For over 300 years the Quakers have been working for peace and acting as mediators. Campbell Leggat mines the experience of a group who have never been afraid to stand up to power or to listen at the deepest level.

'Islam and the Myth of Confrontation - religion and politics in the Middle East' by Fred Halliday, IB Tauris £12.95

Western media images of Muslims as threatening only help to further reinforce Islamic rejection of the West.

Michael Brown reports on a month sent in a conference centre half way up a Swiss mountain, where people from many countries gathered to `free the forces of change'.

Human history has consisted of a series of migrations; every culture is the result of confrontations between peoples. So cultural identity is something which is in need of constant enrichment.

Reviewed by Charis Waddy, author of `The Muslim Mind'.

It was not a scene you would have expected at a scientific meeting.

I met men and women with sore wounds of flesh and spirit, suffered under different regimes: terrible wrongs attributable to the British Raj, to the costly events of Partition and indeed to every government since, right up to Zia's.

There is some point in looking back into the lives of our forebears and seeing how a few French people, who now belong within one frame simply because of the chance of marriages down the generations, experienced the period. I took such a look at the ancestors of my sons.

What has kept us together, despite pressures that often drive couples apart?