Holy Lands ― Reviving Pluralism in the Middle East

When the Ottoman Empire fell apart, colonial powers drew straight lines on the map to create a new region--the Middle East--made up of new countries filled with multiple religious sects and ethnicities. Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, for example, all contained a kaleidoscope of Sunnis, Kurds, Shias, Circassians, Druze and Armenians. Israel was the first to establish a state in which one sect and ethnicity dominated others. Sixty years later, others are following suit, like the Kurds in northern Iraq, the Sunnis with ISIS, the Alawites in Syria, and the Shias in Baghdad and northern Yemen.

The rise of irredentist states threatens to condemn the region to decades of conflict along new communal fault lines. In this book,Economist correspondent and New York Review of Books contributor Nicolas Pelham looks at how and why the world's most tolerant region degenerated into its least tolerant. Pelham reports from cities in Israel, Kurdistan, Iraq and Syria on how triumphant sects treat their ethnic and sectarian minorities, and he searches for hope--for a possible path back to the beauty that the region used to and can still radiate.

Nicolas Pelham has written about the Middle East since 1992. He began as the editor of Middle East Times from Cairo before joining the BBC Arabic Service. He covered the Algerian civil war and the caprice of Colonel Qaddafi as the BBC's correspondent in Rabat. In 2002 he joined the Financial Times reporting on the downfall of first Saddam Hussein and then the American protectorate in Baghdad. Since 2010, he has reported on the region's collapse for The Economist and The New York Review of Books. He is the author of two previous books, A New Muslim Order (2008) on Arab Shiite rule, and A History of the Middle East (2010) with Peter Mansfield. He lives in London with his wife and three children.