Scriptural Religion Research Articles

THE HISTORY OF ISLAM IN BOLAANG MONGONDOW, NORTH SULAWESI

This article describes the spread of Islam in the Bolaang Mongondow region of the province of North Sulawesi and shows that religious conversion was an intermittent if ongoing process. It is characterised by changes very much along the lines of religious rationalisation in the Weberian sense including systematisation and codification of doctrine, building of formal institutions, professionalisation of the clergy and a universalistic claim to truth transcending ethnic and national boundaries. The emphasis on aspects of rationalisation also serves to shed more light on processes that run in the opposite direction since rationalisation of Islam facilitated the carving out of an increasingly separate sphere of popular beliefs and practices. I will refer to this sphere as folk beliefs in contrast to rationalised scriptural religions (in this case Islam) and the traditional local religion of Bolaang Mongondow, because folk beliefs include elements and adaptations of both religions but in markedly derationalised form.

Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem's Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria (review)

Reviewed by: Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem's Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria Paul S. Russell Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem's Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria. By Christine Shepardson. [North American Patristics Society: Patristic Monograph Series, Vol. 20.](Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. 2008. Pp. xiv, 191. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-813-21536-5.) The place of the early Church in the society surrounding it and the manner and timing of its separation from the Synagogue are especially resistant to study in the Syriac-speaking milieu. Surviving sources are few and their application is not always clear. It is not until the arrival on the stage of Aphrahat "the Persian Sage" (active from 337 to 345) and Ephrem the Syrian (d. 373) that the mists begin to clear. For this reason, studies of these two early figures, especially Ephrem who left an entire library of varied works of prose and poetry, not only shed light on their immediate subjects but also illuminate the earlier, [End Page 780]dark period of the life of these communities in Mesopotamia and further East. Christine Shepardson's study of Ephrem's response to what he perceived as threats arising from the presence of Jews around his community and from non-Nicene Christians within his community offers both of these benefits. Shepardson sketches the outline of Ephrem's teaching about Judaism as an opponent to his Christian community by delineating Ephrem's defense of Nicene Christian teaching against Judaizing Christians, his shaping and use of the Bible story for current theological application, and, more briefly, by setting Ephrem's approach to these apologetic tasks alongside those of Athanasius and the three great Cappadocians. Thus, she moves from shedding light on Ephrem's milieu on the eastern fringe of the Roman world to a presentation of his contributions to our knowledge of the Nicene Church's response to the challenges posed by the ongoing liveliness of Judaism and the intellectual tangle we call "the Arian Controversy." A number of especially interesting points arise in the course of this study. Ephrem understands the casting of the Golden Calf in Exodusas the most important break between the Lord and the Children of Israel in the Old Testament period, which greatly affects his picture of the connection between Christianity and Old Testament religion. Because of this, Ephrem describes Jesus Christ as receiving the mantle of Old Testament prophecy and priesthood from Simeon during his presentation in the Temple (an apostate Israel being unable to pass these along to him). She makes clear how important in Ephrem's life was the imperial favoring of non-Nicene Christians, which left his group exposed to threats in the political world as well as to opposition in the religious realm. The old fears of persecution were not wholly dead. The reader is left with a more vivid sense of how tenuous Christian self-identity was during its formative period (and, so, how vehemently it was worked out in debate). Ephrem's sense of his community's place in salvation history must have been affected by his picture of the Old Testament faithful having been a marginalized minority after the stay at Sinai; would this spiritual parallel not have been balm to the souls of the marginalized Nicene Christians in Edessa? The development of boundaries between the Church and the Synagogue remains a fruitful subject of study, and Shepardson's subsequent work on St. John Chrysostom in this light shows that she is already casting her gaze more widely. It would have been interesting to see her evaluation of the effect on the Jewish/Christian and Nicene/non-Nicene struggles of the overwhelming pagan presence within the society. Would this not have made those two other self-described "biblical" faith groups particularly threatening to Ephrem and his community as they worked to sketch out a satisfying scriptural religion in a nonscriptural world? Like all good scholars, Shepardson leaves her reader asking new questions. [End Page 781] All libraries that support study of late antiquity, early Christianity, and early Judaism should possess this useful study. Paul S. Russell St. Joseph of Arimathea Anglican Theological College Berkeley, CA...

Evangelical Christianity and democracy in Latin America

This is one of four projected volumes to emerge from a massive, Pew-funded study that sought to answer the question: What happens when a revivalist religion based on scriptural orthodoxy participates in the volatile politics of the Third World? Is the result a democratic politics of the ballot box, or is it more like an authoritarian politics of command from on high? Does the evangelical faith of the Bible hinder or promote a politics of the ballot box? At a time when the global-political impact of another revivalist and scriptural religion, Islam, fuels vexed debate among analysts the world over, these volumes offer an unusual comparative perspective on a critical issue: the often combustible interaction of resurgent religion and the developing world's unstable politics. The present volume considers the case of Latin America, where evangelical Protestantism is increasingly challenging the historical Catholic hegemony in the religious sphere.

RESPONSE: REFLECTIONS ON BINARISM

AbstractImmanuel Kant asked, What are the transcendental conditions for knowing the world and for knowing how we ought to behave in it? For Scriptural Reasoners, this question is answered through fellowships of scriptural study in which practices of shared reading and interpretation give rise to practices of reasoning, speculatively, about what ultimately guides and authorizes our action in the world. These practices lead, in one direction, to Textual Reasoning: fellowships of study that define and test such speculations from within the context of specific traditions of belief and action. In another direction, these practices lead to recommendations about academic study: for example, about how well or poorly various disciplines comprehend the conditions for understanding scriptural religion.

P. G. Kreyenbroek. « Yezidism and its Sacred Literature: Eastern and Western Perceptions », in : Dieter Weber, ed., Languages Of Iran: Past and Present. Iranian Studies in memorian David Neil MacKenzie. Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz Verlag, 2005, pp. 69-80. (Iranica 8)

In its analysis of Western views of Yezidism, this article covers some of the same ground as the author’s Yezidism: its Background, Observances and Textual Tradition (1995) but it sets this in counterpoint with Yezidi discourse and brings the whole up to date. The unusual nature of Yezidism and the oral transmission of its sacred texts posed many problems for early Orientalists who were inclined to construct models of Yezidism on the basis of the great scriptural religions of the region. Thei...

Text and performance in an African church: The Book, “live and direct”

ABSTRACTIn this article I examine textual authority and religious language in an African Christian church. Known as the Masowe weChishanu, members of this church refer to themselves as “the Christians who don't read the Bible.” I focus on how religious language in Masowe ritual highlights the performative nature of religious authority. In particular, I show how prophets in the church denigrate the role of religious text by working to create a “live and direct” connection to God through their sermons. Drawing on the ethnography of reading and ritual, and contributing to the newly emerging interest in an anthropology of Christianity, I show how Masowe recast the authority of the text as a political and religious object by making it unnecessary. The Bible becomes significant in its absence, challenging an understanding of scriptural religion as objectified in texts.

Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Africa

This is one of four projected volumes to emerge from a massive, Pew-funded study that sought to answer the question: What happens when a revivalist religion based on scriptural orthodoxy participates in the volatile politics of the Third World? Is the result a democratic politics of the ballot box, or is it more like an authoritarian politics of command from on high? Does the evangelical faith of the Bible hinder or promote a politics of the ballot box? At a time when the global-political impact of another revivalist and scriptural religion, Islam, fuels vexed debate among analysts the world over, these volumes offer an unusual comparative perspective on a critical issue: the often combustible interaction of resurgent religion and the developing world's unstable politics.The present volume considers the case of Africa, the region with the world's fastest expanding population.

Mullahs on the Mainframe: Islam and Modernity among the Daudi Bohras (review)

Jonah Blank. Mullahs on the Mainframe: Islam and Modernity among the Daudi Bohras. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. 408 pp. Mullahs on the Mainframe is an ethnography in the old style and well worth reading for how it triangulates surveys, history, biography, interviews, and participant-observation on some very current issues from ethnographic responsibility to what it means to be 'traditionalist' in the modern world. It describes a community previously known only through cliches and global comparisons, focusing on that community's traditions and the social and cultural devices that maintain remarkable continuities. It is the first ethnography of a Muslim community to provide a comprehensive account of its rituals-organized around life cycles and annual cycles-and, within the social limits of that community, to provide an outline of its beliefs, which have been the main analytical and methodological issues that have deterred external scrutiny. Its subtext is a story, revealed in pieces rather than made thematic in the style of reflexive ethnography, of working around boundaries in an over-exposed world. And it provides enough data incidental to its own thesis that traditionalists may eagerly and selectively embrace the techniques of modernity to reinforce tradition that it can potentially serve as grist for other mills. The mullahs in question are an anomaly in conventional wisdom about the Muslim world, but not in that world's actual conventions. They are part of a hierarchy, terminating in an 'apex cleric,' to use Blank's concept, who for their community virtually supplants revelation as a source of authoritative religious guidance. The community is Ismaili, a Shia sect known to western observers largely through the figure of the Aga Khan and the study of the medieval assassins that launched Bernard Lewis's career. Typically, they are represented in global depictions of Islam, which still privilege the majority Sunni as the unmarked point of comparison, as fringe, sectarian, secretive, minority, and for some dubious, rather like Mormons to the Christian represented by Baptists. Bohras might actually agree with these depictions on a superficial level: they consciously stand apart from the Sunni majority, both globally and around them in Mumbai (Bombay), the main site of this study; they dissimulate as a matter of doctrine and with an elaborate scheme that separates and stratifies levels of inner devotion from external practice; they are in fact few in number, and some of their sources of spiritual authority are beyond the Sunni pale. But not outside the practical structures of Islam. Modern ethnography has accumulated a picture of local practice and belief in Muslim communities from Africa, South and Southeast Asia, to some extent in Europe and North America, and even in the Middle East that restore them to the anthropology of religion from idealizations in religious studies. The latter came to depict Islam in terms of canonical Sunnism as a non-hierarchical, scriptural religion in which the believer stands in a relationship to God in worship and social morality mediated solely by revelation and the Prophet Muhammad. This moot relegates to the fringes not only the rich sectarian diversity within Islam but also the Sufi traditions that are its principal spiritual leaven and, more importantly, even the constant renewal and weaving of tradition into the social life and cultural reflexivity of the times, of any times. In this sense, the periphery, an exceedingly problematic concept in a world community numbering over a billion adherents, illuminates the center in a very special way. Ethnographies of and in Muslim communities over the past quarter century have consistently documented embedded patron-client relations throughout the range of Islamic expression: master-disciple, teacher-pupil, role model-seeker, the idealization of Muhammed as a source of emulation, routinization of which is canonical particularly for the Shia, but pervasive also in the Sunni 11 mainstream of preachers and teachers who form the backbones of tradition and are its exemplars. …

Women in Islam

Anne Sofie Roald, a Norwegian convert to Islam and associate professor ofthe history of religion at Malmo University (Sweden), devotes her book totwo major themes: Examining what the interpretations of the Qur'an andSunnah in the Arab cultural sphere "say" on various women's issues, andhow this interpretation tends to change during the cultural encounter withthe West. The cover picture exemplifies these themes: two young happyMuslim women wearing headscarves while biking, illustrating Muslimwomen well integrated into western society but without giving up theirIslamic identity. The book is divided into two parts: theoretical and methodologicalreflections, and empirical issues.Roald's approach involves exact textual citation. Her emphasis on textis explained, as Islam is a scriptural religion, as "what can be termedIslamic is what can be linked to the text." Further, she analyses how classicaland contemporary scholars have interpreted the text, in addition to theresults of her fieldwork among Arab Sunni Muslim activists living in theWest. This methodology allows her to avoid the reification of Islam - theapprehension of Islam as separated from its social context. She chooses toemphasize the opinions of the Muslim Brotherhood (ikhwarJ) and the postikhwantrend, or an "independent Islamist trend" of Islamists who gobeyond the ikhwan's thought and who are not linked to its organization.Being an Arabic-speaking Muslim herself, Roald plays both roles of beingan "insider" and an "outsider."Her analysis builds basically on two theories: the "basket metaphor"combined with the idea of"normative fields." The "basket," defined as theset-up of traditions in a specific religion or ideology, is a metaphor thatcomes from the idea that a basket leaks from the inside and absorbs fromthe outside. In other words, concepts might leak out and new ones mightget absorbed. Further, even though all of its contents are latently present,what is needed in different times and spaces is subjected to the processes ofselection. Roald explains that Muslims might consider such a metaphorblasphemous, but the selection from ''the basket" is what actually happens.The text's function, how it is being interpreted and applied, is superior tothe text's very existence ...

Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, Power, and Belief. Edited by Anthony Reid. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993. xiii, 286 pp. $41.50 (cloth); $15.95 (paper).

The political and religious identities of Southeast Asia were largely formed by the experiences of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, when international commerce boomed before eventually falling under the domination of well-armed European powers intent on monopoly. This book is the first to document the full range of responses to the profound changes of this period: urbanization and the burgeoning of commerce; the proliferation of firearms; an increase in the number and strength of states; and the shift from experimental spirit worship to the universalist scriptural religions of Islam, Christianity, and Theravada Buddhism. Bringing together ten essays by an international group of historians, Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era shows how various states adapted to new pressures and compares economic, religious, and political developments among the major cultures of the area.

Religion and revelation: a theology of revelation in the world's religions

Since first Thomas Aquinas defined theology as revelation, or the rational elucidation of revealed truth, the idea of revelation has played a fundamental role in the history of western theology. This book provides a new and detailed investigation of the concept, examining its nature, sources, and limitations in all five of the major scriptural religions of the world: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. The first part of the book discusses the nature of theology, and expounds the comparative method as the most useful and appropriate for the modern age. Part Two focuses on the nature of religion and its early historical manifestations, whilst the third part of the book goes on to consider the idea of revelation as found in the great canonical traditions of the religions of the world. Part Four develops the distinctively Christian idea of revelation as divine self-expression in history. The final part of the book discusses how far the idea of revelation must be revised or adapted in the light of modern historical and scientific thought, and proposes a new and positive theology of revelation for the future. The book includes discussions of the work of most major theologians and scholars in the study of religion - Aquinas, Tillich, Barth, Temple, Frazer, and Evans Pritchard - and should be of interest to many scholars and students of comparative religion and theology, and anthropologists.