Several Documents from the Cairo Geniza Concerning Conversion to Islam

In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. This book argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East's history. What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, the book provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East. The book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.

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THE 2017 AMENDMENTS TO THE LAW REFORM (MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE) ACT 1976: A MILESTONE OR A STONE’S THROW IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF MALAYSIAN FAMILY LAW?

IIUM Law Journal ◽

10.31436/iiumlj.v28i2.604 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 28 (2) ◽

pp. 449-479

Author(s):

Sridevi Thambapillay

Keyword(s):

Child Custody ◽

Family Law ◽

Law Reform ◽

The Real ◽

The Past ◽

Marriage And Divorce ◽

Conversion To Islam ◽

Family Issues ◽

The Law ◽

Muslim Family

The Law Reform (Marriage and Divorce) Act 1976 (LRA) which was passed in 1976 and came into force on 1st March 1982, standardized the laws concerning non-Muslim family matters. Many family issues concerning non-Muslim have emerged ever since, the most important being the effects of unilateral conversion to Islam by one of the parties to the marriage. There has been a lot of public hue and cry for amendments to be made to the LRA. After much deliberation, the Malaysian Parliament finally passed the amendments to the LRA in October 2017, which came into force in December 2018. Although the amendments have addressed selected family law issues, the most important amendment on child custody in a unilateral conversion to Islam was dropped from the Bill at the last minute. Howsoever, at the end of the day, the real question that needs to be addressed is whether the amendments have resolved the major issues that have arisen over the past four decades? Hence, the purpose of this article is as follows: first, to examine the brief background to the passing of the LRA, secondly, to analyse the 2017 amendments, thirdly, to identify the weaknesses that still exist in the LRA, and finally, to suggest recommendations to overcome these weaknesses by comparing the Malaysian position with the Singaporean position. In conclusion, it is submitted that despite the recent amendments to the LRA, much needs to be done to overcome all the remaining issues that have still not been addressed.

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The Significance of Abdullah Quilliam’s Literary Output

10.1093/oso/9780190688349.003.0004 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Ron Geaves

Keyword(s):

Foreign Policy ◽

The West ◽

Political Issues ◽

Religious Worldview ◽

British Foreign Policy ◽

Conversion To Islam ◽

British Muslims ◽

Literary Output ◽

Unique Status

This chapter discusses the significance of Abdullah Quilliam by primarily focusing on the writings through which he framed his conversion to Islam and wrote as a lens for Victorian society to revisit Islam. A classification of the types of writing undertaken and their role in the promotion of Islam within Britain and internationally in the late Victorian and Edwardian period is explored. Quilliam wrote extensively on the crisis facing Victorian Christianity and was intensely aware of the burning political issues of his time, especially those concerning British foreign policy. However, above all else, he was a Muslim of conviction, and the leader of British Muslims, and his unique status lies in his promotion of Islam in the West as a religious worldview disconnected from ethnicity or "otherness." This examination of his writings explores his vision of Islam and demonstrates that Quilliam’s concerns in his writings remain the essential themes drawn upon by young contemporary British Muslim activists and converts to the religion.

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Abdullah Quilliam

10.1093/oso/9780190688349.003.0002 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Mohammad Siddique Seddon

Keyword(s):

Working Class ◽

Political Activism ◽

Working Classes ◽

Political Influences ◽

Union Movement ◽

The Poor ◽

Conversion To Islam ◽

Class Struggles ◽

Legal Advisor ◽

Shed Light

This chapter explores the religious and political influences that shaped Abdullah Quilliam’s Muslim missionary activities, philanthropic work and scholarly writings in an attempt to shed light on his particular political convictions as manifest through his unique religiopolitical endeavors. It focuses especially on Quilliam’s Methodist upbringing in Liverpool and his support of the working classes. It argues that Quilliam’s religious and political activism, although primarily inspired by his conversion to Islam, was also shaped and influenced by the then newly emerging proletariat, revolutionary socialism. Quilliam’s continued commitment to the burgeoning working-class trades union movement, both as a leading member representative and legal advisor, coupled with his reputation as the "poor man’s lawyer" because of his frequent fee-free representations for the impoverished, demonstrates his empathetic proximity to working-class struggles.

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Rebels, Believers, Survivors

10.1093/oso/9780198857297.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Noel Malcolm

Keyword(s):

Catholic Church ◽

Religious Conversion ◽

Late Nineteenth Century ◽

Napoleonic Wars ◽

Conversion To Islam ◽

Wide Range ◽

History Of ◽

External Powers ◽

First Time ◽

Modern Myth

This book of essays covers a wide range of topics in the history of Albania and Kosovo. Many of the essays illuminate connections between the Albanian lands and external powers and interests, whether political, military, diplomatic or religious. Such topics include the Habsburg invasion of Kosovo in 1689, the manoeuvrings of Britain and France towards the Albanian lands during the Napoleonic Wars, the British interest in those lands in the late nineteenth century, and the Balkan War of 1912. On the religious side, essays examine ‘crypto-Christianity’ in Kosovo during the Ottoman period, the stories of conversion to Islam revealed by Inquisition records, the first theological treatise written in Albanian (1685), and the work of the ‘Apostolic Delegate’ who reformed the Catholic Church in early twentieth-century Albania. Some essays bring to life ordinary individuals hitherto unknown to history: women hauled before the Inquisition, for example, or the author of the first Albanian autobiography. The longest essay, on Ali Pasha, tells for the first time the full story of the role he played in the international politics of the Napoleonic Wars. Some of these studies have been printed before (several in hard-to-find publications, and one only in Albanian), but the greater part of this book appears here for the first time. This is not only a contribution to Albanian and Balkan history it also engages with many broader issues, including religious conversion, methods of enslavement within the Ottoman Empire, and the nature of modern myth-making about national identity.

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Muslim-Jewish Sexual Liaisons Remembered and Imagined in 20th-Century Yemen

International Journal of Middle East Studies ◽

10.1017/s0020743820001105 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 53 (1) ◽

pp. 39-55

Author(s):

Mark S. Wagner

Keyword(s):

20Th Century ◽

Rural Areas ◽

Mass Migration ◽

Jewish Society ◽

Conversion To Islam ◽

Similar Materials ◽

Sexual Encounters ◽

Identity Crises

AbstractDespite mutual taboos against exogamy, memoirs and similar materials written by Jews from Yemen contain a number of anecdotes describing love affairs and sexual encounters between Muslims and Jews prior to the mass migration of the vast majority of Yemen's Jews to Israel in 1949–50. These stories associate these liaisons with vulnerability, poverty, and marginalization. In them, sex and conversion to Islam are intrinsically connected, yet this interreligious intimacy leads not to resolution but to ongoing identity crises that persist beyond the community's realignment with a majority-Jewish society. The staging of the anecdotes in rural areas where shariʿa norms held only nominal sway, in watering places and hostels where strangers might interact, and at dusk, when identity is difficult to discern, heightened their ambiguity.

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History, piety and factional politics in the Arabic chronicle of the Maldives: Ḥasan Tāj al-Dīn’s Ta’rīkh and its continuations

Asiatische Studien – Études Asiatiques ◽

10.1515/asia-2020-0015 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 74 (1) ◽

pp. 195-220

Author(s):

Andrew C. S. Peacock

Keyword(s):

Indian Ocean ◽

Political Life ◽

Political Agenda ◽

Islamic History ◽

The Past ◽

Conversion To Islam ◽

Personal Experiences

AbstractThe Arabic chronicle (Ta’rīkh) of the Maldives composed by the qadi Ḥasan Tāj al-Dīn (d. 1139/1727) and continued by his nephew Muḥammad Muḥibb al-Dīn (1118/1706-1199/1785) and his grandson Ibrāhīm Sirāj al-Dīn (d. after 1243/1827) is major but unexploited source for not just Maldivian but also Indian Ocean history more broadly. Covering Maldivian history from the purported date of the islands’ conversion to Islam in 548/1143, the Ta’rīkh is also imbued with a specific pious and ethical agenda. It seeks to situate the Maldives in the broader context of Islamic history stretching back to the Rāshidūn Caliphs, while using the past to impart ethical lessons to its audience, ostensibly the Maldivian sultans. However, its authors were also deeply involved in the Maldives’ tumultuous political life, and their presentation of events is also influenced by their own personal experiences and factional affiliations. This article explores the pious, ethical and political agenda of the Ta’rīkh.

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