Early Quakers and Islam

Early Quakers and Islam

Author: Justin J. Meggitt

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2016-02-16

Total Pages: 109

ISBN-13: 1498291945

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Early Quaker encounters with Muslims in the seventeenth century helped generate some of the most distinctive and, at times, sympathetic Christian responses to Islam found in the early modern era. Texts such as George Fox's To the Great Turk (1680), in which he engaged in extensive, constructive exegesis of the Qur'an, demonstrate a conception of Islam and Muslims that disrupts many prevailing assumptions of the period. Some responses are all the more striking as they came about as a reaction to the enslavement of a number of Quakers by Muslims in North Africa, where, paradoxically, they often experienced religious freedom denied them at home. This study seeks to understand how and why this heterodox Christian sect created such unusual interpretations of Islam by analyzing the experience of these slaves and scrutinizing the distinctive, oppositional culture of the movement to which they belonged. The work has implications that go beyond the specific subject of study and raises questions about the role that such things as apocalypticism and sectarianism can play in interreligious encounters, and the analytical limitations of Orientalism in characterizing Christian representations of Islam in the early modern period.


Early Quakers and their Theological Thought

Early Quakers and their Theological Thought

Author: Stephen W. Angell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-07-08

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 1107050529

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This comprehensive theological analysis of leading early Quakers' work, offers fresh insights into what they were really saying.


What the Qur'an Meant

What the Qur'an Meant

Author: Garry Wills

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2018-12-04

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1101981040

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America’s leading religious scholar and public intellectual introduces lay readers to the Qur’an with a measured, powerful reading of the ancient text Garry Wills has spent a lifetime thinking and writing about Christianity. In What the Qur’an Meant, Wills invites readers to join him as he embarks on a timely and necessary reconsideration of the Qur’an, leading us through perplexing passages with insight and erudition. What does the Qur’an actually say about veiling women? Does it justify religious war? There was a time when ordinary Americans did not have to know much about Islam. That is no longer the case. We blundered into the longest war in our history without knowing basic facts about the Islamic civilization with which we were dealing. We are constantly fed false information about Islam—claims that it is essentially a religion of violence, that its sacred book is a handbook for terrorists. There is no way to assess these claims unless we have at least some knowledge of the Qur’an. In this book Wills, as a non-Muslim with an open mind, reads the Qur’an with sympathy but with rigor, trying to discover why other non-Muslims—such as Pope Francis—find it an inspiring book, worthy to guide people down through the centuries. There are many traditions that add to and distort and blunt the actual words of the text. What Wills does resembles the work of art restorers who clean away accumulated layers of dust to find the original meaning. He compares the Qur’an with other sacred books, the Old Testament and the New Testament, to show many parallels between them. There are also parallel difficulties of interpretation, which call for patient exploration—and which offer some thrills of discovery. What the Qur’an Meant is the opening of a conversation on one of the world’s most practiced religions.


The Abrahamic Religions

The Abrahamic Religions

Author: Charles L. Cohen

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 0190654341

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Connected by their veneration of the One God proclaimed by Abraham, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share much beyond their origins in the ancient Israel of the Old Testament. This Very Short Introduction explores the intertwined histories of these monotheistic religions, from the emergence of Christianity and Islam to the violence of the Crusades and the cultural exchanges of al-Andalus.


Qur'an in Conversation

Qur'an in Conversation

Author: Michael Lawrence Birkel

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781481300971

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The Qur'an is God's verbatim speech for most traditional Muslims. Qur'an in Conversation reflects how this sacred text of Islam comes into dialogue with the contemporary world through the voices of the eloquent interpreters gathered in this volume. In Qur'an in Conversation, author Michael Birkel engages North American Muslim religious leaders and academics in conversations of scriptural interpretation. Scholars, practicing imams, and younger public intellectuals wrestle with key suras of the Qur'an. Qur'an in Conversation demonstrates a wide spectrum of interpretation and diversity of approaches in reading Islam's scripture. The discussions directly address key issues in Muslim theology--good versus evil, the nature of God, and the future of Islam. Younger North American Muslims read the Qur'an in varied ways; this is analogous to the diverse ways in which Jews and Christians have interpreted their own holy books. Michael Birkel welcomes people of goodwill into a public conversation about the current role of Western Muslims in Islam. Qur'an in Conversation encourages non-specialists and Muslim scholars alike to imagine how the Qur'an will be interpreted among North American Muslims in years to come. --Omid Safi, Professor of Islamic Studies, University of North Carolina "Publishers Weekly"


Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature

Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature

Author: Bernadette Andrea

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2008-01-17

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 1139468022

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In this innovative study, Bernadette Andrea focuses on the contributions of women and their writings in the early modern cultural encounters between England and the Islamic world. She examines previously neglected material, such as the diplomatic correspondence between Queen Elizabeth I and the Ottoman Queen Mother Safiye at the end of the sixteenth century, and resituates canonical accounts, including Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's travelogue of the Ottoman empire at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Her study advances our understanding of how women negotiated conflicting discourses of gender, orientalism, and imperialism at a time when the Ottoman empire was hugely powerful and England was still a marginal nation with limited global influence. This book is a significant contribution to critical and theoretical debates in literary and cultural, postcolonial, women's, and Middle Eastern studies.


Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History Volume 8. Northern and Eastern Europe (1600-1700)

Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History Volume 8. Northern and Eastern Europe (1600-1700)

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2016-10-11

Total Pages: 1032

ISBN-13: 9004326634

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Christian-Muslim Relations, a Bibliographical History, Volume 8 (CMR 8) covering Northern and Eastern Europe in the period 1600-1700, is a continuing volume in a general history of relations between the two faiths from the seventh century to the early 20th century. It comprises a series of introductory essays and also the main body of detailed entries which treat all the works, surviving or lost, that have been recorded. These entries provide biographical details of the authors, descriptions and assessments of the works themselves, and complete accounts of manuscripts, editions, translations and studies. The result of collaboration between numerous leading scholars, CMR 8, along with the other volumes in this series is intended as a basic tool for research in Christian-Muslim relations. Section Editors: Clinton Bennett, Luis F. Bernabe Pons, Jaco Beyers, Lejla Demiri, Martha Frederiks, David Grafton, Stanisław Grodź, Alan Guenther, Emma Loghin, Gordon Nickel, Claire Norton, Reza Pourjavady, Douglas Pratt, Radu Păun, Peter Riddell, Umar Ryad, Cornelia Soldat, Karel Steenbrink, Davide Tacchini, Ann Thomson, Serge Traore, Carsten Walbiner


Intelligent Souls?

Intelligent Souls?

Author: Samara Anne Cahill

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2019-05-17

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 168448099X

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Intelligent Souls? offers a new understanding of Islam in eighteenth-century Britain. Cahill explores two overlapping strands of thinking about women and Islam, which produce the phenomenon of “feminist orientalism.” One strand describes seventeenth-century ideas about the nature of the soul used to denigrate religio-political opponents. A second tracks the transference of these ideas to Islam during the Glorious Revolution and the Trinitarian controversy of the 1690s. The confluence of these discourses compounded if not wholly produced the stereotype that Islam denied women intelligent souls. Surprisingly, women writers of the period accepted the stereotype, but used it for their own purposes. Rowe, Carter, Lennox, More, and Wollstonecraft, Cahill argues, established common ground with men by leveraging the “otherness” identified with Islam to dispute British culture’s assumption that British women were lacking in intelligence, selfhood, or professional abilities. When Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman she accepted that view as true—and “feminist orientalism” was born, introducing a fallacy about Islam to the West that persists to this day. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.


Quaker Studies: An Overview

Quaker Studies: An Overview

Author: C. Wess Daniels

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-03-20

Total Pages: 119

ISBN-13: 9004365079

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In this introductory volume to the Brill Research Perspectives series on Quaker Studies, Quaker Studies, An Overview: The Current State of the Field, C. Wess Daniels, Robynne Rogers Healey, and Jon Kershner investigate Quaker Studies, divided into the three fields of history, theology and philosophy, and sociology. With a focus on schisms, transatlantic networks, colonialism, abolition, gender and equality, and pacifism from Quaker origins onward, Healey explores the rich diversity and complexity of research and interpretation that has emerged in Quaker history. Kershner explores comparisons and divergences in contemporary Quaker theology and philosophy. Special attention is paid to Quaker biblical hermeneutics, mysticism, ethics, epistemology and Global Quakerism. Daniels looks at the sociology of Quakerism as a new field of study that has only recently begun to be explored and developed. He surveys the field of sociological work done within Quakerism from the 1960s to the present day.


Holy Nation

Holy Nation

Author: Sarah Crabtree

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-07-13

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 022625593X

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How Early American Quakers transcended the idea of the nation-state during the turbulent Age of Revolution: “Provocative . . . important . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice Early American Quakers have long been perceived as retiring separatists, but in Holy Nation Sarah Crabtree transforms our historical understanding of the sect by drawing on the sermons, diaries, and correspondence of Quakers themselves. Situating Quakerism within the larger intellectual and religious undercurrents of the Atlantic world, Crabtree shows how Quakers forged a paradoxical sense of their place in the world as militant warriors fighting for peace. She argues that during the turbulent Age of Revolution and Reaction, the Religious Society of Friends forged a “holy nation,” a transnational community of like-minded believers committed first and foremost to divine law and to one another. Declaring themselves citizens of their own nation served to underscore the decidedly unholy nature of the nation-state, worldly governments, and profane laws. As a result, campaigns of persecution against the Friends escalated as those in power moved to declare Quakers aliens and traitors to their home countries. Holy Nation convincingly shows that ideals and actions were inseparable for the Society of Friends, yielding an account of Quakerism that is simultaneously a history of the faith and its adherents and a history of its confrontations with the wider world. Ultimately, Crabtree says, the conflicts between obligations of church and state that Quakers faced can illuminate similar contemporary struggles. “A significant and highly important contribution to the scholarship on the intersection of religion and nationalism during [these] critical decades. . . . carefully researched and elegantly written.” —Kirsten Fischer, University of Minnesota