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

This article focuses upon the Armenian diasporan experience in the Arab world after the First World War. It discusses the formation of Armenian communities in the Fertile Crescent and Egypt in the early 1920s and the strategy that they have since pursued to preserve their distinct ethnic identity within the quasi-millet system that is still applied in these countries. The article also analyzes how political and economic instability in the Arab world has affected the local Armenian communities and discusses the challenges that the latter face today, especially in light of the re-emergence of the Republic of Armenia as a sovereign and independent state in 1991.

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!’.

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.

The old picture of a violent and sudden conquest of the eastern provinces of the Byzantine Empire by Muslim armies must be rethought, especially in light of the significant amount of archaeological evidence now available. This shows, first, that Byzantium was not in decline at the time of Muhammad; instead, the economic and cultural life of Syria and Palestine, including much of modern Jordan, was flourishing. Indeed, there were well-established Christian and Jewish settlements in Arabia itself. Second, there are many indications that life went on without serious disruption for several decades, even after the establishment of the Umayyad caliphate. Large-scale buildings continued to be erected by Christians, as at Madaba, and papyri from Nessana show how different communities coexisted on a daily basis. We must conclude, then, that the tales of violence and destruction in non-Muslim sources are often exaggerated, and that they are not good evidence for the actual state of affairs.

A comparison of stories found in Christian religious texts with similar stories found in the Qurʾan highlights the common heritage shared by Christianity and Islam. One of the many examples illustrating this mutual legacy is the story of the Annunciation of Jesus, which appears twice in the Qurʾan. The version of the story in Surat Maryam (19:16-22) shares basic elements with the one in the Gospel of Luke (1:26-38); in both places, the angel informs Mary that she will conceive a child and the announcement is preceded by the Annunciation of John. In Surat al-ʿImran (3:45-49), however, the story is quite different and, in many respects, comparable to the one which appears in the apocryphal Protevangelium of James (11:1-3); in both of these versions, the Annunciation is preceded by the tale of Mary’s birth and her upbringing in the Temple, culminating in the angel’s announcement that Mary will conceive by, or of, the word of God. The similarity between each version of the Annunciation appearing in the Qurʾan and the correspondent Christian text shows the relationship between the two monotheistic religions to be much more complex than scholars are willing to admit.

An examination of the oldest surviving Arab Christian manuscripts makes it clear that, in the early Abbasid period, the inculturation of Christians into the world of Islam consisted of two steps: the translation of the scriptures and other ecclesiastical texts into Arabic, and the production of original works in Arabic by Christians. The present article studies this process in its earliest development in the monasteries of Palestine in the period between AD 750 and 1050. It features, in particular, an analysis of the introductory chapter to a work called The Summary of the Ways of Faith to highlight the religious issues involved in the Christian response to the call to Islam in this period.

This paper airs to define the role of Christian Arab historians in influencing the substance of the information found in Muslim texts on Byzantium. Various Muslim historians such as al-Masʿudi, Ibn al-ʾAdim and Ibn Khaldun acknowledge their debt to the historical works of Arab Christian historians and an analysis of other Islamic sources reveals that they also must have been acquainted with, and actually dependent upon, Christian Arabic sources, especially in their treatment of the affairs of the Christian church, the theological movements and the ecumenical councils in early Byzantine history. For the later periods, the type of information on Byzantium that Muslim authors required and acquired is different. Much less is said about ecclesiastical affairs while a great deal of attention is focused upon various aspects of Arab-Byzantine relations. Thus, even though reliance on Christian Arab sources in malters pertaining to Byzantium continus, it is less systematic and more directly relevant to the Muslim context. This contrasts with the early period, when the Muslim view of Byzantium was fully shaped by the concerns of Christian Arab authors.

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.