In this study of everyday religious culture in early modern Syria and Palestine, James Grehan offers a social history that looks beyond conventional ways of thinking about religion in the Middle East. The most common narratives about the region introduce us to the separate traditions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, highlighting how each one has created its own distinctive traditions and communities. Twilight of the Saints offers a reinterpretation of religious and cultural history in a region which is today associated with division and violence. Exploring the religious habits of ordinary people, from the late seventeenth to the end of the nineteenth century, when the region was part of the Ottoman Empire, Grehan shows that members of different religious groups participated in a common, overarching religious culture that was still visible at the beginning of the twentieth century.Most evident in the countryside, though present everywhere, this religious mainstream thrived in a society in which few people had access to formal religious teachings. This older, folk religious culture was steeped in notions and rituals that the modern world, with its mainly theological conception of religion, has utterly repudiated. Indeed, the people of Syria and Palestine today would hardly recognize religion as it was experienced in the not-so-distant past. Only by uncovering this lost lived religion, argues Grehan, can we appreciate the largely unacknowledged revolution in religion that has taken place in the region over the last century.

Product Description: Numerous factors underlie the dynamic shaping of present-day Muslim-Christian Arab relations as well as the formulation of Arab national identity. In Muslim-Christian Relations in Late-Ottoman Palestine, Erik Freas argues that paramount among these were three developments that transpired in the late-Ottoman period, of which Palestine provides a microcosm...read more

Product Description: Der Fall Konstantinopels (1453) und die Belagerung Wiens (1529) durch das Osmanische Heer lösten im Alten Reich Reaktionen in sämtlichen Bereichen des gesellschaftlichen Lebens aus. Neben der Finanzierung des Krieges regelten die Reichstage des 16...read more

Product Description: The Lead Books of Granada is the first full-length book in English to investigate the story of the remarkable forgeries fabricated in late sixteenth-century Spain and uncovered on the Sacromonte hillside in Granada in 1595. The unearthing of twenty-two lead discs, which contained sayings of the Virgin Mary, St Peter and St James written in Arabic, Latin and Castilian, rocked the whole of Spain and attracted the attention of the Vatican...read more

Product Description: This volume contains a collection of articles focusing on the philosophical and theological exchanges between Muslim and Christian intellectuals living in Baghdad during the classical period of Islamic history, when this city was a vibrant center of philosophical, scientific, and literary activity...read more

From the bestselling author of Why Catholics Are Right, a new book examining the history, reasoning, theology, and politics behind the great genocidal phenomenon of modern times: the Islamist war on Christianity. Christians are the most persecuted identifiable group on earth. This is not the opinion of some but the informed view of most -- including the United Nations. What is seldom admitted, however, is that the vast majority of the nations that carry out the oppression, intolerance, violence, rape, and murder are Islamic. While Christians suffer in North Korea and parts of India, it is in Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, and even Indonesia and Malaysia where the situation is dark and becoming worse. The statistics and stories are truly terrifying in proportion and degree and as Islam expands and becomes increasingly aggressive, fundamentalist, and confident, Christian minorities live in fear and face a bleak future. Hatred outlines the history of the relationship between Islam and Christianity, explains what Islam actually teaches about the Christian faith, and gives numerous examples of the experience of Christians throughout the Islamic world. It explains not only what happens, but why it happens, and deliberately challenges the comforting but false idea that all of this is somehow an aberration and contrary to Islamic thought.

Product Description: Renewing Islam by Service offers a theological account of the contemporary Turkish faith-based service movement started by Fethullah Gülen, and placed against the backdrop of changes in modern Turkish society. The life and works of Gülen are analyzed against the background of developments in Turkish society, and of spiritual Islamic tendencies in the transition from the Ottoman empire to the secular republic...read more

Product Description: Contemporary Muslim-Christian Encounters: Developments, Diversity and Dialogues addresses the key issues in the present day global encounter between Christians and Muslims. Divided into two parts, the first examines theoretical issues and concerns which affect dialogue between the two traditions...read more

Product Description: Religious Identity and Social Change offers a macro and micro analysis of the dynamics of rapid social and religious change occurring within the Muslim world. Drawing on rich ethnographic and quantitative research in Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia, David Radford provides theoretical insight into the nature of religious and social change and ethnic identity transformation exploring significant questions concerning why people convert and what happens when they do so...read more

Product Description: Is it possible to bridge two faiths, to cross through myriad cultures, and to seek to understand some of today’s great global crises from the viewpoint of the other? With an estimated 5 million Muslims in the United States, Islam is a faith that invites attention...read more

Product Description: “Accessible and readable. Spotlights an important theological theme in a way that both illuminates its internal development in Islamic thought and presents it as a helpful basis for interreligious discussion. The topic is very much in need of teaching and discussion and is a fine example of ‘common ground...read more

Product Description: Could you retain your faith even if it meant losing your life? Your family’s lives?To many Christians in the Middle East today, a "momentary, light affliction" means enduring only torture instead of martyrdom. The depth of oppression Jesus followers suffer is unimaginable to most Western Christians...read more

Product Description: In "Muslim-Christian Polemics across the Mediterranean" Diego R. Sarrio Cucarella provides an exposition and analysis of Shiha b al-Di n al-Qara fi s (d. 684/1285) "Splendid Replies to Insolent Questions" (al-Ajwiba al-f khira an al-as ila al-f jira)...read more

Product Description: The ongoing Egyptian-Ethiopian dispute over the Nile waters is potentially one of the most difficult issues on the current international agenda, central to the very life of the two countries. Analyzing the context of the dispute across a span of more than a thousand years, The Cross and the River delves into the heart of both countries' identities and cultures...read more

Product Description: In The Praised and the Virgin, Rusmir Mahmut ehaji provides an extended theologically and philosophically informed meditation on relations between the Muslim and Christian traditions, through the persons of Muhammad (the Praised) and Mary (the Virgin), as complementary bearers of God s Word...read more

Product Description: This book offers an ethnographic account of contemporary Christian Palestinian lives in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Through individual life stories, Bard Kartveit shows how Christians in the District of Bethlehem strive to live meaningful lives...read more

Product Description: A groundbreaking examination of the way Muslim thinkers have approached and responded to Jesus through the centuries Prophet or messiah, the figure of Jesus serves as both the bridge and the barrier between Christianity and Islam...read more