One God or Two – the Rationality behind Manuel I Komnenos' Attempted Reform of the Abjuration Formula for Converts from Islam (original) (raw)
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This article aims to show that Hernando de Talavera's evangelization strategies toward Muslims and Muslim converts in Granada (1492-1507) cannot be fully understood without investigating his previous preaching activities from the late 1470s aimed at a group of Jewish converts in Seville whom he considered "judaizers." By closely comparing the arguments against Jewish practices which Talavera outlined in his polemical work "Católica impugnación" to a series of instructions on Christian and Muslim practices that he issued as archbishop of Granada, it will be argued that in his reformist view of a society modeled on Paul's theology of the two Laws, Judaism and Islam are closely associated. The article seeks to determine to what extent Judaism, as a well-defined set of cultural and religious practices, shaped Talavera's strategies toward Muslims within the broader conversion plan, with its universalistic character, that was promoted by the Spanish Crown in the late fifteenth century Mediterranean. At the same time, it will demonstrate how specific aspects of both religions, such as the language (Arabic, Hebrew) or the theological view of Law (the Qur'ān, Jewish law), challenged a simplistic conception of the Abrahamic faiths as interchangeable. Finally, the study will raise the question of how Talavera adapted the apostle Paul's universalistic call for conversion.
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The phenomenon of individuals converting to Islam and later returning to their former religions is well attested in both narrative and documentary records from the early Islamic period. Such shifts in religious commitments posed social and legal problems for the communities to which their former members sought reentry. Specifically, legal authorities were faced with the challenge of assessing the trustworthiness of returning apostates, whether their return was wholehearted and sincere or, rather, opportunistic and deceitful. The present discussion offers the historical context and a comparative analysis of some of the legal mechanisms by which the Jewish geʾonim of Babylonia and Eastern Christian church leaders attempted to overcome this challenge.
The Register of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which contains many valuable documents of the period 1315-1402, is one of the most important sources for the (church) history of this time of renewed Muslim expansion at Byzantium's cost. In this paper it will be analyzed how Islam is being described in those documents in regard to the terminology and the framework of traditional Byzantine polemics. A further topic is the reaction of the Byzantine laymen but also of the lower and high clerics to the Islamic expansion - whether in form of confrontation, collaboration, or even conversion. (The slides for the presentation of the paper are in the talks section of my academia.edu-website).
The “Feigned Conversion of Constantine” in Early Islamic Literature
Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, 2020
This article focuses on the literary motif of Constantine’s artful conversion to Christianity in the context of Early Islamic literature. While it is reasonable to expect that this particular way of presenting Constantine’s approach to religion would have proven useful in the context of polemical literature against Christianity, this article aims to show that his conversion also appeared in literary settings different from a strictly theological one. Alongside the polemical work of ʿAbd al-Ǧabbār, the article presents the terms in which the figure of Constantine and his conversion were appropriated within the works of al-Masʿūdī and Miskawayh. In these two particular authors the story of Constantine’s conversion is relevant to problems peculiar not to the apologetic but rather to historiographical and ethical discourses. Constantine therefore stands as a representative case in point for the diversified reception and adaptation of Late Antiquity’s legacy within the emerging Islamicat...
Byzantine Theology and Islam: Paul of Antioch’s Irenic Approach
Edinost in dialog, 2019
For the West, Islam has generally been seen as a typical example of exotic, dangerous and unknown culture, whereas for the Byzantines, Islam was much better known, since they have to live together with Muslims for centuries and therefore their attitude could not have been uniformly hostile but consisted of manifold attempts to hold a (theological) dialogue. The paper presents some key features of the heterogeneous Byzantine theology of Islam within the corpus of the theological polemical works which have been produced from 7th to the 13th century. After examining the first Byzantine theologian who wrote on Islam, John Damascene (ca. 676–749), who gained knowledge of Islam at first hand, as a civil servant in the court of the Umayyad Caliph in Damascus, the present study examines one relatively unknown work, Paul of Antioch’s Letter to a Muslim Friend (MS Sinai Arabic 448; 531), written in Arabic somewhere around 1200, which is a unique among Byzantine polemics for Paul’s irenic appr...