Arab Christians and the Qurʾan from the Origins of Islam to the Medieval Period. Edited by Mark Beaumont. History of Christian-Muslim Relations, vol. 35. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Pp. xiv + 216. $120, €104.

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 94 Heft: 1 Seiten: 5-56.

Christian-Muslim Relations, a Bibliographical History 1 is a history of all the known works on Christian-Muslim relations from 600 to 1500. It comprises introductory essays and over 200 detailed entries containing descriptions, assessments and compehensive bibliographical details of individual works.

The focus here is not on discussing theology of mission/religions but on outlining the developments in Christian thinking on it since Edinburgh 1910 with particular reference to Muslims/islam. The notion of ‘interfaith’ or ‘Christian-Muslim relations’ is not a new one but it is being re-discovered and nurtured by many Christians concerned about the tremendous deficit of trust between Muslims and Christians in the backdrop of a long history of polemics, confrontation and conflicts.

Against the historical backdrop of early Christian–Muslim apologetics in the Middle East, an apologetics that was overwhelmingly polemical in its scope, I consider the contribution of the mystics, in providing a dialogical model that would overcome the state of impasse that inter-religious debate had reached. Dialogue moves beyond the established polemical binaries of two rival belief systems, towards the clarification of defensible difference, in which the other is allowed to speak in all its polyvocality and even to impinge (...) on the truth claims of one’s own tradition. (shrink)

This article gives a brief overview of Christian-Muslim Relations in sub-Saharan Africa. It points out that in recent years, due to the pentecostalisation of Christianity and the increased influence of fundamentalist Islamic groups, relations in sub-Sahara Africa seem to deteriorate, despite initiatives to work on harmonious interfaith relations. The article then identifies three current trends in Christian-Muslim relations: an increase in polarisation and polemics, the debate on the implementation of shari’a and joint (...) social action programmes. (shrink)

This study explores the phrase ‘sealed with the Holy Spirit’ of Ephesians 1:13 as a metaphor, which relates the status of the recipients with the seal. Past studies view that the metaphor teaches about covenant or unity in God’s protection, assurance, and ownership. This study hypothesises that the author uses metaphor to address the recipients who have a deeper sentiment with a seal meaning they are both Jewish and Gentile Christians but especially those who are slaves. The study combines the (...) Ephesians’ background, lexical, and exegetical analyses with the cognitive-linguistic metaphor exploration. The result shows that the metaphor ‘seal’ is closely related to the personal experience of the Gentile Christians especially the slaves more than to others as it teaches that the endowment with the Spirit makes them worthy and united in the same identity as God’s chosen people. Contribution: This article seeks to contribute to the ongoing challenges that Indonesian Christians face in manifesting their unity because of their diverse cultural or historical backgrounds as part of a formerly colonialised nation especially those who are underprivileged and live in rural areas. By recognising that God has redeemed, endowed them with the Holy Spirit, and united with each other, they are free from various status bondages, especially as a minority group among the largest Muslim population in the world. (shrink)

In face of unprecedented awareness of religious diversity, as well as the dangers of conflict, interreligious dialogue has become vital. Yet, these authors maintain, it is the commitment to think together about religious faith and our inherited traditions that genuinely moves mutual understanding to new levels. Here is such a religious experiment, an interreligious theological quest, framed in the interests of peacemaking." -- Publisher.

Over the past several years, the intelligent design/evolutionism debate and a collective national reckoning with Islam as both a religious confession and a political force have both become significant issues in public discourse in the United States. In my paper, I argue that philosophy can begin to determine a connection between extremist, Islamophobic rhetoric and extremist, pro-ID rhetoric. The connection is that both these forms of extreme rhetoric, while they deal with different issues, tend to corrupt reason and show the (...) darker side of human nature – surely if we suppose that the extreme rhetoric expresses falsehoods, and even if we suppose that the extreme rhetoric expresses truth. (shrink)

Today's conflicts between religions are grounded largely in historical injustices and grievances but partly in serious conceptual disagreements. This essay agrees with Miroslav Volf that a nontritheistic Christian account of the Trinity is highly desirable. Three traditional models of the Trinity are examined. In their pure, unmixed form, two of them should logically be acceptable to Jews, Muslims, and strict monotheists who regard Christianity as inherently tritheistic, despite lip service to one God. In the social model, three distinct self-aware (...) subjects are unified by being in perfect harmony with each other. Despite Volf's best defense of this, to conceive of three gods, this is how one would go about it. In the psychological model, one divine subject has three psychological capacities—memory, understanding, and will. In the functional model, one subject relates to the world in three different ways—as creator, redeemer, and companion. These two are genuinely monotheistic. Finally, a monotheistic account of the unity of Jesus with God is proposed for consideration. (shrink)

Strengthening Muslim-Christian relations is very important for a nation such as Indonesia that has plurality in terms of tribes, ethnicity and religion. This study aims to analyse the role of Muslim women who live in a pluralistic socio-religious situation. This is a qualitative research that uses purposive sampling to determine the informants. The approach used by the Discovering Cultural Themes model is to understand the symptoms of the many themes, cultures, values and cultural symbols. Data analysis (...) was conducted by using software for qualitative research, which is needed in managing data found from the field, in this case, nVivo Basic 12.00 for Windows. The results show that Muslim women translate justice, empathy and rationality in religion by building relationships with other religions. This attitude is part of Islamic teachings that contain moderate, accommodating and tolerant aspects. In addition, culture has encouraged women to blend in and form egalitarian equality in the social and cultural realm. The culture of generosity and mutual help has become a tradition both in religious and customary activities. CONTRIBUTION: This article provides an insight into the contribution of Muslim women in strengthening Muslim-Christian relations. This agenda is very important because Islam and Christianity have the largest adherents in Indonesia. This contribution is very important and crucial in the midst of radicalism issues in Indonesia lately. (shrink)

One of the many faces of Islam in Indonesia is the abangan Muslims or the abangans. As one of the most populous Muslim groups in the country, it is important to know them. To understand Indonesian Islam or Muslims, one cannot overlook them. The article argues that, amid recent escalating Muslim–Christian tension in the country, this majority Muslim group can play a significant role in enhancing Muslim–Christian relations in the future, on account of (...) their worldview that emphasizes and maintains cosmic harmony and balance of all existence. Their open and syncretic attitudes toward other religions may foster religious tolerance and coexistence. These are attested in the author’s personal engagement with them. It is suggested that Christians be more inclusive toward them, but, at the same time, be critical in engaging their worldview. These attitudes are necessary for building a mutual and peaceful Muslim–Christian relationship in the region. (shrink)

"Human Conscience and Muslim-Christian Relations provides an insight into the notion of conscience and the impact of Christian-Muslim relations in Egypt on the ...

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] starting point of the book is the assessment of discrimination against Muslim immigrants in French society. The first part presents the results from several surveys that illustrate the negative opinions as well as the discriminatory practices against Muslim immigrants. The second part reviews the characteristics of Muslim immigrants that fuel the discrimination and (...) negative opinions, mainly their religious practices, their gender relations, and their poor competence with the French language.Although this kind of investigation is needed, it rests on two main ideological assumptions that severely weaken its relevance. First, why do the authors claim an investigation into Christian-heritage countries, when the focus is on France? The particularity of French laicity... (shrink)

Spacetime as we know and love it is lost in most approaches to quantum gravity. For many of these approaches, as inchoate and incomplete as they may be, one of the main challenges is to relate what they take to be the fundamental non-spatiotemporal structure of the world back to the classical spacetime of GR. The present essay investigates how spacetime is lost and how it may be regained in one major approach to quantum gravity, loop quantum gravity.

Some moral theorists argue that innocent beneficiaries of wrongdoing may have special remedial duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims of the wrongdoing. These arguments generally aim to simply motivate the idea that being a beneficiary can provide an independent ground for charging agents with remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing. Consequently, they have neglected contexts in which it is implausible to charge beneficiaries with remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing, thereby failing to explore the limits (...) of the benefiting relation in detail. Our aim in this article is to identify a criterion to distinguish contexts in which innocent beneficiaries plausibly bear remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing from those in which they do not. We argue that innocent beneficiaries incur special duties to the victims of wrongdoing if and only if receiving and retaining the benefits sustains wrongful harm. We develop this criterion by identifying and explicating two general modes of sustaining wrongful harm. We also show that our criterion offers a general explanation for why some innocent beneficiaries incur a special duty to the victims of wrongdoing while others do not. By sustaining wrongful harm, beneficiaries-with-duties contribute to wrongful harm, and we ordinarily have relatively stringent moral requirements against contributing to wrongful harm. On our account, innocently benefiting from wrongdoing _per se_ does not generate duties to the victims of wrongdoing. Rather, beneficiaries acquire such duties because their receipt and retention of the benefits of wrongdoing contribute to the persistence of the wrongful harm suffered by the victim. We conclude by showing that our proposed criterion also illuminates why there can be reasonable disagreement about whether beneficiaries have a duty to victims in some social contexts. (shrink)

This book examines the epistemic function of perception and the relation between language and conceptual thought, and provides new ways of conceptualizing the Buddhist defense of the reflexivity thesis of consciousness: namely, that each cognitive event is to be understood as involving a pre-reflective implicit awareness of its own occurrence.

Abstract:Organizational justice is a behavioral science concept that refers to the perception of fairness of the past treatment of the employees within an organization held by the employees of that organization. These subjective perceptions of fairness have been empirically shown to be related to 1) attitudinal changes in job satisfaction, organizational commitment and managerial trust beliefs; 2) behavioral changes in task performance activities and ancillary extra-task efforts to assist group members and improve group methods; 3) numerical changes in the quantity, (...) quality and efficiency of divisional outputs; and—though this is far more tentative—4) eventual changes in the competitive advantage and financial performance of the full organization. The authors propose that these constructs can be applied to all stakeholders, rather than just to the current employees of the firm, and that objective determinations of fairness by the managers can be related to subjective perceptions of fairness by the stakeholders that will result in the sequential series of attitudinal, behavioral and numerical changes that will lead to performance improvements. In short, the authors propose a normative stakeholder theory of the firm, based upon ethical principles, that will have testable descriptive hypotheses derived from the behavioral constructs. (shrink)

The first impacts of climate change have become evident and are expected to increase dramatically over the next decades. Thus, it becomes more and more pressing to decide who has to compensate those people who suffer from negative impacts of climate change but have neither contributed to the problem nor possess the resources to cope with the consequences. Since the frequently invoked Polluter Pays Principle cannot account for all climate-related harm, I will take a closer look at the much more (...) controversial Beneficiary Pays Principle. It is argued that, appropriately qualified, the Beneficiary Pays Principle can help to identify additional duty-bearers. Based on these results, I briefly comment on three different policy options to generate funds for compensation. (shrink)

Why does equality matter, as a social and political value, and what does it require? Relational egalitarians argue that it does not require that people receive equal distributive shares of some good, but that they relate as equals. Christian Schemmel here provides the first comprehensive development of a liberal conception of relational equality, one which understands relations of non-domination and egalitarian norms of social status as stringent demands of social justice. He first argues that expressing respect for the (...) freedom and equality of individuals in social cooperation requires stringent protections against domination. Taking this as a starting point, he then develops a substantive, liberal conception of non-domination and argues that non-domination is a particularly important, but not the only, concern of social justice. From there, Schemmel develops an account of the wrongness of inegalitarian norms of social status which shows how status-induced foreclosure of important social opportunities is a social injustice in its own right, over and above the role of status inequality in enabling domination, and the threats it poses to individuals' self-respect. Finally, Schemmel articulates the core requirements of liberal relational egalitarianism for political, economic, and health justice: these amount to demands for far-reaching forms of equality in all three domains, which can rarely, if ever, be overridden by competing concerns. With expert rigor and creativity, Justice and Egalitarian Relations brings together scholarship in a variety of related topics, from social justice and liberalism to distributive and relational equality, social equality, neo-republicanism, and non-denomination. (shrink)

In the climate ethics debate, scholars largely agree that individuals should promote institutions that ensure the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. This paper aims to establish that there are individual duties beyond compliance with and promotion of institutions. Duties of individuals to reduce their emissions are often objected to by arguing that an individual’s emissions do not make a morally relevant difference. We challenge this argument from inconsequentialism in two ways. We first show why the argument also seems to undermine (...) the case for duties to promote institutions that the arguments’ proponents endorse. Second, we argue that individuals ought to cut emissions if they exceed their fair share of emissions entitlements and, by emitting, contribute to climate-related harm. In response to inconsequentialism, we specify the notion of ‘contribution’ via the so-called NESS theory, according to which an act is causally relevant for and contributes to an outcome if it is a Necessary Element of a Set of conditions that is Sufficient for the outcome. After refuting two objections to our approach, we conclude by discussing how to deal with possible conflicts between duties to promote institutions and to reduce one’s emissions. (shrink)

If I am aware that p, say, that it is raining, is it the case that I must be aware that I am aware that p? Does introspective or object-awareness entail the apprehension of mental states as being of some kind or another: self-monitoring or intentional? That is, are cognitive events implicitly self-aware or is “self-awareness” just another term for metacognition? Not surprisingly, intuitions on the matter vary widely. This paper proposes a novel solution to this classical debate by reframing (...) the problem of self-knowledge in terms of the relation between phenomenal concepts and phenomenal knowledge. Concepts of consciousness such as “introspective awareness” and “reflexive self-awareness” are grounded in phenomenal experiences rather than physical events and processes. As such they yield a different kind of self-knowledge than what can be gained by applying externalist conceptual schemas to understanding the mind. I argue that Dharmakīrti’s theory of content can be seen as endorsing the efficacy of phenomenal experience as a vehicle for self-knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper I will introduce a practical explication for the notion of expertise. At first, I motivate this attempt by taking a look on recent debates which display great disagreement about whether and how to define expertise in the first place. After that I will introduce the methodology of practical explications in the spirit of Edward Craig’s Knowledge and the state of nature along with some conditions of adequacy taken from ordinary and scientific language. This eventually culminates in the (...) respective explication of expertise according to which this term essentially refers to a certain kind of service-relation. This is why expertise should be considered as a predominantly social kind. This article will end up with a discussion of advantages and prima facie plausible objections against my account of expertise. (shrink)

Is equality a distributive value or does it rather point to the quality of social relationships? This article criticizes the distributive character of luck egalitarian theories of justice and fleshes out the central characteristics of an alternative, relational approach to equality. It examines a central objection to distributive theories: that such theories cannot account for the significance of how institutions treat people (as opposed to the outcomes they bring about). I discuss two variants of this objection: first, that distributive theories (...) fail to account for the importance of how institutions cause good shortfalls and, second, that they fail to account for the normative attitude of social and political institutions expressed in different ways of treating people. The article argues that the causal variant of the objection has only very limited reach, and endorses the expressive variant: the attitudes expressed by institutions in their treatment of persons, such as contempt or neglect, generate potentially unjust social relationships and hierarchies. This should be the focus of a relational egalitarian approach to social justice. The article proceeds to explain how it is possible that artificial agents such as institutions have attitudes and how these attitudes are not reducible to those of the individuals that sustain them, and argues that distributive theories cannot be so modified as to account for such attitudes. It concludes by indicating several directions for the development of more worked-out conceptions of relational equality on this basis. (shrink)

How should International Political Theory (IPT) relate to public policy? Should theorists aspire for their work to be policy- relevant and, if so, in what sense? When can we legitimately criticize a theory for failing to be relevant to practice? To develop a response to these questions, I will consider two issues: (1) the extent to which international political theorists should be concerned that the norms they articulate are precise enough to entail clear practical advice under different empirical circumstances; (2) (...) whether they should provide concrete practical advice on policy choice and institutional reform. These questions are related but distinct, and we should answer each quite differently. Regarding the first, I shall argue that it counts heavily against a theory if it is not precise enough to guide policy and reform given certain empirical assumptions. On the second, I will argue that theorists should be very cautious when engaging with questions of policy and institutional design. Some principles of IPT can be criticized for being insufficiently precise, but a degree of abstraction from concrete policy recommendations is a virtue, rather than a vice, of an element of IPT. I conclude that we should aim to be precise without being concrete. To help fix ideas and anchor my argument, I will discuss these issues with reference to a principle that John Rawls has advocated in his influential work The Law of Peoples (Rawls 1999a): a duty of assistance to societies that lack the capacity to satisfy the basic needs or protect the basic rights of their people. (shrink)

Relational views of equality put forward a social and political ideal of equality that aims at being a better interpretation of what social justice requires than the prevailing distributive conceptions of equality, especially luck egalitarian views. Yet it is unclear what social justice as relational equality demands in distributive terms; Elizabeth Anderson's view seems to vacate a large part of the terrain of distributive justice in favor of a minimalist, sufficiency view. Against that, this paper argues that relational equality, properly (...) understood, requires setting stringent limits to distributive inequality, for both intrinsic and instrumental reasons. First, the relational egalitarian conception of society as a cooperative enterprise among equals gives rise to a presumption of equality in socially produced goods (and bads); inequalities in these goods have to be justified by justice-relevant reasons. Second, relational egalitarianism also delivers instrumental reasons to limit inequalities in income, wealth, and opportunities, because such inequalities may generate both opportunities for domination and inegalitarian status norms that threaten the social bases of self-respect of the worse off. (shrink)

Agents are often assumed to have degrees of belief (“credences”) and also binary beliefs (“beliefs simpliciter”). How are these related to each other? A much-discussed answer asserts that it is rational to believe a proposition if and only if one has a high enough degree of belief in it. But this answer runs into the “lottery paradox”: the set of believed propositions may violate the key rationality conditions of consistency and deductive closure. In earlier work, we showed that this problem (...) generalizes: there exists no local function from degrees of belief to binary beliefs that satisfies some minimal conditions of rationality and non-triviality. “Locality” means that the binary belief in each proposition depends only on the degree of belief in that proposition, not on the degrees of belief in others. One might think that the impossibility can be avoided by dropping the assumption that binary beliefs are a function of degrees of belief. We prove that, even if we drop the “functionality” restriction, there still exists no local relation between degrees of belief and binary beliefs that satisfies some minimal conditions. Thus functionality is not the source of the impossibility; its source is the condition of locality. If there is any non-trivial relation between degrees of belief and binary beliefs at all, it must be a “holistic” one. We explore several concrete forms this “holistic” relation could take. (shrink)

In this chapter we will use the case of beaver reintroduction in southern Scandinavia to illuminate the philosophical issues underlying the value of biodiversity. First, we rehearse some of the main types of argument relating to the practice of ecological restoration. This is followed by a description of the case study, and by a summary of what we take to be the main positions in the ongoing debate over reintroduction of beavers. We then interpret these different positions, asking in each (...) case how ‘biodiversity’ is being understood. In this way, we try to establish the causes of the disagreement. It is important to distinguish between disagreements caused by conflicting interests and disagreements caused by conflicting values. We shall focus on a special type of disagreement where there seems to be a genuine conflict of values pertaining to biodiversity. Finally, we show how the claim that biodiversity should be protected is made by several participants in the debate and taken to have remarkably different implications: the need to protect biodiversity has been invoked both in attacks on, and defenses of, reintroduction and other forms of ecological restoration. (shrink)

In quantity discrimination tasks, adults, infants and animals have been sometimes observed to process number only after all continuous variables, such as area or density, have been controlled for. This has been taken as evidence that processing number may be more cognitively demanding than processing continuous variables. We tested this hypothesis by training mosquitofish to discriminate two items from three in three different conditions. In one condition, continuous variables were controlled while numerical information was available; in another, the number was (...) kept constant and information relating to continuous variables was available; in the third condition, stimuli differed for both number and continuous quantities. Fish learned to discriminate more quickly when both number and continuous information were available compared to when they could use continuous information only or number only; there was no difference in the learning rate between the two latter conditions. Our results do not support the hypothesis that processing numbers imposes a higher cognitive load than processing continuous variables. Rather, they suggest that availability of multiple information sources may facilitate discrimination learning. (shrink)

Bradford F. Hinze şi Irfan A. Omar (eds.), Heirs of Abraham. The Future of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian Relations Maryknoll, New York, 2005.

Approaches to quantum gravity often involve the disappearance of space and time at the fundamental level. The metaphysical consequences of this disappearance are profound, as is illustrated with David Lewis's analysis of modality. As Lewis's possible worlds are unified by the spatiotemporal relations among their parts, the non-fundamentality of spacetime---if borne out---suggests a serious problem for his analysis: his pluriverse, for all its ontological abundance, does not contain our world. Although the mere existence---as opposed to the fundamentality---of spacetime must (...) be recovered from the fundamental structure in order to guarantee the empirical coherence of the non-spatiotemporal fundamental theory, it does not suffice to salvage Lewis's theory of modality from the charge of rendering our actual world impossible. (shrink)

Spaces in the brain can refer either to psychological spaces, which are derived from similarity judgments, or to neurocognitive spaces, which are based on the activities of neural structures. We want to show how psychological spaces naturally emerge from the underlying neural spaces by dimension reductions that preserve similarity structures and the relevant categorizations. Some neuronal representational formats that may generate the psychological spaces are presented, compared and discussed in relation to the mathematical principles of monotonicity, continuity and convexity. In (...) particular, we discuss the spatial structures involved in the connections between perception and action, for example eye-hand coordination, and argue that spatial organization of information makes such mappings more efficient. (shrink)

In the first section of this paper I draw, on a purely conceptual level, a distinction between two kinds of reasons: content-related and attitude-related reasons. The established view is that, in the case of the attitude of believing something, there are no attitude-related reasons. I look at some arguments intended to establish this claim in the second section with an eye to whether these argument could be generalized to cover the case of preferences as well. In the third section I (...) argue against such generalizations and present a case in favour of accepting attitude-related reasons for preferences. In the fourth section I present an objection to which I react in the fifth section where I try to strengthen my case for attitude-related reasons for preferences. Finally, I discuss and reject criticisms raised by two opponents of the view defended here. (shrink)

This paper provides an introductory review of the theory of judgment aggregation. It introduces the paradoxes of majority voting that originally motivated the field, explains several key results on the impossibility of propositionwise judgment aggregation, presents a pedagogical proof of one of those results, discusses escape routes from the impossibility and relates judgment aggregation to some other salient aggregation problems, such as preference aggregation, abstract aggregation and probability aggregation. The present illustrative rather than exhaustive review is intended to give readers (...) new to the field of judgment aggregation a sense of this rapidly growing research area. (shrink)

This paper provides an introductory review of the theory of judgment aggregation. It introduces the paradoxes of majority voting that originally motivated the field, explains several key results on the impossibility of propositionwise judgment aggregation, presents a pedagogical proof of one of those results, discusses escape routes from the impossibility and relates judgment aggregation to some other salient aggregation problems, such as preference aggregation, abstract aggregation and probability aggregation. The present illustrative rather than exhaustive review is intended to give readers (...) new to the field of judgment aggregation a sense of this rapidly growing research area. (shrink)

This article explores Muslim conversion to Christianity using a body of hagio-graphical sources in Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Greek, and Latin. Through these lives of Christian martyrs, the article seeks to understand why Muslims undertook the surprising journey from “mosque to church” in the early centuries after the conquests. Many studies of Islamization are teleological, aiming to explain the large-scale conversion of the Middle East by the end of the Crusades. In contrast, this article aims to show why Islamization—especially (...) in the Umayyad and early ʿAbbāsid periods—could be highly contingent, even fragile, at a time when Muslims formed a numerical minority in many regions under their control. (shrink)