Syrian Christians Under Islam

Syrian Christians Under Islam PDF Author: David Richard Thomas
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004120556
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
These papers from the Third Woodbrooke-Mingana Symposium on "Arab Christianity in Greater Syria in the pre-Ottoman Period" portray aspects of the distinctive character developed by Arab Christianity as it endeavoured to preserve its identity while coming under influences from Islam.

Syrian Christians Under Islam

Syrian Christians Under Islam PDF Author: David Richard Thomas
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004120556
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book Here

Book Description
These papers from the Third Woodbrooke-Mingana Symposium on "Arab Christianity in Greater Syria in the pre-Ottoman Period" portray aspects of the distinctive character developed by Arab Christianity as it endeavoured to preserve its identity while coming under influences from Islam.

Christian Martyrs Under Islam

Christian Martyrs Under Islam PDF Author: Christian C. Sahner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069120313X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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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.

The First Thousand Years

The First Thousand Years PDF Author: Robert Louis Wilken
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300118848
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Describes the first 1,000 years of Christian history, from the early practices and beliefs through the conversion of Constantine as well as documenting its growth to communities in Ethiopia, Armenia, Central Asia, India and China.

Cross Veneration in the Medieval Islamic World

Cross Veneration in the Medieval Islamic World PDF Author: Charles Tieszen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786731584
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
One of the most common religious practices among medieval Eastern Christian communities was their devotion to venerating crosses and crucifixes. Yet many of these communities existed in predominantly Islamic contexts, where the practice was subject to much criticism and often resulted in accusations of idolatry. How did Christians respond to these allegations? Why did they advocate the preservation of a practice that was often met with confusion or even contempt? To shed light onto these questions, Charles Tieszen looks at every known apologetic or polemical text written between the eighth and fourteenth centuries to include a relevant discussion. With sources taken from across the Mediterranean basin, Egypt, Syria and Palestine, the result is the first in-depth look at a key theological debate which lay at the heart of these communities' religious identities. By considering the perspectives of both Muslim and Christian authors, Cross Veneration in the Medieval Islamic World also raises important questions concerning cross-cultural debate and exchange, and the development of Christianity and Islam in the medieval period. This is an important book that will shine much needed light onto Christian-Muslim relations, the nature of inter-faith debates and the wider issues facing the communities living across the Middle East during the medieval period.

Islam's Reformation of Christianity

Islam's Reformation of Christianity PDF Author: Zulfiqar Ali Shah
Publisher: Claritas Books
ISBN: 1800119933
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Jesus was a product of Semitic monotheism, moral law, piety and humility. His kingdom was the other worldly. His ethical monotheism was transformed by the Roman Empire and mythology. The supernatural, Trinitarian and miraculous Roman Christianity transitioned into unintelligible dogmas, the abolition of law, moral laxity, this worldly kingdom and divine right absolutism. Natural theology, law, cosmology and politics were all compromised. Religious freedom was barred, and persecutions were normalised. Latin Christendom was a persecutory society. Islam was an intellectual cure to Christian paradoxes and an egalitarian pluralistic alternate to Christian inquisitions and religiopolitical absolutism. It spread in the Eastern Christian territories like a bush fire. This reformation of Christian excesses in religiopolitical theology reformed its paradoxical incarnational theology, antinomianism, grace-based salvation scheme, divine right Church and monarchy, interventionist cosmology and religious persecutions. This insightful and groundbreaking new book provides an in-depth study of the Is- lamic, Southern Reformation of Christianity; a reformation seldom acknowledged or studied by the historians. It explores how the Islamic reformative scheme emphasised ethical, transcendental monotheism, natural theology and rational discourse. It limited monarchy and placed significance on an inclusive, pluralistic and free society. The Seventh Century Islamic natural, rational, moral, republican and egalitarian reformation was the Southern Reformation of Christianity, long before the partial Northern Reformation of Luther and Calvin.

The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque

The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque PDF Author: Sidney H. Griffith
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400834023
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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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.

Arab Christians and the Qurʾan from the Origins of Islam to the Medieval Period

Arab Christians and the Qurʾan from the Origins of Islam to the Medieval Period PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004360743
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Arab Christians and the Qurʾan from the Origins of Islam to the Medieval Period is a collection of essays on the use and interpretation of the Qur’an by Christians writing in Arabic in the period of Islamic rule in the Middle East up to the end of the thirteenth century. These essays originated in the seventh Woodbrooke-Mingana Symposium on Arab Christianity held in Birmingham, UK, in 2013, and are edited by Mark Beaumont. Contributors are: David Bertaina, Sidney Griffith, Sandra Keating, Michael Kuhn, Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala, Gordon Nickel, Emilio Platti and David Thomas

Christian Thought in the Medieval Islamicate World

Christian Thought in the Medieval Islamicate World PDF Author: Salam Rassi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192846760
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
"John Wesley and George Whitefield are remembered as founders of Methodism, one of the most influential movements in the history of modern Christianity. Characterized by open-air and itinerant preaching, eighteenth-century Methodism was a divisive phenomenon, which attracted a torrent of printed opposition, especially from Anglican clergymen. Yet, most of these opponents have been virtually forgotten. The Struggle for True Religion is the first large-scale examination of the theological ideas of early anti-Methodist authors. By illuminating a very different perspective on Methodism, Simon Lewis provides a fundamental reappraisal of the eighteenth-century Church of England and its doctrinal priorities. For anti-Methodist authors, attacking Wesley and Whitefield was part of a wider defence of 'true religion', which demonstrates the theological vitality of the much-derided Georgian Church. This book, therefore, places Methodism firmly in its contemporary theological context, as part of the Church of England's continuing struggle to define itself theologically"--

Christians and Muslims in the Middle Ages

Christians and Muslims in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Michael Frassetto
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498577571
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
The conflict and contact between Muslims and Christians in the Middle Ages is among the most important but least appreciated developments of the period from the seventh to the fourteenth century. Michael Frassetto argues that the relationship between these two faiths during the Middle Ages was essential to the cultural and religious developments of Christianity and Islam—even as Christians and Muslims often found themselves engaged in violent conflict. Frassetto traces the history of those conflicts and argues that these holy wars helped create the identity that defined the essential characteristics of Christians and Muslims. The polemic works that often accompanied these holy wars was important, Frassetto contends, because by defining the essential evil of the enemy, Christian authors were also defining their own beliefs and practices. Holy war was not the only defining element of the relationship between Christians and Muslims during the Middle Ages, and Frassetto explains that everyday contacts between Christian and Muslim leaders and scholars generated more peaceful relations and shaped the literary, intellectual, and religious culture that defined medieval and even modern Christianity and Islam.

The Qur'an in Christian-Muslim Dialogue

The Qur'an in Christian-Muslim Dialogue PDF Author: Corrie Block
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135014043
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
Offering an analysis of Christian-Muslim dialogue across four centuries, this book highlights those voices of ecumenical tone which have more often used the Qur’an for drawing the two faiths together rather than pushing them apart, and amplifies the voice of the Qur’an itself. Finding that there is tremendous ecumenical ground between Christianity and Islam in the voices of their own scholars, this book ranges from a period of declining ecumenism during the first three centuries of Islam, to a period of resurging ecumenism during the most recent century until now. Among the ecumenical voices in the Christian-Muslim dialogue, this book points out that the Qur’an itself is possibly the strongest of those voices. These findings are cause for, and evidence of, hope for the Christian–Muslim relationship: that although agreement may never be reached, dialogue has led at times to very real mutual understanding and appreciation of the religious other. Providing a tool for those pursuing understanding and mutual appreciation between the Islamic and Christian faiths, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of Islam, the Qur’an and the history of Christian-Muslim relations.