scholarly journals Islam, Catholicism, and Religion-State Separation: An Essential or Historical Difference?

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-104
Author(s):  
Ahmet Kuru
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Dissent ◽  
Muslim Majority ◽  
Historical Methods ◽  
Historical Difference ◽  
The Church ◽  
State Separation

There exist severe restrictions over religious dissent in most Muslim-majority countries. This problem is associated with the alliance between religious and political authorities in these cases. I argue that the alliance between Islamic scholars (the ulema) and the state authorities was historically constructed, instead of being a characteristic of Islam. Hence, the essentialist idea that Islam inherently rejects religion-state separation, whereas Christianity endorses it, is misleading. Instead, this article shows that the ulema-state alliance in the Muslim world was constructed after the mid-eleventh century, as well as revealing that the church-state separation in Western Europe was also historically institutionalized during that period. Using comparative-historical methods, the article explains the political and socioeconomic backgrounds of these epochal transformations. It particularly focuses on the relations between religious, political, intellectual, and economic classes.

What Did Conversion to Islam Mean in Seventh-Century Arabia?

Islamisation ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 83-101
Author(s):  
Harry Munt
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Conversion To Islam ◽  
Church Father ◽  
Muslim Majority ◽  
The Church

In a late seventh- or very early eighth-century Coptic homily anachronistically attributed to the church father Athanasius of Alexandria (d. 373), it is lamented that, following the Arab conquest of Egypt in the early 640s, ‘many Christians, Barbarians, Greeks, Syrians and from all tribes will go and join them in their faith’.1 This prophecy comes across as somewhat hysterical to many modern observers – at least within its seventh-or eighth-century context – since it is now the generally accepted consensus of historians that the processes through which the inhabitants of the conquered territories of the Middle East converted to Islam were extremely gradual and persisted for centuries. Monumental changes to the political, social and religious life of many communities in this region came in the decades and centuries after the conquests – developments to which many non-Muslims fully contributed – but Muslim-majority populations are not thought to have emerged widely until the ninth or tenth centuries at the very earliest.

Nationalism in Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages

1972 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dimitri Obolensky
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
General Definition ◽  
The Political ◽  
European Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of

The divergent views held by historians and sociologists as to what does and does not constitute nationalism will, I hope, provide me with some excuse for not attempting here a general definition of this phenomenon. Nor will I presume to adjudicate between the opinions of scholars like Hans Kohn who, confining their attention to Western Europe, will not hear of nationalism before the rise of modern states between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century, and of historians like G. G. Coulton who, after surveying the policy of the Papacy, the life of the Universities, the internal frictions in the monasteries and the history of medieval warfare, concluded that nationalism, which had been developing in Western Europe since the eleventh century, became a basic factor in European politics by the fourteenth. My paper is concerned with the medieval history of Eastern Europe: an area which I propose to define, by combining a geographical with a cultural criterion, as the group of countries which lay within the political or cultural orbit of Byzantium. The subject is vast and complex, and I can do no more than select a few topics for discussion. These I would like to present as arguments in support of three theses.

Varieties of Monastic Discipline in Southern Italy During the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries

2007 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
pp. 144-158
Author(s):  
G. A. Loud
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Southern Italy ◽  
Peripheral Region ◽  
The Church

The conquest of southern Italy by the Normans during the eleventh century incorporated what had hitherto been a peripheral region more fully within the mainstream of Western Europe. However, notwithstanding this, in a number of respects the development of the Church in Norman Italy followed its own idiosyncratic pattern, rather different from the trends that prevailed in other parts of contemporary Latin Christendom. This distinctive evolution can be clearly observed in south Italian monasticism during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Bible Illustration and Gregorian Reform

1965 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 154-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. H. Brieger
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Large Size ◽  
Equal Importance ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
New Type ◽  
Gregorian Reform ◽  
The Church

This paper wishes to draw attention to a phenomenon which is of equal importance to the historian of art as to the ecclesiastical historian. In correlating facts which are largely known, it tries to explain the emergence of a new type of illustrated bible at the end of the eleventh century, chiefly in France and in Italy. These giant bibles, usually in more than one volume, were obviously not made for an individual reader who studied the bible in private. Their large size, as well as the richness and content of their decoration, indicate that they were conceived as visual symbols of the authority, the history, and the structure of the Church as an institution, as revealed in the Old and the New Testament. The origin of this new type of illustrated bible is closely connected with the Reform of the eleventh century, and it appears first in the diocese of Rheims, though its example was followed rapidly throughout western Europe.

‘God Wills It’: Signs of Divine Approval in the Crusade Movement

2005 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 88-98
Author(s):  
Bernard Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Western Society ◽  
The West ◽  
First Crusade ◽  
Divine Inspiration ◽  
To Come ◽  
Papal States ◽  
The Church

Robert the Monk, who was present at the Council of Clermont in 1095 and heard Urban II preach the crusade sermon, reports that when he had finished speaking all who were there shouted: ‘God wills it. God wills it’. The pope, Robert tells us, saw in this unanimity a sign of divine inspiration: ‘I tell you that God has drawn this response from you to express the feeling which he has inspired in your hearts’. Yet although Urban’s arguments and eloquence convinced his audience at Clermont, reactions to the crusade were more ambivalent among some people in the West, even among some of those who took the cross. This was a legacy of the ambiguous attitude of Western churchmen towards violence and warfare. Western society in the early medieval centuries was very violent, and, as Guy Halsall has rightly pointed out, the Church helped to determine the norms of violence which Christian society found acceptable. No doubt churchmen viewed their intervention primarily as a limitation exercise. From the later ninth century onwards, as the Carolingian Empire declined, the popes intermittently called on the warriors of the West to come to their aid. Indeed, in some ways the campaign of the Garigliano, conducted by a league of Byzantine and Lombard forces organized by Pope John X, who himself took part in the fighting, and which achieved its objective of ridding the Papal States of bands of Muslim raiders who had settled there, was like a rehearsal for the First Crusade. The Church further tried to influence the behaviour of Christian fighting men by encouraging the Truce and Peace of God movements in the early eleventh century, and in some areas the liturgical blessing of swords was introduced. Consequently, by 1095 the fighting men in Western Europe were accustomed to the Church hierarchy’s calling on them for help.

Why did the Crusader States Produce so Few Saints?

2011 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 103-111
Author(s):  
Bernard Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Armed Force ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
Crusader States ◽  
Warrior Class ◽  
The Church ◽  
Christian Society

The crusading movement was an important part of the attempt by the papal reformers of the eleventh century to integrate the turbulent and powerful warrior class of western Europe into Christian society. Pope Urban II’s aim was to persuade these fighting men to use their skills in defence of Christendom, and to form an armed force directed by the Church. Crusading would enable the warriors to combine their military abilities with the practice of the Christian life. This ideal later came to be accepted as normative by the armies of all Western states.

Aliens in a Strange Land?

2019 ◽  
pp. 172-192
Author(s):  
Brian Stanley
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Individual Rights ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Coptic Orthodox ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Muslim Majority ◽  
The Church

This chapter details the course of Christian–Muslim relations in the Islamic world in the twentieth century. It presents two case studies. The first focuses on Egypt, which in the first part of the twentieth century was the intellectual and publishing hub of the Muslim world, and hence was regarded by Western Christians as the key to its regeneration by the Christian gospel and “modern” ideas of reform. Egypt was also the home of Africa's oldest church, the Coptic Orthodox Church. The second case study examines a younger Christian community within a younger nation, that of the church in Indonesia. The Egyptian case study highlights the dissonance between the post-Enlightenment political philosophy of individual rights and freedom of religion that undergirds Western academic discourse on the subject of interreligious relations and the markedly different concept of religious toleration that prevails in Muslim majority states.

The production ofde luxemanuscripts and the patronage of King Cnut and Queen Emma

1990 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 151-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. A. Heslop
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Book Production ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Illustrated Manuscripts ◽  
General Terms ◽  
Luxury Item ◽  
The Church ◽  
Made In

The illustrated manuscripts of later Anglo-Saxon England are justly famed for their beauty. The expense lavished on the most elaborate of them is paralleled in Western Europe at the time only in late-tenth- and eleventh-century Germany. Neither France, Spain nor Italy can offer anything that is comparable to this sustained luxury production. Modern art-historical scholarship on the Anglo-Saxon material has not really attempted to explain this phenomenal industry beyond implying that the vast majority of these books were made in monastic scriptoria and for the use of the church. If this implication is correct, it begs the questions, ‘where did the money come from?’ and ‘whence the desire to spend it in this way?’ Perhaps the questions are not asked because the answers in general terms seem rather obvious. Expenditure on any particular luxury item is usually in part a question of fashion, and fashion in certain circumstances becomes a priority which determines that surplus money is directed towards its indulgence. Doubtless a response along these lines could be fleshed out by a discussion of the sources of income of the Anglo-Saxon church and of its aspirations to conspicuous display. But any exploration of monastic wealth and rivalry for prestige which attempts to explain book production at this period would be based on the assumption, and it is no more than an assumption, that the phenomenon is to be accounted for by ecclesiastical patronage. The arguments brought forward in this paper will be directed towards a different end: that many of the most famous English illuminated books of this period owe their creation to royal money, and that they were produced, sometimes without a particular recipient in mind, to be given as presents which would help cement allegiance to the crown and serve as an indication of the donor's piety. But what is the evidence for this upturn in the production ofde luxemanuscripts?

scholarly journals The Legal Treatment of Religious Dissent in Western Europe: A Comparative View

2022 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-37
Author(s):  
Rossella Bottoni ◽  
Cristiana Cianitto
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Dissent ◽  
Fundamental Step ◽  
Legal Evolution ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
The Individual

This article examines the legal treatment of religious dissent from a comparative perspective, by focusing on the legal evolution from intolerance to toleration, and from toleration to emancipation in France, Italy, Norway and the United Kingdom. Historically, in Europe, only people professing the official religion were regarded as full members of the political community. Those who professed another religion were expelled, persecuted, discriminated or – in the best cases – merely tolerated. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in different degrees and forms according to the country concerned, European states started separating citizenship from religious belonging – a fundamental step in the process of secularisation of law in Europe. This development led to the emancipation of religious dissenters through the recognition of both the principle of equality of all citizens before the law, regardless of one's religion or belief, and the individual right to freedom of religion and belief.

A.I. Solzhenitsyn Apropos of Russia’s Future: Specific Outlook Features Depending on Different Historical Context

2019 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 327-334
Author(s):  
Inga V. Zheltikova ◽  
Elena I. Khokhlova
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Stability ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
The Future ◽  
Pessimistic Attitude ◽  
Personal Qualities ◽  
Images Of The Future ◽  
The Church

The article considers the dependence of the images of future on the socio-cultural context of their formation. Comparison of the images of the future found in A.I. Solzhenitsyn’s works of various years reveals his generally pessimistic attitude to the future in the situation of social stability and moderate optimism in times of society destabilization. At the same time, the author's images of the future both in the seventies and the nineties of the last century demonstrate the mismatch of social expectations and reality that was generally typical for the images of the future. According to the authors of the present article, Solzhenitsyn’s ideas that the revival of spirituality could serve as the basis for the development of economy, that the influence of the Church on the process of socio-economic development would grow, and that the political situation strongly depends on the personal qualities of the leader, are unjustified. Nevertheless, such ideas are still present in many images of the future of Russia, including contemporary ones.

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