In Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Levant, Arabic printing began with the work of Antim the Iberian, a scholar and metropolitan of Wallachia, and Athanasios III Dabbās, patriarch of the Church of ...Antioch and metropolitan of Aleppo. The book presents the first Arabic press in the Ottoman lands, founded in 1705 in Aleppo due to a transfer of Romanian printing tools and expertise, and the later presses of Lebanon that produced Christian Arabic books.
Prophet or messiah, the figure of Jesus serves as both the bridge and the barrier between Christianity and Islam. In this accessible and revelatory book, Muslim scholar and popular commentator Mona ...Siddiqui explores the theological links between the two religions, showing how Islamic thought has approached and responded to Jesus and Christological themes from its earliest days to modern times. The author finds that the philosophical overlap between the two religions is greater than previously imagined, and this being so, her book brings with it the hope of improving interfaith communication and understanding.
Through a careful analysis of selected works by major Christian and Muslim theologians during the formative, medieval, and modern periods of both religions, Siddiqui focuses on themes including revelation, prophesy, salvation, redemption, grace, sin, eschatology, law, and love. How did some become the defining characteristics of one faith and not the other? Which-and why-do some translate between the two religions? With a nuanced and carefully considered analysis of critical doctrines of Christianity and Islam, the author provides a refreshing counterpoint to contemporary polemical arguments and makes an important contribution to reasoned interfaith conversation.
Pure and True Stroup, David R; Harrell, Stevan
02/2022
eBook
The Chinese Communist Party points to the Hui-China's largest
Muslim ethnic group-as a model ethnic minority and touts its
harmonious relations with the group as an example of the party's
great ...success in ethnic politics. The Hui number over ten million,
but they lack a common homeland or a distinct language, and have
long been partitioned by sect, class, region, and language. Despite
these divisions, they still express a common ethnic identity. Why
doesn't conflict plague relationships between the Hui and the
state? And how do they navigate their ethnicity in a political
climate that is increasingly hostile to Muslims?
Pure and True draws on interviews with ordinary urban
Hui-cooks, entrepreneurs, imams, students, and retirees-to explore
the conduct of ethnic politics within Hui communities in the cities
of Jinan, Beijing, Xining, and Yinchuan and between Hui and the
Chinese party-state. By examining the ways in which Hui maintain
ethnic identity through daily practices, it illuminates China's
management of relations with its religious and ethnic minority
communities. It finds that amid state-sponsored urbanization
projects and in-country migration, the boundaries of Hui identity
are contested primarily among groups of Hui rather than between Hui
and the state. As a result, understandings of which daily habits
should be considered "proper" or "correct" forms of Hui identity
diverge along professional, class, regional, sectarian, and other
lines. By channeling contentious politics toward internal
boundaries, the state is able to manage ethnic politics and exert
control.
This vivid introduction to the heart of Islam offers a unique approach to understanding Allah, the central focus of Muslim religious expression. Drawing on history, culture, theology, politics, and ...the media, Bruce B. Lawrence identifies key religious practices by which Allah is revered and remembered, illuminating how the very name of Allah is interwoven into the everyday experience of millions of Muslims. For Muslims, as for adherents of other religions, intentions as well as practices are paramount in one's religious life. Lawrence elucidates how public utterances, together with private pursuits, reflect the emotive, sensory, and intellectual aspirations of the devout. Ranging from the practice of the tongue (speaking) to practices in cyberspace (online religious activities), Lawrence explores how Allah is invoked, defined, remembered, and also debated. While the practice of the heart demonstrates how Allah is remembered in Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, the practice of the mind examines how theologians and philosophers have defined Allah in numerous contexts, often with conflicting aims. The practice of the ear marks the contemporary period, in which Lawrence locates and then assesses competing calls for jihad, or religious struggle, within the cacophony of an immensely diverse umma, the worldwide Muslim community.
The principal theological struggle in Islam has taken place between traditionalist and rationalist theologians. Assessing materials from the 3rd/9th century to the 10th/16th century, Professor ...Abrahamov focuses on the foundations of both traditionalism and rationalism, the arguments which the two tendencies used against each other and the compromises reached. This is a ground-breaking study by a renowned scholar and writer.
Secularizing Islamists? provides an in-depth analysis of two Islamist parties in Pakistan, the highly influential Jama'at-e-Islami and the more militant Jama'at-ud-Da'wa, widely blamed for the ...November 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, India. Basing her findings on thirteen months of ethnographic work with the two parties in Lahore, Humeira Iqtidar proposes that these Islamists are involuntarily facilitating secularization within Muslim societies, even as they vehemently oppose secularism. This book offers a fine-grained account of the workings of both parties that challenges received ideas about the relationship between the ideology of secularism and the processes of secularization. Iqtidar particularly illuminates the impact of women on Pakistani Islamism, while arguing that these Islamist groups are inadvertently supporting secularization by forcing a critical engagement with the place of religion in public and private life. She highlights the role that competition among Islamists and the focus on the state as the center of their activity plays in assisting secularization. The result is a significant contribution to our understanding of emerging trends in Muslim politics.
Under the guise of Islamic law, the prophet Muhammad's Islam, and the Qur'an, states such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Bangladesh are using blasphemy laws to suppress freedom of ...speech. Yet the Prophet never tried or executed anyone for blasphemy, nor does the Qur'an authorize the practice. Asserting that blasphemy laws are neither Islamic nor Qur'anic, Shemeem Burney Abbas traces the evolution of these laws from the Islamic empires that followed the death of the Prophet Muhammad to the present-day Taliban. Her pathfinding study on the shari'a and gender demonstrates that Pakistan's blasphemy laws are the inventions of a military state that manipulates discourse in the name of Islam to exclude minorities, women, free thinkers, and even children from the rights of citizenship.
Abbas herself was persecuted under Pakistan's blasphemy laws, so she writes from both personal experience and years of scholarly study. Her analysis exposes the questionable motives behind Pakistan's blasphemy laws, which were resurrected during General Zia-ul-Haq's regime of 1977-1988-motives that encompassed gaining geopolitical control of the region, including Afghanistan, in order to weaken the Soviet Union. Abbas argues that these laws created a state-sponsored "infidel" ideology that now affects global security as militant groups such as the Taliban justify violence against all "infidels" who do not subscribe to their interpretation of Islam. She builds a strong case for the suspension of Pakistan's blasphemy laws and for a return to the Prophet's peaceful vision of social justice.
In Islam in Post-communist Eastern Europe Egdūnas Račius reveals how governance of religions and practical politics in Eastern Europe are permeated by churchification and securitization of Islam, and ...Muslim religious organizations have been turned into ecclesiastical-bureaucratic institutions akin to 'Muslim Churches'.
