Conversion to or within Islam in Some Aljamiado Exhortatory Texts: “Fízose creyente […] i fue buena su creyencia con Allah”

Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic

Madeline Ruth Walker. The Trouble with Around: in Ethnic American Autobiography, 1965-2002. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011. 216 pp. $35. The conversion narrative, which broadly speaking follows a tripartite structure of fall, conversion, and redemption, is a master narrative in American culture. (1) Seventeenth-century Puritans framed their experiences in early America according to tropes of conversion: the new world was a testing ground, a howling wilderness, where a select few would be elected for a heavenly afterlife. narratives have since permeated American literature and culture. Many captivity narratives, slave narratives, prison life writings, coming-out stories, and addiction recovery narratives (like the personal stories collected in the Alcoholics Anonymous' Big Book), for example, follow the conversion narrative paradigm. The ongoing importance of the conversion narrative to American culture can also be seen in its omnipresence in American electoral politics. Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Jimmy Carter, as well as former house speaker and recent presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich, all employ the conversion narrative in their official autobiographies. While the conversion narrative has been important to mainstream American culture, the conversion narrative has been vital to ethnic American life writing. From the aforementioned slave narratives to immigrant stories, which often articulate experiences of socio-cultural assimilation into or disaffiliation from mainstream American life, the conversion narrative has provided ethnic Americans with a template for experiencing and representing life in a polity that has historically sought their exclusion, whether it be through slavery or Jim Crow segregation or through Nativist immigration policies like the 1921 Emergency Quota Act or its offspring, the Immigration Act of 1924. Since conversion plays such an integral role in American political, literary, and cultural life, the dearth of critical studies of the conversion narrative in America is surprising. In Language and Self-Transformation: A Study of the Christian Narrative (1993), Peter Stromberg observes that, with few exceptions, there are no detailed studies of the conversion narrative as a in the United States (5). (Peter Dorsey's Sacred Estrangements: The Rhetoric of in Modern American Autobiography, which was published the same year as Stromberg's book, is certainly an outlier, particularly since Dorsey extends his study of religious conversion narratives to more secular expressions of the genre in American life writing.) Similarly, although ethnic American life writings frequently employ the conversion narrative, the archive of ethnic American conversion narratives have rarely been plumbed by academics interested in conversion per se. The shortage of critical work on American conversion narratives in general, and on ethnic American conversion narratives in particular, makes Madeline Ruth Walker's The Trouble with Around: in Ethnic American Autobiography, 1965-2002 timely indeed. Walker explores the conversion narratives of four ethnic American authors--Malcolm X (and his amanuensis, Alex Haley), Oscar Zeta Acosta, Amiri Baraka, and Richard Rodriguez--in order to complicate the presumption that conversions are wholly benign, epiphanic experiences between converts and their God. Instead, suggests Walker, conversion needs to be understood as articulating a matrix of often competing religious, social, and political interests. As a result, conversions can be coerced or they can be opportunistic inasmuch as they can result from divine intervention. In chapter 1, Conversion and the Intractable Walker uses her book's controlling terms, Sauling around and Pauling around, to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) (6). She gleans these two analytical categories from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: 'You start Saul, and end up Paul,' explains the unnamed protagonist's grandfather. …

This case study centres to focus on 4 recording transcriptions as the main data from an outside-in perspective, to aim to analyze the different illocutionary forces expressed by a 60-year-old Chinese woman; thus, to seek whether there are any illocutionary differences between familiar people and strangers conveyed from her stories. Although some research has been done on Chinese speakers’ categorization of speech acts, narrative and cognitive activities in conversational storytelling, and some have shown that for Chinese speakers, their utterance comprehension involves speech act recognition. However, concerning of the illocutionary acts in conversational narratives, the research is far from adequate. A complete pragmatic method of narrative could adopt both an outside-in approach to functions of narrative in context, looking at what we accomplish in telling stories and at what effects pragmatics have in speech events; and an inside-out approach, looking at how recurrent units function within narratives. The results showed that conversational stories were performed with the different kinds of illocutionary speech act functions not just to state or illustrate an affair or a point, but with illocutionary forces both direct and indirect in apologizing, requesting and rejecting, even indirect in declarations, which had gained opposite ideas from Norrick’s (2015) claim in the denying of this function in conversational narratives. The study also showed that the leading narrator, the lady, employed identity construction in involving more direct illocutionary acts to familiar people than to strangers, and more indirect illocutionary acts in the entire narratives.

“Salvation through socialism”Conversion in the Work of Jack London and Upton Sinclair Andrew J. Ball (bio) The most common motif in early twentieth-century radical literature is the conversion narrative. Walter Rideout has observed that the conversion story is a central element in one-third of all the labor novels written in the first three decades of the twentieth century. A variation on the bildungsroman, these works feature techniques used by evangelical revivalists and depict conversions to socialism or to the labor movement that are modeled on religious experience. Here, a character’s salvation is achieved through the acquisition of class consciousness, which is described as a kind of rebirth, awakening, or recognition of revelation.1 The most widely read and emblematic radical authors to consistently employ this trope were Jack London and his protégé Upton Sinclair. Not only did London and Sinclair use the conversion story in their fiction and nonfiction time and again, but they also both described their own discovery of socialism as a religious conversion. In their work, both authors seek to conflate Christianity and socialism, to prove that the two are compatible, and that authentic conformity to Christian principles demands the endorsement of socialism. London and Sinclair use their writing as an instrument of evangelism that aims to convince their audience that socialism is a religious enterprise and a means to salvation. Evangelists for the Church of the Revolution Jack London’s fervent devotion to socialism is well known, but he is not typically remembered as a Christian socialist. However, in both his essays and his fiction, as Jay Williams [End Page 219] puts it, “socialism and Christianity” run “in the same stream bed.”2 Though London’s “deeply spiritual” interpretation of socialism is most overt in the work he produced from 1899 to 1906, “the religious element in London’s rhetoric is never lost” and remained “a constant for him throughout his life.”3 “Christian imagery and rhetoric abounds” in London’s early essays, where he first begins to present socialism as a religion that is synonymous with authentic Christianity.4 Biographer Carolyn Johnston argues that London not only believed he had found “salvation through socialism” but that it “could provide salvation” for all Americans as well.5 London’s identification of Christianity and socialism can be traced back to his early tutelage under Frederick Irons Bamford, a reference librarian at the Oakland public library and proponent of the Social Gospel who endorsed the Christian socialism of minister-activists George Herron and Walter Rauschenbusch. Bamford acted as a mentor to young London in the 1890s, guiding the reading that would ultimately lead London to champion socialism and to persistently interpret it through the lens of Christianity. Joan London writes that her father’s early acquaintance with Bamford “was destined to dictate the course of his life,” and Williams notes that while “London was too radical to be called a Social Gospeler, he did agree with its major tenets.”6 The sustained influence of this early study of the Social Gospel is evident in that in the years to come, after he had long outgrown Bamford and become increasingly versed in Marxist theory and scientific socialism, London, like his friend Upton Sinclair, continued to approach socialism as a moral imperative. The period of London’s most fervid interest in socialism, 1899–1908, coincides with the time when he was engrossed in the study of Christianity and the figure of Jesus in particular. Throughout this period, he publicly represented the socialist cause as a religious endeavor and privately compiled notes and research for the grand “Christ novel” he planned to write. Johnston explains that London was both “a socialist minister” and an “evangelist for socialism” who engaged in a tireless “crusade” to spread the “revolutionary gospel,” effectively making him “the Charles Finney” or “the Billy Sunday of the socialist movement.”7 Prior to his famous 1905–6 lecture tour, London’s “preaching” was confined to print.8 In 1899, London entered Cosmopolitan editor John Brisbane Walker’s essay contest and won with his essay “What Communities Lose by the Competitive System.” Walker, a millionaire and would-be preacher “who wrote Christian sociological essays...

From a sociointeractional perspective of discourse (Gumperz, 1982), this research aims at investigating the construction of the narrative identity (Ricoeur, 1990) that is brought out in the discursive production of a story of religious conversion taking into consideration the perspective of present time (Jarvinen, 2004; Bastos e Santos, 2006). The narratives of conversion have very particular characteristics, such as working as testimonies of the passage from one bad condition of existence to a better one, in which the contrast between present and past are especially visible. In this paper, I investigate parts of a conversion narrative of a woman who has experienced conversion to an evangelical church (of which she is a member at the moment of the interview) after having participated in other religious practices. The research points to the fact that, when narrating different moments of her past experiences, the narrator realizes different identity constructions of herself, such as being superficial in her adolescence, troublesome in the relationship with her family and unhappy in her adulthood. According to her view of the present time, these constructions work, in the general schema of her narrative, as counterpoints to the construction of her present identity (after the conversion) as a happy and confident woman. Key words: interactional sociolinguistics, social identity, narrative and religious discourse.

In this article, I explore strategies storytellers use to increase listener response to their performances, such as (1) repeating a salient phrase, particularly a piece of dialogue; (2) adding an explanation of the point of a story; (3) drawing out some consequence of the story; and particularly (4) the unobtrusive strategy of producing a minimal response to draw out a more extensive reaction from listeners. This last strategy came to light in a large-scale corpus-based search. Instead of working from a set of narratives, I begin by looking at a linguistic element, namely items from the class of discourse markers like so and y’know in all kinds of contexts in a very large corpus, and slowly narrowed my focus to narrative passages within the whole array of examples. In the process, I discovered distributions and functions for items, which have not been described in previous research on conversational narrative.

The Importance of Being Ezra:Canons and Conversions in The Moonstone William R. Mckelvy Much has been written about Ezra Jennings, the mysterious figure who makes a belated appearance in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone. Scholars have had important things to say about his status as a colonial subject, his hybridities of race and gender, his use and administration of opium, his practice of medicine, and his relation to the developing fields of physiology, psychology, and criminology.1 But no one, at any length, has linked Jennings to his historical namesake, the priest and scribe Ezra who came from Babylon to Jerusalem in the fifth century BCE to restore the temple there.2 In this essay I trace the naming of Ezra Jennings to the historical criticism of biblical texts that commanded so much attention in the 1860s—the decade that saw, among other things, the publication of many editions of Essays and Reviews and the initial installments of Bishop Colenso's The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined, works that incited a deluge of printed commentary and trials for heresy.3 In doing so my aim is to put two habitually segregated subfields of the larger history of reading in the nineteenth century—the reading of serialized sensation fiction and the reading of ancient scriptures—into conversation.4 But my goal is not simply to plead that The Moonstone needs to be read by the light of mid-Victorian debates about biblical authority. I want to show how our current understanding of those debates needs updating in the context of the novel's interests in religious difference experienced on global terms. In what follows I also make the case that The Moonstone deserves recognition as a novel of conversion, one that features multiple conversionist agendas situated in an extended history of religious and cultural strife. As Margery Sabin has demonstrated, The Moonstone is animated by a self-aware understanding of the major transitions in the history of foreign rule over the native Hindu majority in the Indian subcontinent. This history begins in the tenth century with the invasions of various Muslims who are gradually succeeded by the British starting in the second half of the eighteenth century. The novel then goes on to contrast a period of "eighteenth-century profiteering" (represented [End Page 495] by Uncle John Herncastle) with a later, reformed rationale for rule as Britons increasingly claimed to be in India in order to bring good governance to imperial subjects.5 What is missing in this account is another stage that became legible in the 1860s when many Britons came to see themselves as members of an imperial polity in which non-Christian subjects—most prominently among them Hindus like the three Brahmin priests in The Moonstone—constituted a demographic majority that was proving to be relatively impervious to Christian missionary efforts.6 In place of an optimistically envisioned future that would include numerous Hindu converts to Christianity, the novel speaks from a historical perspective skeptical of the success of missions to India and records a state of confusion in which representatives of different faiths struggle with mixed success in their evangelizing efforts. So-called heathens are to be found throughout the novel and may be of any race or religious background. Most innovatively of all, The Moonstone contemplates a time when the British presence in India will mobilize Asian missionaries to the West—figures like Ezra Jennings, who ultimately exhibits an Anglo-Indian version of eclectic religiosity that is ripe for recovery in our post-secular critical moment. Before turning to a detailed discussion of the novel's conversion narratives in the second section of this essay, the first section argues that The Moonstone more generally must be recognized as a response to the vitality of two antagonistic histories of the canonization of inspired writings that became clarified in the Bible debates of the 1860s. To reckon with the novel's conversion stories, we need first to recall these vigorous canon wars. ________ At the core of my own critical narrative is a culturally productive friction between the adherents of a triumphalist narrative of bibliocentric Protestantism and the promoters of a newer, expanded canon...

The following paper originates in a series of reflections on the phenomenon of religious conversion in antiquity and the processes which lead to the completion of the event. Conversion has often been studied as a single process of change, a process defined by Arthur D. Nock in 1933 as "the reorientation of the soul of an individual, his deliberate turning from indifference or from an earlier form of piety to another, a turning which implies a consciousness that a great change is involved, that the old was wrong and the new is right." Whether or not this definition is in line with contemporary notions of religious conversion, the idea that a conversion leads one away from the "wrong" and towards the "right" is a common feature to all of the narratives from the Greco-Roman period that will be considered in this study. Previous studies of religious conversion have used a number of disciplinary or inter-disciplinary approaches, usually from the fields of sociology, psychology, history, and anthropology. These studies have focused on several aspects of the conversion experience, including motivations of the person seeking to convert, the socio-political environments in which conversions take place, and thematic elements present in conversion narratives, to name a few. On the basis of these studies a few models have been proposed for understanding experiences of religious conversion.

The introduction is a pivotal sub-genre in academic writing because of its rhetorical role in determining whether a written work is necessary and worth reading. A significant body of research has examined the rhetorical structure of introductions in different written text genres, such as research articles and dissertations. However, little research has investigated the rhetorical moves of the introduction in undergraduate students’ academic essays, particularly in the Saudi context. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the rhetorical moves in the introductions of argument essays. Also, the rhetorical strategies (steps) employed to construct each move in the introduction did not receive much attention. Hence, the second purpose of this study is to explore how each move in the introduction was rhetorically constructed. This study analyzed 49 introductions from argument essays written by L2 undergraduate Saudi students at a Saudi university. The textual data was analyzed according to Hyland’s (1990) five moves in the introduction section of his proposed model. The results showed that most students employed Move 1, Move 2, and Move 3 to compose their introductions. It was also found that while Move 4 was not used in several introductions, Move 5 was excluded from all the texts. The study also determined lists of steps to construct Move 1 and Move 2, whereas Move 3 was mostly constructed with the thesis statement (Step 2). The findings of this study have pedagogical and research implications for L2 students’ academic writing.
 
 Received: 10 May 2023 / Accepted: 15 June 2023 / Published: 5 July 2023

The case studies chosen in this chapter highlight contrasts, and differ regarding many factors such as biographical background experiences, network influence, converts' reflexivity, the degree to which a conversion narrative is an account or cultural tool, and life course agency. The chapter first illustrates the life story and process of conversion in the subjects' own words, followed by a section in which they are contrasted with the findings of the structural-substantial analysis. Some of the case studies presented are: Todd Kruger, John Summer (Conversion to Christianity), Peter Leafland (Becoming Unitarian Universalist), Carlo Johnson (Conversion to the Jehovah's Witnesses), Carola Kramer (Conversion to Islam). The chapter focuses on focusing on background experiences, structural powers over which individuals do not have much control, and which have an influence on their biography. It also introduces the key concept of conversion.Keywords: biographical background experiences; case studies; structural powers; structural-substantial analysis

This chapter addresses the impact of Galeazzo Caracciolo's conversion narrative on later generations, especially among English Puritans on both sides of the Atlantic. Far from being an episode of purely personal significance, the story of Caracciolo's conversion is squarely anchored in the broader context of the Italian Reformation. Caracciolo is no longer the absolutely uncompromising figure in the Nicodemite controversy which ravaged the sixteenth-century continental Reformation, but he becomes rather a symbol of the steadfast Puritan critique of the established church hierarchy and its pro-Catholic attitude in seventeenth-century England. There is evidence that Newes from Italy of a second Moses or rather The Italian convert , as the book became to be known since the 1635 edition, circulated not only in England but on both sides of the Atlantic. After the Glorious Revolution, enthusiasm for new editions of Caracciolo's biography apparently waned in England, but not in the colonies. Keywords: English Puritans; Galeazzo Caracciolo; seventeenth-century England; sixteenth-century continental reformation; The Italian convert

This chapter addresses the presumed relationship between confessional identity and juridical subjecthood in early modern Venetian narratives of conversion from Islam to Christianity and from Christianity to Islam (and to a lesser extent: conversion to Catholicism from Judaism and Protestantism). It suggests how the process of conversion, and converts' subjectivity itself, were differently articulated in various textual genres, including reports penned by Venetian diplomats in Istanbul about renegades who had 'Turned Turk', inquisitorial depositions by Muslim and Protestant subjects who sought reconciliation with the Church, and converts' baptismal records and matrimonial examinations. The chapter discusses how divergent assumptions about continuity and discontinuity of the convert's intending self relate to contemporary notions of gendered and confessional subjecthood. Keywords:Christianity; conversion; Islam; Protestant; subjecthood; Venetian

The author reflects on a conversion narrative that emerged in the context of a yearlong ethnographic study of a Catholic parish in the Midwest. The study was intended to uncover the practices and understandings of parish life in a shared parish, that is, a parish with two or more distinct cultural communities with their own masses and ministries but sharing the same parish facilities. The “lost and found” narrative of conversion that emerged in the parish’s Latino/a community has roots in Latin American manifestations of the new evangelization but has taken particular form here in the United States. It frames conversion as the outcome of religious education, and it offers both gifts and limitations. On the one hand, immigrant parishioners receive a rich template for articulating their own stories of faith, especially in the midst of the dramatic change associated with migration to a new country. On the other hand, that same template has some polemical and reductionist themes that will trouble pastoral leaders and that may not serve the second generation well. Pastoral leaders and theologians do well to note both the advantages and ambiguities of this faith narrative as Latino/a Catholics move toward becoming the majority of U.S. Catholics.

The intersection of British imperialism and religious proselytism, especially in the context of India, has not been deeply scrutinised by postcolonial scholars. In particular, the complex extension of the English 'Established Church' into South Asia, and its role in underpinning British control, is the focus of this article. Translation of Indians into non-Hindu Hindus, or non-Muslim Muslims—coinciding with the redefinition of British India as 'One Power, One Mind', a theological ideal with a secular translation—is highlighted in two genres of writing: conversion narratives of Indians, and stories of conversion targeting a British audience. This article surveys conversion narratives, examining in particular the works of Krupabai Satthianadhan and Lakshmibai Tilak, as well as stories written by Sara Jeannette Duncan and Fanny Emily Penny. These narratives give a kaleido scopic perspective on the issues surrounding the extension of the National Church into various parts of the British Empire.

Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven (2003) and the Dustin Lance Black television series based on the book and sharing its title, are ostensibly about the brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints living in suburban Salt Lake City, the Laffertys are drawn into Mormon fundamentalist movements and eventually commit murder. But both works have greater ambition than simply telling the Lafferty’s gripping and important story. Both Krakauer and Black want also to comment on the nature and meaning of religion in general, and the Mormon movement in particular. The miniseries shows how conversation about Mormonism has evolved in the twenty years since the publication of Krakauer’s book.The basic facts of the story on which both are based are the same. Over the course of the early 1980s, Ron and Dan Lafferty grew interested in the teachings of the Mormon visionary Robert Crossfield. Sometimes calling himself the “prophet Onias,” Crossfield began receiving revelations in the 1960s condemning the leaders of the LDS Church for their abandonment of countercultural practices like polygamy. He was excommunicated from the LDS church in the early 1970s, and founded his own branch of the Mormon movement, the School of the Prophets. By 1983, the Lafferty brothers had joined Crossfield, only to be ejected from the School of the Prophets when they claimed that God wanted them to punish their sister-in-law, Brenda Lafferty, for urging her husband Allen not to embrace his brothers’ teachings. Ron and Dan Lafferty killed Brenda and her fifteen-month-old daughter Erica in July 1984.These are the bare bones of the story. But Krakauer and Black shape the narrative in different ways. Krakauer’s book, published at the height of the New Atheist movement, centered on the work of authors like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, reads like a sweeping condemnation of religion in general. “Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off. Anything can happen,” Krakauer writes (xxiii). The particularities of Mormonism interest him only insofar as they illustrate his broader thesis, and the book has been critiqued for its sloppy understanding of the history of religion and the ease with which Krakauer blurs the lines between the LDS Church, fundamentalist Mormonism, the terrorists who happened to be Muslim that instigated the tragedies of September 11, 2001, and religious people of all sorts—from Roman Catholics to Hindus. Krakauer misses how concepts like common sense and reason are not normative, but rather are the products of history. For him, the baseline of appropriate human behavior is the scientific rationalism of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Western modernity. In this, Krakauer is echoing the language of Harris and Dawkins, scientifically trained atheists notable for their somewhat naive glorification of scientific ways of knowing.To demonstrate his thesis, Krakauer weaves the story of the Lafferty family with historical flashbacks into the story of Joseph Smith and the founding of the Mormon movement. The TV series follows this method and somewhat echoes the argument. But Black is more interested in the experiences of lay Mormons than is Krakauer, and is less given to the author’s grand sociological pronouncements.The book was often criticized for its seeming inability to make distinctions between the culturally conventional Mormonism of the sort that famous LDS Church members like Mitt Romney practice and that of the self-consciously countercultural movements like the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The miniseries is much more attuned to these distinctions, likely due to Black’s consultation with scholars of fundamentalist Mormonism. Unlike Krakauer, Black builds the story of the Laffertys around a fictional character, a police detective named Jeb Pyre, a devout member of the LDS Church. As Pyre wanders across the landscape of suburban Utah, he encounters Mormons of all stripes, and his investigation of the murders of Brenda and Erica leads him into an exploration of the history of his own church and growing skepticism about its truth claims.And that, perhaps, is Black’s point. While Krakauer’s interest in the story reflects his generalized suspicion of religion, the miniseries reflects the world of the American millennial generation of the LDS Church. Pyre’s journey is like that of Black himself, who has spoken about how his happy childhood in the Church fell apart as he came to terms with his identity as a gay man in a Church devoted to the nuclear heterosexual family, and as he learned more about the raucous nineteenth-century beginnings of the faith. The work of scholars like Jana Reiss (The Next Mormons, 2019) have begun to systematize and analyze the emergence of an ex-Mormon identity and conversion narrative, one that links coming to knowledge about the Church’s past to an inevitable loss of faith and presents it as a turning point analogous to those described in many Protestant conversion stories. Therefore the plot of the miniseries, unlike that in the book, ultimately belongs to the fictional character of Jeb Pyre rather than to any of the Laffertys. It is not so much a story of a murder or of the fragmentation of modern religion as it is an account of disillusionment.Black doesn’t share Krakauer’s conviction that all forms of religion are essentially the same and inherently destructive. Indeed, his series shows some real affection for Pyre’s religious life early in the series, even if it resembles other popular depictions of members of the LDS Church as simultaneously kind and ridiculously naive. Black instead is driven by the desire to point out that the LDS Church is built upon the fraught foundation of mendacity and repression that he believes Joseph Smith and Brigham Young laid. It is not that religion in general is a delusion; it is that the history of the LDS Church irrevocably demonstrates that it is in particular.There are genuinely fascinating questions about the sociology of the Mormon movement in the Lafferty story. How might a religious tradition built on the premise of consistent and ongoing revelation and a lay priesthood simultaneously support an elaborate priestly hierarchy? Such tension has consistently birthed Robert Crossfields. And yet, Black’s account consistently reaches too far in his presentation of Smith and Young and other early Mormon leaders as power-hungry con artists. Factual errors in the series undermine Black’s investigation of the issues the Lafferty case raises, but they do serve Black’s premise—that all religious belief will falter when confronted with history.