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Biblical & Qurʼānic Traditions in the Middle East

Author: Sidney Griffith, editor

Publisher: Abelian Academic

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9780692609750

As the threat to the existence and continuation of the diversity of peoples and cultures in the Middle East steadily increases, despair is not the answer. Instead, the contributors to and editors of this volume respond positively with their work to the ever more important and urgent task of intensifying efforts in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere to study with rigor, dedication, and intellectual acumen the profound and foundational heritage of Middle Eastern origins in order to render it fruitful, productive, and enriching for the development of modern life and thought in all its dimensions. With discussions of Satan's role in Adam's Fall in Islamic and Syriac Christian traditions, stories about Aaron's death, Jewish and Christian stories concerning the matriarch Sarah or interpretations in poetry and prose of the role of the Psalms, with reflections on the spiritual memories of paradise in the Odes of Solomon, or Manichaean magic, only to mention a few of the topics, this book will take your imagination and insights into new depths and to new heights. Scholars from the Middle East, South Africa, North America, and Europe--Tammie Wanta, Herrie van Rooy, Jason Scully, Ben Rosenfeld, Ilaria Ramelli, Robert Phenix, Rebekka Nieten, Giulio Maspero, Aryeh Levene, Cornelia Horn, Angela Harkins, Sidney Griffith, Craig Blaising, and Gaby Abousamra--contribute new evidence and foundational reflections to understanding the diverse relationships between Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. The seeds for this volume's articles were laid at the gatherings of scholars of Syriac Studies at the SBL conferences in New Orleans, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Chicago between 2009 and 2012 and in the context of subsequent international, collaborative projects. As Sacred Scriptures for the believers, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur'an guide and inspire billions of faithful women and men across the globe. One of the exceptionally fruitful contexts in which the reception, interpretation, transmission of, and engagement with these holy texts flourished was in the Syriac- and Arabic-speaking milieux. The articles in this volume illuminate once more the critical contribution of Syriac Studies more specifically, and Christian Oriental Studies more generally, to understanding important aspects of reading and hearing Jewish, Christian, and Islamic sacred texts in historical contexts. They open the reader's imagination to the contribution of the Middle East for the cross-fertilization of these sacred texts and their interpretation and reception. This book is the second volume of Abelian Academic's new series: Eastern Mediterranean Texts and Contexts (EMTC). This series takes its readers on journeys through Eastern Mediterranean time and space. Its cutting-edge research illuminates foundational aspects of this formative region of the modern world. Geoffrey Greatrex, Sidney H. Griffith, Cornelia Horn, Guita G. Hourani, Basil Lourie, Robert R. Phenix, Hagith Sivan, and Cynthia Villagomez serve on the series' editorial board. Upcoming volumes, to be published in 2016 and 2017, will include chapters by Predrag Bukovec, Vicente Dobroruka, Mats Eskhult, Carl Griffin, Blake Hartung, Cornelia Horn, Stanley F. Jones, Robert Kitchen, Tuomo Lankila, Basil Lourie, Robert Phenix, Ilaria Ramelli, Erga Shnerson, Herrie van Rooy, Cynthia Villagomez, and Helen Younansardaroud, among others.

The Making of the Medieval Middle East

Author: Jack Tannous

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-12-04

Total Pages: 664

ISBN-13: 0691179093

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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.

Christian Martyrs Under Islam

Author: Christian C. Sahner

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-03-31

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 069120313X

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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 Arab Christian

Author: Kenneth Cragg

Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press

Published: 1991-01-01

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 9780664221829

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Centuries before the existence of the Islamic faith, there were Arabs who could be described as Christian. And there has been a Christian Arabism, an Arab Christianity, since Muhammad's day. Arab Christianity has survived Muslin dominance, and this enlightening book takes an in-depth look at its survival.

The Religious Other

Author: Martin Accad

Publisher: Langham Global Library

Published: 2020-12-31

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 1839734442

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We live at a time when religious diversity has become a fact of life in our globalized societies. Yet Christian engagement with Muslims remains complex, complicated by fear, misunderstanding and a history fraught with political and cultural tensions. These essays, drawn from the 2018 and 2019 Middle East Consultations hosted by the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary’s Institute of Middle East Studies, engage the need for a carefully developed theological understanding of Islam, its origins and its sacred text. Weaving together the work of christian scholars of Islam, the Bible, theology and missiology, along with the insights of ministry practitioners, this book combines scholarly exploration with pertinent ministry practice, offering a rich framework for the church to continue its conversation about its engagement with Muslim communities and its proclamation of Christ worldwide.

The Qur'an and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions

Author: Emran El-Badawi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-12-17

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1317929322

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This book is a study of related passages found in the Arabic Qur’ān and the Aramaic Gospels, i.e. the Gospels preserved in the Syriac and Christian Palestinian Aramaic dialects. It builds upon the work of traditional Muslim scholars, including al-Biqā‘ī (d. ca. 808/1460) and al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505), who wrote books examining connections between the Qur’ān on the one hand, and Biblical passages and Aramaic terminology on the other, as well as modern western scholars, including Sidney Griffith who argue that pre-Islamic Arabs accessed the Bible in Aramaic. The Qur’ān and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions examines the history of religious movements in the Middle East from 180-632 CE, explaining Islam as a response to the disunity of the Aramaic speaking churches. It then compares the Arabic text of the Qur’ān and the Aramaic text of the Gospels under four main themes: the prophets; the clergy; the divine; and the apocalypse. Among the findings of this book are that the articulator as well as audience of the Qur’ān were monotheistic in origin, probably bilingual, culturally sophisticated and accustomed to the theological debates that raged between the Aramaic speaking churches. Arguing that the Qur’ān’s teachings and ethics echo Jewish-Christian conservatism, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Religion, History, and Literature.

A History of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Middle East

Author: Heather J. Sharkey

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-04-03

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 1108155863

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Across centuries, the Islamic Middle East hosted large populations of Christians and Jews in addition to Muslims. Today, this diversity is mostly absent. In this book, Heather J. Sharkey examines the history that Muslims, Christians, and Jews once shared against the shifting backdrop of state policies. Focusing on the Ottoman Middle East before World War I, Sharkey offers a vivid and lively analysis of everyday social contacts, dress, music, food, bathing, and more, as they brought people together or pushed them apart. Historically, Islamic traditions of statecraft and law, which the Ottoman Empire maintained and adapted, treated Christians and Jews as protected subordinates to Muslims while prescribing limits to social mixing. Sharkey shows how, amid the pivotal changes of the modern era, efforts to simultaneously preserve and dismantle these hierarchies heightened tensions along religious lines and set the stage for the twentieth-century Middle East.

Redefining Christian Identity

Author: Jan J. Ginkel

Publisher: Peeters Publishers

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 9789042914186

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Cultural interaction in the Middle East since the Rise of Islam - such was the title of a combined research project of the Universities of Leiden and Groningen aimed at describing the various ways in which the Christian communities of the Middle East expressed their distinct cultural identity in Muslim societies. As part of the project the symposium "Redefining Christian Identity, Christian cultural strategies since the rise of Islam" took place at Groningen University on April 7-10, 1999. This book contains the proceedings of this conference. From the articles it becomes clear that a number of distinct "cultural strategies" can be identified, some of which were used very frequently, others only in certain groups or at particular periods of time. The three main strategies that are represented in the papers of this volume are: (i) reinterpretation of the pre-Islamic Christian heritage; (ii) inculturation of elements from the new Islamic context; (iii) isolation from the Islamic context. Viewed in time, it is clear that the reinterpretation of older Christian heritage was particularly important in the first two centuries after the rise of Islam, the seventh and eighth centuries, that inculturation was the dominant theme of the Abbasid period, in the ninth to twelfth centuries, whereas from the Mongol period onwards, from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, isolation more and more often occurs, although inculturation of elements from the predominantly Muslim environment never came to a complete standstill.

Arabic Christian Theology

Author: Zondervan,

Publisher: Zondervan Academic

Published: 2019-03-19

Total Pages: 492

ISBN-13: 0310555795

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Theology is not done in a vacuum. Our theology is affected by the culture in which we live, and our theology can have unexpected effects on the lives of Christians who live thousands of miles away. This point emerges clearly as we listen to seven Arabic evangelical theologians address issues that are of critical importance to Christians living as minorities in the Muslim world. North American readers may find that many of their assumptions are challenged as they see how respected Christian thinkers from a very different context address issues of biblical interpretation, national and international politics, culture and gender.

Orthodoxy and Islam in the Middle East

Author: Constantine A. Panchenko

Publisher: Holy Trinity Publications

Published: 2021-03-01

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1942699352

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"Panchenko has written a masterful, exhaustive study of the life of Arab Orthodox Christians..." -- John-Paul A. Ghobrial, Department of History, Balliol College, University of Oxford Conflict or concord? Histories of Islam from its early seventh century beginnings in Arabia often portray its explosive growth into the wider Middle East as a story of struggle and conquest of the Christian people of Greater Syria, Palestine and Egypt. Alternatively these histories suggest that as often as not the conquerors were welcomed by the conquered and their existing monotheistic faiths of Christianity and Judaism tolerated and even allowed to flourish. In this short but in depth survey of the almost nine centuries that passed from the beginning of the spread of Islam up to the Ottoman Turkish conquest of Syria and Egypt beginning in 1516, Constantin Panchenko offers a more complex portrayal that opens up fresh vistas of understanding of these centuries focusing on the impact that the coming of Islam had on the Orthodox Christian communities of the Middle East and in particular the interplay of their Greek cultural heritage and experience of increasing Arabization. This work is drawn from the author's much larger work, Arab Orthodox Christians Under the Ottomans, being an updated and expanded version of the first chapter of that book which set the historical context for the period after 1516. It will deepen the readers understanding both of the history of the Middle East in these centuries and of how the faith of Orthodox Christians in these lands is lived today.