Genghis Khan and the Quest for God: How the World's Greatest Conqueror Gave Us Religious Freedom

The conquests of the Mongols were arguably the most important event of the last millennium in Eurasia. Yet Genghis Khan has remained an opaque and enigmatic figure, a symbol of cruelty and little else. Jack Weatherford has peeled back the curtain and revealed a complex man and thinker in this path-breaking work of rousing history and scholarship. -- Robert D. Kaplan, author of The Revenge of Geography and Eastward to Tartary 'Revisionist history on a grand scale, but one as scrupulously well researched as such an intellectual overhaul needs to be...What is most remarkable about this fine and fascinating book is Weatherford's central claim that the Great Khan's ecumenism has as its legacy the very same rigid separation of church and state that underpins no less than the American idea itself. The United States Constitution's First Amendment is, at its root, an originally Mongol notion.... Weatherford argues his case very well, and in doing so offers further amplification of the notion