This volume explores the relationship between the Qur’an and the Jewish and Christian traditions, considering aspects of continuity and reform. The chapters examine the Qur’an’s retelling of biblical narratives, as well as its reaction to a wide array of topics that mark Late Antique religious discourse, including eschatology and ritual purity, prophetology and paganism, and heresiology and Christology. Twelve emerging and established scholars explore the many ways in which the Qur’an updates, transforms, and challenges religious practice, beliefs, and narratives that Late Antique Jews and Christians had developed in dialogue with the Bible. The volume establishes the Qur’an’s often unique perspective alongside its surprising continuity with Judaism and Christianity. Chapters focus on individual suras and on intra-Qur’anic parallels, on the Qur’an’s relationship to pre-Islamic Arabian culture, on its intertextuality and its literary intricacy, and on its legal and moral framework. It illustrates a move away from the problematic paradigm of cultural influence and instead emphasizes the Qur’an’s attempt to reform the religious landscape of its time. The Qur'an's Reformation of Judaism and Christianity offers new insight into the Islamic Scripture as a whole and into recent methodological developments, providing a compelling snapshot of the burgeoning field of Qur’anic studies. It is a key resource for students and scholars interested in religion, Islam, and Middle Eastern Studies.

An essential single-volume companion to the critical interpretation of Islamic scripture This book provides detailed and multidisciplinary coverage of a wealth of key Qur’anic terms, with incisive entries on crucial expressions ranging from the divine names allāh (“God”) and al-raḥmān (“the Merciful”) to the Qur’anic understanding of belief and self-surrender to God. It examines what the terms mean in Qur’anic usage, discusses how to translate them into English, and delineates the role they play in expressing the Qur’an’s distinctive understanding of God, humans, and the cosmos. It offers a comprehensive but nonreductionist investigation of the relationship of Qur’anic terms to earlier traditions such as Jewish and Christian literature, pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, and Arabian epigraphy. While the dictionary is primarily engaged in ascertaining what the Qur’an would have meant to its original recipients in late antique Arabia, it makes selective and critical use of later Muslim scholarship alongside an extensive body of secondary research in English, German, and French from the nineteenth century to today. The most authoritative historical-critical reference work on key Qur’anic terms Features a host of entries ranging from concise overviews to substantial essays Draws on comparative material such as Jewish and Christian literature, pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, and Arabian epigraphy Discusses how to best translate Qur’anic terms into English Explores the Qur’an’s vision of God, humans, and the cosmos through an analysis of fundamental and recurrent Qur’anic expressions Accessible to readers with little or no Arabic

Judaism, Christianity and Islam: An Introduction to Monotheism shows how a shared monotheistic legacy frames and helps explain the commonalities and disagreements among Judaism, Christianity and Islam and their significant denominations in the world today. Taking a thematic approach and covering both historical and contemporary dimensions, the authors discuss how contemporary geographic and cultural contexts shape the expression of monotheism in the three religions. It covers differences between religious expressions in Israeli Judaism, Latin American Christianity and British Islam. Topics discussed include scripture, creation, covenant and identity, ritual, ethics, peoplehood and community, redemption, salvation, life after death, gender, sexuality and marriage. This introductory text, which contains over 30 images, a map, a timeline, chapter afterthoughts and critical questions, is written by three authors with extensive teaching experience, each a specialist in one of the three monotheistic traditions.

The Hebrew Bible formulates two sets of law: one for the Israelites and one for the gentile "residents" living in the Holy Land. Law Beyond Israel: From the Bible to the Qur'an argues that these biblical laws for non-Israelites form the historical basis of qur'anic law. This volume corroborates its central claim by assessing laws for gentiles in late antique Jewish and especially in Christian legal discourse, pointing to previously underappreciated legal continuity from the Hebrew Bible to the New Testament and from late antique Christianity to nascent Islam. This volume first sketches the legal obligations that the Hebrew Bible imposes on gentiles, on humanity more broadly and, more specifically, on the non-Israelite residents of the Holy Land. It then traces these laws through Second Temple Judaism to the early Jesus movement, illustrating how the biblical laws for residents inform those formulated in Acts of the Apostles. Building on this legal continuity, the study employs detailed historical and literary analyses of legal narratives in order to make three propositions. Firstly, rabbinic laws for gentiles, the so-called Noahide Laws, while offering a more lenient interpretation than the one we find in Acts, are equally based on the biblical laws for gentiles. Secondly, Christians generally appreciated and even expanded the gentile laws of Acts. Thirdly, the Qur'an reinvents Arabian religious practice by formulating its own distinctive approach to the biblical laws for gentiles, in close continuity with - and at times in critical distance from - late antique Jewish and especially Christian gentile law.

Thematic examination of monotheistic religions The second edition of Jews, Christians, Muslims: A Comparative Introduction to Monotheistic Religions, compares Judaism, Christianity, and Islam using seven common themes which are equally relevant to each tradition. Provoking critical thinking, this text addresses the cultural framework of religious meanings and explores the similarities and differences among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as it explains the ongoing process of interpretation in each religion. The book is designed for courses in Western and World Religions.

This Companion to Comparative Theology offers a survey of historical developments, contemporary approaches and future directions in a field of theology that has experienced rapid growth and expansion in the past decades.

Since its inception, Islam and its civilization have been in continuous relationships with other religions, cultures, and civilizations, including not only different forms of Christianity and Judaism inside and outside the Middle East, Zoroastrianism and Manicheism, Hinduism and even Buddhism, but also tribal religions in West and East Africa, in South Russia and in Central Asia, including Tibet. The essays collected here examine the many texts that have come down to us about these cultures and their religions, from Muslim theologians and jurists, travelers and historians, and men of letters and of culture.

What would you say if the Holy Quran turned out to contain components consistent with Zionism? What if the Quran in its very philological content blesses and encourages the Jews to live in the land of Israel? What if billions of Muslims were to be made aware of the clearly "pro-Zionist" verses in the Quran and were to alter their worldview to welcome the Jews in their ancestral homeland? One of them is Sura Al-Ma'ida 5:21, which has a striking significance as a powerful command from Allah, as interpreted by the renowned Muslim exegetes, including Al-Tabari. On the other hand, the examining of the status of al-Aqsa Mosque being the third-holiest site in the Muslim world, as well as the status of the city of Jerusalem from Muslims' and Jews' viewpoint, would reveal fully new perspectives. Ever since 1937, there have been multiple attempts to resolve the Arab-Jewish conflict to no avail. The hidden religious aspect of the conflict has been generally neglected by the parties. Accordingly, the Muslim world is often subjected to provocation by zealous clerics and politicians who implement anti-Jewish propaganda, including the misinterpretation of the Quranic verses. This book will tackle on the very sensitive topics alluded above and should serve as an eye-opener for Muslim politicians, traditional clerics, Muslims in general and the interested Westerners.. The welldocumented accuracy and authenticity of the quoted facts render them beyond malicious interpretation.

This textbook covers the GCSE Religious Studies course for EDEXCEL 'A' - Religion in Life and Religion in Society.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Most of what we know about attitudes toward Islam in the medieval and early modern West has been based on polemical treatises against Islam written by Christian scholars preoccupied with defending their own faith and attacking the doctrines of others. Christian readings of the Qur'an have in consequence typically been depicted as tedious and one-dimensional exercises in anti-Islamic hostility. In Reading the Qur'an in Latin Christendom, 1140-1560, Thomas E. Burman looks instead to a different set of sources: the Latin translations of the Qur'an made by European scholars and the manuscripts and early printed books in which these translations circulated. Using these largely unexplored materials, Burman argues that the reading of the Qur'an in Western Europe was much more complex. While their reading efforts were certainly often focused on attacking Islam, scholars of the period turned out to be equally interested in a whole range of grammatical, lexical, and interpretive problems presented by the text. Indeed, these two approaches were interconnected: attacking the Qur'an often required sophisticated explorations of difficult Arabic grammatical problems. Furthermore, while most readers explicitly denounced the Qur'an as a fraud, translations of the book are sometimes inserted into the standard manuscript format of Christian Bibles and other prestigious Latin texts (small, centered blocks of text surrounded by commentary) or in manuscripts embellished with beautiful decorated initials and elegant calligraphy for the pleasure of wealthy collectors. Addressing Christian-Muslim relations generally, as well as the histories of reading and the book, Burman offers a much fuller picture of how Europeans read the sacred text of Islam than we have previously had.