Early Modern Dialogue with Islam


Book Description

This book makes available in translation a riveting sixteenth-century chronicle of European and North African cultural contacts that is virtually unknown to English-speaking readers. The Topography was written by a Portuguese cleric, Doctor Antonio de Sosa, who was captured by Algerian corsairs in 1577 and held as a Barbary slave for over four years while awaiting ransom. Sosa''s work is a fascinating description of a city at the crossroads of civilizations, with a sophisticated multilingual population of Turks, Arabs, Moriscos, Berbers, Jews, Christian captives, and converts to Islam from across the world.




Contested Conversions to Islam


Book Description

This book explores the role of conversion to Islam in the emergence of the Ottoman Empire, its imperial ideology and Sunni identity, and its relationship with its Muslim and non-Muslim subjects, in the context of the early modern Mediterranean.




Jews, Christians and Muslims in Medieval and Early Modern Times


Book Description

This volume brings together articles on the cultural, religious, social and commercial interactions among Jews, Christians and Muslims in the medieval and early modern periods. Written by leading scholars in Jewish studies, Islamic studies, medieval history and social and economic history, the contributions to this volume reflect the profound influence on these fields of the volume’s honoree, Professor Mark R. Cohen.




Christianity and Violence in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period


Book Description

The volume explores the relationship between religion and violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Early modern period, involving European and Japanese scholars. It investigates the ideological foundations of the relationship between violence and religion and their development in a varied corpus of sources (political and theological treatises, correspondence of missionaries, pamphlets, and images).




Time in Early Modern Islam


Book Description

The prophet Muhammad and the early Islamic community radically redefined the concept of time that they had inherited from earlier religions' beliefs and practices. This new temporal system, based on a lunar calendar and era, was complex and required sophistication and accuracy. From the ninth to the sixteenth centuries, it was the Muslim astronomers of the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires who were responsible for the major advances in mathematics, astronomy and astrology. This fascinating study compares the Islamic concept of time, and its historical and cultural significance, across these three great empires. Each empire, while mindful of earlier models, created a new temporal system, fashioning a new solar calendar and era and a new round of rituals and ceremonies from the cultural resources at hand. This book contributes to our understanding of the Muslim temporal system and our appreciation of the influence of Islamic science on the Western world.




The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque


Book Description

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.




Jesus in Muslim-Christian Conversation


Book Description

Jesus is a revered messenger of God for Muslims and Lord and Savior for Christians. How can Muslims and Christians relate to each other when this figure from the past attracts them yet drives them apart? Jesus is the very center of the Christian faith, but for Muslims he is a faithful witness to God, who is central to Islam. In the twenty-first century, is it possible for Muslims and Christians to relate to each other around him? This book is an attempt to bring together two representative voices from Muslim and Christian communities to talk about Jesus. Ibrahim is a Sunni Sufi Muslim who has studied Christianity and has been active as an academic in the Western world. Paul is an Evangelical Protestant who has lived in the Muslim world and has been engaged in teaching religious studies in the West. The conversation begins with the conception of Jesus and ends with his return from heaven and deals with his earthly work in between. His miraculous activity, his teaching, and the titles he has been given are considered in detail, and differences over the ending of Jesus' life are debated. ""Jesus in Muslim-Christian Conversation builds upon the classic genres of Christian Arabic theology by constructing a theoretical dialogue between a Muslim and a Christian. The result is an exchange that is as lucid and engaging as it is informative and carefully researched. Mark Beaumont is the perfect guide to help readers navigate this discussion of theological ideas, drawing his readers towards greater understanding around the person and work of Jesus in Christianity and Islam."" --Charles Tieszen, SIS Adjunct Professor of Islamic Studies, Fuller Theological Seminary Mark Beaumont is Research Associate at London School of Theology, UK. He has published books and articles on Christian-Muslim relations, especially on theological concerns.




How the Bible Led Me to Islam


Book Description

In the summer of 1996, Yusha Evans went on a passage through the Bible and its four Gospel. He scrutinized more than five different religions in search of God and His message. In 1998, he reverted to Islam. He yearned for the truth in life which is to “Worship God alone as one, obey Him and His Messenger to go to Heaven,” of which he found through Islam.




Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage


Book Description

This book explores the threat of Christian conversion to Islam in twelve early modern English plays. In works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Massinger, and others, conversion from Christianity to Islam is represented as both tragic and erotic, as a fate worse than death and as a sexual seduction. Degenhardt examines the stage's treatment of this intercourse of faiths to reveal connections between sexuality, race, and confessional identity in early modern English drama and culture. In addition, she shows how England's encounter with Islam reanimated post-Reformation debates about the embodiment of Christian faith. As Degenhardt compellingly demonstrates, the erotics of conversion added fuel to the fires of controversies over Pauline universalism, Christian martyrdom, the efficacy of relics and rituals, and even the Knights of Malta.




Islamic Thought Through Protestant Eyes


Book Description

Early modern Protestant scholars closely engaged with Islamic thought in more ways than is usually recognized. Among Protestants, Lutheran scholars distinguished themselves as the most invested in the study of Islam and Muslim culture. Mehmet Karabela brings the neglected voices of post-Reformation theologians, primarily German Lutherans, into focus and reveals their rigorous engagement with Islamic thought. Inspired by a global history approach to religious thought, Islamic Thought Through Protestant Eyes offers new sources to broaden the conventional interpretation of the Reformation beyond a solely European Christian phenomenon. Based on previously unstudied dissertations, disputations, and academic works written in Latin in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Karabela analyzes three themes: Islam as theology and religion; Islamic philosophy and liberal arts; and Muslim sects (Sunni and Shi‘a). This book provides analyses and translations of the Latin texts as well as brief biographies of the authors. These texts offer insight into the Protestant perception of Islamic thought for scholars of religious studies and Islamic studies as well as for general readers. Examining the influence of Islamic thought on the construction of the Protestant identity after the Reformation helps us to understand the role of Islam in the evolution of Christianity.