2 Isaiah (the newness of God). This literature is seen to contain the theological resources for handling both brokenness and surprise with freedom, courage, and imagination. Throughout, Brueggemann demonstrates how these resources offer vitality for ministry today.

2023 marks the fiftieth anniversary of General Pinochet's coup on September 11, 1973. During the wave of mass arrests, torture, and executions that followed, people began fleeing Chile. Over the next fifteen years some two hundred thousand Chileans sought exile in countries around the world. Out of their anguish and anger come these moving and powerful testimonies of their fractured lives--the first oral history of the Chilean diaspora, now revised and updated. Many who fled had been tortured, and they clung to the principle that the dictatorship was an evil that had to be destroyed. But their zeal and solidarity with other refugees often failed to sustain families. Many marriages collapsed, and children lost interest in their native land and culture. After civilian rule returned in 1990, many returning exiles felt estranged from a homeland forever changed. This timely update of the 1998 collection continues to remind us of the fracturing legacy and enduring oppression of usurpation and authoritarian rule long after its time has passed.

Elilal, exile, is the condition of thousands of Mayas who have fled their homelands in Guatemala to escape repression and even death at the hands of their government. In this book, Victor Montejo, who is both a Maya expatriate and an anthropologist, gives voice to those who until now have struggled in silence--but who nevertheless have found ways to reaffirm and celebrate their Mayaness. Voices from Exile is the authentic story of one group of Mayas from the Kuchumatan highlands who fled into Mexico and sought refuge there. Montejo's combination of autobiography, history, political analysis, and testimonial narrative offers a profound exploration of state terror and its inescapable human cost.

Decades of conflicts and persecution have driven millions from their homes in all parts of the northeast African country of Sudan. Many thousands more have been enslaved as human spoils of war. In their own words, the narrators of Out of Exile recount their lives before their displacement, the reasons for their flight, and their hopes to someday return home. Included are the stories of: ABUK: a native of South Sudan now living in Boston, who survived ten years as a slave after being captured by an Arab militia. MARCY and ROSE: best friends, who have spent the vast majority of their lives in a refugee camp in Kakuma, Kenya. They remember almost nothing of their former homes in Sudan. MATHOK: who struggled to find opportunities as a refugee in Cairo, but eventually fell into a world of gangs and violence.

This book explores a heretical blueprint for Jewish modernization written by a Venetian rabbi (under cover of pseudonym) in the early seventeenth century, almost two centuries before political emancipation. The analysis of this text, Kol Sakhal ("Voice of a Fool"), highlights the ways in which it harnessed concepts and methods drawn from the texts of rabbinic Judaism itself in order to reform Jewish culture from within. This book thus challenges the assumption that pre-modern Jewish society was culturally monolithic and unquestioningly obedient to rabbinic authority. In so doing, it raises fresh and unsettling questions about the periodization of Jewish history. Like the contemporaneous political and religious struggle that the Republic of Venice was waging against papal Rome, this remarkable Jewish attack on rabbinic authority targets—and revises—both the traditional historiography of sacred institutions and the legal canon itself. The text's very iconoclasm is shown to derive from the corpus of rabbinic Judaism, for the preservation of certain strains of inquiry in traditional sources makes them a virtual repository of tolerated dissent. Conjecture about the possible influence that a recently discovered work by a heretical Iberian Jewish convert to Catholicism may have had on the composition of "Voice of a Fool" leads to a discussion of the types of heterodoxy that threatened rabbinic Jewish communities in Italy and elsewhere in the early modern period. Reflections on the significance of the mask adopted by the text's author and on his (false) claim that the work was composed in 1500 in Spain facilitate speculation about his motives in trying to reinvent history. The second half of the book presents the first annotated English translation of "Voice of a Fool." Three appendixes analyze evidence concerning the date and place of the text's composition, the identification of its author, and its various manuscripts.