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Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies (BRIIFS)

From the tenth to the twelfth centuries, the Jews of Muslim Spain experienced a remarkable cultural renaissance. This flowering began under the patronage of Hasdai ibn Shaprut, a Jewish courtier serving in the court of the Caliph ʿAbd al-Raḥman III of Cordova. With Ḥasdai’s encouragement, Jewish poets and scholars flocked to Andalusia from Irag and North Africa, launching what was to become known in Jewish history as The Golden Age of Spain. Particularly noteworthy were the poets, who borrowed freely from the form and poetic content of Arabic poetry to introduce a new system of prosody in pure Biblical Hebrew. The sophisticated literary movement that unfolded blended secular Arabic motifs and the Hebraic tradition in new and revolutionary ways. At its forefront were Jewry’s religious leaders, presenting an unusual example of thoroughgoing acculturation to the surrounding culture. However, the popularity of Golden Age Hebrew poetry was not confined to one class, but appears to have been widely shared and disseminated among Jews as part of a broader cultural agenda. The stimulus for this poetic revolution, in contrast to other forms of cultural expression, appears to have been the claims to perfection of Arab poets and linguists. No evidence exists to indicate whether the new Hebrew poetry was known beyond the confines of the Jewish community. In general, caution should therefore be exercised in claiming that it is testimony to cultural pluralism and cultural symbiosis among Christians, Muslims and Jews in medieval Spain.

Many secular Egyptian intellectuals began to examine the modern history of the Jews of Egypt as an aspect of their opposition to the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. Fearing that normalizing economic relations would permit Israel’s technologically more advanced economy to dominate Egypt, they have often portrayed Jews, Israelis as well as the historic Egyptian Jewish community, as economic parasites, usurers, and rapacious capitalists. Recent Egyptian writings on the privileged position of bourgeois Jews in the twentieth century typically assume an absolute opposition between compradors and foreigners on the one hand, and a patriotic national bourgeoisie on the other, thus denying the Egyptian element of Egyptian Jewish identity and portraying the activities of Jews as inimical to the national economy. Using the concept of colonial capitalism and a case study of La Société Générale des Sucreries et de la Raffinerie d’Egypte, this article argues that there were no significant differences between the business strategies of the leading Jewish and Muslim elements of the Egyptian haute bourgeoisie; they were often partners in the same enterprises. In political economy categories, there was not a unified bloc of Jewish capital or a Jewish bourgeoisie with a common set of economic and political interests.

The first part of this article assesses modern scholarship on the history of the Jews of Yemen in light of Arabic sources written by Yemeni Muslim scholars. Since accounts of this history have largely neglected this rich vein of material and, indeed, seldom consulted more than a few Yemeni Jewish sources, it is here argued that the reconstruction of the history of the Jews of Yemen—as well as the larger history of the Jews under Islam—will remain inconclusive unless adequate use is made of Arabic Muslim sources. The second part of the article questions the notion, prevalent in modern scholarship on Jewish thought under Islam, that Muslims were oblivious to developments in Jewish literature, philosophy and religious discourse. Evidence from Yemeni Muslim literature reflects a high level of interest in, and use of, concepts found in Jewish religious thought and presupposes genuine Muslim intellectual curiosity in the subject. Furthermore, the evidence at hand reflects a higher level of cultural integration between the Jews and Muslims of Yemen than is usually recognized in modern studies.

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.

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.

In a rarely-cited treatise still preserved in the work of the medieval biographer, Ibn Abi Usaybiʿa, 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.

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.‬

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 (CIS), 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 CIS represents a systematic and vitriolic attack against it. In the CIS, he takes up the questions of God’s essence and Muhammad’s prophethood and compares Christ with Muhammad and the gospels with the Qurʾan. In the centuries to follow, both Nicholas of Cusa and Martin Luther relied heavily on Riccoldo’s influential work.

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.‬

This statement on ‘Sociology and Demography’ is introduced by some personal remarks on how, for some time in his early academic career, the author felt that he was in a no-man’s-land between sociology and demography. Next, it is asked how the relationship between sociology and demography can be described and interpreted. It seems that a few demographers still regard sociology as a somewhat dubious enterprise, which lacks, for instance, the precision which mathematical demographic models claim to possess and precise definitions of its central variables. On the other hand, there are (also only a few) sociologists who do not consider demography to be a real science, but rather a kind of accountancy: population bookkeeping. In the view of these sociologists, demography is neither a social science nor any kind of science at all, because it does not have explanatory theories. One might even maintain that demography is, in fact, ultimately unable to explain population processes, nor prognosticate such processes, beyond solely empirically-based extrapolations. However, an open-minded sociologist cannot overlook the fact that demography has many virtues which will also be referred to in detail here. This statement concludes with a presentation of the results of a quantitative content analysis of articles that appeared in four demographic journals between 1997 and 1999. This content analysis has been carried out in order to give an empirically-based answer to the question regarding the relationship between sociology and demography.