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ALL Abstracts [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] |
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Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies |
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Copyright © 2000 Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies. All rights reserved.
Hastings
Donnan This
paper sets out to uncover some of the less prominent factors that generate
antipathy toward marriage between Catholic and Protestant in Northern
Ireland. Attitudes and responses to these mixed religion unions are
described in the context of Northern Ireland's wider pattern of sectarian
social relations. The paper suggests that particular cultural ideas about
the relative influence of men and women underlie the more obvious conflict
in Northern Ireland over religious and political identities which
intermarriage represents. The paper concludes with some modest reflections
on the 'slippage' between apparently private acts of individual
'tolerance' and wider patterns of public 'prejudice.' Sharifah
Zaleha Syed Hassan
This
paper examines how heightened religious consciousness occasioned by
Islamic revivalism affects the structure of relationships between groups
of different religious and ethnic backgrounds in a multi-ethnic urban
community in Malaysia. Since its exposure to resurgent Islam in the 1970s,
there gradually evolved in the community of Pekan Raja two camps holding
divergent views with regard to Islam's role in modern society: the
'moderate' and 'extremist' Muslims. While the former revitalized Islamic
beliefs and rituals through accommodation to consumerism, the modern urban
lifestyle and existing hierarchical social relationships, the latter
totally rejected traditional cultural elements in favour of an egalitarian
and theocratic social system. As the two groups consolidated their
positions, religion, which previously played a less crucial role relative
to ethnicity, became the major factor guiding individual and collective
behaviour in Pekan Raja. The Malay-Muslim residents, for example, ceased
to incorporate their non-Malay neighbours into the network of mutual help
and support as the latter were seen as spiritually and morally inferior
when compared to Muslims. A cleavage also appeared among the Malays as
differences in religious orientation and attitudes toward the state and
indigenous heritage were used as the rationale for rejecting or supporting
cooperation. The paper argues that although the experiences in Pekan Raja
may not be generalized to show typical trends in Malaysia, the
possibilities are always there for religion to help revitalize ethnicity. Samir
Seikaly In
the half century or so preceding World War I, Palestine, represented by a
number of flourishing urban centres, witnessed a real cultural renaissance
which, in terms of social configuration and content, largely reproduced
what was going on in other major cities in the region such as Beirut and
Cairo. This is a study of some aspects of Palestine's cultural revival,
analyzing in depth the role played therein by a number of Palestinian
Christian intellectuals. Douglas
H. Johnson
The
Sudan's current religious confrontation began in the nineteenth century,
first with the establishment of Egyptian colonial rule, which made a
political distinction between Egypt's Sudanese Muslim and non-Muslim
subjects and then with the introduction of the organizing principles of
the jihadic state under the Mahdiyya. Post-World War II Sudanese
nationalism has attempted to build a national identity around the spread
of Islam and Arabism, and this has made the Sudan's large pagan population
the particular focus of religious conversion and oppression. This paper
describes the different ways in which some Sudanese pagan societies have
confronted, accommodated, or evaded Islam in the twentieth century. It
also briefly discusses the different relations which exist between the
Sudanese Christian churches and paganism, since the use of vernacular
languages in the propagation of Christianity means that pagans and
Christians have entered into a dialogue, based on a shared language of
spirituality. George
Saliba
In
a rarely-cited treatise still preserved in the work of the medieval
biographer, Ibn Abi Usaybi`a, the famous ninth-century translator of Greek
sciences into Arabic, Hunayn ibn Ishaq, reports on contemporary working
conditions at the Abbasid court. In particular, he paints a vivid picture
of the competition that raged amongst the members of the professional
classes—in this case, the class of court physicians—and the kinds of
intrigues in which they were willing to engage in order to promote
themselves at court or merely secure a position there. The present article
uses the account of this eyewitness and participant in such activities in
order to illustrate more fully the conditions under which the Greek
sciences were translated into Arabic and to suggest the possibility that
the competition detailed here served as a motivation for such translation
activities. The article also includes a full translation of Hunayn's
account from the original Arabic. Ali
S. Asani
This
paper examines the redefinition and sharpening of boundaries between
Muslims and non-Muslims in South Asia over the centuries as a result of
changing conceptions of religious identity. It describes the development
of two conflicting attitudes among Muslims concerning the issue of being
Muslim in a predominantly non-Muslim majority society, namely, a
separatistic/legalistic one and an assimilationist/mystical one. The paper
contends that much of the history of South Asian Muslim communities and
their interactions with non-Muslims in the region may be understood within
the framework of a dynamic interaction and tension between these two
antagonistic attitudes. In addition, the paper discusses the impact of
British colonial rule and the growth of communal nationalisms in fostering
ideologies of difference between Muslim and non-Muslim in South Asia. It
also considers briefly the role of variously-defined policies of
Islamization and Sanskritization in culturally distancing Muslim from
non-Muslim as common cultural elements, such as language, dress and music,
are increasingly perceived as elements of religiously-based communalisms. L.
Michael Spath
The
Florentine Dominican, Riccoldo da Monte Croce, was a thirteenth-century
missionary and apologist to Islam who travelled throughout the Middle East
during a time of ferment in the Latin Church. While his initial
impressions and observations of Muslim spirituality and devotion were
largely positive, they altered radically when he observed, in Baghdad, a
parade of booty resulting from the fall of Acre to the Mamluk Turks in
1291. Thrown into a theological and spiritual crisis, he searched for a
theodicy by which this seeming triumph of Islam over Christianity might be
made comprehensible. Upon his return to Florence, he wrote his great work,
the Contra legem Sarracenorum (ClS), which was not intended to be
constructive but, as he put it, "to expose what is deficient in the
teachings of the Saracens" for the benefit of future missionaries
from his and other Christian orders. Thus, while Riccoldo's pre-1291
writings are marked by an open and respectful attitude toward Islam, the
ClS represents a systematic and vitriolic attack against it. In the ClS,
he takes up the questions of God's essence and Muhammad's prophethood and
compares Christ with Muhammad and the gospels with the Qur’an. In the
centuries to follow, both Nicholas of Cusa and Martin Luther relied
heavily on Riccoldo's influential work. Elizabeth
Koepping This
paper examines conversion from animism to Christianity or Islam in Borneo
and from Lutheranism to other denominations in South Australia in an
attempt to discern the implications for identity among Kadazan and among
Australians of German origin. Taking an historical as well as a
micro-anthropological perspective allows us to examine the effect of
external hegemony on local religious discourse and the negotiation of
religious conversion by individuals—attitudes which are affected by
external processes. Belief often has tenuous links to the assumed
'universal' doctrines of a faith and it is misleading to expect them to be
stronger. Some believers may indeed depend on 'orthodox' content and
boundaries, while others find doctrinal details interfere with religion as
social identity. Conversion for the latter may be more a matter of
changing friends and food than of changing ideology. Conversion discourses
couched in religious terms may thus be a way of talking about quite
different issues, which may be political, economic, or personal in nature.
Tension arises from the linkages between the individual, the local group
and the state with regard to religious identity. A comparative approach to
this process requires an examination of the parameters of the society and
state within which the person acts, as well as the actual parameters of
the particular belief.
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