Author: Nimrod Hurvitz
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520296729
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 381
Book Description
Conversion to Islam is a phenomenon of immense significance in human history. At the outset of Islamic rule in the seventh century, Muslims constituted a tiny minority in most areas under their control. But by the beginning of the modern period, they formed the majority in most territories from North Africa to Southeast Asia. Across such diverse lands, peoples, and time periods, conversion was a complex, varied phenomenon. Converts lived in a world of overlapping and competing religious, cultural, social, and familial affiliations, and the effects of turning to Islam played out in every aspect of life. Conversion therefore provides a critical lens for world history, magnifying the constantly evolving array of beliefs, practices, and outlooks that constitute Islam around the globe. This groundbreaking collection of texts, translated from sources in a dozen languages from the seventh to the eighteenth centuries, presents the historical process of conversion to Islam in all its variety and unruly detail, through the eyes of both Muslim and non-Muslim observers.
Conversion to Islam in the Premodern Age
Author: Nimrod Hurvitz
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520296729
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 381
Book Description
Conversion to Islam is a phenomenon of immense significance in human history. At the outset of Islamic rule in the seventh century, Muslims constituted a tiny minority in most areas under their control. But by the beginning of the modern period, they formed the majority in most territories from North Africa to Southeast Asia. Across such diverse lands, peoples, and time periods, conversion was a complex, varied phenomenon. Converts lived in a world of overlapping and competing religious, cultural, social, and familial affiliations, and the effects of turning to Islam played out in every aspect of life. Conversion therefore provides a critical lens for world history, magnifying the constantly evolving array of beliefs, practices, and outlooks that constitute Islam around the globe. This groundbreaking collection of texts, translated from sources in a dozen languages from the seventh to the eighteenth centuries, presents the historical process of conversion to Islam in all its variety and unruly detail, through the eyes of both Muslim and non-Muslim observers.
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520296729
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 381
Book Description
Conversion to Islam is a phenomenon of immense significance in human history. At the outset of Islamic rule in the seventh century, Muslims constituted a tiny minority in most areas under their control. But by the beginning of the modern period, they formed the majority in most territories from North Africa to Southeast Asia. Across such diverse lands, peoples, and time periods, conversion was a complex, varied phenomenon. Converts lived in a world of overlapping and competing religious, cultural, social, and familial affiliations, and the effects of turning to Islam played out in every aspect of life. Conversion therefore provides a critical lens for world history, magnifying the constantly evolving array of beliefs, practices, and outlooks that constitute Islam around the globe. This groundbreaking collection of texts, translated from sources in a dozen languages from the seventh to the eighteenth centuries, presents the historical process of conversion to Islam in all its variety and unruly detail, through the eyes of both Muslim and non-Muslim observers.
Conversion to Islam in the Premodern Age
Author: Nimrod Hurvitz
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520296737
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 381
Book Description
Conversion to Islam is a phenomenon of immense significance in human history. At the outset of Islamic rule in the seventh century, Muslims constituted a tiny minority in most areas under their control. But by the beginning of the modern period, they formed the majority in most territories from North Africa to Southeast Asia. Across such diverse lands, peoples, and time periods, conversion was a complex, varied phenomenon. Converts lived in a world of overlapping and competing religious, cultural, social, and familial affiliations, and the effects of turning to Islam played out in every aspect of life. Conversion therefore provides a critical lens for world history, magnifying the constantly evolving array of beliefs, practices, and outlooks that constitute Islam around the globe. This groundbreaking collection of texts, translated from sources in a dozen languages from the seventh to the eighteenth centuries, presents the historical process of conversion to Islam in all its variety and unruly detail, through the eyes of both Muslim and non-Muslim observers.
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520296737
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 381
Book Description
Conversion to Islam is a phenomenon of immense significance in human history. At the outset of Islamic rule in the seventh century, Muslims constituted a tiny minority in most areas under their control. But by the beginning of the modern period, they formed the majority in most territories from North Africa to Southeast Asia. Across such diverse lands, peoples, and time periods, conversion was a complex, varied phenomenon. Converts lived in a world of overlapping and competing religious, cultural, social, and familial affiliations, and the effects of turning to Islam played out in every aspect of life. Conversion therefore provides a critical lens for world history, magnifying the constantly evolving array of beliefs, practices, and outlooks that constitute Islam around the globe. This groundbreaking collection of texts, translated from sources in a dozen languages from the seventh to the eighteenth centuries, presents the historical process of conversion to Islam in all its variety and unruly detail, through the eyes of both Muslim and non-Muslim observers.
Conversion to Islam in the Premodern Age
Author: Nimrod Hurvitz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520969103
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 382
Book Description
Conversion to Islam is a phenomenon of immense significance in human history. At the outset of Islamic rule in the seventh century, Muslims constituted a tiny minority in most areas under their control. But by the beginning of the modern period, they formed the majority in most territories from North Africa to Southeast Asia. Across such diverse lands, peoples, and time periods, conversion was a complex, varied phenomenon. Converts lived in a world of overlapping and competing religious, cultural, social, and familial affiliations, and the effects of turning to Islam played out in every aspect of life. Conversion therefore provides a critical lens for world history, magnifying the constantly evolving array of beliefs, practices, and outlooks that constitute Islam around the globe. This groundbreaking collection of texts, translated from sources in a dozen languages from the seventh to the eighteenth centuries, presents the historical process of conversion to Islam in all its variety and unruly detail, through the eyes of both Muslim and non-Muslim observers.
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520969103
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 382
Book Description
Conversion to Islam is a phenomenon of immense significance in human history. At the outset of Islamic rule in the seventh century, Muslims constituted a tiny minority in most areas under their control. But by the beginning of the modern period, they formed the majority in most territories from North Africa to Southeast Asia. Across such diverse lands, peoples, and time periods, conversion was a complex, varied phenomenon. Converts lived in a world of overlapping and competing religious, cultural, social, and familial affiliations, and the effects of turning to Islam played out in every aspect of life. Conversion therefore provides a critical lens for world history, magnifying the constantly evolving array of beliefs, practices, and outlooks that constitute Islam around the globe. This groundbreaking collection of texts, translated from sources in a dozen languages from the seventh to the eighteenth centuries, presents the historical process of conversion to Islam in all its variety and unruly detail, through the eyes of both Muslim and non-Muslim observers.
Christian Martyrs Under Islam
Author: Christian C. Sahner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069120313X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 360
Book Description
A look at the developing conflicts in Christian-Muslim relations during late antiquity and the early Islamic era How did the medieval Middle East transform from a majority-Christian world to a majority-Muslim world, and what role did violence play in this process? Christian Martyrs under Islam explains how Christians across the early Islamic caliphate slowly converted to the faith of the Arab conquerors and how small groups of individuals rejected this faith through dramatic acts of resistance, including apostasy and blasphemy. Using previously untapped sources in a range of Middle Eastern languages, Christian Sahner introduces an unknown group of martyrs who were executed at the hands of Muslim officials between the seventh and ninth centuries CE. Found in places as diverse as Syria, Spain, Egypt, and Armenia, they include an alleged descendant of Muhammad who converted to Christianity, high-ranking Christian secretaries of the Muslim state who viciously insulted the Prophet, and the children of mixed marriages between Muslims and Christians. Sahner argues that Christians never experienced systematic persecution under the early caliphs, and indeed, they remained the largest portion of the population in the greater Middle East for centuries after the Arab conquest. Still, episodes of ferocious violence contributed to the spread of Islam within Christian societies, and memories of this bloodshed played a key role in shaping Christian identity in the new Islamic empire. Christian Martyrs under Islam examines how violence against Christians ended the age of porous religious boundaries and laid the foundations for more antagonistic Muslim-Christian relations in the centuries to come.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069120313X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 360
Book Description
A look at the developing conflicts in Christian-Muslim relations during late antiquity and the early Islamic era How did the medieval Middle East transform from a majority-Christian world to a majority-Muslim world, and what role did violence play in this process? Christian Martyrs under Islam explains how Christians across the early Islamic caliphate slowly converted to the faith of the Arab conquerors and how small groups of individuals rejected this faith through dramatic acts of resistance, including apostasy and blasphemy. Using previously untapped sources in a range of Middle Eastern languages, Christian Sahner introduces an unknown group of martyrs who were executed at the hands of Muslim officials between the seventh and ninth centuries CE. Found in places as diverse as Syria, Spain, Egypt, and Armenia, they include an alleged descendant of Muhammad who converted to Christianity, high-ranking Christian secretaries of the Muslim state who viciously insulted the Prophet, and the children of mixed marriages between Muslims and Christians. Sahner argues that Christians never experienced systematic persecution under the early caliphs, and indeed, they remained the largest portion of the population in the greater Middle East for centuries after the Arab conquest. Still, episodes of ferocious violence contributed to the spread of Islam within Christian societies, and memories of this bloodshed played a key role in shaping Christian identity in the new Islamic empire. Christian Martyrs under Islam examines how violence against Christians ended the age of porous religious boundaries and laid the foundations for more antagonistic Muslim-Christian relations in the centuries to come.
Pluralism in the Middle Ages
Author: Ragnhild Johnsrud Zorgati
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136622101
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252
Book Description
The challenges of cultural and religious diversity that face European and American societies today are not a new phenomenon. People in the Middle Ages lived in pluralistic societies, and they found highly interesting ways of dealing with religious and cultural diversity. While religious and political authorities commanded people to stick to their kind, some people explored the borderland between religious identities. In medieval Iberia, Christians and Muslims challenged the legal authorities’ prohibitions against crossing religious and cultural boundaries when they engaged in mixed marriages between Muslims and Christians or converted from one religion to the other. By examining the topics of conversion and mixed marriages in legal texts of Muslim and Christian origin, Pluralism in the Middle Ages explores the construction of boundaries as well as the reasons explaining such constructions. It demonstrates that the religious and social boundaries were not static, nor were they similarly defined by Islamic and Christian medieval cultures. Moreover, the book argues that Muslims and Christians in medieval Iberia did not constitute clearly separated groups, since various categories of people haunted the boundaries between them: false converts employing taqiya strategy (taking on an outward Christian identity while practicing Islam in secret), those engaged in mixed marriages or interreligious sexual relations (and their children), and converts, whose conversion may be perceived as sincere or insincere, total or partial.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136622101
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252
Book Description
The challenges of cultural and religious diversity that face European and American societies today are not a new phenomenon. People in the Middle Ages lived in pluralistic societies, and they found highly interesting ways of dealing with religious and cultural diversity. While religious and political authorities commanded people to stick to their kind, some people explored the borderland between religious identities. In medieval Iberia, Christians and Muslims challenged the legal authorities’ prohibitions against crossing religious and cultural boundaries when they engaged in mixed marriages between Muslims and Christians or converted from one religion to the other. By examining the topics of conversion and mixed marriages in legal texts of Muslim and Christian origin, Pluralism in the Middle Ages explores the construction of boundaries as well as the reasons explaining such constructions. It demonstrates that the religious and social boundaries were not static, nor were they similarly defined by Islamic and Christian medieval cultures. Moreover, the book argues that Muslims and Christians in medieval Iberia did not constitute clearly separated groups, since various categories of people haunted the boundaries between them: false converts employing taqiya strategy (taking on an outward Christian identity while practicing Islam in secret), those engaged in mixed marriages or interreligious sexual relations (and their children), and converts, whose conversion may be perceived as sincere or insincere, total or partial.
The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion
Author: Lewis R. Rambo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199713545
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 829
Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion offers a comprehensive exploration of the dynamics of religious conversion, which for centuries has profoundly shaped societies, cultures, and individuals throughout the world. Scholars from a wide array of religions and disciplines interpret both the varieties of conversion experiences and the processes that inform this personal and communal phenomenon. This volume examines the experiences of individuals and communities who change religions, those who experience an intensification of their religion of origin, and those who encounter new religions through colonial intrusion, missionary work, and charismatic and revitalization movements. The thirty-two innovative essays provide overviews of the history of particular religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Sikhism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, indigenous religions, and new religious movements. The essays also offer a wide range of disciplinary perspectives-psychological, sociological, anthropological, legal, political, feminist, and geographical-on methods and theories deployed in understanding conversion, and insight into various forms of deconversion.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199713545
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 829
Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion offers a comprehensive exploration of the dynamics of religious conversion, which for centuries has profoundly shaped societies, cultures, and individuals throughout the world. Scholars from a wide array of religions and disciplines interpret both the varieties of conversion experiences and the processes that inform this personal and communal phenomenon. This volume examines the experiences of individuals and communities who change religions, those who experience an intensification of their religion of origin, and those who encounter new religions through colonial intrusion, missionary work, and charismatic and revitalization movements. The thirty-two innovative essays provide overviews of the history of particular religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Sikhism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, indigenous religions, and new religious movements. The essays also offer a wide range of disciplinary perspectives-psychological, sociological, anthropological, legal, political, feminist, and geographical-on methods and theories deployed in understanding conversion, and insight into various forms of deconversion.
Muslim and Christian Contact in the Middle Ages
Author: Jarbel Rodriguez
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442604247
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 649
Book Description
To study the interactions between Muslims and Christians in the medieval period is to observe a history of conflict and co-existence encompassing warfare, piracy, and raiding as well as commerce, intellectual exchanges, and personal relationships that transcended religious differences. With particular focus on the Mediterranean world, this collection of more than 80 readings includes sources from Byzantine, Jewish, Muslim, and Latin Christian authors that explore the conflicts and contacts between Muslims and Christians from the seventh to the fifteenth century. Jarbel Rodriguez has selected geographically diverse readings and multiple sources on the same event or topic so that readers gain a better understanding of the relationship that existed between Muslims and Christians in the Middle Ages.
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442604247
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 649
Book Description
To study the interactions between Muslims and Christians in the medieval period is to observe a history of conflict and co-existence encompassing warfare, piracy, and raiding as well as commerce, intellectual exchanges, and personal relationships that transcended religious differences. With particular focus on the Mediterranean world, this collection of more than 80 readings includes sources from Byzantine, Jewish, Muslim, and Latin Christian authors that explore the conflicts and contacts between Muslims and Christians from the seventh to the fifteenth century. Jarbel Rodriguez has selected geographically diverse readings and multiple sources on the same event or topic so that readers gain a better understanding of the relationship that existed between Muslims and Christians in the Middle Ages.
Before Religion
Author: Brent Nongbri
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300154178
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328
Book Description
Examining a wide array of ancient writings, Brent Nongbri dispels the commonly held idea that there is such a thing as ancient religion. Nongbri shows how misleading it is to speak as though religion was a concept native to pre-modern cultures.
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300154178
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328
Book Description
Examining a wide array of ancient writings, Brent Nongbri dispels the commonly held idea that there is such a thing as ancient religion. Nongbri shows how misleading it is to speak as though religion was a concept native to pre-modern cultures.
Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds
Author: Hyunhee Park
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107018684
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Book Description
This book documents the relationship and wisdom of Asian cartographers in the Islamic and Chinese worlds before the Europeans arrived.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107018684
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Book Description
This book documents the relationship and wisdom of Asian cartographers in the Islamic and Chinese worlds before the Europeans arrived.
Religious Difference in a Secular Age
Author: Saba Mahmood
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691153280
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254
Book Description
How secular governance in the Middle East is making life worse—not better—for religious minorities The plight of religious minorities in the Middle East is often attributed to the failure of secularism to take root in the region. Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges this assessment by examining four cornerstones of secularism—political and civil equality, minority rights, religious freedom, and the legal separation of private and public domains. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork in Egypt with Coptic Orthodox Christians and Bahais—religious minorities in a predominantly Muslim country—Saba Mahmood shows how modern secular governance has exacerbated religious tensions and inequalities rather than reduced them. Tracing the historical career of secular legal concepts in the colonial and postcolonial Middle East, she explores how contradictions at the very heart of political secularism have aggravated and amplified existing forms of Islamic hierarchy, bringing minority relations in Egypt to a new historical impasse. Through a close examination of Egyptian court cases and constitutional debates about minority rights, conflicts around family law, and controversies over freedom of expression, Mahmood invites us to reflect on the entwined histories of secularism in the Middle East and Europe. A provocative work of scholarship, Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges us to rethink the promise and limits of the secular ideal of religious equality.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691153280
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254
Book Description
How secular governance in the Middle East is making life worse—not better—for religious minorities The plight of religious minorities in the Middle East is often attributed to the failure of secularism to take root in the region. Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges this assessment by examining four cornerstones of secularism—political and civil equality, minority rights, religious freedom, and the legal separation of private and public domains. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork in Egypt with Coptic Orthodox Christians and Bahais—religious minorities in a predominantly Muslim country—Saba Mahmood shows how modern secular governance has exacerbated religious tensions and inequalities rather than reduced them. Tracing the historical career of secular legal concepts in the colonial and postcolonial Middle East, she explores how contradictions at the very heart of political secularism have aggravated and amplified existing forms of Islamic hierarchy, bringing minority relations in Egypt to a new historical impasse. Through a close examination of Egyptian court cases and constitutional debates about minority rights, conflicts around family law, and controversies over freedom of expression, Mahmood invites us to reflect on the entwined histories of secularism in the Middle East and Europe. A provocative work of scholarship, Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges us to rethink the promise and limits of the secular ideal of religious equality.