Despite the increased number of interreligiously married Muslim women, especially in Western countries, the phenomenon remains overlooked. This research aims to highlight interreligiously married Muslim women's untold stories and to examine their experiences of being part of an interfaith marriage. The research illustrates that Muslim women's interfaith marriages are seen as prohibited and unconventional by many Muslim scholars and communities, and they view this prohibition as a subject that is closed for discussion due to the traditional scholarly consensus supporting it. However, some contemporary Muslim scholars have started to discuss Muslim women's interfaith marriages and argue that the rule and consensus regarding these unions should be re-evaluated considering the ways in which society and gender roles in today's marriages are changing. Using qualitative interviews with intermarried Muslim women, this study examines the impact of the families on Muslim women's decision to marry a non-Muslim, how they deal with the religious differences in the family and the impact the interfaith union has upon their religiosity. The research reveals that 'love' is the main reason behind the Muslim women's decision of interfaith marriage. The findings also indicate that while interfaith marriage does not directly impact Muslim women's religiosity, community pressure and negative perceptions of their marriages have curtailed Muslim women and their children's relationship with the Muslim community.

This study investigated the accuracy and quality across five different translations of the Quran from Arabic into English, focusing on euphemism. It evaluated the degree of faithfulness or deviation in meaning from the original and corroborated whether this is due to the translating approach or inadequate understanding of the meaning of Quranic text. It assessed the main features of euphemistic expressions in the Quran, how euphemistic expressions have been translated, and provided recommendations on how to improve the translation of euphemistic expressions in the Quran. Throughout its long history, translation and translation studies have never been free from conflicting views. Translation is one of the most researched topics and no other issue has preoccupied theorists and practitioners as much as the translation debate which has brought about a split of views, specifically into those who claim that translation is an art and those who believe that translation is a science. Each camp puts forward unrealistic expectations of what translation is and what it can achieve. Despite the boom in translation studies over the last decades which has provided interesting and fresh insights, it remains an area which has little theoretical base and very few research landmarks. Translation has rarely managed to rise above mere comparative analysis of language pairs, examining their cross linguistic and cultural differences. Translation approaches, procedures and techniques are not one size fits all. They may work well for Indo-European languages but may not for Semitic languages, for instance. They are often prescriptive, abstract and lack practical implications. Highly expressive and colourful components of any language are often deliberately substituted by euphemistic expressions. Euphemism is thus a purposeful act of softening existing terms or expressions with neutral, courteous and ‘clean’ words. Euphemism is said to be a form of deception. This study examined the translation of euphemism in the Quran focusing on the English versions of the Quran by Abdel Haleem, Khan and Al-Hilali, Yusuf Ali, Arberry, and Pickthall. It was found that translators often underestimate the complexity of translation, particularly the translation of euphemism in the Quran Based on the nature of the problem and the research questions, the method adopted in this study used a qualitative approach starting with text based analysis of a broad sample of euphemistic expressions from the five selected versions of translations of the Quran. This was supported by semi-structured interviews with professional translators to gauge their views and perceptions regarding the meanings of euphemism in the Quran. The key findings suggest that there is no single method which will address all of the challenges faced by the translators of euphemisms of the Quran. Moreover, many Islamic concepts and cultural bound items are untranslatable, thus loss of some meaning is inevitable. Findings revealed that straightforward and mechanical transfer of euphemisms from the Quran produces meaningless or clumsy utterances because there is no direct correspondence between Arabic and English euphemistic expressions. Therefore, translating euphemism in the Quran goes beyond mere linguistic transfer. This study has several practical implications. Firstly, it will benefit translators of the Quran by providing fresh insights into dealing with some of the challenges of translating euphemism from the Quran. Secondly, it will provide a platform for further research on translating euphemism as it has expanded the existing literature on translating euphemistic expressions from the Quran to benefit future researchers.

This research studied the applicability of Ibn Khaldūn’s theory of ‘Aṣabiyyah in a modern context, by choosing the Malay Muslim community in Malaysia as a case study. Although the theory was introduced by Ibn Khaldūn in the 14th century and has been discussed by numerous scholars, only recently has its relevance to the modern situation been reviewed. The current situation of the Muslim community in general and Malay Muslims in Malaysia in particular, who are mainly associated with the issues of moral degradation, misunderstanding of religion, economic stagnation, political division and lack of intellectuality, directs us to examine the theory of ‘Aṣabiyyah in the modern context and to reflect on its relevance to the issues listed above. To achieve the research objective, the theory was reviewed via library study and fieldwork. The current situation of the Malay Muslim community, comprising its problems and challenges, was studied with this approach. In particular, a group of students of the University of Malaya undertook to distribute questionnaires and conduct interviews. To obtain further information regarding the applicability of Aṣabiyyah at the present time to the context of the Malay Muslim community, interviews were also conducted among Malaysian scholars who have expertise in the related area. The results of the fieldwork show that most of the respondents have a general and average understanding of the theory of ‘Aṣabiyyah. Furthermore, most of the feedback from the respondents suggests that the current condition of the Malay Muslim community is at an ‘average’ level, with the exception of the political and social aspects, which are viewed as problematic and worrying.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the manner in which the Qur’an and sunna depict female personalities in their narrative literature. It is a comprehensive study of all the female personalities mentioned in the Qur’an, and is selective in the personalities of the sunna to the three prominent women of ahl al-bayt, Khadi>ja, Fa>t}ima, and Zaynab. The sources examined here are the major sources of Ima>mi> Shi>‘i> Islam, including the exegetical compilations of the eminent Shi>‘i> religious authorities of the classical and modern periods; as well as the authoritative books of Shi>’i> traditions. The results reached here are that female personalities are portrayed as human beings, and that they display feminine qualities, which are often viewed positively and are sometimes commendable traits for men, at least as far as the spiritual domain is concerned. The hypothesis, particularly about women’s humanity, will be tested against the depiction of womanhood in the h}adi>th literature, with special emphasis on Nahj al-Bala>gha. The study recommends that future research on the subject of “women in Islam” widen the scope of what it considers to be its data, outside the domain of the law.

This thesis is a study of the Qur'ānic discourse on knowledge and its impact on the Muslim world. It focuses in particular on the division of knowledge into the Revealed or Religious sciences and the Rational sciences. The thesis asks whether both Revealed knowledge and Rational knowledge are considered religiously praiseworthy and questions what the purpose is in acquiring knowledge. The thesis then examines the impact of the Qur’anic discourse on the Muslim community through the development of the revealed and the rational sciences and through the development of educational institutions. Finally it asks why it is that in the present day the two branches are isolated from each other when there was clearly a great deal of overlap and cross-fertilisation during the medieval period. The findings were that the purpose of acquiring knowledge in Islam is to understand God and oneself. It found that within the Qur'ānic discourse the revealed sciences and the rational sciences enjoy a symbiotic relationship. This relationship did not however always manifest in society. The educational institutions did incorporate the rational sciences during times of prosperity but when under political or economic pressure they regressed back to only teaching the revealed sciences.

In this thesis I am investigating the religious ideas of Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, H. P. Blavatsky and Annie Besant as examples of early approaches to religious pluralism. In this context, the term ‘religious pluralism’ refers to the belief that all religious traditions are paths to genuine religious ends. Thus, religions other than one’s own are considered to be of significance to people of all faiths and even to those who are not believers. I relate the appearance of these early notions of religious pluralism to the historical and ideological setting in which they were proposed, particularly the late nineteenth-century debate about science and religion in the West and its spheres of influence. I argue that theories of evolution, in addition to the emerging field of historical biblical criticism, presented a serious challenge to traditional understandings of religion. Together, these two strands of thought made a strong case for a purely materialistic worldview and for the further development of modern sciences on such a basis. In response to this crisis of religion, the four thinkers proposed religious teachings inspired by their own intense religious experience. They emphasised the experiential aspect of these teachings in order to claim an epistemic status of religious knowledge equal to that of scientific or empirical knowledge. In order to universalise this claim, they appealed to religious experience and religious knowledge originating in all faith traditions. In my assessment of these arguments I suggest that the two main thinkers, i.e. Ramakrishna and Blavatsky, may have been led towards pluralistic ideas of religion through their endorsement of the esoteric traditions of Tantrism and Hermeticism, respectively. Moreover, I trace the impact of the British colonial presence in India on the content, presentation and reception of the teachings of all four thinkers. I conclude that the teachings of Ramakrishna et al. represent early attempts to engage with the fact of religious plurality from a religious perspective. Thus, the four thinkers encouraged people to relate to the beliefs and practices of other faiths and to explore them in relation to their own life. These early efforts in interreligious understanding represented the initial steps towards our current debates about religious pluralism and interreligious dialogue.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität, Hamburg, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 165-188) and index.

The present work is an exploration of the relationship between love and law in Islam and Christianity through the works of al-Ghazālī (c.1056-7-1111 C.E.) and Thomas Aquinas (c.1224/5-1274 C.E). In doing so, it aims to provide the historical theological perspective of two thinkers, each pivotal to their respective tradition, with a view to contributing to contemporary Christian-Muslim discourse, which, since the 2007 Common Word initiative, has had a strongly scholarly focus on love. Notably, however, this discourse has tended to avoid discussion pertaining to how we ‘act out’ such love, particularly in regard to legal frameworks. To redress the balance of scholarly discourse, this thesis aims to present key aspects of al-Ghazālī’s and Aquinas’ thought in order to provide the conceptual background necessary to understand and then synthesize how they likely conceived of the love-law relationship. From this, it becomes clear that for al-Ghazālī, the relationship between the heart, intellect, and various categories of knowledge is integral in fostering love for God. In a similar manner, the intellect for Aquinas is integral and its formation is based on our cumulative knowledge and experience. The key facet of the intellect for both is its ability to abstract from particulars to universals. This position is essential to the thought of both writers as God for them is beyond creation and yet in some sense also reflected in and intimately related to creation. As such, the intellect acts as a ‘bridge’ between the immanent and the transcendent. It is both affected by the knowledge gained through this-worldly legal frameworks and the other-worldly divine attributes in which it can share: this includes the divine attribute of love. The extent to which one can share the latter is dependent on the extent to which one is formed by the former. The intellect is, however, aided in this process by the gratuitous gift of revelation, which acts as immanent ‘certain’ knowledge of the transcendent. Such thinking provides the background for a detailed exploration of love and law. Towards this end, first noted is how both authors consider this-worldly law to be an appropriation of other-worldly law, represented by The Preserved Tablet for al-Ghazālī and the eternal law for Aquinas. Reasoning is essential in mankind’s attempt to understand this divine, other-worldly paradigm, although man is aided by a partial manifestation of ‘certain’ knowledge within the created order by way of revelation. Human reasoning on law results in this-worldly legal frameworks, which, in some sense, aim to provide knowledge of God either explicitly or implicitly by way of orientating towards the maintenance of the common good. However, as all good is derivative of God, this-worldly law, whether orientated to a temporal or ultimate good, should be understood as orientation to God. Inclining to our good according to our nature is something both al-Ghazālī and Aquinas maintain is ‘in-built’ within us. At its most fundamental level this good is God, but it does not exclude the material goods and objects that constitute the necessities of life. Thus law orientated towards the good (to whatever degree) encourages orientation to God (to some degree). Inclination to the good is natural within our being, and both al-Ghazālī and Aquinas define love, in the first instance, as inclination to the good according to our nature. The more we are inclined to the good, the more ‘goodness’ is made manifest within us; that is, the more we ‘participate’ in or ‘reflect’ the divine attributes. Thus the more law-abiding we are, the more we are drawn to the good. This eventually forms the intellect in such a way that it is drawn to the good in itself: al-Ghazālī calls this ‘contentment’ and Aquinas calls this ‘charity’. Based on their respective positions, this thesis will therefore firstly argue that the relationship between love and law for al-Ghazālī and Aquinas is as follows: before one can love, one must know, and law provides knowledge; however, such knowledge reflects a gratuitous gift from the creator and therefore divine love underpins the knowledge that enables human love. In course of this study, it will become evident that both al-Ghazālī and Aquinas have a strong apophatic-cataphatic emphasis to their work. That is, their methodologies affirm issues of immanence and transcendence, the knowability and unknowability of God. The only ‘certain’ knowledge for both authors is that which is represented by revelation, and to which all other knowledge should be correlated. However, all other knowledge is reflective of acquired knowledge and human reasoning, which are by nature imperfect. Providing we deploy ‘reason’ effectively in relation to the ‘certain’ knowledge of revelation, we can talk about God to an extent. In such an instance, human language points towards and reflects the divine, but does not totally encapsulate or definitively define the divine. Ultimately, the divine is beyond comprehension while equally somehow reflected or detectable within creation. Indeed, for both authors, genuine experience of the divine exhausted their prolific works and words; this realisation resulted in each adopting a state of ‘silence’ at various points in their respective careers. That is, both come to an appreciation of the insufficiency of words and concepts in the face of a transcendent, immutable God. Noting the centrality of this emphasis in both authors, this study then turns to the present day Christian-Muslim milieu touching upon the ‘reason debate’ that formed the background to the Common Word initiative. Using this as a platform, this thesis argues for a ‘re-emphasis’ or ‘re-discovery’ of the apophatic-cataphatic reasoning that both al-Ghazālī and Aquinas display for contemporary Christian-Muslim discourse. The final hope for the study is two-fold. Firstly, to encourage further discourse on how ‘love’ is ‘acted out’ between the two traditions. And secondly, to remind Christians that law has an important theological tradition within their heritage with a view to providing encouragement for further studies in the neglected area of comparative law in Christian-Muslim discourse.

Socially and politically significant Muslim communities are posing a challenge to the public spheres of Western Europe: can public reason in a liberal democracy be so conceived as to accommodate the religious reasons of Muslims and other religiously motivated citizens? This question, often discussed from the perspective either of political philosophy or of particular religious traditions, is addressed here instead by drawing on the theory and practice of inter-religious dialogue. The dialogue movement known as ‘scriptural reasoning’ is analysed for its potential to provide a way of conceptualising the nature of reasoning in the public sphere. ‘Reasoning with texts’, it is argued, is a way of describing much of the reasoning that takes place within the public sphere and not just religious reasoning. This approach to understanding public reasoning is established through a combination of example and theory. A model of communicative hermeneutics as public reason based on an (inter)textual rationality is proposed. As well as providing space for textually based religious arguments, this (inter)textual imagination can be situated alongside and complement postmodern developments of Jürgen Habermas’s conception of the public sphere. Whilst this approach to reasoning in the public sphere initially appears very different from the classic statement of the idea of public reason in John Rawls’s political liberalism, it is shown to have significant continuity with Rawls’s theory when this is viewed through the lens of the Supreme Court as exemplar of public reason. This highest level of public reason involving legislation is also a form of reasoning with texts. But in order for religious and more popular levels of public discourse and deliberation to impact on the political and legislative processes, these too must be conceived as modes of reasoning having some continuity with higher levels of public reasoning. It is such continuity that this thesis seeks to theorise.

Conservative religious believers often make use of language that represents the perception that there are clear, fixed differences between their view of the world and the worldview of others, and that their view is unambiguously true and other views are not. This thesis explores the validity of that notion through an analysis of conservative religious language from a cognitive linguistic perspective. It first examines the research relating to what is involved in the process of categorising the environment around us and applies it to how that process can lead to and even encourage the perception of conservative religious believers that reality can be simplified into sets of fixed, binary categories. It then investigates whether there are clear, fixed differences between a 15,225 word collection of Evangelical Times Christian testimonials and a 29,067 word collection of islamfortoday.com Muslim testimonials in terms of their use of movement and proximity metaphors to express their way of believing. This thesis concludes with an analysis of the language of three pairs of conservative Muslims and Christians during a videoed discussion focusing on the differences in their experience as believers. In contrast to the first study`s focus on collections of texts, this analysis focuses on individual differences in their use of proximity and movement metaphors and empathetic language. The results of these studies suggest that, despite the fact that such believers perceive their views of the world as clear and fixed, the expression of their perceived experience of interacting with a divine agent can only be accurately described in terms of varying patterns of emphasis. In addition, not only is it sometimes quite difficult to mark out clear differences between different belief communities in terms of this type of language, it is also possible for individuals within the same communities to exhibit as much divergence as individuals from two different communities.