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]

Peter Shoeffer’s book-list is usually dated to the year 1470. The author challenges this dating, however, supplying a detailed analysis of the content of the list and suggested when it was printed and under what circumstances.

HELLcome to ameriKKKa! * QRt by PRURITUS MIGRANS * CC: BY-NC-ND

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.

Alija Ali Izetbegović (1925-2003) is one of the outstanding Muslim thinkers in recent history who have re-conceptualized the Islamic worldview and ethos in the context of the contemporary world on the one hand and critically reflected upon the modern Western civilization, on the other. Izetbegović conceives Islam as a system representing a m…[Read more]

The classical Muslim scholarly tradition produced an assortment of literature on different religions including a considerable number of descriptive studies, a phenomenon that leaves imposing questions. Most importantly, how a pre-modern civilization was able to generate a tradition of descriptive scholarship on different religions in the absence…[Read more]

Scholars have made contesting claims about the nature and scale of works on religions by Muslim scholars before modern times. The present paper explores various primary and secondary sources, especially the classical bibliographical indexes that the scholarly tradition under scrutiny itself produced, and classifies these works into three types:…[Read more]

Francesca Romana

This chapter analyses the image production practices of the Goettingen university anatomist and natural historian Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) and the Berlin artis Daniel Chodowiecki (1726-1801) when they collaborated on Blumenbach’s Beyträge zur Naturgeschichte (1790). Blumenbach wanted Chodowiecki to produce family scences for each of…[Read more]

Two art exhibitions, “Training Humans” and “Making Faces,” and the accompanying essay “Excavating AI: The politics of images in machine learning training sets” by Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, are making substantial impact on discourse taking place in the social and mass media networks, and some scholarly circles. Critical scrutiny reveals,…[Read more]

BIS REPETITA PLACENT! * QRt by PRURITUS MIGRANS * CC: BY-NC-SA

This study is a fresh analysis of a collection of scrolls and fragments grouped under the rubric, The Community Rule or Serekh ha-Yaḥad. As part of the manuscripts discovered in the Judean Desert, the Community Rule manuscripts are all fragmentary to various degrees, yet attest to important issues of legal dispute and community formation in the S…[Read more]