scholarly journals The Sogdians and Their Religions in Turfan: Evidence in the Catalogue of the Middle Iranian Fragments in Sogdian Script of the Berlin Turfan Collection

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christiane Reck

We are able to verify the variety of the religions of the Sogdians by the text fragments found in the Turfan oasis (East Turkistan, today’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China). They are housed in several libraries and museums in Europe, Japan, and China. The Berlin Turfan collection contains a large part of them. The catalogue of the Sogdian text fragments in the indigenous Sogdian script of that collection was completed in 2018. The fragments represent parts of the literature of Christian, Manichaean and Buddhist communities in Turfan from the eighth to eleventh century CE. The best represented religion in the homeland of the Sogdians is a type of the Zoroastrian religion, as evidenced by archaeological findings and wall paintings. However, there are only very few texts found in Turfan and other locations in Central Asia which could be interpreted as Zoroastrian. The discussion about the religious affiliation of those texts is going on. The religious background of some other text fragments from Turfan is difficult to identify as well. Two of these examples will be published here. A remarkable feature of the religious communities in Turfan is the multilingual character of their literature, reflecting the development and path of the believers and the multi-ethnical structure of the community.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 286-288
Author(s):  
Therese Martin

The year 2018 saw the publication of two important monographs, each with groundbreaking scholarship on complementary aspects of monasticism; together they offer a clear path forward for Medieval Studies as a whole. While Fiona Griffiths’s Nuns’ Priests’ Tales and Steven Vanderputten’s Dark Age Nunneries approach the essentially interrelated natures of men’s and women’s medieval monasticism from different perspectives, it is by reading them in concert that one becomes aware of the paradigm shift they signal. In a welcome change from a traditional consideration of so-called “double” monasteries as neither fish nor fowl, Griffiths and Vanderputten offer a feast of evidence for the multiple levels of interactions between the genders—including priests and nuns, students and teachers, patrons, family members, and rulers, as well as the conventionally understood mixed religious communities of monks and nuns—at majority female monasteries in Western Christendom from the early through central Middle Ages. Vanderputten starts at the beginning of the ninth century and carries his investigation forward to the mid-eleventh, at which point Griffiths launches her study, moving the matter on from the late eleventh century into the early thirteenth.


2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 339-371 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Gould

Notwithstanding its value as the earliest extant New Persian treatment of the art of rhetoric, Rādūyānī's Interpreter of Rhetoric (Tarjumān al-Balāgha) has yet to be read from the vantage point of comparative poetics. Composed in the Ferghana region of modern Central Asia between the end of the eleventh century and the beginning of the twelfth century, Rādūyānī's vernacularization of classical Arabic norms inaugurated literary theory in the New Persian language. I argue here that Rādūyānī's vernacularization is most consequential with respect to its transformation of the classical Arabic tropes of metaphor (istiʿāra) and comparison (tashbīh) to suit the new exigencies of a New Persian literary culture. In reversing the relation between metaphor and comparison enshrined in Arabic aesthetics, Rādūyānī concretized the Persian contribution to the global study of literary form.


2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Haimei Jia ◽  
Chao Ma ◽  
Mengting Lu ◽  
Jianping Fu ◽  
Lance E. Rodewald ◽  
...  

2016 ◽  

This volume has as its subject reflections on religious affiliation in the theory of law, political constitutions and the reality of law in Eastern Europe. How did parliamentary representations, religious communities, scholars and writers imagine an ethnically as well as religiously heterogenous society? How did changes in power affect the life and the institutions of the various religious communities? On which levels did religious law, enlightened reason and state law compete against each other? How was ethnic and religious coexistence conceived theoretically and enacted locally? The contributions to this volume, presenting the outcome of an international conference held in Lviv, discuss these questions from the perspectives of historical, anthropological, legal and literary sciences.


2012 ◽  
Vol 33 (12) ◽  
pp. 3886-3906 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Veroustraete ◽  
Q. Li ◽  
W. W. Verstraeten ◽  
X. Chen ◽  
J. Li ◽  
...  

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 233
Author(s):  
Vladimir Bakrač ◽  
Danijela Vuković-Ćalasan ◽  
Predrag Živković ◽  
Rade Šarović

The process of converting individuals to a particular religious community is one of the issues addressed by the Sociology of Religion. In the post-socialist Montenegrin society, there have been research works related to dominant religious communities, the Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, and the Islamic, while science has shown no interest in small religious groups. The Adventist movement in Montenegro, although present for a long period of time, has failed to mobilise individuals for conversion to a greater extent. Therefore, this research aims to find out when, under what conditions and in what way the individuals in Montenegro, as a post-socialist state, chose Adventism as religious affiliation, what affected this process the most, and were there any specificities in that regard. This paper is a result of a survey conducted via an in-depth interview with 17 believers of the Adventist Church. The obtained results indicate several valuable data: most respondents accepted the Adventist movement in Montenegro in the early 1990s; they got first-hand knowledge of this religion from their friends or wider family members and relatives, a consistent interpretation of the Holy Bible is the main reason for conversion. A significant factor in the process of conversion to Adventism is early religious socialisation within a family.


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