Thirty-one chapters. Each states a principle, tells a true story from somewhere in fifteen centuries of history, and draws from it a method for disarming one doctrine of holy war. By Sam Shamsan.
A French king once emptied a town so that the Ottoman fleet could winter in its harbor. An Egyptian surgeon wrote the legal manual of global holy war, and then, from a prison cell, took it back. A Japanese emperor told his people in a single sentence that he was not a god. A Tunisian prince freed the slaves before Abraham Lincoln did.
The book collects these moments and asks what they have in common. Its answer is that no doctrine of sacred violence has ever been as fixed as its guardians claimed, and that the work of closing the last of them is smaller, and more possible, than either side of the argument admits.
It ends with seven plain demands, and with the strongest objections to them, stated in full.