Propaganda And Un Covered Identities In Treatises And Sermons Christians Jews And Muslims In The Premodern Mediterranean

The eleven essays included in this collective volume examine a range of textual genres produced by Christians and Muslims throughout the Mediterranean, including materials from the Corpus Islamolatinum, Christian propaganda and polemical works targeting Muslims and Jews, Inquisition records, and Christian and Muslim sermons. Despite the diversity of the works under consideration and the variety of methodological and disciplinary approaches employed in their analysis, the volume is bound together by the common goals of exploring the propaganda strategies premodern authors deployed for specific aims, be it the unification of religious, cultural, and political groups through discourses of self-representation, or the invention of the political, cultural, religious, or gendered other. Many of the essays offer critical re-readings of works that are obscure or have never been studied, while others shed new light on the cultural and textual interactions between Christians, Muslims and Jews. The volume is divided into four sections, the first of which is comprised of three chapters on the Corpus Islamolatinum that furnish new evidence showing the important role this “encyclopedia” played in spreading knowledge about Islam and contributing to the creation of propaganda and polemics against Islam among European intellectual circles. The chapters in section two offer novel interpretations of the hermeneutical strategies underlying the composition of polemical works such as the lives of Muhammad and Pedro de la Cavalleria’s Zelus Christi. The essays in section three identify some common hermeneutical strategies in the use of anti-Jewish and anti-Islamic arguments to polemicize against religious others or edify Christians and illuminate intertextual relations between authors and genres (disputatio and praedicatio). Finally, section four introduces the gender perspective: the genered nature of the accusations of Judaizing in the analysis of the transcripts of the inquisitorial court of three sisters who were tried in Barcelona in 1496, on the one hand, and two studies that explore the constructions of identities and gender relations reflected in various Islamic sources from opposite ends of the Mediterranean. They offer glimpses of women as subject (s) and as object (s) of preaching and show how such texts can reify or subvert traditional binary gender roles.

In 1143 Robert of Ketton produced the first Latin translation of the Qur’an. This translation, extant in 24 manuscripts, was one of the main ways in which Latin European readers had access to the Muslim holy book. Yet it was not the only means of transmission of Quranic stories and concepts to the Latin world: there were other medieval translations into Latin of the Qur’an and of Christian polemical texts composed in Arabic which transmitted elements of the Qur’an (often in a polemical mode). The essays in this volume examine the range of medieval Latin transmission of the Qur’an and reaction to the Qur’an by concentrating on the manuscript traditions of medieval Qur’an translations and anti-Islamic polemics in Latin. We see how the Arabic text was transmitted and studied in Medieval Europe. We examine the strategies of translators who struggled to find a proper vocabulary and syntax to render Quranic terms into Latin, at times showing miscomprehensions of the text or willful distortions for polemical purposes. These translations and interpretations by Latin authors working primarily in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Spain were the main sources of information about Islam for European scholars until well into the sixteenth century, when they were printed, reused and commented. This volume presents a key assessment of a crucial chapter in European understandings of Islam.

Despite its relevance to the subsequent development of Western Islamic studies, the intellectual contribution of early modern Catholicism is still an under-researched area. The aim of this volume is to fill this gap, offering a series of essays dealing with the study of the Qur’an and Arabic language in early modern Catholic Europe. Focusing on the circulation of manuscripts, translations and printed books, the essays highlight how Catholic Orientalism contributed to the birth and spread of Western Islamic studies, although sometimes it was still directed towards religious polemics. Among the protagonists of this period of Islamic studies, the volume will focus on Catholic priests, missionaries, religious orders (Jesuits, Franciscans, Carmelites) Eastern Christians, converts, and other prominent figures in the Catholic culture of the time. Special attention will be given to the work of Ludovico Marracci, author of a fundamental edition of the Arabic text and Latin translation of the Qur’an with an introduction, notes, refutations and religious and linguistic insights. The volume is of interest to an audience of specialists and non-specialists interested both in Islamic and Qur'anic studies and in the history of modern Catholicism, missions, and Orientalism

En aquesta tesi hem fet servir dades del Dark Energy Survey per estudiar l'evolució i continguts de l'Univers. El Dark Energy Survey (DES) ha construït un mapa de galàxies que cobreix un vuitè del cel, mesurant les posicions i distàncies de centenars de milions de galàxies, amb l'objectiu d'entendre les causes de l'expansió accelerada de l'Univers, fet que ha estat confirmat observacionalment. Entre els mecanismes que podrien causar aquesta expansió accelerada hi ha l'energia del buit associada a una constant cosmològica, una altra forma d'energia fosca, o una modificació de la generalitat general. Amb mapes de galàxies com DES, aspirem a poder distingir entre aquestes possibilitats mesurant el creixement d'estructures i la geometria de l'Univers en funció del temps.En aquesta tesi utilitzem lents gravitacionals febles per contribuir a aquest objectiu final amb mesures del Dark Energy Survey. El fenomen de lents gravitacionals es produeix quan la llum d'objectes llunyans es desvia a causa de la presència d'una distribució de massa més propera a nosaltres que corba l'espai-temps. En particular, el fenomen de lents gravitacionals febles, que només pot ser mesurat de forma estadística, ha emergit com una de les mesures més potents de la cosmologia, ja que és sensible tant a la geometria de l'Univers com a la història del creixement d'estructures, i és la tècnica principal que s'utilitza en aquesta tesi. Específicament, hem utilitzat correlacions creuades entre una font de llum al fons, ja siguin galàxies llunyanes o el fons còsmic de microones, i les posicions de galàxies en primer pla, que serveixen d'indicadors de les grans estructures de l'Univers que estan produint l'efecte de lent gravitacional. Per una banda, hem fet servir la sensitivitat d'aquestes correlacions creuades a la història del creixement d'estructures i a la geometria de l'Univers per mesurar els paràmetres cosmològics, en combinació amb altres mesures. D'altra banda, ja que aquestes correlacions creuades també són sensibles a la relació entre la matèria bariònica (visible) que forma les galàxies i el subjacent camp gravitacional produït per la matèria (majoritàriament fosca), hem pogut mesurar l'anomenat \textit{galaxy bias}, que encapsula aquesta relació entre galàxies i matèria.

"The Unconverted Self proposes that questions of difference inside Christian Europe not only are inseparable from the painful legacy of colonialism but also reveal Christian domination to be a fragile construct. Boyarin compares the Christian efforts aimed toward European Jews and toward indigenous peoples of the New World, bringing into focus the intersection of colonial expansion with the Inquisition and adding significant nuance to the entire question of the colonial encounter."--Publisher description

This volume engages with antisemitic stereotypes as religious symbols that express and transmit a belief system of Jew-hatred. These religious symbols are stored in Christian, Muslim and even today’s secular cultural and religious memories. This volume explores how antisemitic religious symbol systems can play a key role in the construction of group identities.

Modern Arab and Muslim hostility towards Jews and Israel is rooted not only in the Arab-Israeli conflict and traditional Islamic teaching but also in Christian anti-Semitic attitudes brought into the Islamic world by Western colonial powers. In this volume, Raphael Israeli examines how the worsening situation in the Middle East together with large waves of Muslim immigration to Europe, North America, and Australia has brought about a commingling of two anti-Semitic traditions. As the author explains, the unique interaction of Muslim immigrants in the West with the host societies brought them into contact with local, traditional anti-Semites of the xenophobic fascist and racist Right along with the avowedly anti-Zionist Left, to build a formidable wall of hatred against the Jewish state and its people. To complicate this picture further the same Muslim immigrants share with them minority status in a Christian-majority society. Often finding themselves at odds with the majority host society, they find themselves subject to criticism and censure on all sides. They are engaged simultaneously in battle with both their host society into which they cannot integrate, and their Jewish compatriots who are a model of good integration. Consequently, they feel exposed and lose ground in the struggle for social acceptance. Israeli lays out the nature and ideologies of the Muslim immigrant world and shows how in each European country they create their own ethnic sub-groups and religious communities, often in competition with each other. This remarkable and courageous book will be of interest to sociologists, Middle East specialists, and political scientists.