Book excerpt: Focusing on the Arab World and Turkey, the authors show how Christian and Jewish minorities survived and even prospered under Islam thus modifying the view of Islam as dogmatic and unbending. They demonstrate that the decline of these minorities occurred in the wake of confrontation with the Christian West, the Crusades, the Spanish Reconquista, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in North Africa and the Balkans as a result of colonialism and the First World War, and the creation of the state of Israel.