Book Review: From the Holy Mountain

From the Holy Mountain: A Journey among the Christians of the Middle East by William Dalrymple
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

William Dalrymple is a brilliant and sincere author, who puts in a lot of effort to research before he writes a book and that is very evident in From the Holy Mountain.

The book itself is a treasure with great insight into Middle East and Arab. Dalrymple makes his journey through what was known as the Byzantine empire. Some may think this book to be prejudiced towards religion but this serves as an excellent history and travel book as well.

The amount of knowledge that I have gained about the history of three predominant sections - Christains, Muslims and Jews through this book is immense. I knew about Jerusalem being the main center for both Christians and Jews but never knew that Christainity is actually a religion which took birth and developed there as well. Today when we talk about Christian nations we mostly think of US, Europe, who would have thought that it all originated in Arab nations which are viewed as Muslim nations.

It's a pity that most of the religions in the world are influenced by each other and have similarities between each other yet we are increasingly getting separated by religion even in this modern world. None of the religions are at peace with each other. There are constant wars to destroy each others' heritage rather than develop our own. The real victims are those whose lives got caught forever in such war. There are people in places like Beirut who have been seeing violence right from birth and are still witnessing them at an old age. What a life it is where you live constantly in the fear of death rather than living life itself.

Completely impressed by Dalrymple's writing and researching style I have now picked up another book of his "City of Djinns" as a near future read.

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