Hindiyya is a consummate piece of historical writing that combines biographical narrative, long-term structure analysis and good oldfashioned murder mystery. ... Hindiyya breaks new ground as a study of religious deviance and mentalite in an early modern Levantine society. Stefan Winter, in MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies It is a book that ... Read morewill be valuable to those wishing to understand more of the Maronite religious heritage and Lebanese religious history, and to those concerned with the psychological aberrations of claimed spiritual experience. Geoffrey Rowell, in Church Times, 11 October 2013 It will be of great interest to anyone seeking a deeper understanding of an affair which has been long obscured by contradictory reports, or to those interested in eighteenth-century Maronite Christianity and its complex interactions with the authority of Rome. Theological Book Review , Vol 25, No 2 [...]a solid work of historical research, culling the mines of the archives of the Propaganda Fide in Rome as well as the Maronite Patriach in Bkirki. The bibliography is well laid out, noting workings on local history and culture of the Maronites [...] as well as contemporary social and gender studies focusing upon the Western and Oriental Catholic traditions [...] Hindiyya, Mystic and Criminal is an extremely important resource in the area of Middle East Christianity, which reveals the complicated relationships between the Oriental Catholic Churches and Rome. David D. Grafton, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol 46, (2014) This is a thoroughly and meticulously researched, documented, and well-written book. It is a masterpiece that employs a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary social science and humanities contextual approach, which makes it an academic edifice, a monumental work. It is rich in historiography; it contains a range of impressive primary sources and archival material as well as a watershed spectrum of references arranged thematically. It is a living, picturesque piece of social history. Heyberger has encyclopedic knowledge and seems to be a philologist who has apparently mastered at least six languages: Arabic, English, French, German, Italian and Latin. -Joseph Alagha, Bibliotheca Orientalis, LXXII, No 3-4, May-August 2015 Lebanon covers an area roughly just the size of Wales, yet its divisions
ethnics, confessional, political
often seem as infinitely complex as a fractal. Bernard Heyberger's fascinating Hindiyya, a real-life The Name of the Rose, offers evidence that this toxic state of affairs is nothing new to Levant. -Clement Grene, The Expository Times, Vol. 127 No. 6, March 2016 By translating this work into English an even broader audience has gained access to this masterpiece (...) -Carsten Walbiner, Ostkrichliche Studien 63 (2014) 1 Show Less