Interreligious dialogue Archives

From one empire to the next: The reconfigurations of “Indian” literatures from Persian to English translations By Claire Gallien

This article focuses on the first translations of Sanskrit literature into English in the late eighteenth century and how they can be contrasted with pre-existing cultures of translation in India, and in particular with Mughal precedents. Following a brief survey of Sanskrit and Persian theories of translation, the article offers a study of British reconfigurations of Indian literatures in translation and highlights British orientalists’ tendencies to either disavow or reject their reliance on Indian literature in Persian. This move towards absenting Indo-Persian precedents and presenting English translations as new, essentially distinct, and superior created a symbolic space where English could challenge and replace a Persian culture of translation, projecting British colonial rule as the new dominant force dislodging the Mughals in India.

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Chinese–Islamic Connections: An Historical and Contemporary Overview

Following overland and maritime trade routes, early Muslims reached China within a century after the Prophet Muhammad (570-632) lived, when the Chinese and Islamic empires were the superpowers of their day, engaging each other in instances of both competition and collaboration: military, economic and diplomatic. Exchanges between China and the Islamic world have produced significant technological and cultural developments, and set the stage for ongoing relations between the two civilizations that helped shape world history and continue to influence global affairs today. The arrival of Islam more than 1200 years ago also resulted in a sizeable Muslim minority population in China, who play an important role between the two civilizations: sometimes as cultural intermediaries, sometimes as political pawns. The following is an overview of the history of Chinese-Islamic relations, including historical and contemporary involvement by China’s internal Muslim populations, with a survey of connections between China and several Muslim countries. A simple confluence of facts-that China may soon be challenging the United States in its demand for foreign oil, that world oil production will peak and begin to decline within decades, and that China acts as a major supplier of arms and military technology to oil-rich, predominantly Muslim, Middle Eastern states whose region becomes less stable as oil supplies wane-all but guarantees the importance of Chinese-Islamic relations in the foreseeable future. Given this situation, the informed observer of international affairs would be well-served not only by an examination of current relations between China and global Islam, but also of historical encounters between the Chinese and Islamic civilizations, which provide valuable insight into the roots of many of today’s political and societal realities. In view of the long history of trade, not only in commodities, but also in ideas, along the geographical continuum that connects western and eastern Asia, recent relations between the Chinese and Islamic spheres of influence are grounded in an ancient tradition of economic, political, and cultural commerce. 1 I made these comments in order to lend contemporary relevance to my historical study. The facts, however, increase in significance with each passing year as we proceed ever

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Rethinking the Unio Mystica: From McGinn to Ibn Arabī By Arjun A Nair

By Arjun A Nair

Research into the unio mystica has revealed what seems to be an area of “real discussion” between scholars of different traditions of mysticism, particularly those of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Although this research serves as a promising start to the dialogue among scholars, it has also raised many questions about a “shared moment” that is nevertheless expressed in “irreducibly diverse” and distinct ways in each tradition. What purpose, for instance, can generic cross-cultural categories serve when they mean little or nothing to scholars in each tradition? By contrast, tradition-specific vocabularies are profuse and often difficult to represent in interlinguistic contexts without significant explanation. The challenge of translating mystical texts, imagery, and ideas across cultures and linguistic traditions raises obvious concerns about the misrepresentation and distortion of traditions in an environment of post-colonial critique. Nevertheless, the continued promise of dialogue calls for specialists of these traditions-particularly non-western and non-Christian traditions-to approach, assess, re-formulate, and even challenge the categories of mysticism from within the conceptual and theoretical horizons of the traditions that they research. The present study models such an approach to scholarship in mysticism. It offers a (re)formulation of the unio mystica from within the theoretical frame of the 12th/13thcentury Muslim/Sufi mystic, Ibn Arabī (d. 638/1240) and early members of his school of thought. By unpacking the primary terms involved in such an account-“God”, the “human being/self”, and “union”-from within the conceptual and theoretical horizons of that tradition, it problematizes the prevailing understanding of the unio mystica constructed from the writings of specialists in Christian mysticism. More importantly, it illustrates the payoff in terms of dialogue (incorporating the critique of existing theories) when each tradition operates confidently from its own milieu, developing its own theoretical resources for mysticism rather than prematurely embracing existing ideas or categories.

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The Sufi Phenomenology of Love Based on the Thoughts of Rabia Al-Adawiyya and Edith Stein

This article contributes to research on the consideration of the phenomenon of Love through a comparison of the thoughts of Sufi thinker Rabia al-Adawiyya (713-801) and phenomenological philosopher Edith Stein (1891-1942). The author studies the poems of Rabia and the final work of Edith Stein, where she discussed her views on divine love, “Science of Cross”. The main aim of the article is a search for the crossing point between Sufism and Phenomenology. The author considers three stages of phenomenological reduction: faith, hope and love. First, the heart is considered as a noematic core and the result of epoché. The second part of the article is an investigation into the second stage of phenomenological reduction, hope, which is studied as a transition between rational and irrational thoughts. In the third part of the article, divine love is investigated as a process of perfection in Sufism and of phenomenological reduction in phenomenology. In conclusion, the essence of love is presented on the basis of Sufi phenomenology, where the principles of Sufism and phenomenology are in contact. In other words, the consideration of love is a method of representing Sufi phenomenology as a new philosophical doctrine.

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Did Socrates Meditate? On Some Traces of Contemplative Practices in Early Greco-Latin Philosophy – Michael Chase

Abstract:

In one of his earliest papers, given in 1953, Pierre Hadot wrote of the lasting inﬂuence of the Stoic idea of tonic motion (tonikê kinêsis), a “vibrational movement proceeding from the internal to the external, and from the external to the internal” (Hadot 2019, pp. 45–52). For Hadot, this conceptual scheme “beyond the Stoics, goes back to more primitive intuitions concerning vital rhythm, and particularly respiration” (Hadot 2019, pp. 45–46). Hadot saw this conceptual scheme, involving a stage of inward-directed motion followed by one of outward-directed expansion, as constitutive of many aspects of Greco-Roman thought. When, more than twenty years later (Hadot 1993, 1995), Hadot ﬁrst set forth his analysis of ancient philosophy as consisting in spiritual exercises (SEs), he divided these exercises, in accordance with this distinction between internally and externally directed orientations, into what Christoph Horn has analyzed as SEs intended for concentration or self-development, and those intended for “self-renunciation” (Horn 1998, p. 39). For Horn, SEs intended for concentration may be seen as corresponding to Hadot’s movement of contraction from the external to the internal, while what Horn calls SEs of self-renunciation, but I would prefer to call SEs of self-transcendence, would correspond to the reverse process, or movement of expansion from the internal to the external

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Ibn al-‘Arabí and the Qabbalah: A Study of Thirteenth-Century Iberian Mysticism – Ronald Kiener

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“Hebrew law: a secular translation of Jewish law.” Trumah 26 (2023): 113-24

“The author highlights three interrelated aspects of Jewish law: that it is a non-state legal tradi- tion, it is neither secular nor religious, and its application within Israeli law results in a secular hybridization of Jewish law. That is, Hebrew law combines aspects of the Jewish tradition and secularism. Using historicist and critical approaches, the author explains that Hebrew law is the outcome of a speci fc history of Zionism and broad secular patterns”

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Sufi Texts in Chinese – Sachiko Murata

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Creating Harmony Through Tradition in Japan – Matthew Teller

Abstract:

The tea ceremony is a marker of Japanese traditional culture, refined over centuries so that every aspect has significance, from the room setting and the arrangement of flowers to the calibrated movements of the tea master in preparing and serving the brew. Yet despite his skill, Yamamoto is not a tea master. A professor of Islamic studies at Marmara University in Istanbul, Turkey, he is an influential figure shaping Japanese Muslim society. His tea ceremony is taking place not in a traditional tea house but before a seated audience ranging from students to elders in Tokyo’s main congregational mosque. At the age of only 33, Yamamoto has developed what he calls an “Islamic tea ceremony” as an experiment, an innovative public workshop in which new links of understanding can be forged between Japan’s roughly 0.1-percent Muslim population and the rest of the country’s people, almost all of whom follow Buddhism and Japan’s homegrown religion, Shinto.“The point is to help people acquire the power of interpretation, the intellectual muscles of critical thinking and critical understanding of this world,” Yamamoto says. “We, as Muslims, can contribute to the prosperity and diversity of Japanese society.”

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Details including registration can be found at:

https://www.sufferingpandemicconference.org/