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

This article focuses upon three main concerns. The first is an overview of the textual tradition of a central part of Arabic mechanics dealing with the science of weights. A short paragraph on the ongoing digitization of Arabic mechanical writings is appended to this description of texts in order to indicate how they are being analyzed with the new tools of information technology. This is followed by an assessment of the historical significance of the Arabic science of weights, in which the transformation brought about in this important sub-field of Arabic mechanics is interpreted as the reorganization of a core part of ancient mechanics into an independent science of weights. Upon this basis, a strong claim is made in favour of the independent status of ʿilm al-athqāl, which may no longer be confused with ʿilm al-ḥiyal, understood as a general descriptive discourse upon different types of machines. Finally, the paper presents a preliminary survey of the institutional setting for the control of weighing instruments in Islamic medieval society through the office of ḥisba.‬

This paper investigates the problems of transferring scientific literature from one culture to another, in this case, with respect to the translation of texts from Arabic into Latin in the sixth-seventh centuries AH/twelfth-thirteenth centuries AD. It takes as its starting point the injunction of Ibn ʿAbdūn to the market-traders of Seville in the early sixth/twelfth century that they “should not sell to the Jews or Christians books concerning science . . . [because] they translate them and attribute them to their co-religionists and their bishops” and investigates whether Christian translators made the translations against the will of Islamic authorities, disguised the translations’ Arabic origin to pass off the works as their own and dishonoured Islam in their treatment of Arabic books. Only in the last case is there some evidence of practices that may give grounds for Ibn ʿAbdūn’s prohibition.

First §: AN IMPORTANT SHIʿI MUSLIM community, the Ismailis have had a complex history dating to the formative period of Islam, when different communities of interpretation were developing their doctrinal positions. In time, these communities acquired specific designations and were generally classified as Sunni or Shiʿi, Islam’s two main divisions. From early on, the Ismailis, who were dispersed throughout much of the Islamic world, from North Africa to Central Asia and India, represented a multiplicity of ethnic groups as well as social and cultural milieus; they also produced a rich literary heritage in a variety of languages. On two occasions in the course of their long and eventful history, the Ismailis established states of their own, the Fatimid Caliphate (909-1171) and the Nizari Ismaili state (1094-1256), also making important contributions to Islamic thought and culture.

This paper surveys the development of the institution of the fundug in the Islamic Mediterranean world, from its pre-Islamic origins as the Byzantine pandocheion until the fifteenth century AD. This institution mediated relations between different cultural and religious groups in the medieval Islamic world and was itself transferred, in slightly differing forms, between groups. By the twelfth century, the funduq had evolved into the parallel form of the fondaco, the Latinate term for hostelries housing communities of Western Christian merchants in Muslim Mediterranean cities. At the same time, the fundug also served as a charitable facility in the Egyptian Jewish community, as testified by documentation in the Cairo Geniza.

This paper focuses upon the interaction between the Northern Tswana kingdoms, located in present-day Botswana, and evangelizing missionaries. Agents of such highly institutionalized, monotheistic ‘religions’ as Judaism, Christianity and Islam mutually conceive of their faiths as entirely incompatible with others and as defining radically distinct communities. The relationship between such communities involves issues of conflict and coexistence that are basically different from the case of the Tswana. Where ‘religion’ is immanent, institutionally as well as culturally, the interface might not only be characterized by processes of separation, but also by mutual adaptation. Evangelizing missionaries, Christianity and the Tswana interacted on the basis of cultural models that only partially overlapped, a fact that gave rise to some controversy. Coexistence may be attributed to the limited extent to which Tswana ideas about superhuman forces are externalized in public rituals that are perceived as ‘religious’ by missionaries. By extension, notions of ‘faith’ and the sacred-secular divide are questioned as concepts adequate for cross-cultural comparison. Such considerations suggest that the colonized are not necessarily the passive victims of evangelizing missionaries. Yet, amongst the Tswana, Christianity has, at times, contributed significantly to aggravate the tensions and conflicts inherent in Tswana polities. This has led Tswana rulers to tackle various challenges, including the rise of indigenous Christian movements, by incorporating the missionary church in their polities as a kind of ‘state church,’ granting it a monopoly.

Tracing the historical development of the Crimean Tatar diaspora of Turkey, the Balkans and Central Asia, this paper looks first at the migration of this small Muslim ethnie from 1783 to the twentieth century, particularly after the Russian Empire’s victory in the Crimean War and Josef Stalin’s deportation of Muslim communities in the final year of World War II. Conquered, persecuted and scattered, the Crimean Tatars were either assimilated into host societies, as in Turkey, or rejected by them, as in Bulgaria and Romania. Yet, many maintained or rediscovered their Crimean Tatar identity in the twentieth century, especially during their long period of exile in Central Asia when they came to form a true diasporan community. Supported by their co-ethnics in Turkey and the Balkans, many Tatars took the opening that appeared in the final days of the Soviet Union to return to an uncertain future in their homeland. The case of the this little-studied ethnic group has obvious implications for scholars interested in ethnically-based oppression, national and diasporic identity construction and Muslim-Christian relations in the marginal zone between Christianity and Islam.

This paper is primarily concerned with those aspects of the life and spirituality of Hindiyya Anne ʿAjaymi (1727-1798) that reveal a unique blending of Western and Syriac elements in an era when the Roman Catholic Church and proponents of the Latin Rite within it exerted a greater influence upon Middle Eastern ecclesiastic circles. The outer framework of Hindiyya’s own environment was the Ottoman Empire, in which were situated both her hometown of Aleppo and the rural area of Mount Lebanon, where she spent her adult years. Hindiyya’s more intimate environment was the church into which she was born, the Maronite Church of Lebanon and Syria.

Refugees have often been either excluded from recent studies on transnationalism or treated as exceptions to the rule. By contrast, this paper proposes one way of incorporating them more fully into the literature. The paper charts the transition of refugees into transnationals, focusing on the case of Eritreans in the UK and Germany. It suggests that three processes have been instrumental in this transition. Eirst, despite the recognition of Eritrean independence in 1991, most refugees chose not to return, instead securing their statuses in their host countries. Second, notwithstanding this decision, most Eritreans have developed lasting links with their communities and country of origin. Finally, as a result of the current conflict with Ethiopia, the Eritrean state has taken steps to institutionalize the Eritrean diaspora. The paper concludes by considering the wider applicability of this case-study with reference to three possible qualifications: the extent to which the transition has applied to all Eritreans overseas; the extent to which other refugee communities might be expected to undergo a similar transition; and the extent to which the transition is permanent.

First § : IT IS ONLY AT A RELATIVELY late date that the Muslim holy space in Jerusalem came to be referred to as al-haram al-sharif (literally, the Noble Sacred Precinct or Restricted Enclosure, often translated as the Noble Sanctuary and usually simply referred to as the Haram). While the exact early history of this term is unclear, we know that it only became common in Ottoman times, when administrative order was established over all matters pertaining to the organization of the Muslim faith and the supervision of the holy places, for which the Ottomans took financial and architectural responsibility. Before the Ottomans, the space was usually called al-masjid al-aqsa (the Farthest Mosque), a term now reserved to the covered congregational space on the Haram, or masjid bayt al-maqdis (Mosque of the Holy City) or, even, like Mecca’s sanctuary, al-masjid al-haram.

This article, which is based upon seven years of anthropological field research in London, outlines the reasons why the so-called Rushdie Affair forced Muslims in Britain into a corner that was not of their own choosing. Ultimately, these reasons are based upon a trend, in the West, to reify Islam in an unwarranted manner. There are social forces, however, among Muslims as well as other believers, to overcome reification by new modes of coexistence which go well beyond theological dialogue. They are practice-based and often local in scale; yet, they do entail processes of action and rethinking which can respond to the fundamental sociological findings about pluralist community-building. The article concludes with an assessment of their variables of success.