Author: Bradley Bowman
Publisher: EUP
ISBN: 9781474479691
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
During the rise of Islam, Muslim fascination with Christian monastic life was articulated through a fluid, piety-centred movement. Bradley Bowman explores this confessional synthesis between like-minded religious groups in the medieval Near East. He argues that this potential ecumenism would have been based upon the sharing of core tenets concerning piety and righteous behaviour. Such fundamental attributes, long associated with monasticism in the East, likely served as a mutually inclusive common ground for Muslim and Christian communities of the period. This manifested itself in Muslim appreciation, interest and - at times - participation in Christian monastic life.
Author: Thomas Sizgorich
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812207440
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 407
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Book Description
In Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity, Thomas Sizgorich seeks to understand why and how violent expressions of religious devotion became central to the self-understandings of both Christian and Muslim communities between the fourth and ninth centuries. Sizgorich argues that the cultivation of violent martyrdom as a path to holiness was in no way particular to Islam; rather, it emerged from a matrix put into place by the Christians of late antiquity. Paying close attention to the role of memory and narrative in the formation of individual and communal selves, Sizgorich identifies a common pool of late ancient narrative forms upon which both Christian and Muslim communities drew. In the process of recollecting the past, Sizgorich explains, Christian and Muslim communities alike elaborated iterations of Christianity or Islam that demanded of each believer a willingness to endure or inflict violence on God's behalf and thereby created militant local pieties that claimed to represent the one "real" Christianity or the only "pure" form of Islam. These militant communities used a shared system of signs, symbols, and stories, stories in which the faithful manifested their purity in conflict with the imperial powers of the world.
Author: Reyhan Durmaz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520386477
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 277
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Book Description
Stories between Christianity and Islam offers an original and nuanced understanding of Christian–Muslim relations that shifts focus from discussions of superiority, conflict, and appropriation to the living world of connectivity and creativity. Here, the late antique and medieval Near East is viewed as a world of stories shared by Christians and Muslims. Public storytelling was a key feature for these late antique Christian and early Islamic communities, where stories of saints were used to interpret the past, comment on the present, and envision the future. In this book, Reyhan Durmaz uses these stories to demonstrate and analyze the mutually constitutive relationship between these two religions in the Middle Ages. With an in-depth study of storytelling in Late Antiquity and the mechanisms of hagiographic transmission between Christianity and Islam in the Middle Ages, Durmaz develops a nuanced understanding of saints’ stories as a tool for building identity, memory, and authority across confessional boundaries.
Author: Louise Blanke
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009278975
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 413
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Book Description
This book situates discussions of Christian monasticism in Egypt and Palestine within the socio-economic world of the long Late Antiquity, from the golden age of monasticism into and well beyond the Arab conquest (fifth to tenth century). Its thirteen chapters present new research into the rich corpus of textual sources and archaeological remains and move beyond traditional studies that have treated monastic communities as religious entities in physical seclusion from society. The volume brings together scholars working across traditional boundaries of subject and geography and explores a diverse range of topics from the production of food and wine to networks of scribes, patronage, and monastic visitation. As such, it paints a vivid picture of busy monastic lives dependent on and led in tandem with the non-monastic world.
Author: Andrew Jotischky
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300280432
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 481
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Book Description
A major new history of medieval monasticism, from the fourth to the sixteenth century From the late Roman Empire onwards, monasteries and convents were a common sight throughout Europe. But who were monasteries for? What kind of people founded and maintained them? And how did monasticism change over the thousand years or so of the Middle Ages? Andrew Jotischky traces the history of monastic life from its origins in the fourth century to the sixteenth. He shows how religious houses sheltered the poor and elderly, cared for the sick, and educated the young. They were centres of intellectual life that owned property and exercised power but also gave rise to new developments in theology, music, and art. This book brings together the Orthodox and western stories, as well as the experiences of women, to show the full picture of medieval monasticism for the first time. It is a fascinating, wide-ranging account that broadens our understanding of life in holy orders as never before.
Author: Ilkka Lindstedt
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004687130
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390
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Book Description
This title is published in Open Access with the support of the University of Helsinki Library.The book surveys and analyzes changes in religious groups and identities in late antique Arabia, ca. 300-700 CE. It engages with contemporary and material evidence: for example, inscriptions, archaeological remains, Arabic poetry, the Qurʾān, and the so-called Constitution of Medina. Also, it suggests ways to deal with the later Arabic historiographical and other literary texts. The issue of social identities and their processes are central to the study. For instance, how did Arabian ethnic and religious identities intersect on the eve of Islam? The book suggests that the changes in social groups were more piecemeal than previously thought.
Author: Catalin-Stefan Popa
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643914261
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
The volume is the result of a Lecture Series on The Levant, Cradle of Abrahamic Religions, which engaged scholars on topics related to the cultural and religious diversity of the historical Levant. Like a jigsaw, the studies contained within showcase interlock fragments of the historical encounters between faiths, religions and societies in a rich Levantine and Oriental space, in an attempt to render them more accessible to readers today by focusing both on broader religious phenomena as well as on the practical, liturgical and social interaction between traditions and mentalities, features representative of both faith and society at large.
Author: Jack Tannous
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691179093
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 664
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Book Description
A bold new religious history of the late antique and medieval Middle East that places ordinary Christians at the center of the story In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. Jack Tannous argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East’s history. What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, Tannous provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East. This provocative book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.
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.
Author: Olivia Remie Constable
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812249488
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
To Live Like a Moor traces the many shifts in Christian perceptions of Islam-associated ways of life which took place across the centuries between early Reconquista efforts of the eleventh century and the final expulsions of Spain's converted yet poorly assimilated Morisco population in the seventeenth.
