Browsing by Subject "History, Middle Eastern"
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Item Open Access Human Perfection in the Thought of Bābai the Great: Tradition and Development in East Syrian Theology(2022) Tilley, NathanThis dissertation examines the development of ideas about human nature and perfection in late East Syriac Christian thought through the writings of Bābai the Great (c. 551-628). It argues that Bābai develops an East Syrian approach to transformative participation in God that allows his theology to be seen as a localized analogue to deification. In terms of intellectual history, I also show how Bābai’s writings consistently use other late ancient sciences to construct his theological anthropology, especially Greek medicine and philosophy transmitted into Syriac through the work of an active translation movement. Bābai wrote at a significant stage in the development of Christian theology, practices, and institutions in the Sasanian Empire. As a monastic and ecclesial leader, he played a central role in this process during his lifetime and through the influence of his writings on later generations. For this reason, Bābai’s writings demonstrate important developments in dyophysite or Antiochene theological anthropology and reflect currents in the vibrant intellectual atmosphere of late ancient Mesopotamia.
First, I show how Bābai’s formal Christological theory of two hypostases (qnōmē) in a union of person (parṣōpā) allows him to develop a dyophysite version of the exchange of properties. The human nature of Jesus receives everything of divinity except nature. But Bābai applies this exchange asymmetrically, likely due to his opponents who appeared to endanger the transcendence of God. Second, I trace how Bābai’s dyophysite emphasis on preserving the order of nature licenses his use of medical knowledge for theology. Bābai uses late ancient biology to analyze the delayed ensoulment of Christ in the womb while defending his Christological theory. In doing so, he argues for the near non-separability of body and soul. Moreover, his use of biology indicates that Bābai is one of the earliest instances of East Syrian medicalization in theology, a development usually placed later in the 7th century. Third, Bābai’s conflicts with competing ascetic groups claiming perfection in this life allowed him to develop a dialectic of preparatory natural perfection leading to superadded eschatological perfection. By re-reading the work of Evagrius of Pontus against his opponents, Bābai outlines the ascetic and sacramental path of progress in this life and the gift of spiritual perfection in the next. Finally, I argue that Bābai’s idea of the resurrection reflects his ideas about the transformation that human nature undergoes in participation in God. His understanding of the resurrection body preserves specific lineaments of human form while also indicating their healing and suffusion with divine light. In discussing the resurrection body, Bābai also offers an idiosyncratic argument that the wounds of Christ in Jn 20.20 were a temporary but real miracle. In sum, Bābai reflects a significant development of earlier traditions of East Syrian towards a robust theology of human perfection in which human nature is transformed by participation in God.
Item Open Access Muslim Distinction: Imitation and the Anxiety of Jewish, Christian, and Other Influences(2012) Patel, YoushaaContrary to later Muslim tradition, the first Muslims initially looked favorably upon assimilating Jewish and Christian religious and cultural practices. As Muslim collective religious identity conjoined with political power, Muslims changed their religious policy from imitation to distinction; they began to define themselves both above and against their arch-religious rivals. They visibly and publicly materialized their unique brand of monotheism into a distinct religious community.
This dissertation is the first attempt to map the Muslim religious discourse that expressed this deliberate turn away from Jews, Christians, and others across pre-modern Islamic history. First, I argue that this discourse functions as a prism through which to view the interplay of religion and politics; a key function of both empire and religion in a pre-modern Muslim context was to uphold hierarchical social distinctions. Next, I show that Muslims imagined these distinctions in very concrete terms. In contrast to conventional studies that emphasize the role of abstract doctrine in making Islam a distinct religion, this study highlights the aesthetic mediation of Muslim distinction through everyday quotidian practice such as dress, hairstyle, ritual, festivals, funerary rites, and bodily gestures - what Sigmund Freud has called, "The Narcissism of Minor Differences." These acts of distinction illustrate that Muslim religious identity was not shaped in a social and cultural vacuum; its construction overlapped with that of ethnicity, gender, class, and the even the human. What this study reveals, then, is how Muslims attempted to fashion more than just a distinct religion, but an ideal moral order, or social imaginary. In this robust Muslim social imaginary, human beings were mimetic creatures; becoming, or subject-formation, was inextricably related to belonging, being part of a community. Despite the conscious attempt of religious scholars to normalize Muslim distinction, this study contests that both elite and ordinary Muslims continued to imitate, and ultimately assimilate, foreign practices within a Near Eastern cultural landscape of sharedness.
Drawing upon approaches from religious studies, history, and anthropology, this interdisciplinary study foregrounds both text and theory. It interweaves theories of difference, imitation (mimesis), power, embodiment, semiotics and aesthetics with a broad range of Arabic literary texts spanning theology, law, Quranic exegesis, prophetic traditions, ethics, mysticism, historical chronicles, and biography. More specifically, this study highlights the critical role of prophetic utterances (hadith) in shaping the Islamic discourses of Shari'a and Sufism. It foregrounds the contributions of two pre-modern Damascene religious scholars in their historical contexts: the controversial Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), and the underappreciated Najm al-Din al-Ghazzi; (d. 1651), who authored a remarkable encyclopedia of mimesis and distinction hitherto ignored in both Euro-American and Islamic scholarship.
Item Open Access The Persian Persecution: Martyrdom, Politics, and Religious Identity in Late Ancient Syriac Christianity(2011) Smith, Kyle RichardAccording to the Syriac Acts of the Persian Martyrs, the Sasanian king Shapur II began persecuting Christians in Persia soon after Constantine's death in 337 CE. Previous studies of the Acts (and related material) set Shapur's persecution within the context of Constantine's support for Christianity in the Roman Empire. Religious allegiances are said to have been further amplified during the Roman-Persian war over Rome's Mesopotamian provinces that followed Constantine's death. According to most interpretations, by the mid-fourth century Christianitas had become coextensive with Romanitas: Persian Christians were persecuted because they worshipped Caesar's god and, thereby, allied themselves with Rome.
By contrast, this dissertation reconsiders Christian historical narratives, the rhetorical and identity-shaping nature of the martyrological genre, and assumptions about the clear divisions of religious groups in late antiquity. Although the notion of Christianity as a "Roman" religion can be found in some of the historiography of persecution in Persia, our knowledge about Christians in fourth-century Persia is a harmonized event history woven from a tapestry of vague and conflicting sources that often exhibit later religious, political, and hagiographical agendas.
To demonstrate how Shapur's persecution came to be interpreted as the result of religious changes within the Roman Empire, the dissertation first reconsiders how Constantine is imagined as a patron of the Christians of Persia in Syriac and Greek sources. The second part looks at the ways by which constructed imperial ideals territorialized "religion" in the post-Constantinian era. Finally, the third part presents the first English translations of the Martyrdom and History of Simeon bar Sabba'e, a fourth-century Persian bishop whose martyr acts are central to the historiography of the period.
Item Open Access The Qur'an after Babel: Translating and Printing the Qur'an in Late Ottoman and Modern Turkey(2009) Wilson, Michael BrettThis dissertation examines the translation and printing of the Qur'an in the late Ottoman Empire and the early years of the Republic of Turkey (1820-1938). As most Islamic scholars deem the Qur'an inimitable divine speech, the idea of translating the Qur'an has been surrounded with concern since the first centuries of Islam; printing aroused fears about ritual purity and threatened the traditional trade of the scribes. This study examines how Turkish Muslims challenged these concerns and asserted the necessity to print and translate the Qur'an in order to make the text more accessible.
With the spread of the printing press and literacy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Qur'an translations have become increasingly important as means of transmitting the meaning of the text to expanding audiences. I investigate the rise of Qur'an translation through a historical survey of Ottoman and Turkish language translations and an examination of the debates surrounding them waged in periodicals, government archives, and monographs. While Turkish translations have often been construed as a product of nationalism, I argue that the rise of translation began with a renewed emphasis on the Qur'anic theme of intelligibility bolstered by the availability of printed books, the spread of state schools, and increased knowledge of European history and intellectual currents. Turkish nationalists later adopted and advocated the issue, reconstruing the "Turkish Qur'an" as a nationalist symbol.
Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the meaning of Qur'an translation itself has changed and incorporated a variety of new concerns. Asserting translation of the Qur'an in the late Ottoman Empire became synecdoche for a new vision of Muslim authority and modernity that reduced the role of the ulama and created space for interpretive plurality on an unprecedented scale. Meanwhile, some Turkish intellectuals came to appreciate the symbolic value of Turkish renderings for the assertion of national identity in the Islamic sphere. While the notion of translation as replacement has withered, in practice, translations have come to play a robust role in Turkish Muslim life as supplement and counterpoint to the Qur'anic text.