The Sectarian Milieu

The Sectarian Milieu
Author: John E. Wansbrough
Publisher:
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2006
Genre: Religion
ISBN:

In this influential work originally published in 1978, the author, one of the most innovative thinkers in the field of Islamic Studies, analysed 'early Islamic historiography -- or rather the interpretative myths underlying this historiography -- as a late manifestation of Old Testament salvation history'. Continuing themes that he treated in a previous work, Quranic Studies, Wansbroguh argued that the traditional biographies of Muhammad are best understood, not as historical documents that attest to 'what really happened', but as literary texts written more than 100 years after the facts and heavily influenced by Jewish, and to a lesser extent, Christian, interconfessional polemics. Thus Islamic 'history' is almost completely a later literary reconstruction, which evolved out of an environment of competing Jewish and Christian sects. As such the author felt that the most fruitful means of analysing such texts was literary analysis. Although Wanbrough's work remains controversial to this day, his fresh incites and approaches to the study of Islam continue to inspire scholars.

A Muslim Theologian in the Sectarian Milieu

A Muslim Theologian in the Sectarian Milieu
Author: Gabriel Reynolds
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2005-02-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 904740582X

In 385 AH/AD 995 the Qāḍī ‘Abd al-Jabbār, well known for his Mu‘tazilī theological writings, wrote the Confirmation of the Proofs of Prophecy, a work that includes a creative polemic against Christianity. ‘Abd al-Jabbār reinterprets the Bible, Church history (especially the lives of Paul and Constantine) and Christian practice to argue that Christians changed the Islamic religion of Jesus. The present work begins with an examination of the controversial theory that this polemic was borrowed from an unkown Judaeo-Christian group. The author argues that ‘Abd al-Jabbār's polemic is better understood as a response to his particular milieu and the on-going inter-religious debates of the medieval Islamic world. By examining the life and thought of ‘Abd al-Jabbār, along with the Islamic, Christian and Jewish antecedants to his polemic, the author uncovers the intimate relationship between sectarian controversy and the development of an Islamic doctrine on Christianity.

The Character of Christian-Muslim Encounter

The Character of Christian-Muslim Encounter
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 642
Release: 2016-01-12
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004297219

The Character of Christian-Muslim Encounter is a Festschrift in honour of David Thomas, Professor of Christianity and Islam, and Nadir Dinshaw Professor of Inter Religious Relations, at the University of Birmingham, UK. The Editors have put together a collection of over 30 contributions from colleagues of Professor Thomas that commences with a biographical sketch and representative tribute provided by a former doctoral student, and comprises a series of wide-ranging academic papers arranged to broadly reflect three dimensions of David Thomas’ academic and professional work – studies in and of Islam; Christian-Muslim relations; the Church and interreligious engagement. These are set in the context of a focussed theme – the character of Christian-Muslim encounters – and cast within a broad chronological framework. Contributors, excluding the editors, are: Clare Amos, John Azumah, Mark Beaumont, David Cheetham, Rifaat Ebied, Stanisław Grodź SVD, Alan Guenther, Damian Howard SJ, Michael Ipgrave, Muammer İskenderoğlu, Risto Jukko, Alex Mallett, Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala, Lucinda Mosher, Gordon Nickel, Jørgen Nielsen, Claire Norton, Emilio Platti, Luis Bernabé Pons, Peniel Rajkumar, Peter Riddell, Umar Ryad, Andrew Sharp, Sigvard von Sicard, Richard Sudworth, Mark Swanson, Charles Tieszen, John Tolan, Davide Tacchini, Herman Teule, Albert Walters.

Law and the Rule of God

Law and the Rule of God
Author: Joshua Ralston
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2020-11-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1108801811

Sharī'a is one of the most hotly contested and misunderstood concepts and practices in the world today. Debates about Islamic law and its relationship to secularism and Christianity have dominated political and theological discourse for centuries. Unfortunately, Western Christian theologians have failed to engage sufficiently with the challenges and questions raised by Islamic political theology, preferring instead to essentialize or dismiss it. In Law and the Rule of God, Joshua Ralston presents an innovative approach to Christian-Muslim dialogue. Eschewing both polemics and apologetics, he proposes a comparative framework for Christian engagement with Islamic debates on sharī'a. Ralston draws on a diverse range of thinkers from both traditions including Karl Barth, Ibn Taymiyya, Thomas Aquinas, and Mohammad al-Jabri. He offers an account of public law as a provisional and indirect witness to the divine rule of justice. He also demonstrates how this theology of public law deeply resonates with the Christian tradition and is also open to learning from and dialoguing with Islamic and secular conceptions of law, sovereignty, and justice.

The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Philosophy

The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Philosophy
Author: John Marenbon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 768
Release: 2015
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190246979

This Handbook shows the links between medieval and contemporary philosophy. Topic-based essays on all areas of philosophy explore this relationship and introduce the main themes of medieval philosophy. They are preceded by the fullest chronological survey now available of the different traditions: Latin and Greek, Islamic and Jewish.

The Bible in Arabic

The Bible in Arabic
Author: Sidney H. Griffith
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2015-10-27
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0691168083

From the first centuries of Islam to well into the Middle Ages, Jews and Christians produced hundreds of manuscripts containing portions of the Bible in Arabic. Until recently, however, these translations remained largely neglected by Biblical scholars and historians. In telling the story of the Bible in Arabic, this book casts light on a crucial transition in the cultural and religious life of Jews and Christians in Arabic-speaking lands. In pre-Islamic times, Jewish and Christian scriptures circulated orally in the Arabic-speaking milieu. After the rise of Islam--and the Qur'an's appearance as a scripture in its own right--Jews and Christians translated the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament into Arabic for their own use and as a response to the Qur'an's retelling of Biblical narratives. From the ninth century onward, a steady stream of Jewish and Christian translations of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament crossed communal borders to influence the Islamic world. The Bible in Arabic offers a new frame of reference for the pivotal place of Arabic Bible translations in the religious and cultural interactions between Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

The Religious Polemics of the Muslims of Late Medieval Christian Iberia

The Religious Polemics of the Muslims of Late Medieval Christian Iberia
Author: Mònica Colominas Aparicio
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2018-04-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004363610

The Religious Polemics of the Muslims of Late Medieval Christian Iberia examines the corpus of polemical literature against the Christians and the Jews of the protected Muslims (Mudejars). Commonly portrayed as communities in cultural and religious decay, Mònica Colominas convincingly proves that the discourses against the Christians and the Jews in Mudejar treatises provided authoritative frameworks of Islamic normativity which helped to legitimize the residence of their communities in the Christian territories. Colominas argues that, while the primary aim of the polemics was to refute the views of their religious opponents, Mudejar treatises were also a tool used to advance Islamic knowledge and to strengthen the government and social cohesion of their communities.

The Islamic World

The Islamic World
Author: Andrew Rippin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 817
Release: 2013-10-23
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1136803505

The Islamic World is an outstanding guide to Islamic faith and culture in all its geographical and historical diversity. Written by a distinguished international team of scholars, it elucidates the history, philosophy and practice of one of the world's great religious traditions. Its grounding in contemporary scholarship makes it an ideal reference source for students and scholars alike. Edited by Andrew Rippin, a leading scholar of Islam, the volume covers the political, geographical, religious, intellectual, cultural and social worlds of Islam, and offers insight into all aspects of Muslim life including the Qur’an and law, philosophy, science and technology, art, literature, and film and much else. It explores the concept of an ‘Islamic’ world: what makes it distinctive and how uniform is that distinctiveness across Muslim geographical regions and through history?

The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque

The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque
Author: Sidney H. Griffith
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2012-01-09
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1400834023

Amid so much twenty-first-century talk of a "Christian-Muslim divide"--and the attendant controversy in some Western countries over policies toward minority Muslim communities--a historical fact has gone unnoticed: for more than four hundred years beginning in the mid-seventh century, some 50 percent of the world's Christians lived and worshipped under Muslim rule. Just who were the Christians in the Arabic-speaking milieu of Mohammed and the Qur'an? The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque is the first book-length discussion in English of the cultural and intellectual life of such Christians indigenous to the Islamic world. Sidney Griffith offers an engaging overview of their initial reactions to the religious challenges they faced, the development of a new mode of presenting Christian doctrine as liturgical texts in their own languages gave way to Arabic, the Christian role in the philosophical life of early Baghdad, and the maturing of distinctive Oriental Christian denominations in this context. Offering a fuller understanding of the rise of Islam in its early years from the perspective of contemporary non-Muslims, this book reminds us that there is much to learn from the works of people who seriously engaged Muslims in their own world so long ago. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.