The Christian Muslim Frontier

An examination of the civilisational interface between Christianity and Islam from the unique perspective as a zone of contact rather than a distinct boundary.

The media have identified the fundamentalist component of Islam as the new bogey man of the civilised world, taking the place of communism. This book sets out to examine what is really going on and how western Christian civilisation should react.

In this book, Michael Nazir-Ali, author of Conviction and Conflict: Islam, Christianity and World Order (2006), discusses themes of major theological and missiological importance for the Christian encounter with Islam. Chapters include ÒThe Christian Doctrine of God in an Islamic Context,Ó ÒContextualization: The Bible and the Believer in Contemporary Muslim Society,Ó ÒChristian Theology for Inter-Faith Dialogue,Ó and ÒWholeness and Fragmentation: The Gospel and Repression.Ó

In this book, Michael Nazir-Ali, author of Conviction and Conflict: Islam, Christianity and World Order (2006), discusses themes of major theological and missiological importance for the Christian encounter with Islam.

The retreat of the Byzantine army from Syria in around 650 CE, in advance of the approaching Arab armies, is one that has resounded emphatically in the works of both Islamic and Christian writers, and created an enduring motif: that of the Islamic-Byzantine frontier. For centuries, Byzantine and Islamic scholars have evocatively sketched a contested border: the annual raids between the two, the line of fortified fortresses defending Islamic lands, the no-man's land in between and the birth of jihad. In their early representations of a Muslim-Christian encounter, accounts of the Islamic-Byzantine frontier are charged with significance for a future 'clash of civilizations' that often envisions a polarised world. A. Asa Eger examines the two aspects of this frontier: its physical and ideological ones. By highlighting the archaeological study of the real and material frontier, as well as acknowledging its ideological military and religious implications, he offers a more complex vision of this dividing line than has been traditionally disseminated.With analysis grounded in archaeological evidence as well the relevant historical texts, Eger brings together a nuanced exploration of this vital element of medieval history. In this way, Eger's volume contributes to a more complex vision of the frontier than traditional historical views by bringing to the fore the layers of a real ecological frontier of settlement and interaction. For Eger, exposing the settlements and communities of the frontier constitutes a crucial gesture for understanding the interaction of two civilizations in a contested yet connected world. This work is thus vital for students of not only the medieval period and Byzantine and Islamic studies, but also for readers attempting to understand the ways in which frontiers and borders shape the construction of identity while functioning outside the traditionally understood state.

No subject looms larger over the historical landscape of medieval Spain than that of the reconquista, the rapid expansion of the power of the Christian kingdoms into the Muslim-populated lands of southern Iberia, which created a broad frontier zone that for two centuries remained a region of warfare and peril. Drawing on a large fund of unpublished material in royal, ecclesiastical, and municipal archives as well as rabbinic literature, Jonathan Ray reveals a fluid, often volatile society that transcended religious boundaries and attracted Jewish colonists from throughout the peninsula and beyond. The result was a wave of Jewish settlements marked by a high degree of openness, mobility, and interaction with both Christians and Muslims. Ray's view challenges the traditional historiography, which holds that Sephardic communities, already fully developed, were simply reestablished on the frontier. In the early years of settlement, Iberia's crusader kings actively supported Jewish economic and political activity, and Jewish interaction with their Christian neighbors was extensive. Only as the frontier was firmly incorporated into the political life of the peninsular states did these frontier Sephardic populations begin to forge the communal structures that resembled the older Jewish communities of the North and the interior. By the end of the thirteenth century, royal intervention had begun to restrict the amount of contact between Jewish and Christian communities, signaling the end of the open society that had marked the frontier for most of the century.

Modern Russia's turbulent relations with its Muslim frontiers date back centuries. Indeed the nineteenth century, when the Muslim Caucasus first came under Russian rule, witnessed many of the historical antecedents to today's violent confrontations. With this in mind, On The Religious Frontier examines the history of Muslim Azerbaijan under Christian Orthodox Russian imperial rule and the attempts of the Russian administrators of the Caucasus to integrate the region into the empire. Drawing on original archival research from across Azerbaijan and Russia, Firouzeh Mostashari considers the formation of a Russian colonial administration in the Muslim Caucasus; subsequent social, political and economic developments; and the local responses to conquest, military rule and Russification. From 1804 to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, On The Religious Frontier offers a fascinating and timely insight into both the period itself and the ways in which the seeds of recent conflict were sown in tsarist Russia. This is important reading for all scholars of the history and politics of the Caucasus, as well as those with an interest in imperial Russia and its relationship with minority groups.

Covering Portugal and Castile in the West to the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in the East, this collection focuses on Muslim minorities living in Christian lands during the high Middle Ages, and examines to what extent notions of religious tolerance influenced Muslim-Christian relations. The authors call into question the applicability of modern ideas of toleration to medieval social relations, investigating the situation instead from the standpoint of human experience within the two religious cultures. Whereas this study offers no evidence of an evolution of coherent policy concerning treatment of minorities in these Christian domains, it does reveal how religious ideas and communitarian traditions worked together to blunt the harsh realities of the relations between victors and vanquished. The chapters in this volume include "The Mudejars of Castile and Portugal in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries" by Joseph F. O'Callaghan, "Muslims in the Thirteenth-Century Realms of Aragon: Interactions and Reaction" by Robert I. Burns, S.J., "The End of Muslim Sicily" by David S. H. Abulafia, "The Subjected Muslims of the Frankish Levant" by Benjamin Z. Kedar, and "The Papacy and the Muslim Frontier" by James M. Powell. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.