The book sets out to explain the diffusion of Catholicism and Islam in the 17th-century
district of Jerusalem through a detailed analysis of the changes of faith undergone by the
inhabitants of some villages in the area (Dayr Aban ?uba Bethlehem Bayt Jala Bayt Sha?ur
and Ayn Karim). The way a new faith spread within and between the local Christian communities
was the result of a complex interaction between religious landscape communal dynamics and
individual agency which the book unravels. Through the stories of the conversions of the
Christian villagers as recorded in contemporary Christian and Muslim sources alike the book
analyzes the factors that shaped conversion in Palestinian villages. At the same time it
addresses general issues such as the relationship between individual and mass conversion and
the relationship between these geographical factors and social processes. In addition the
analysis of religious conversions illuminates numerous aspects of the functioning of religious
communities shedding light on their internal dynamics on how they dealt with questions of
identity and on the interactions between religious communities that lived side by side.
