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Thesis advisor: Frederick G. Lawrence / There are two aspects, and thus two aims, of the dissertation. Primarily, the dissertation is an interpretation. It seeks to understand Louis Massignon's understanding of Islam as it developed across three stages of his life and work. Secondarily, the dissertation is methodological. It takes Massignon's experience as a test-case and attempts to show that, as a possibly relevant hypothesis, his understanding of Islam warrants further attention by contemporary theologians working on Catholic-Islamic dialogue, Catholic-Islamic comparative theology, and Catholic theologies of Islam. The dissertation consists of six chapters. The first is an introduction to the questions and the relevant secondary literature. In it I establish the work of Massignon, primarily a scholar of Islam, on the relationship of Islam to the Catholic Church as <italic>theological</italic>, that is, as faith seeking understanding, and as <italic>conversational</italic>, that is, as constitutive communication. In Chapter Two, I establish Massignon's Catholic beliefs and examine his early and fairly traditional position on the question of Islam's relationship to the Catholic Church. I focus primarily on his apologetic treatise, <italic>Examen du &ldquoPr&eacutesent de l'homme lettr&eacute&rdquo par Abdallah ibn al-Torjoman</italic> (1917), in which he presents the contrast between the Christian and Islamic apologetics in stark terms, arguing for the superiority of the Christian position at every turn. I argue that the Examen should be read less as a condemnation of Islam than as an articulation of Massignon's Catholic beliefs. In Chapter Three, I examine &ldquoL'h&eacutegire d'Ismaël,&rdquo the second of <italic>Les trois pri&egraveres d'Abraham</italic> (1935), in which Massignon articulates what the secondary literature has called his five-point <italic>credo</italic> of Islam, namely, that the God of the Muslims is the same as the God of the Jews and Christians, the Qur'an is in some sense inspired and retains a conditional authority, Muhammad is sincere and can be understood as a negative prophet, Islam has a positive mission in the divine economy of salvation vis-à-vis the Church and Israel, and Arabic, the language of revelation in Islam, has a particular spiritual vocation. This represents the second stage of his life and work. In Chapter Four, after considering the possible (and likely) influence that Massignon's work exerted on the statements on Islam in <italic>Lumen Gentium</italic> and <italic>Nostra Aetate</italic> as proclaimed at the Second Vatican Council, I establish the bases for a nascent Massignonian Catholic theology of Islam, whereby the two religions enjoy a complementary relationship such that the Church knows and communicates explicitly what remains implicit in Islam, while Islam provokes the Church toward greater fidelity, charity, and hospitality. In Chapter Five, I turn to the third stage of Massignon's life and work in which he was increasingly concerned to establish practical means for encouraging Muslim-Catholic understanding. I focus on the <italic>Badaliya Annual Letters</italic> (1947-1962) in which he articulates the philosophy of the Badaliya prayer sodality that he co-founded for the purpose of interiorizing the rites of Islam and praying with and for Muslims. I focus on Massignon's understanding of substitute mysticism, which I argue is actually an expanded understanding of Redemption such that through participation in what Massignon calls the <italic>secret of history</italic>, and what Bernard Lonergan, S.J. would call the <italic>Law of the Cross</italic>, the saints of Christianity and Islam (and other religions) knowingly or unknowingly participate in the saving mission of Jesus Christ. At the conclusion to each main body chapter I suggest possible lessons that one might draw from Massignon's engagement with Islam at that particular stage, and in Chapter Six I summarize the findings and the limitations of the dissertation and suggest possible lines of further enquiry. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

After the Second Vatican Council, which took place in 1962-1965, the Catholic Church reached out to both co-religionists and non-Christians. As the second largest religion in the world (after Christianity), the Muslim world began to react to this call for dialogue. Without a worldwide religious authority, Muslim scholars and communities have tried to understand and respond to this call for dialogue in their own way. Turkey, as one of the most influential and modern Muslim majority states, joined the discussion about interreligious dialogue, especially with Christians. Very diverse in culture, religion, and thought, Turkish scholars' discussions and critiques of the dialogue requested by the Christian world have clearly contributed to interreligious dialogue on a global scale in the last decades. This dissertation examines the development of interreligious dialogue in Turkey and the works of prominent and widely recognized Turkish theologians as a response to the Christian call for dialogue. It explores the problems, challenges, and future of the perception of interreligious dialogue in the Turkish context, in particular, the views of three influential Turkish scholars: Abdurrahman Küçük, Mahmut Aydin, and Davut Aydüz. The conclusion proposes the Turkish Model for interreligious dialogue. / Religion

The increasingly politicized presence of Muslim communities in Britain today is raising issues not only for society in general but for other faith communities as well. Among these the Evangelical constituency, including the members of various Christian diasporas, is struggling to find a coherent response which is true to its Bible-based, activist roots. This thesis discusses the relationship of religion to the theoretical notion of the public sphere. Specifically it hypothesizes an Evangelical micro public sphere as the framework for an empirical exploration of the responses of British Evangelicals to Muslims since the events of 11th September 2001. It describes the formation, composition and discourse of this sphere drawing on data gathered from books, articles, lectures and interviews with key participants. The data reveal a marked tension, indeed a polarization, amongst Evangelicals, with an increasingly sharp disagreement between ‘confrontationalists’ and ‘conciliators’. A detailed analysis of the interaction of this sphere with Muslims, the national media and church leaders follows, leading to a concluding discussion of the future trajectory of the British Evangelical movement. Whilst it is still too early to say whether Evangelicalism will be strengthened or weakened, its encounter with Islam is likely to be an increasingly significant factor in British public life for the foreseeable future.

This dissertation explores the prospects for Christian-Muslim dialogue regarding the ecological crisis. It compares the views of Sallie McFague and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, leaders in ecological theology and ethics. In 1990, at the Spirit and Nature symposium at Middlebury College, they dialogued unsuccessfully. They could not understand each other across the ideological gulf of McFague's postmodernism and Nasr's traditionalism. However, beneath an outer shell of significant differences, McFague and Nasr share profound common ground. They both understand the ecological crisis as a result of the desacralization of nature in human perception. They believe that Western Christianity's failure to cultivate a spiritual vision of nature set the stage for the development of a thoroughly mechanistic and desacralized worldview in the Renaissance and Enlightenment. They both articulate visions for the resacralization of nature. While unique, these visions both image the world as a body animated by the Spirit of God rather than as a lifeless machine. Furthermore, both authors find insights to support human harmony with the natural world in the mystical wisdom of their traditions. The dissertation models a process of dialogue that unveils McFague's and Nasr's common ground. The first two chapters explore their stories and contexts, modeling the importance of getting to know one's interlocutor. In chapters three and four, their overall ecological theologies are outlined. Only in chapter five, in a dialogical setting in which both authors' ideas are viewed empathetically, are their differences engaged. Chapter six looks at their common ground, tracing how it grows out of their mutual ecological concerns. Finally, chapter seven creatively synthesizes their ideas, especially their proposals for the reintegration of nature into cities and their descriptions of the mystical understanding of the God-world and human-world relationships. The dissertation explores how the mystical consciousness of the unity of the human body with the body of the world needs to be cultivated more widely, and extended into the practice of interfaith dialogue. Christians, Muslims, and all others concerned about the ecological crisis need to become more aware of our unity and see through the illusion that we are separate.

No description available.

This thesis examines how women negotiate their identification within and as a group when engaging in interreligious dialogue. It is an in-depth case study of the women’s interfaith book groups, the Daughters of Abraham, located in the Greater Boston Area. This focus facilitates an in-depth understanding of the dynamics of relationships within one group, between different groups, and as situated in the American sociocultural context. I explore the tensions arising from religious diversity, and the consequences of participating in an interreligious dialogue group for understandings of religious self and others. Categories such as boundary, power, sameness, difference, self and other serve to explore the complexities and fluidity of identity constructions. I answer the following questions: How do members of the Daughters of Abraham engage with the group’s religious diversity? How does their participation in the Daughters of Abraham affect their self-understanding and understanding of the “other?” What can we learn about power dynamics and boundary drawing from the women’s accounts of their participation in the Daughters of Abraham and from their group interactions? Two interrelated arguments guide this thesis. One, I show that Daughters members arrive at complex and fluid understandings of what it means to identify as an American Jewish, Christian, and Muslim woman by negotiating various power dynamics arising from ideas of sameness and difference of religion, gender, and sociopolitical values. Two, I contend that the collective emphasis on commonalities in the Daughters of Abraham is a double-edged sword. Explicitly, this stress intends to encourage engagement with the group’s religious diversity by excluding those deemed too different. However, whilst this emphasis can generate nuanced understandings of religious identity categories, at times it highlights differences detrimental to facilitating such understanding. Moreover, this stress on commonalities illuminates the power dynamics and tensions characterizing this women’s interfaith book group. Scholarship has by and large overlooked women’s interreligious engagements with explicit ethnographic studies of such being virtually non-existent. This thesis addresses this gap by using ethnographic methods to advance knowledge about women’s interreligious dialogue. Furthermore, it pushes disciplinary discourses by speaking to the following interlinked areas: Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations, formalized interreligious dialogue, interreligious encounters on the grassroots level, women’s interreligious dialogue, a book group approach to engaging with religious diversity, and interreligious encounters in the American context post-September 11th 2001.

Significant differences as well as similarities between Islam and Christianity in the areas of the transcendence of God is the main discussion of the thesis. The investigation of the transcendence of God in the Bible and the Qur’an is within the limits of corresponding relationship accounts of God with Adam, Abraham, and Moses. Selected passages are used as examples to fulfil the aim of the study. Through this study an attempt is also made to determine what constitutes different aspects of theologies and practices of Christianity and Islam. The preliminary preparation of the study and the orientation of the readers into the transcendence of God are dealt with in the first three chapters: Chapter 1 presents an overview of the research as well as the various aspects of research methodology, chapter 2 describes the similarities and differences of the Qur’an and the Bible in order to present an appropriate approach to the exegesis of the selected passages, and chapter 3 establishes the theological issues of the transcendence of God from the views of both Christian and Muslim scholars. The main discussion of the transcendence of God unfolds in chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 4 investigates how God reveals his will in respect to the Qur’an and the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, and describes and analyses the transcendence of God revealed in the Old Testament and the Qur’an within the limits of the parallel passages dealing with Adam, Abraham, and Moses. Chapter 5 carries over the results of chapter 4 to find the cause of the differences between the corresponding episodes of the Old Testament and the Qur’an with regard to the transcendence of God, and analyses the implications of the transcendence of God with regard to the differences in Christianity and Islam theology. Finally, chapter 6 concludes the study as well as presents implications and solutions for the Christian-Muslim conflicts and the necessity for further studies. In conclusion, the exegesis of identical passages concerning God’s relationship with man found in both the Qur’an and the Bible establishes that the Qur’an presupposes that God, maintaining absolute transcendence from creation, will not allow his immanent state with man. Thus, Muslims can only have a transcendent relationship with God, which diminishes their ability to know God, and closes the door to personal relationships between God and man. The lack of God’s personal relationship with man has been a key factor in shaping the theology of Islam. In the Bible, on the other hand, God’s relationship with man is expressed in both his transcendence and immanence. God first wanted his immanent state with man, but due to man’s sinful state the ontological transcendent relationship has been established. God, in turn, uses his transcendence as a method of immanence with man. This transcendence-immanence of God is evident through Christian theology which can be expressed as God’s horizontal-vertical relationship compared to the vertical relationship of God in Islam. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Biblical and Religious Studies / unrestricted

This Master’s Thesis examines transnational conflicts and Christian-Muslim relations in Nigeria between the years 2001 and 2006. It focuses on two major transnational conflicts: The September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States and the Danish cartoon controversy of 2005/2006. It discusses the impact of these transnational conflicts on Christian-Muslim relations in Nigeria in the light of the implementation of the Sharia Law in some northern Nigerian states and the improved access to the broadcast media and mobile telephone communication in Nigeria. By underscoring the relationship between transnational conflicts and the local context, this study provides a new perspective for understanding Christian-Muslim relations in Nigeria

Summaries in English and Afrikaans / Die verhoudings tussen Christene en Moslems word dikwels vertroebel deur wantroue, misverstand en kultuurverskille. Hierdie studie behandel gebed as 'n moontlike brug van begrip tussen Moslems en Christene. Die motivering vir die studie le egter dieper as die soeke na goeie wedersydse verhoudings. Dit vloei voort uit deelname aan die "God se sending" in die wereld. Hoofstuk 2 gee 'n noukeurige beskrywing van Moslemgebed (salat), deur te kyk na die oproep tot gebed, voorneme, wassing, gebedshoudings, asook die plek en rigting van gebed. Hoofstuk 3 bevat 'n Christelike interpretasie van Moslemgebed. Di t bestudeer die aanroep ("In die naam van God"), die Moslem-geloofsbelydenis en salat as ritueel. Hoofstuk 4 tref 'n vergelyking tussen die eerste Soerah (Al-Fatihah) en die "Onse Vader". Beide verskille en ooreenkomste word aangetoon. Hoofstuk 5 trek dan 'n paar missiologiese konklusies, met die klem op gebedshoudings en die verhouding tussen dialoog en getuienis. / Relations between Christians and Muslims have often been strained due to mistrust, misunderstanding and cultural differences. This study focuses on prayer as a possible bridge to mutual understanding between Muslims and Christians. However, the motivation for this study goes deeper than a search for good neighbourliness. It stems from participating in the ''mission of God" in society. Chapter 2 gives a detailed description of Muslim prayer (salat), looking at the call to prayer, intention, ablution, prayer postures, the place and the direction of salat. Chapter 3 contains a Christian interpretation of Muslim prayer. It examines the invocation ("In the name of God"), the Islamic Creed, and salat as ritual. Chapter 4 draws a comparison between the opening Surah (Al-Fatihah) and the Lord's Prayer. Both the common and distinguishing features are highlighted. Chapter 5 draws some missiological implications, focusing on prayer postures and the relationship between dialogue and witness. / Christian Spirituality, Church History and Missiology / M. Th. (Missiology)