India’s lost emperor Ashoka Maurya has a special place in history. In his quest to govern India by moral force alone he turned Buddhism from a minor sect into a world religion, and set up a new yardstick for government. But Ashoka’s bold experiment ended in tragedy and he was forgotten for almost two thousand years.
In this beautifully written, multi-layered journey Charles Allen describes how fragments of the Ashokan story were gradually discovered, pieced together by a variety of British Orientalists: antiquarians, archaeologists and epigraphists. In doing so, they did much to recover India’s ancient history itself. The Lost Emperor tells the story of the man who was arguably the greatest ruler India has ever known.
What are the roots of today’s militant fundamentalism in the Muslim world? In this insightful and wide-ranging history, Charles Allen finds an answer in an eighteenth-century reform movement of Muhammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab and his followers—the Wahhabi—who sought the restoration of Islamic purity and declared violent jihad on all who opposed them. The Wahhabi teaching spread rapidly—first throughout the Arabian Peninsula, then to the Indian subcontinent, where a more militant expression of Wahhabism flourished. The ranks of today’s Taliban and al-Qaeda are filled with young men trained in Wahhabi theology.
God’s Terrorists sheds much-needed light on the origins of modern terrorism and shows how this dangerous ideology lives on today.