FIRST ESTABLISHED IN Amman, Jordan, in July 1994, as a centre for the study of Christian and Jewish traditions in the Arab World, the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies, operating under the patronage of HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal, has since broadened its field of academic interest with a view to becoming a clearing house for knowledge and ideas relating to culture contact in the broadest possible sense. From our original focus on questions of religion and religious diversity, we have widened the scope of our activities to make them interdisciplinary, covering all fields of the humanities and social sciences that bear on cultural or civilizational interaction; and from our original concentration on regional issues, which remain one of our main concerns, we have turned more and more to the global, in a world where regionality can no longer afford isolation.
With a view to our change in approach, we decided to publish this journal, Bulletin of the Royal institute for Inter-Faith Studies (BRIIFS), as an experiment of a new kind, attuned to the increasingly cross-cultural mores of the contemporary world, providing a venue for the parochial to blend with the cosmopolitan, and for the findings of different disciplines to merge and, by so doing, reinforce one another. Ultimately, our intent is to share our experience with interested parties in the region and in the world at large. For this purpose, we not only look forward to a wide international readership for our journal, but also to contributions from interested scholars in different parts of the world: the established and the aspiring alike. The success of our journal will depend as much upon the quantity, quality and pertinence of contributions to it as it will upon the reception it is accorded by its readership.
Duwayhi as a Historian of Ottoman Syria
Isṭifan al-Duwayhi, patriarch of the Maronite church (1670-1704) and a graduate of Maronite College in Rome, stands out as the leading historian of Syria in his time. A man of…
Renegotiating Islam: The Reception of Al-ʿashmawi’s Al-islam Al-siyasi in the Egyptian Press
In early 1988, the Egyptian press was inundated with articles and editorials about the controversial book al-Islam al-siyasi (Political Islam), published in Cairo in December of 1987 by Judge Muḥammad…
Riccoldo Da Monte Croce: Medieval Pilgrim and Traveller To the Heart of Islam
The Florentine Dominican Riccoldo da Monte Croce was a thirteenth-century missionary and apologist to Eastern Christianity and Islam, who travelled throughout the Middle East during a period in which the…
Civilization and Religion in Ancient South Arabia
Ancient South Arabian civilization has been largely ignored by anthropologists in their comparative study of complex cultures. This omission of South Arabia from the catalogue of civilizations is difficult to…
Collective Identity And the Discourse on Cultural Hegemony in Japanese Syncretism
Japan has often been acknowledged as a major example of successful cultural, in particular religious, syncretism and has, in modern times, projected this positive self-image to the outside world. In…
The Struggle for Political Representation in Ladakh
Once a mountain kingdom lying between the Moghul empire and the Tibetan state, Ladakh is today the third part of the political conglomerate of Kashmir. Since Indian independence, the Buddhist…
Understanding New Religious Sects in America: the Search for Community
Many sociological theories on new religious movements (sects or cults) point out that they create new types of community in response to contemporary social and cultural changes that have had…
Islam in the Post-soviet Space: Imaginative Geographies of the Caucasus and Central Asia
This paper discusses prevailing representations in social science studies on the successor states of the Soviet Union, as well as on the ethnic fringe of the Russian Federation. Whereas the…
Dreams of Jesus in the Islamic Tradition
First §: MANY CHRISTIANS ARE unaware of the important role Jesus plays in Islam, or rather, that he is considered to be the last and most important prophet before Muḥammad’s…
Report on the Conference, “Louis Massignon: The Vocation of a Scholar,” Notre Dame University, Indiana (2-5 October 1997)
First §: THIS CONFERENCE WAS the first ever held in the United States on the life and works of Professor, later Father, Louis Massignon (1883-1962). As such, it assembled the…