|
Books > Religion & Spirituality > General > Interfaith relations
This book is open access and available on
www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by the Religious
Matters in an Entangled World program, Utrecht University, the
Netherlands. Public manifestations of Islam remain fiercely
contested across the Global West. Studies to date have focused on
the visual presence of Islam - the construction of mosques or the
veiling of Muslim women. Amplifying Islam in the European
Soundscape is the first book to add a sonic dimension to analyses
of the politics of Islamic aesthetics in Europe. Sound does not
respect public/private boundaries, and people experience sound
viscerally. As such, the public amplification of the azan, the call
to prayer, offers a unique opportunity to understand what is at
stake in debates over religious toleration and secularism. The
Netherlands were among the first European countries to allow the
amplification of the azan in the 1980s, and Pooyan Tamimi Arab
explores this as a case study embedded in a broader history of
Dutch religious pluralism. The book offers a pointed critique of
social theories that regard secularism as all-encompassing. While
cultural forms of secularism exclude Muslim rights to public
worship, Amplifying Islam in the European Soundscape argues that
political and constitutional secularism also enables Muslim demands
for amplifying calls to prayer. It traces how these exclusions and
inclusions are effected through proposals for mosques, media
debates, law and policy, but also in negotiations on the ground
between residents, municipalities and mosques.
It is impossible to understand Palestine today without a careful
reading of its distant and recent past. But until now there has
been no single volume in English that tells the history of the
events--from the Ottoman Empire to the mid-twentieth century--that
shaped modern Palestine. The first book of its kind, "A History of
Palestine" offers a richly detailed interpretation of this critical
region's evolution.
Starting with the prebiblical and biblical roots of Palestine,
noted historian Gudrun Kramer examines the meanings ascribed to the
land in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions. Paying
special attention to social and economic factors, she examines the
gradual transformation of Palestine, following the history of the
region through the Egyptian occupation of the mid-nineteenth
century, the Ottoman reform era, and the British Mandate up to the
founding of Israel in 1948. Focusing on the interactions of Arabs
and Jews, "A History of Palestine" tells how these connections
affected the cultural and political evolution of each community and
Palestine as a whole."
Why should Christians engage in interfaith dialogue with Muslims?
Does Islam have anything to offer Christians? What is Islamophobia,
and what should we do about it? These are just some of the
questions addressed in Finding Jesus among Muslims, an urgent new
book from author Jordan Denari Duffner. Drawing from church
teaching, the stories of saints and martyrs, and her extensive
personal experiences living among Muslims in both the United States
and the Middle East, Duffner explains why all Christians are called
to participate in a "dialogue of life" with Muslims. Her
intelligent and fresh approach makes Duffner a welcome voice on
some of the most important social and religious questions of our
day.
'Ambiguous sanctuaries' are places in which the sacred is shared.
These exist in almost all religions: tombs of saints, mausoleums,
monasteries and shrines, a revered mountain peak, a majestic tree,
a cave or special boulders in the river. This book examines this
phenomenon in diverse parts of the world: in Europe, the Middle
East, Asia and Brazil. What these ritual spaces share is the
capacity to unsettle and challenge people's experiences and
understandings of reality, as well as to provoke the imagination,
allowing universes of meanings to be interlinked. The spaces
discussed reveal the many different ways the sacred can be shared.
Different groups may once have visited sites that are nowadays
linked to only one religion. The legacy of earlier religious
movements is subtly echoed in the devotional forms, rituals,
symbols or narratives (hagiographies) of the present, and the
architectural settings in which they take place. In some pilgrimage
sites, peoples of different faiths visit and take part in
devotional acts and rituals - such as processing, offering candles,
incenses and flowers - that are shared. The saints to whom a shrine
is dedicated can also have a double identity. Such ambiguity has
often been viewed through the lens of religious purity, and the
exclusivity of orthodoxy, as confusion, showing a lack of coherence
and authenticity. But the openness to interpretation of sacred
spaces in this collection suggests a more positive analysis: that
it may be through ambiguity transcending narrow confines that
pilgrims experience the sanctity and power they seek. In the
engaging and accessible essays that comprise Pilgrimage and
Ambiguity the contributors consider the ambiguous forces that
cohere in sacred spaces - forces that move us into the
inspirational depths of human spirituality. In so doing, the essays
bring us closer to a deeper appreciation of how ambiguity helps to
define the human condition. This collection is one that will be
read and debated for many years to come. Paul Stoller, West Chester
University, Pennsylvania, 2013 Anders Retzius Gold Medal Laureate
in Anthropology In a time of religious polarization, this fine
collection of essays recalls that ambiguity, ambivalence and shared
experience characterize the sacred as it is encountered in
pilgrimages. Readers will travel through the Mediterranean, India,
Pakistan and China, but also Western Europe and Amazonia, to
discover saintly landscapes full of multiple meanings. Alexandre
Papas, Senior Research Fellow, National Centre for Scientific
Research, Paris
|
|