Religious Differences

This bibliographical essay documents for the first time the treatises written on the Sunni Islamic doctrine of tašabbuh—the reprehensible imitation of others, especially non-Muslims. Since the formative period of Islam, tašabbuh has played an important role in shaping both Islamic orthodoxy and Muslim inter-religious relations. But due to a focus on the doctrine’s historical origins, existing scholarship has yet to identify the Islamic literary genre that I call “the treatises against imitation,” which was a post-formative development. To fill this scholarly lacuna, this study traces the genre’s historical evolution by creating an archive of available treatises against imitation, pre-modern and modern. Chronologically arranged and periodized, the bibliographical entries include descriptive summaries of each treatise, with references to published and/or manuscript editions and existing scholarship on the text and its author.

This article examines the nexus of Islam, difference, and the
senses. Amidst the diverse ethno-religious landscape of
post-conquest Islam where communal boundaries often blurred,
religious and state authorities defined belonging in the Muslim
community through differences; they felt compelled to set apart
Muslims from non-Muslims and other “wayward” Muslims by
disciplining the physical body, including the sensorium. Building
upon a robust theory of the senses advanced by Abbasid Muslim
litterateur Jāḥiẓ (d. 868/9), I demonstrate how pre-modern (7th
– 14th centuries CE) Muslim discourses and practices of difference
configured the senses in specific ways, transforming body,
object and landscape into material signs of collective identity in
public life. Drawing upon literary and material sources, I narrate
four episodes set in the pre-modern Islamic Middle East where
Muslim authorities defined ritual and everyday quotidian practice
along lines of communal difference. Together, the episodes
highlight the multisensoriality of Muslim difference: the visibility
of Christian crosses; acoustic memories of the adhān (audible
call to prayer); the expensive taste of gold and silver metalware;
and, finally, sensory overload at commemorative public gatherings
(ʿīds)—holiday celebrations, tomb visitations, and funerals.

This article explores the relationship between religious difference, nationhood and secular citizenship in Turkey. Turkey is the only country in the Middle East which applies a non-religious and unified law to matters related to the family. The legislation of a secular civil law in 1926 has made interreligious marriages legally possible, removing institutional barriers to religious mixing in the private and intimate sphere of family. At the same time, religious difference remained central to the definition of who is included in, and excluded from, the nation. Against the backdrop of these seemingly competing understandings of religious difference, this article explores the arguments that ordinary citizens made in favor of or opposed to the second marriage in 1962 of Ülkü Adatape, the spiritual daughter of Atatürk, to Yeshua Bensusen, a Jewish citizen of Turkey. Drawing on the notes and proceedings of the Lausanne Peace Conference in 1922/23, parliamentary depositories and newspaper reviews, it demonstrates that a paradox stemming from an ethnoreligious formation of Turkish nationhood, which has denied non-Muslim citizens recognition as full members of the nation, and the secular understanding of the private realm, which has in principle made religious difference inconsequential to the governance of family, simultaneously produced resistance to and justification for interreligious marriages. If the first decades of the republic laid the foundations of this paradox, the period between the transition into electoral democracy in 1946 and the military coup in 1960 intensified it making the link between ethnicity and religion stronger.

Abstrak. Pernikahan beda agama merupakan penyatuan antara laki-laki dan wanita yang memiliki agama dan keyakinan yang berbeda. Pernikahan berbeda agama masih dianggap menyimpang oleh sebagian masyarakat di Indonesia sehinggah terkadang menyebabkan disonansi kognitif bagi pasangan tersebut, yaitu dimana mereka harus mempertahankan rumah tangganya dan disaat bersamaan mereka tahu apa yang mereka lalukan itu tidak sesuai dengan yang ada di masyarakat. Festinger (1957) mengemukakan disonansi kognitif adalah ketidaksesuaian antara dua elemen kognitif yang tidak konsisten yang menyebabkan ketidaknyamanan psikologis bagi individu serta memotivasi individu untuk berbuat sesuatu agar disonansi kognitif tersebut dapat dikurangi. Tujuan dilakukannya penelitian ini adalah untuk mengetahui bagaimana disonansi kognitif, faktor penyebab reduksi disonansi kognitif yang digunakan pasangan suami dan isteri yang memiliki perbedaan agama. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan kualitatif dengan metode studi kasus intrinsic. Fokus penelitian ini yaitu disonansi kognitif pada pasangan berbeda agama. Penelitian ini menggunakan 2 pasangan yang berbeda agama. Teknik analisis data pada penelitian ini adalah menggunakan analisis tematik dengan koding terhadap hasil wawancara yang telah dibuat dalam bentuk verbatim. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan pasangan memiliki alasan tersendiri untuk melakukan pernikahan beda agama. Sumber-sumber disonansi kognitif berasal dari inkonsistensi logis, nilai budaya, dan pendapat umum, sedangkan cara mereka mereduksi disonansi kognitif yaitu dengan cara mengubah elemen kognitif lingkungan dan meyakinkan diri mereka bahwa apa yang mereka lalukan itu benar.

The aim of my essay is to illustrate the differences portrayed in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice both in terms of human characteristics conveyed mainly through the aspect of one’s religion (Antonio and Shylock), in terms of gender, and in geographical terms (Venice and Belmont). I will present the elements of my comparison and I will indicate in what ways they differ, as well as what makes the said differences particularly relevant for this analysis.

Like Volter, French salient author, Al- Jahiz is a philosopher literate; namely, literary dimension of his personality predominates over his philosophical character. Like other great literati and writer of the world, he was a master in all sciences and knowledge of his age including philosophy, speech, politics, and a verity of customs, beliefs and religions and in some of them he was skillful and adroit and wrote books and pamphlets. Among classic writers, the main advantage of Al- Jahiz was in that like the contransitory and modern well- known authors, he has pondered about realities of life and daily problems of community including racism, differences in religions and beliefs and caste characteristics and even morality and behavior of individuals while ignoring ideal community or so-called Utopia. He did not intend to create an ideal socity in his mind in order to laed people toward such community, but instead he made effort only to identify and making the community known at his time. In his philosophical thoughts and contemplations, he was thinking about sensible and tangible realities like Greek naturalist philosophers before Socrates while he has avoided from metaphysical generalities and abstractions beyond feeling and senses. Al-Jahiz was a mirthful and smiley writer and philosopher and loved all states of life and like Volter; he both laughed himself and made the others to laugh.

L’articolo prende in esame, in una prospettiva di dialogo interreligioso, il problema della differenza religiosa a partire dai dati che emergono dal Corano e dalla tradizione musulmana e più in generale dall’antropologia coranica e dai concetti ivi illustrati di fratellanza e guerra santa
Key words: Corano, hadith, Muhammad, fratellanza, differenza, prova, jihad, ahl al-kitab