Author Archives: claudehanley

I particularly appreciated the selection from Mahfouz’s novel Children of the Alley. I found the concluding pages of the novel thought provoking yet troubling. On the one hand, much of the depiction of Rifaa — his death, the the disappearance of his body, the variant accounts of his four friends — seems to correlate withContinue reading “Modern Arabic Religious Novels”

One central conceits of Rida’s critique is his repeated assertion that the educated and worldly among European Christian abandon their faith in the course of their education: the fully rational, he suggests, reject Christianity. This conceit underpins a series of comparisons between Christianity and Islam in the second article. Trinitarian doctrine, for instance, reveals theContinue reading “Rida and Enlightenment “Reason””

I found Elias of Nisibis’s dialogue with the Vizier particularly interesting.  After working through the precise doctrine attached to the Christian understanding of God’s one substance and three hypostases, the vizier demands to know why, if Christians are truly monotheists, they confess that God is three hypostases.  This doctrine, as the Vizier sees it, isContinue reading “Fundamental Theology and Trinitarian Apologetics”

I was struck in this reading by the simultaneously traditional and apologetic quality of Aquinas’s defence of Trinitarian doctrine.  This responds to an Islamic criticism of the Christian doctrine of Christ’s generation which criticized the Christian doctrine of the Trinity on the grounds that it entailed God’s having a wife.  Aquinas relies on the so-calledContinue reading “Thomas’s Trinitarian Apologetics”

Warraq offers a recitation and criticism of an innovative argument for the triunity of persons in one divine substance.  In order to be perfect, the argument runs, the divine substance must combine both sorts of number, even and odd. Any number which does not include both even and odd numbers falls short of “the perfectionContinue reading “Warraq’s Critique of Christian Trinitarianism”

Sidney Griffith’s chapter on the genre and content of Christian theology in Arabic, particularly apologetic literature, raises interesting questions for Trinitarian theology.  In light of the preference in Christian-Muslim polemics for arguments from reason, Christian articulations of the Trinity situated the doctrine in the context of Islamic discussions of “the ontological status of the divineContinue reading “Trinity and Divine Attributes in Christian Polemic”

Hoyland’s account of Doctrina Jacobi draws attention in particular the the way in which early Christian (and Jewish?) apologists criticized Islam via its account of prophethood.  Doctrina Jacobi V.16 encapsulates this.  After describing the death of a candidatus at the hands of muslims, the character Justus relates his brother’s comments about Muhammad: “He is falseContinue reading “Prophetology Contested in Christian-Muslim Polemics”

Amina Wadud’s essay on the rights and roles of women in Islamic society raises a number of pressing questions about the relationship between Islamic revelation, familial structures, and the ordering of society.  She attempts to bridge a fundamental tension between two assertions. First, she wants to argue that the Qur’an does not stipulate a particularContinue reading “Marriage and Society in Contemporary Islam”

The basis for the identification of the Imam is, in Shi’ite Islam, found in his sinlessness; the Imam must necessarily be immune from any sin.  For this reason, it is necessary to affirm that “the Imam should be designated for the Imamate since immunity to sin is a matter of the heart, which is discernedContinue reading “Designation in Shi’ite Islam”

In his account of the origins of Islamic legal schools, Wael Hallaq makes a strong case that the root of any authoritative doctrine was the knowledge of the law possessed — or allegedly possessed — by a particular legal scholar.  Hallaq observes that the “eponyms” of a given school were perceived by later generations toContinue reading “Epistemic and Social Bases for Islamic Jurisprudence”