This title includes an assessment of the influence and impact of the Islamic scholar and activist Fethullah Gulen, and those who are inspired by him, on contemporary Islam. This edited collection deals with the challenges and opportunities faced by Muslims and the wider society in Europe following the Madrid train bombings of 2003 and the London Transport attacks of 2007. The contributors explore the challenges to the concept and practice of civility in public life within a European context, and demonstrates the contributions that can be made in this regard by the thought and practice of the global movement associated with the Turkish Muslim scholar Fethullah Gulen. The importance and distinctiveness of teaching of Gulen and the practice of the movement is that it is rooted in a confident Turkish Islamic heritage while being fully engaged with modernity. It offers the possibility of a contextualised renewal of Islam for Muslims in Europe while being fully rooted in the teachings of the Qu'ran and the Sunnah of the Prophet. This volume is an important contribution to the study of the movement, which advocates the freedom of religion while making an Islamic contribution to the wider society based on a commitment to service of others.

In Shoah Through Muslim Eyes, the author discusses her journey with Judaism as a Muslim. Her book is based on the struggle with antisemitism within Muslim communities and her interviews with Shoah survivors. Rejecting polemical myths about the Holocaust and Jews, Afridi offers a new way of creating understanding between the two communities through the acceptance the enormity of the Shoah. Her journey is both personal and academic: the reader can find nuances of her belief in Islam, principles of justice, and the loneliness of such a journey. The chapters discuss the Holocaust and how it was in truth unprecedented, interviews with survivors, antisemitism and Islamophobia, camps in Arab lands, and Islam and memory. Afridi includes newly-uncovered Muslim-Arab narratives that enhance our understanding of the reach of the Holocaust into Muslim lands under the Vichy and Nazi governments.

Jews, Christians and Muslims all trace their history and spiritual raison d'etre to their common tribal ancestor, Abraham. Their religious identities are interrelated and even dependent on each other. Jesus lived as a Jew and Christianity was born in the heart of Judaism. Early Christianity was inherently Jewish, referring to the same scriptures-the Tanach, later called the "Old Testament"-and holding to the same messianic promises. Mohammed, the prophet of Islam, knew both Christianity and Judaism. The Qur'an contains material indebted to the Old Testament and Jewish tradition, as well as stories and teachings from the New Testament; and Mohammed himself met Jews and Christians alike during his lifetime. Furthermore, the three religions share many fundamental ideas and beliefs. They testify to the same memory of Abraham; value the same divine law; urge the same ideal of righteousness; and proclaim the same hope of peace for the earth and salvation for humankind. Despite this shared heritage, the three Abrahamic faiths have sometimes been more closely identified not for what they offer to save the world but for what they bring to destabilise it. It is one of the depressing paradoxes of religion- supposedly a force for good-that it is all too frequently the occasion for conflict instead of peace, generosity and better treatment of one's neighbor. The contributors to this volume start from the premise that there is a price to be paid by the "sons of Abraham": whether Jews, Muslims or Christians. And that is the cost of learning how to be brothers through mutual and attentive engagement. Mature interfaith discussion offers respect for a shared heritage while also recognising points of distinctiveness. This book explores what articulating such regardful difference, as well as commonality, might mean for the future of faith relations. Including provocative reflections by Elie Wiesel, Irving Greenberg, Hans Kung and others, the book makes a vital contribution to dialogue. In its searching analysis of issues of peace, justice, hope and forgiveness, it will engage all students and scholars of interfaith studies.

Combining insider and outsider perspectives, Women in Lebanon looks at Christian and Muslim women living together in a multicultural society and facing modernity. While the Arab Spring has begun to draw attention to issues of change, modernity, and women's subjectivity, this manuscript takes a unique approach to examining and describing the Lebanese "alternative modernities" thesis and how it has shaped thinking about the meaning of terms like evolution, progress, development, history, and politics in contemporary Arab thought. The author draws on extensive ethnographic research, as well as her own personal experience.

This volume gathers together studies on various ""engagements"" between Judaism and Christianity. Following an introduction on ""my odyssey in New Testament interpretation,"" Professor Davies examines such topics as the nature of Judaism, canon and Christology, Torah and dogma, law in Christianity, and the promised land in Jewish and Christian tradition. Part II focuses on Paul and Judaism, with special attention to Paul and the exodus, Paul and the law, and the allegory of the two olives in Romans 11:13-24. Part III looks at the background and origins of the Gospels, centering specifically on Matthew and John. Part IV takes up an exclusively American engagement with Judaism, that is, the Mormon's claim to be Christian and their assertion that they are genealogically connected with Jews and therefore physically a recovered, restored, and reinterpreted Israel. The volume concludes with a discussion and critique of ""mystical anti-Semitism,"" that is, ascribing to ""The Jews"" (not to ""Jews"") the central role in the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, leading to a view of ""The Jews"" as essentially satanic or demonic. This collection of seminal essays by a preeminent New Testament scholar highlights the encounter of two great religious traditions and stimulates the dialogue between them. W. D. Davies was Emeritus Ivey Professor of Advanced Studies and Research in Christian Origin at Duke University. He was the author of many books, including Paul and Rabbinic Judaism and Jewish and Pauline Studies.

This book focuses on the interconnections of religion and migration in the Black Sea region through case studies that explore shifting identities, community, and national boundaries, as well as social practices and networks. During the past few decades the Black Sea has been transformed from a largely closed region, due to the Cold War, to a bridge for human, economic, and cultural capital flows. As the region opened up, understandings and practices of religion were re-signified due to new and diverse mobilities and resettlements. This volume addresses and responds to the current scarcity of academic research on the repercussion of political reform, migration, and modernization in the areas surrounding the Black Sea. Contributors uncover and examine the pivotal role of religion in current cultural contestations taking place in this strategic region. Engaging with a wide range of case studies, the book offers a fresh, comparative examination of migration as it relates to different countries and religious groups in the region.

Religous pluralism has characterized America almost from its seventeenth-century inception, but the past half century or so has witnessed wholesale changes in the religious landscape, including a proliferation of new spiritualities, the emergence of widespread adherence to ''Asian'' traditions, and an evangelical Christian resurgence. These recent phenomena-important in themselves as indices of cultural change-are also both causes and contributions to one of the most remarked-upon and seemingly anomalous characteristics of the modern United States: its widespread religiosity. Compared to its role in the world's other leading powers, religion in the United States is deeply woven into the fabric of civil and cultural life. At the same time, religion has, from the 1600s on, never meant a single denominational or confessional tradition, and the variety of American religious experience has only become more diverse over the past fifty years. Gods in America brings together leading scholars from a variety of disciplines to explain the historical roots of these phenomena and assess their impact on modern American society.

Seamon explores the historical, theological, and societal dynamics of religious intermarriage as a way to introduce scholars to the myriad of factors that have contributed and will continue to contribute to the complete transformation of religion and Christianity in the twenty-first century.

Interfaith Just Peacemaking is a collected work by 27 Jewish, Muslim and Christian scholars and religious leaders on the ten 'practice norms' of the peacemaking paradigm called 'Just Peace.'Just Peace theory, like the paradigm it most resembles, Just War theory, is a list of specific practices that are applied to concrete contexts.

This book provides an edited text, introduction, and the first English translation of a central document in the history of religious coercion in late antiquity: Severus of Minorca's Letter on the Conversion of the Jews. The Letter describes the forced conversion of the Jews of Minorca to Christianity in AD 418, allegedly under the influence of St. Stephen's relics. Although ostensibly a hagiographical work, the Letter is fundamentally an anti-Jewish document, and therein lies its interest for historians. It offers a fascinating perspective on Jewish-Christian relations in a Mediterranean town, and on the motives for religious intolerance in the unsettled age of the Germanic invasions. In addition, its wealth of information about a diaspora Jewish community in the Western empire makes it unique among the surviving sources.

For the first time classic readings on Jesus from outside of Christianity have been brought together in one volume. Jesus Beyond Christianity: The Classic Texts features significant passages on Jesus from Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. The fifty-six selections span two millennia of thought, including translated extracts from the Talmud and the Qur'an, and writings by Mahatma Gandhi and the 14th Dalai Lama.
The volume features fresh translations of important texts, 'Key-Issues' introductions, questions for discussion and guides for further reading. Importantly, each set of readings ends with an entirely fresh reflection from a leading scholar in the field. Every care has been taken to present these often controversial passages in a manner consistent with the aims of their authors; accompanying notes directly address challenging issues.
This unique collection of readings promises to become an essential resource in the study of the world's religions, providing rich guidance for anyone seeking to understand the central convergences and debates between religious traditions.

Shared ritual practices, multi-faith celebrations, and interreligious prayers are becoming increasingly common in the USA and Europe as more people experience religious diversity first hand. While ritual participation can be seen as a powerful expression of interreligious solidarity, it also carries with it challenges of a particularly sensitive nature. Though celebrating and worshiping together can enhance interreligious relations, cross-riting may also lead some believers to question whether it is appropriate to engage in the rituals of another faith community. Some believers may consider cross-ritual participation as inappropriate transgressive behaviour. Bringing together leading international contributors and voices from a number of religious traditions, Ritual Participation and Interreligious Dialogue delves into the complexities and intricacies of the phenomenon. They ask: what are the promises and perils of celebrating and praying together? What are the limits of ritual participation? How can we make sense of feelings of discomfort when entering the sacred space of another faith community? The first book to focus on the lived dimensions of interreligious dialogue through ritual participation rather than textual or doctrinal issues, this innovative volume opens an entirely new perspective.

In a time in which Islamophobia has become common, and many public discussions have focused upon either terrorist activities of Muslims or the implementation of shar'ia in the United States, little attention has been given to actual inter-faith engagement and practice among Christian and Muslim communities. Anglicans and Lutherans have a long history, and a wide variety of experiences from which to draw and reflect in responding to both simplistic interpretations of Islam and vitriolic rhetoric against Muslims. This work seeks to provide vignettes of Muslim-Christian engagement within the Anglican and Lutheran experiences from around the world. This work does not look to reduce Christian-Muslim relationships to a least common denominator of religious pluralism or civic religion. Rather, it provides thoughtful Anglican and Lutheran responses to these relationships from a variety of perspectives and contexts, and lays the groundwork for ongoing thoughtful, faithful, sensitive, and sincere engagement between Christians and Muslims.

How does the Qur'an depict the religious 'other'? Historically, this question has provoked extensive debate among Islamic scholars about the identity, nature, and status of the religious 'other.' Today, this debate assumes great importance because of the pervasive experience of religious plurality, which prompts inquiry into convergences and divergences in belief and practice as well as controversy over appropriate forms of interreligious interaction. The persistence of religious violence and oppression give rise to difficult questions about the relationship between the depiction of religious 'others,' and intolerance and oppression. Scholars have traditionally accounted for the coexistence of religious similarity and difference by resorting to models that depict religions as isolated entities or by models that arrange religions in a static, evaluative hierarchy. In response to the limitations of this discourse, Jerusha Tanner Lamptey constructs an alternative conceptual and hermeneutical approach that draws insights from the work of Muslim women interpreters of the Qur'an, feminist theology, and semantic analysis. She employs it to re-evaluate, re-interpret, and re-envision the Qur'anic discourse on religious difference. Through a close and detailed reading of the Qur'anic text, she distinguishes between two forms of religious difference-hierarchical and lateral. She goes on to explore the complex relationality that exists among Qur'anic concepts of hierarchical religious difference and articulates a new, integrated model of religious pluralism.

Finnish Women Making Religion puts forth the complex intersections that Lutheranism, the most important religious tradition in Finland, has had with other religions as well as with the larger society and politics also internationally.

This book takes a fresh look at the roots and implications of the enduring major historic fissure in Western Christianity, which has had profound implications for culture, social life, politics and international relations across five centuries. It presents expertly informed historical research in a manner that relates meaningfully to contemporary and cross-disciplinary concerns. It explores the origins, perpetuation, reactivation and resolution of such conflicts, giving particular attention to the interaction of religious belief with other factors, including the impact of nationalism and the role of local contingencies. New insights into the historic dynamics of Protestant-Catholic conflict not only illuminate present-day contexts (such as Northern Ireland and the United States) where such polarities persist, but will also suggest instructive comparisons for approaching other seemingly entrenched conflicts in which religion is implicated, such as the perceived 'clash of civilisations' between Christianity and Islam.

The connection of interfaith and intercultural understanding stems from a conceptual foundation on the dialogue between religions and cultures. These types of conversation are essential for the clarification and reflection of practical opportunities and challenges that these exchanges are facing. New Media and Communication Across Religions and Cultures offers a unique opportunity in both the social sciences, humanities, and communication fields to provide concrete concepts and notions in the areas of inter-religious and inter-cultural dialogue. By exploring this empirical research of relevant experiences, this book is important for researchers, practitioners, and students in varied fields of philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, media students, law, and more.

The twentieth century was a fascinating period of profound political, social and economic changes in Indonesia. These changes contributed to the diversification of the religious landscape and as a result, religious authority was redistributed over an increasing number of actors. Although many Muslims in Indonesia continued to regard the ulama, the traditional religious scholars, as the principle source of religious guidance, religious authority has become more diffused and differentiated over time. The present book consists of contributions which all deal with the multi-facetted and multidimensional topic of religious authority and aim to complement each other. Most papers deal with Indonesia, but two dealing with other countries have been included in order to add a comparative dimension. Amongst the topics dealt with are the different and changing roles of the ulama, the rise and role of Muslim organizations, developments within Islamic education, like the madrasa, and the spread of Salafi ideas in contemporary Indonesia.

This title offers comprehensive and contemporary exploration of the role of Jesus in both Islam and Christianity and issues of dialogue in Christian-Muslim relations. "Images of Jesus Christ in Islam 2nd Edition" provides a general introduction to the question of Jesus Christ in Islam and a dialogical discussion of this issues' importance for Christian-Muslim relations. Its originality lies in its comprehensive presentation of relevant sources and research and its discussion of Islamic images of Christ in the wider context of Muslim-Christian relations. Oddbjorn Leirvik provides a comprehensive introduction to a breadth of Muslim traditions through an examination of interpretations of Jesus throughout history, whilst also examining historic tensions between Islam and Christianity. This book's distinctive contribution lies in its dialogical perspective in the perennial area of interest of Islam and Christian-Muslim relations.

Redemption and Resistance brings together an eminent cast of contributors to provide a state-of-the-art discussion of Messianism as a topic of political and religious commitment and controversy. By surveying this motif over nearly a thousand years with the help of a focused historical and political searchlight, this volume is sure to break fresh ground. It will serve as an attractive contribution to the history of ancient Judaism and Christianity, of the complex and often problematic relationship between them, and of the conflicting loyalties their hopes for redemption created vis--vis a public order that was at first pagan and later Christian. Although each chapter is designed to stand on its own as an introduction to the topic at hand, the overall argument unfolds a coherent history. The first two parts, on pre-Christian Jewish and primitive Christian Messianism, set the stage by identifying two entities that in Part III are then addressed in the development of their explicit relationship in a Graeco-Roman world marked by violent persecution of Jewish and Christian hopes and loyalties. The story is then explored beyond the Constantinian turn and its abortive reversal under Julian, to the Christian Empire up to the rise of Islam.

All Religion Is Inter-Religion analyses the ways inter-religious relations have contributed both historically and philosophically to the constructions of the category of "religion" as a distinct subject of study. Regarded as contemporary classics, Steven M. Wasserstrom's Religion after Religion (1999) and Between Muslim and Jew (1995) provided a theoretical reorientation for the study of religion away from hierophanies and ultimacy, and toward lived history and deep pluralism. This book distills and systematizes this reorientation into nine theses on the study of religion. Drawing on these theses--and Wasserstrom's opus more generally--a distinguished group of his colleagues and former students demonstrate that religions can, and must, be understood through encounters in real time and space, through the complex relations they create and maintain between people, and between people and their pasts. The book also features an afterword by Wasserstrom himself, which poses nine riddles to students of religion based on his personal experiences working on religion at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Religion can heal, but it can hurt as well. This collection of essays addresses some key issues of religious stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination, and considers a wide range of important topics which haunt our societies today. When stereotyping becomes the oxygen we inhale, when it is so important to us that we cannot see how we can survive without it - what can and should we do? Twenty-two scholars from Australia, Europe, the Middle East and North America explore the anatomy of various forms of stereotyping and ways to oppose them.

This book explores "A Common Word Between Us and You," a high-level ongoing Christian-Muslim dialogue process. The Common Word process was commenced by leading Islamic scholars and intellectuals as outreach in response to the Pope's much criticized Regensburg address of 2007, and brings to the fore, in the interest of developing a meaningful peace, how the Islamic and Christian communities representing well over half of the world's population might agree on love of God and love of neighbor as common beliefs.