Mapping the Semantics of Dīn ('Religion') in 9th-century Arabic Christian Controversy.pdf (original) (raw)
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Dissertation: Historical & Semantic of Dīn and Islām from the Seventh Century to Present
ProQuest, 2021
In this dissertation I bring clarity to debates on the meaning and history of religion with a linguistically and anthropologically informed approach that maintains a clear distinction between language and ontology and seeks to avoid the traps of both nominalism and essentialism. The Arabic word dīn, like its Semitic cognates has meanings related to law and judgment, but unlike others, also came to be used to refer to the phenomenon of religion. Religion in this context refers to cross-cultural identity based on cult and belief which grew to socially relevant scales in the first few centuries CE, the largest being various types of Christianity, Manichaeism, Judaism, and gnosticism. This usage is not, as is often suspected, a Persian loanword but rather a case in which polysemy has become obscured by loss of an ancient religious context where religion was more coextensive with custom, law, culture, and locality. I seek to give an account of the emergence of Islam that balances between continuities, ruptures, importations, shared roots, and parallel evolution, and how Islam served as a synthesis, in the form of a religion, between the two major Arabian cultic constellations of the Ḥums and the Ḥanafiyya. With an improved understanding of this history and context, I argue we can better understand Qur’ānic terminology and rhetoric. Using the framework of Sherry Ortner, I argue that dīn and islām began as elaborating symbols that are used in the Qur’ān to describe the cosmos in terms of central-Arabian legal and political structures. In the post-Qur’ānic period, however, they have increasingly become summarizing symbols, obscuring the metaphors and purposeful exploitation of polysemy that is a common feature of Qur’ānic rhetoric. Play between multiple possible meanings of dīn and islām are used to portray the new religion as one that naturally emerges from an acknowledgement of God’s sovereignty over the universe, a concept that was recognized by Muslim thinkers and later discussed under the rubric of al-amr al-takwīnī (“Creative Command”) and al-amr al-taklīfī (“Normative Command”).
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 65, No. 1 (2002), pp. 1-30, 2002
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Journal of Islamic Studies , 2020
This article challenges the widely-held belief, within and outside academia, that premodern Muslims did not make a distinction between the religious and secular. I explore the issue by examining several usages of the dīn–dunyā binary across diverse genres of medieval Islamic writings and assessing to what extent it accords with or diverges from the categories of the religious and secular as commonly used in the modern Western world. I situate my particular counter-claim vis-à-vis the argument against the relevance of the religious–secular distinction to Islam made by Shahab Ahmed in his, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. My findings show that contrary to Ahmed and the broader consensus, premodern Muslims did in fact view the world in terms of distinct spheres of religion and non-religion and that this distinction was used to understand phenomena as diverse and significant as politics and prophethood. Nevertheless, the two categories interacted in a way distinct from the common understanding of the two in the modern world insofar as, under the medieval Islamic conception, it was religion that regulated the secular. My article will make sense of these similarities and differences in an effort to present an indigenous account of the religious–secular dialectic in medieval Islam, one that problematizes the current standard account which holds that these categories were invented within the modern West.
Religion, din, and Islam: A Complex Web
Transformation of Religion: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. by Christoph Danz and Jakob Helmit Deibl, 2023
Thinking about religion is confronted with several problems. Is religion a term to be applied in every religious tradition? Are there other concepts used as an equivalent for religion? Is the meaning of the terminology used transhistorical or not? The contribution argues that in Arabic there is a term dīn indicating a complex and ambiguous meaning before modernity and adapting to the all-encompassing meaning of religion influenced by the colonial domination of meaning at a global level.
The Religion of Islam: The Qur’an’s Essential Notion of Din
Religious Inquiries , 2012
The overall aim of this paper is to highlight a transcendental usage of the Religion of Islam in the Qur’an. I will show that the notion of Islam as a unitary Religion is used in the Qur’an as a genus for religions (adyan) which have appeared throughout human history. This usage will show that there is a sense of Religion which guarantees the essential unity of all religions and prepares us to understand the apparent plurality and conflicting diversity of world religions; however, it is essentially different from the sense which has emerged within the modern discipline of religious studies in Western scholarship which interprets religion as a cultural phenomenon and considers the myriad variety of religions to be mere socio-historical events. In this paper, I will first briefly provide a background on the difficulty faced within this modern Western concept of religion, then I will progress to the Islamic concept of Religion to illustrate a model for understanding the plurality and the diversity of religions, which apparently have their own individual boundaries, yet at the same time enjoy a unitary reality
International Summer School 'Arabic Christianity: History, Culture, Language, Theology, and Liturgy, 2016