This book is an incisive attempt by a leading exponent on Christian Muslim relations to unravel and understand the perspectives and complexities of semitic past and present in theological, political and cultural terms. The work tackles sensitive issues of ethnicity, prejudice, persecution and state-making. Cyclone and anti-cyclone are comprehensible contrasts. Semitism and anti-Semitism are of a different order. Semitism is hardly current at all; the latter is all too grimly and darkly familiar. Both terms seem only to have come into use in the 19th century, but the reality of their meanings...