This study offers a thorough treatment of Ottoman policy with respect to Christianity's holiest shrines during the first two centuries of Ottoman rule in Jerusalem. Based on official Ottoman records found in the registers of the kadi's court in Jerusalem as well as the Prime Ministry's Archives in Istanbul, it sheds new light on one of the most obscure and controversial chapters in the history of Christianity under Islam in Jerusalem.
Explores life in eleventh-century Jerusalem for the ruling Muslims, as well as "The Peoples of the Book," Christians and Jews, who came as pilgrims or lived there.
A look at the developing conflicts in Christian-Muslim relations during late antiquity and the early Islamic era How did the medieval Middle East transform from a majority-Christian world to a majority-Muslim world, and what role did violence play in this process? Christian Martyrs under Islam explains how Christians across the early Islamic caliphate slowly converted to the faith of the Arab conquerors and how small groups of individuals rejected this faith through dramatic acts of resistance, including apostasy and blasphemy. Using previously untapped sources in a range of Middle Eastern languages, Christian Sahner introduces an unknown group of martyrs who were executed at the hands of Muslim officials between the seventh and ninth centuries CE. Found in places as diverse as Syria, Spain, Egypt, and Armenia, they include an alleged descendant of Muhammad who converted to Christianity, high-ranking Christian secretaries of the Muslim state who viciously insulted the Prophet, and the children of mixed marriages between Muslims and Christians. Sahner argues that Christians never experienced systematic persecution under the early caliphs, and indeed, they remained the largest portion of the population in the greater Middle East for centuries after the Arab conquest. Still, episodes of ferocious violence contributed to the spread of Islam within Christian societies, and memories of this bloodshed played a key role in shaping Christian identity in the new Islamic empire. Christian Martyrs under Islam examines how violence against Christians ended the age of porous religious boundaries and laid the foundations for more antagonistic Muslim-Christian relations in the centuries to come.
Focusing on the Arab World and Turkey, the authors show how Christian and Jewish minorities survived and even prospered under Islam thus modifying the view of Islam as dogmatic and unbending. They demonstrate that the decline of these minorities occurred in the wake of confrontation with the Christian West, the Crusades, the Spanish Reconquista, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in North Africa and the Balkans as a result of colonialism and the First World War, and the creation of the state of Israel.
In two waves of Islamic expansion the Christian and Jewish populations of the Mediterranean regions and Mesopotamia, who had developed the most prestigious civilizations of the time, were conquered by jihad. Millions of Christians from Spain, Egypt, Syria, Greece, and Armenia; Latins and Slavs from southern and central Europe; as well as Jews were henceforth governed by the shari'a (Islamic law).
In this work, thirty-three scholars consider the significance of Jerusalem in the thought and practice of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. They describe its archeological remains, cultural creations, and tumultuous history from biblical times to the present. But they also probe its rich significance as a religious site sacred to three faiths: as the sacred center of the world, as a goal of pilgrimage, and as a symbol of eschatological fullness. --From publisher's description.
