This paper deals with the Sufi shaykh Haji Imdad Allah Muhajir Makki’s (1817-1899) efforts for conciliation of different strands of Muslim religious thought in the late nineteenth century with particular reference to his main work on this theme-a short treatise titled Faisalah-i Haft Mas’alah (literally: A Resolution of the Seven Controversies).…[Read more]

Religion, language, and race have been among the most crucial factors behind the formation of various national and communal identities in modern South Asian history. Just like the political division of British India, the complex interplay of these factors also culminated in a bifurcation of linguistic boundaries along the religious lines according…[Read more]

Medieval Hebrew and Syriac scribes both indicated vowels by placing dots above or below their consonantal writing. These vowel points were created in the Late Antique and early Islamic periods to disambiguate the vocalization of important texts, especially the Bible. The earliest step in this process was the implementation of the Syriac ‘diacritic…[Read more]

Dawid bar Pawlos’ Letter on Dots is an eighth-century text that purportedly describes the introduction of some of the dots used in Syriac writing. It also sheds light on the life of a certain Rāmišoʿ of Beṯ Rabban, apparently the same man as the master of pointing named in MS BL Add. 12138. However, most studies of Syriac dots either neglec…[Read more]

The Arabic-script Qurʾān fragments of the Cairo genizah collections have not yet drawn much interest among Arabic and genizah scholars. This paper aims to bring them to the attention of a broader audience by presenting the palaeographic features (§3) and vocalisation systems (§4) of eleven Arabic-script Qurʾān fragments from the Cambridge Unive…[Read more]

This article presents new data on links between the various medieval vocalisation traditions of Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic. These include the identification of overlaps in the Aramaic terminology used by Jewish Masoretes and Syriac Christian grammarians and in the phonological theories that underlie them, as well as connections between Syriac and…[Read more]

Three types of academic sources are crucial for understanding the Hindu tradition in our times: a) scriptures and the classical texts that are available mostly in Sanskrit b) works in the English language produced by orientalists, religious studies scholars, and some modern Hindu religious leaders themselves, and c) writings of…[Read more]

Objective. The purpose of this study was to adapt and validate the New Indices of Religious Orientation Revised (NIROR) scale, which has been developed in different cultural settings, for a study of Pakistani university students. The NIROR was developed by Francis, Fawcett, Robbins, and Stairs (2016), consisting of 27 items for Canadian-Christian…[Read more]

Muslim study of religions before modern times has claimed the attention of some modern Western scholars. At least three developmental phases of this nascent discursive field are discernable. Firstly, Western views of Muslim writings on different religions started appearing as prefaces, marginal notes, and introductions to the edited manuscripts…[Read more]

The Muslim study of religions has claimed the attention of some modern Western scholars. Patrice C. Brodeur, a scholar of religious studies, based at the University of Montreal, is one of them. He delves into the historical realities and epistemological developments that shaped the Muslim study of other religions in the past as well as in…[Read more]

This paper discusses various interpretations about the emergence of the academic study of religion in the modern world. It is viewed that the expansion of Europe and resultant engagement of European consciousness with religious and cultural otherness played a role. Internally, the Enlightenment movement had prepared the ground for a critical and…[Read more]

Sri Ramakrishna (1836–1886) is an important Hindu spiritual personality from nineteenth-century Bengal who is best known for his pluralistic approach to religions, which is based on his claim to have practically experienced the same divine reality through various strands of Hinduism and different religions of the world. This paper pertains to an a…[Read more]

This paper discusses internationalisation of the study of religion after the mid-twentieth century and some methodological implications of this development. It is shown that when the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR) was established in 1950 under the auspices of UNESCO to collaborate between scholars from different…[Read more]

Several scholarly works and media reports claim that the Christian minority in Pakistan is mistreated, persecuted, and discriminated against, giving an overall impression as if Christians are alienated from the main social stream everywhere in Pakistan and that the public at large is responsible for their miseries. Noticing that most of the…[Read more]

Fomeshi, Behnam M. “Green Apples, Red Apples: Politics of Comparative Literature in Iran.” Comparative Literature Around the World: Global Practice. Eds. Eugene Eoyang, Gang Zhou, and Jonathan Hart. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2021. 201-218.