Download or read book The Qur an and Late Antiquity written by Angelika Neuwirth and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 848 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Angelika Neuwirth provides a new approach to understanding the founding text of Islam. Typical exegesis of the Qur'an treats the text teleologically, as a fait accompli finished text, or as a replica or summary of the Bible in Arabic. Instead Neuwirth approaches the Qur'an as the product of a specific community in the Late Antique Arabian peninsula, one which was exposed to the wider worlds of the Byzantine and Sasanian empires, and to the rich intellectual traditions of rabbinic Judaism, early Christianity, and Gnosticism. A central goal of the book is to eliminate the notion of the Qur'an as being a-historical. She argues that it is, in fact, highly aware of its place in late antiquity and is capable of yielding valuable historical information. By emphasizing the liturgical function of the Qur'an, Neuwirth allows readers to see the text as an evolving oral tradition within the community before it became collected and codified as a book. This analysis sheds much needed light on the development of the Qur'an's historical, theological, and political outlook. The book's final chapters analyze the relationship of the Qur'an to the Bible, to Arabic poetic traditions, and, more generally, to late antique culture and rhetorical forms. By providing a new introduction to the Qur'an, one that uniquely challenges current ideas about its emergence and development, The Qur'an and Late Antiquity bridges the gap between Eastern and Western approaches to this sacred text.
Download or read book Islam and Its Past written by Michael Cook and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An edited collection on the historical, religious, and cultural contexts of the origins of the Qur'an.
Download or read book The Qur n in Context written by Angelika Neuwirth and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010 with total page 873 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By addressing various aspects of the Qur'?n's linguistic and historical context and offering close readings of selected passages in the light of Jewish, Christian, and ancient Arabic literature, the volume seeks to stimulate a new interaction between literary and historical scholarship.
Download or read book Late Antiquity on the Eve of Islam written by Averil Cameron and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume reflects the huge upsurge of interest in the Near East and early Islam currently taking place among historians of late antiquity. At the same time, Islamicists and Qur'anic scholars are also increasingly seeking to place the life of Muhammad and the Qur'an in a late antique background. Averil Cameron, herself one of the leading scholars of late antiquity and Byzantium, has chosen eleven key articles that together give a rounded picture of the most important trends in late antique scholarship over the last decades, and provide a coherent context for the emergence of the new religion. A substantial introduction, with a detailed bibliography, surveys the present state of the field, as well as discussing some recent themes in Qur'anic and early Islamic scholarship from the point of view of a late antique historian. The volume also provides an invaluable introduction to recent scholarship, making clear the ferment of religious change that was taking place across the Near East before, during and after the lifetime of Muhammad. It will be essential reading for Islamicists and late antique students and scholars alike.
Download or read book The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity written by Aziz Al-Azmeh and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-06 with total page 659 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on epigraphic and other material evidence as well as more traditional literary sources and critical review of the extensive relevant scholarship, this book presents a comprehensive and innovative reconstruction of the rise of Islam as a religion and imperial polity. It reassesses the development of the imperial monotheism of the New Rome, and considers the history of the Arabs as an integral part of Late Antiquity, including Arab ethnogenesis and the emergence of what was to become Muslim monotheism, comparable with the emergence of other monotheisms from polytheistic systems. Topics discussed include the emergence and development of the Muhammadan polity and its new cultic deity and associated ritual, the constitution of the Muslim canon, and the development of early Islam as an imperial religion. Intended principally for scholars of Late Antiquity, Islamic studies and the history of religions, the book opens up many novel directions for future research.
Download or read book The Late Antique World of Early Islam written by Robert G. Hoyland and published by Darwin Books. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a number of innovative studies on the three main communities of the East Mediterranean lands—Muslims, Jews and Christians—in the aftermath of the seventh-century Arab conquests. It focuses principally on how the Christian majority were affected by and adapted to their loss of political power in such arenas as language use, identity construction, church building, pilgrimage, and the role of women. Attention is also paid to how the Muslim community defined itself, administered justice, and regulated relations with non-Muslims. This book will be important for anyone interested in the ways in which the cultures and traditions of the late antique Mediterranean world were transformed in the course of the seventh to tenth centuries by the establishment of the new Muslim political elite and the gradual emergence of an Islamic Empire. --
Download or read book Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity written by Thomas Sizgorich and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-03-19 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity, Thomas Sizgorich seeks to understand why and how violent expressions of religious devotion became central to the self-understandings of both Christian and Muslim communities between the fourth and ninth centuries. Sizgorich argues that the cultivation of violent martyrdom as a path to holiness was in no way particular to Islam; rather, it emerged from a matrix put into place by the Christians of late antiquity. Paying close attention to the role of memory and narrative in the formation of individual and communal selves, Sizgorich identifies a common pool of late ancient narrative forms upon which both Christian and Muslim communities drew. In the process of recollecting the past, Sizgorich explains, Christian and Muslim communities alike elaborated iterations of Christianity or Islam that demanded of each believer a willingness to endure or inflict violence on God's behalf and thereby created militant local pieties that claimed to represent the one "real" Christianity or the only "pure" form of Islam. These militant communities used a shared system of signs, symbols, and stories, stories in which the faithful manifested their purity in conflict with the imperial powers of the world.
Download or read book Late Antiquity A Very Short Introduction written by Gillian Clark and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-24 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sheds light on the concept of late antiquity and the events of its time, showing that this was in fact a period of great transformation
Download or read book Islam and its Past written by Carol Bakhos and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-03 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Islam and its Past: Jāhiliyya, Late Antiquity, and the Qur'an brings together scholars from various disciplines and fields to consider Islamic revelation, with particular focus on the Qur'an. The collection provides a wide-ranging survey of the development and current state of Qur'anic studies in the Western academy. It shows how interest in the field has recently grown, how the ways in which it is cultivated have changed, how it has ramified, and how difficult it now is for any one scholar to keep abreast of it. Chapters explore the milieu in which the Meccan component of the Qur'an made its appearance. The general question is what we can say about that milieu by combining a careful reading of the relevant parts of the Qur'an with what we know about the religious trends of Late Antiquity in Arabia and elsewhere. More specifically, the issue is what we can learn in this way about the manner in which the 'polytheists' of the Qur'an related to the Jewish and Christian traditions: were they Godfearers in the sense familiar from the study of ancient Judaism? It looks at the Qur'an as a text of Late Antiquity-not just considering those features of it that could be seen as normal in that context, but also identifying what is innovative about it against the Late Antique background. Here the focus is on the 'believers' rather than the 'polytheists'. The volume also engages in different ways with notions of monotheism in pre-Islamic Arabia. This collection provides a broad survey of what has been happening in the field and concrete illustrations of some of the more innovative lines of research that have recently been pursued.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity written by Scott Fitzgerald Johnson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-11 with total page 1294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity offers an innovative overview of a period (c. 300-700 CE) that has become increasingly central to scholarly debates over the history of western and Middle Eastern civilizations. This volume covers such pivotal events as the fall of Rome, the rise of Christianity, the origins of Islam, and the early formation of Byzantium and the European Middle Ages. These events are set in the context of widespread literary, artistic, cultural, and religious change during the period. The geographical scope of this Handbook is unparalleled among comparable surveys of Late Antiquity; Arabia, Egypt, Central Asia, and the Balkans all receive dedicated treatments, while the scope extends to the western kingdoms, and North Africa in the West. Furthermore, from economic theory and slavery to Greek and Latin poetry, Syriac and Coptic literature, sites of religious devotion, and many others, this Handbook covers a wide range of topics that will appeal to scholars from a diverse array of disciplines. The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity engages the perennially valuable questions about the end of the ancient world and the beginning of the medieval, while providing a much-needed touchstone for the study of Late Antiquity itself.
Download or read book Rethinking the Qur an in Late Antiquity written by Juan Cole and published by . This book was released on 2024-12-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the Qur'ān reflects on and responds to the regional cultural, religious and political currents swirling in Western Arabia and neighboring areas during the great war, 603-630, between the Roman and Sasanian empires? The book approaches the Qur'an through six case studies. The first two consider the era 200-800 CE, which classicist Peter Brown dubbed late antiquity. The second two contextualize quranic stories and tropes in the era of Herakleios and Khosrow II. The final pair consider issues in how the Qur'an was constituted, both physically and stylistically, and also sets these processes in their late antique context. The book treats the constitution of the quranic text, first physically and then rhetorically. The use in the Qur'ān of the technique of narrative apostrophe is for the first time subjected to a concerted analysis. These themes are all united by a concern to understand better issues in why the Qur'ān makes certain narrative choices, how the narrative changes over time, and how it articulates with other texts and perspectives.
Download or read book The Making of the Medieval Middle East written by Jack Tannous and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold new religious history of the late antique and medieval Middle East that places ordinary Christians at the center of the story In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. Jack Tannous argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East’s history. What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, Tannous provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East. This provocative book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.
Download or read book Late Antique Responses to the Arab Conquests written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-13 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Late Antique Responses to the Arab Conquests is a showcase of new discoveries in an exciting and rapidly developing field: the study of the transition from Late Antiquity to Early Islam. The Arab conquests are shown to have changed both the Arabian conquerors and the conquered.
Download or read book The Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity written by Guy G. Stroumsa and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents how ancient Christianity must be understood from the viewpoint of the history of religions in late antiquity. The continuation of biblical prophecy runs like a thread from Jesus through Mani to Muhammad. And yet this thread, arguably the single most important characteristic of the Abrahamic movement, often remains outside the mainstream, hidden, as it were, since it generates heresy. The figures of the Gnostic, the holy man, and the mystic are all sequels of the Israelite prophet. They reflect a mode of religiosity that is characterized by high intensity. It is centripetal and activist by nature and emphasizes sectarianism and polemics, esoteric knowledge, or gnosis and charisma. The other mode of religiosity, obviously much more common than the first one, is centrifugal and irenic. It favors an ecumenical attitude, contents itself with a widely shared faith, or pistis, and reflects, in Weberian parlance, the routinization of the new religious movement. This is the mode of priests and bishops, rather than that of martyrs and holy men. These two main modes of religion, high versus low intensity, exist simultaneously, and cross the boundaries of religious communities. They offer a tool permitting us to follow the transformations of religion in late antiquity in general, and in ancient Christianity in particular, without becoming prisoners of the traditional categories of patristic literature. Through the dialectical relationship between these two modes of religiosity, one can follow the complex transformations of ancient Christianity in its broad religious context.
Download or read book Readings in Late Antiquity written by Michael Maas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume seeks to make accessible to students a multiplicity of texts which illuminate the history, culture, medicine, philosophy, religion and peoples of late antiquity.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to the Qur an written by George Archer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to the Qur’an offers an impressive and comprehensive overview of the formative scripture of Islam. Including a wide number of scholarly approaches to the Qur’an by both established authorities and emergent voices, the 40 chapters in this volume represent the latest word on the academic understanding of the Muslim scripture. The Qur’an is spoken of in scholarship across disciplines; it is the beating heart of a living community of believers; it is a work of beauty and a basis for art and culture; it is a profoundly significant historical artifact; and it is a mysterious survivor from the Late Ancient Arabic-speaking world. This Handbook accompanies the reader into the many worlds that the Qur’an lives in, from its ancient settings, to its internal drama, and through the 1,400 years of discussion and debate about its meaning. Bringing diverse approaches to the Qur’an together in one volume The Routledge Companion to the Qur’an represents the vibrancy of the field of Qur’anic Studies today. This Handbook is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies and Islamic studies. It will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as area studies, sociology, anthropology, and history.
Download or read book Qur nic Studies Today written by Angelika Neuwirth and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-14 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Qur'ānic Studies Today brings together specialists in the field of Islamic studies to provide a range of essays that reflect the depth and breadth of scholarship on the Qur'ān. Combining theoretical and methodological clarity with close readings of qur’ānic texts, these contributions provide close analysis of specific passages, themes, and issues within the Qurʾān, even as they attend to the disciplinary challenges within the field of qur’ānic studies today. Chapters are arranged into three parts, treating specific figures appearing in the Qurʾān, analysing particular suras, and finally reflecting on the Qur’ān and its "others." They explore the internal dimensions and interior chronology of the Qur’ān as text, its possible conversations with biblical and non-biblical traditions in Late Antiquity, and its role as scripture in modern exegesis and recitation. Together, they are indispensable for students and scholars who seek an understanding of the Qur’ān founded on the most recent scholarly achievements. Offering both a reflection of and a reflection on the discipline of qur’ānic studies, the strong, scholarly examinations of the Qur’ān in this volume provide a valuable contribution to Islamic and qur’ānic studies.
