Tag: Study of Religions

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Books

Forgotten religions in the Middle East

We rarely introduce non academic books. The following volume, however, is too close to our interests to be ignored:

Russell, Gerard. 2015. Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms. Simon & Schuster UK.

Despite its reputation for religious intolerance, the Middle East has long sheltered many distinctive and strange faiths: one regards the Greek prophets as incarnations of God, another reveres Lucifer in the form of a peacock, and yet another believes that their followers are reincarnated beings who have existed in various forms for thousands of years. These religions represent the last vestiges of the magnificent civilizations in ancient history: Persia, Babylon, Egypt in the time of the Pharaohs. Their followers have learned how to survive foreign attacks and the perils of assimilation. But today, with the Middle East in turmoil, they face greater challenges than ever before.
For more on the book, see its website. William Dalrymple has reviewed it for the Guardian.
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Events

SOAS: Jordan Lectures in Comparative Religion 2016

Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mani.jpg

The 2016 Jordan Lectures in Comparative Religion will be delivered by Iain Gardner, University of Sydney.  The lectures are:

  1. Mani’s Background and Early Life: Who was He and What did He Think He was Doing?
  2. Mani’s Career as the ‘Apostle of Jesus Christ’: His Missions and the Community he Founded
  3. Mani’s Death: Inter-Religious Conflict in Early Sasanian Iran and the Memory of the Apostle

For more information, see  Jordan Lectures in Comparative Religion: SOAS.

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Events

Incense in the Zoroastrian Rituals

A pilgrim lays offerings of candles and incense at the Zoroastrian mountain shrine at Chak Chak (Pir-e Sabz), during the annual pilgrimage, Yazd, Iran, 16th June 1994. Photo © Kaveh Kazemi
A pilgrim lays offerings of candles and incense at the Zoroastrian mountain shrine at Chak Chak (Pir-e Sabz), during the annual pilgrimage, Yazd, Iran, 16th June 1994. Photo © Kaveh Kazemi

Workshop: Trade Going Up in Smoke? Contact and Exchange in Incense Practices — The Southern Levant as Case Study

Käte-Hamburger-Kolleg “Dynamics in the History of Religions Betwenn Asia and Europe”

14-15 June 2016, Bochum, Germany

Götz König (Berlin): “The Use of Incense in the Zoroastrian Rituals and its Eschatological Meaning”

Rüdiger Schmitt (Münster): “Incense Practice in the Family and Household Religion of the Levant in the Iron Age”

Continue reading “Incense in the Zoroastrian Rituals”
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Articles

Les origines du dualisme mazdéen

Kellens, Jean. 2015. Les origines du dualisme mazdéen. In Jourdan Fabienne  & Anca Vasiliu (eds.), Dualismes: Doctrines religieuses et traditions philosophiques (χώρα Hors-série/2015), 21–29.

The discussions about the origin of mazdean dualism are concentrated upon the interpretation of the Gathic stanza Y30.3 which opposes two mental powers called mainiiu and usually translated by «spirit». The divergence of the understandings led to a controversy on the nature of this dualistic opposition : is it philosophical, cosmic or religious? Do these various distinctions remain relevant now we know that this stanza is not a piece of a sermon, but of a liturgical recitative?

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Events

The concept of Iran

Sasanian SilkThe Concept of Iran in Zoroastrian and Other Traditions

Professor François de Blois (AHRC Research Fellow, UCL)

Date: 21 April 2016Time: 6:00 PM
Finishes: 21 April 2016Time: 8:00 PM
Venue: Russell Square: College Buildings
Room: Khalili Lecture Theatre

Series: Dastur Dr Sohrab Hormasji Kutar Memorial Lecture Series

Continue reading “The concept of Iran”
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Books

Iranian Reception of Islam

Crone, Patricia. 2016. The Iranian reception of Islam: The non-traditionalist strands (Islamic History and Civilization 130). Collected Studies in Three Volumes. Vol. 2 edited by Hanna Siurua. Leiden; Boston: Brill.

Patricia Crone’s Collected Studies in Three Volumes brings together a number of her published, unpublished, and revised writings on Near Eastern and Islamic history, arranged around three distinct but interconnected themes. Volume 2, The Iranian Reception of Islam: The Non-Traditionalist Strands, examines the reception of pre-Islamic legacies in Islam, above all that of the Iranians. Volume 1, The Qurʾānic Pagans and Related Matters, pursues the reconstruction of the religious environment in which Islam arose and develops an intertextual approach to studying the Qurʾānic religious milieu. Volume 3, Islam, the Ancient Near East and Varieties of Godlessness, places the rise of Islam in the context of the ancient Near East and investigates sceptical and subversive ideas in the Islamic world.

ToC:

  • 1. Kavād’s heresy and Mazdak’s revolt
  • 2. Zoroastrian communism
  • 3. Khurramīs
  • 4. Muqannaʿ
  • 5. Abū Tammām on the Mubayyiḍa
  • 6. The Muqannaʿ narrative in the Tārīkhnāma: Part I, Introduction, edition and translation
  • 7. The Muqannaʿ narrative in the Tārīkhnāma: Part II, Commentary and analysis
  • 8. Al-Jāḥiẓ on aṣḥāb al-jahālāt and the Jahmiyya
  • 9. Buddhism as ancient Iranian paganism
  • 10. A new text on Ismailism at the Samanid court
  • 11. What was al-Fārābī’s ‘imamic’ constitution?
  • 12. Al-Fārābī’s imperfect constitutions
  • 13. Pre-existence in Iran: Zoroastrians, ex-Christian Muʿtazilites, and Jews on the human acquisition of bodies
  • List of Patricia Crone’s publications

Patricia Crone (1945-2015), Ph.D. (1974), School of Oriental and African Studies, was Professor Emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Her numerous publications include Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (1987); Pre-Industrial Societies (1989); Medieval Islamic Political Thought (2004); and The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran (2012).

Hanna Siurua (BA, School of Oriental and African Studies; MA, University of Sussex) is a professional editor based in Chicago. She specialises in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies and has edited numerous books and articles in these as well as other fields.

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Events

Networks: Connecting the Middle East through Time, Space and Cyberspace

Image: josullivan.59 via Flickr | ‘World Airline Routes’

BRISMES Annual Conference 2016 Networks: Connecting the Middle East through Time, Space and Cyberspace

BRISMES Annual Conference 2016 will take place at the University of Wales Trinity St David, Lampeter Campus, on 13 – 15 July.

The Middle East and North Africa as a region is intimately connected both regionally and to the wider world. This is true historically, where the region has long acted as a crossroads of trade, culture and ideas, as well as in more contemporary contexts – when Arab protest movements inspired similar actions around the world, and migration within and from the region is having a global impact. It is no coincidence that the Middle East is at the forefront of innovative developments in social media and other networks of communication.

Papers and panels on historical or contemporary issues are welcome as part of sub-themes such as this one:
•Networks within religion: religious communities (ancient and modern), interfaith connections, religious authority and evolving theological interpretations.
Categories
Articles

Rethinking Sasanian Iconoclasm

Shenkar, Michael. 2015. Rethinking Sasanian Iconoclasm. Journal of the American Oriental Society 135(3). 471–498.

This article presents a detailed reconsideration of the well-established and canonized theory of “Sasanian iconoclasm” postulated by Mary Boyce in 1975. The Sasanians did not develop any prohibition against anthropomorphic representations of the gods, and in the surviving Zoroastrian literature and inscriptions there is no evidence of either theological disputes over idols or of a deliberate eradication of them by the Persian kings. Sasanian cult was aniconic, but the historical and archaeological evidence clearly demonstrates that Sasanian visual culture was anything but iconoclastic. It seems that the Persian iconoclastic identity was constructed in the early Sasanian period as a response to the challenges posed by Christianity. By joining the common monotheistic discourse against idolatry, the Zoroastrian clergy adopted the conventions of the world in which they lived.
Attacks against “idols” and “idolatry” should be understood in the context of internal and external polemical discourse against beliefs deemed to be erroneous by the Zoroastrian priesthood.

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Books

Mani’s pictures

Gulácsi, Zsuzsanna. 2015. Mani’s pictures: The didactic images of the Manichaeans from Sasanian Mesopotamia to Uygur Central Asia and Tang-Ming China (Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 90). Brill.

The founder of Manichaeism, Mani (216-274/277 CE), not only wrote down his teachings to prevent their adulteration, but also created a set of paintings—the Book of Pictures—to be used in the context of oral instruction. That pictorial handscroll and its later editions became canonical art for Mani’s followers for a millennium afterwards. This richly illustrated study systematically explores the artistic culture of religious instruction of the Manichaeans based on textual and artistic evidence. It discusses the doctrinal themes (soteriology, prophetology, theology, and cosmology) depicted in Mani’s canonical pictures. Moreover, it identifies 10th-century fragments of canonical picture books, as well as select didactic images adapted to other, non-canonical art objects (murals, hanging scrolls, mortuary banners, and illuminated liturgical manuscripts) in Uygur Central Asia and Tang-Ming China.

ToC:
 
  • Part 1 – Textual Sources on Manichaean Didactic Art
  • Introduction to Part 1
  • Primary and Secondary Records in Coptic, Syriac, Greek, and Arabic Texts (3rd–10th Centuries)
  • Primary Records in Parthian and Middle Persian Texts (3rd–9th Centuries)
  • Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Records in Uygur and Chinese Texts (8th–13th Centuries)
  • Tertiary Records in Post-Manichaean Arabic, Persian, and Chagatai Texts (11th–17th Centuries)
  • Part 2 – Physical Remains of Manichaean Didactic Art
  • Introduction to Part 2
  • Format and Preservation
  • Subject Repertoire and Iconography

Zsuzsanna Gulácsi, Ph.D. (1998, Indiana University) is a Professor of Asian Religious Art at Northern Arizona University and the author of Mediaeval Manichaean Book Art (Brill, 2005), Manichaean Art in Berlin Collections (Brepols 2001), and dozens of articles on Manichaean art.

Categories
Books

Hindu ritual and its significance for ritual theory

The following monograph does not directly relate to Iranian Studies, but promises to be an important book and will be of interest to scholars of religion and Iranian Studies for its content and methodological approach:

Michaels, Axel. 2015. Homo Ritualis: Hindu ritual and its significance for ritual theory (Oxford Ritual Studies). Oxford University Press.

Drawing on extensive textual studies and fieldwork in Nepal and India, Axel Michaels demonstrates how the characteristic structure of Hindu rituals employs the Brahmanic-Sanskritic sacrifice as a model, and how this structure is one of the distinguishing features of Hinduism more generally. Many religions tend over time to develop less ritualized or more open forms of belief, but Brahmanical Hinduism has internalized ritual behavior to the extent that it has become its most important and distinctive feature, permeating social and personal life alike. The religion can thus be seen as a particular case in the history of religions in which ritual form dominates belief and develops a sweeping autonomy of ritual behavior.

Read more here.

Axel Michaels is Director of the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe” and Professor of Classical Indology at the South Asia Institute at the University of Heidelberg.