Jews and Muslims in the Arab World: Haunted by Pasts Real and Imagined Jacob Lassner and S. Ilan Troen From the Preface This book highlights the effects of historical memory on the Arab-Israel conflict. We demonstrate that both Jews and Arabs employ narratives of distant pasts to construct identities and shape politics. Whatever real or imagined, the past filtered through collective memory has had and will continue to have enormous influence on how Jews and Arabs perceive themselves and others. These perceptions are linked in turn to contemporary patterns of social and political behavior […] Some analysis of the current scene often neglect or dismiss altogether the residual influences of memories derived from a Near Eastern past that reach back into distant centuries, and even millennia. Focused on the here and now, they move backward only through the Arab-Israel conflict and the Palestine problem that preceded it […] This book stresses the importance of historical imagination on evolving political cultures. We make no claim that cultural explanations drawn from an ancient or medieval past shed light on every aspect of contemporary events, and we acknowledge the delicate balance between the long-term effects of culture and the specific reactions generated by current realities […] This study obviously extends beyond the popular notion that modern states are "imagined communities". For more than a millennium in the case of Islam and several millennia in the case of Judaism, Muslims and Jews have nurtured understanding of themselves and of each other […]