Dhimmis And Others

Islam has always had ambivalent relations with Judaism and Christianity, as also with Jews and Christians. The awkwardness of their character has been accentuated by the creation and perpetuation, on all sides, of partial and ill-intentioned images during the middle ages and by political developments in the modern period. Since the beginning of serious modern study of Islam in the west, these relations have found an important place in scholars' interest, partly because many of those in the west who have studied Islam have been Jews, with a natural attraction to an interest in those topics which affected Jews and other minorities in the Islamic environment. In this volume, we have tried to assemble a collection of papers which reflect something of the diversity of the problems offered by this range of relations. We have also attempted to reflect, in the variety of the papers and the topics discussed in them, the rich variety of approach adopted by scholars over the last century and a half of such study. Israel Oriental Studies has ceased publication with volume 20.

Analysing the rules governing the treatment of foreigners in Islam and situating them in their historical, political, and legal context, this book sets out a new framework for understanding these rules as part of a wider problem of governing through law amidst pluralism.

Dhimmitude is thus discussed from the perspective of Muslim theory, and also in regard to divergent Christian attitudes to Jews and Zionism."--BOOK JACKET.

The question of tolerance and Islam is not a new one. Polemicists are certain that Islam is not a tolerant religion. As evidence they point to the rules governing the treatment of non-Muslim permanent residents in Muslim lands, namely the dhimmi rules that are at the center of this study. These rules, when read in isolation, are certainly discriminatory in nature. They legitimate discriminatory treatment on grounds of what could be said to be religious faith and religious difference. The dhimmi rules are often invoked as proof-positive of the inherent intolerance of the Islamic faith (and thereby of any believing Muslim) toward the non-Muslim. This book addresses the problem of the concept of 'tolerance' for understanding the significance of the dhimmi rules that governed and regulated non-Muslim permanent residents in Islamic lands. In doing so, it suggests that the Islamic legal treatment of non-Muslims is symptomatic of the more general challenge of governing a diverse polity. Far from being constitutive of an Islamic ethos, the dhimmi rules raise important thematic questions about Rule of Law, governance, and how the pursuit of pluralism through the institutions of law and governance is a messy business. As argued throughout this book, an inescapable, and all-too-often painful, bottom line in the pursuit of pluralism is that it requires impositions and limitations on freedoms that are considered central and fundamental to an individual's well-being, but which must be limited for some people in some circumstances for reasons extending well beyond the claims of a given individual. A comparison to recent cases from the United States, United Kingdom, and the European Court of Human Rights reveals that however different and distant premodern Islamic and modern democratic societies may be in terms of time, space, and values, legal systems face similar challenges when governing a populace in which minority and majority groups diverge on the meaning and implication of values deemed fundamental to a particular polity.

Examines the treatment of non-Arab people under the rule of the Muslims and collects historical documents related to this subject

The interaction between Muslims and the other religious denominations of the Middle East in the period 620-1020 is the subject of this volume. This is arguably the single most important issue in the history of the early Islamic Middle East, since the Muslims were initially a minority in the lands that they had conquered and so had to reach some modus vivendi with the various religious communities in their realm. Fifteen articles by leading scholars shed light on this process from a number of different perspectives: historical, conceptual, legal, social and theological. An introduction both gives an overview and examines possibilities for future research. The period under study is demarcated at one end by the Prophet Muhammed (d. 632) who, as the Qur’an tells us, had to deal with Jews, Christians and polytheists. At the other end lies the great legal/political thinker Manardi (d. ca. 1020), by whose time the Middle East had become substantially Islamicised.

In two waves of Islamic expansion the Christian and Jewish populations of the Mediterranean regions and Mesopotamia, who had developed the most prestigious civilizations of the time, were conquered by jihad. Millions of Christians from Spain, Egypt, Syria, Greece, and Armenia; Latins and Slavs from southern and central Europe; as well as Jews were henceforth governed by the shari'a (Islamic law).

This book traces the history of conflict and contact between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Ottoman Middle East prior to 1914.

In the book of Genesis, God bestows a new name upon Abram--Abraham, a father of many nations. With this name and his Covenant, Abraham would become the patriarch of three of the world's major religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Connected by their mutual--if differentiated--veneration of the One God proclaimed by Abraham, these traditions share much beyond their origins in the ancient Israel of the Old Testament. This Very Short Introduction explores the intertwined histories of these monotheistic religions, from the emergence of Christianity and Islam to the violence of the Crusades and the cultural exchanges of al-Andalus. Each religion continues to be shaped by this history but has also reacted to the forces of modernity and politics. Movements such as the Reformation and that led by seventh-century Kharijites have emerged, intentioned to reform or restore traditional religious practice but quite different in their goals and effects. Relationships with states, among them Israel and Saudi Arabia, have also figured importantly in their development. The Abrahamic Religions: A Very Short Introduction brings these traditions together into a common narrative, lending much needed context to the story of Abraham and his descendants. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

This book is about the transformation of Europe into "Eurabia," a cultural and political appendage of the Arab/Muslim world. Eurabia is fundamentally anti-Christian, anti-Western, anti-American, and antisemitic. The institution responsible for this transformation, and that continues to propagate its ideological message, is the Euro-Arab Dialogue, developed by European and Arab politicians and intellectuals over the past thirty years.--From publisher description.