Religion

Director's Visitor Katharina Heyden discusses her ongoing project with Director and Leon Levy Professor David Nirenberg, which seeks to think collaboratively about the religions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism using the concept of co-production as a methodology. 

Historian Jérémie Foa offers a very unique view of the 1572 massacres in his work entitled Tous ceux qui tombent: visages du massacre de la Saint–Barthélemy [All that fall: faces of the St. Bartholomew's day massacre]. He exhumes the “small lives” that were taken by reconstituting history in minute detail and honoring the names of the anonymous victims.

The conversion of Hagia Sophia, then the greatest church of Christianity, into a mosque in 1453 by Mehmet the Conqueror was not a historical paradox. Over the centuries, places of worship often passed from one religious community to another, hosting...

Inevitably the Qur’an is rooted in its time, just as the brutal parts of the Hebrew Bible are. Even so, much of what the Qur’an proclaims is more benevolent and less barbarous than many of the fundamentalist doctrines that emerged in later centuries...

The emergence of Judaism is closely intertwined with the emergence of Samaritanism. Both are heirs of ancient Israelite traditions, and the predecessors of both shared the same religious and literary culture. Until the second century B.C.E., this...

In the preface to her last book, The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran,1 the late IAS Professor Patricia Crone (1945–2015) relates when and how she became interested in Iranian Studies. It was early on during her time at Oxford that her...

The Qurʾān defines itself as the last, perfect link in a chain of progressive divine revelations. This determines the ambivalent attitude of the Qurʾān and the Muslim tradition towards the two earlier monotheistic religions: Judaism and Christianity...

Sabine Schmidtke, Professor in the School of Historical Studies, and Gudrun Krämer have edited Speaking for Islam: Religious Authorities in Muslim Societies (Brill Academic Publishers, 2014). The present volume–grown out of an international...

The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism (Cambridge University Press, 2012) by Patricia Crone, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the School of Historical Studies, has received numerous major awards. The book...

Human beings have waged war or engaged in violent conflict with each other since ancient times, an observation that prompted a Member at the Institute to suggest in the course of a casual conversation that surely it was a waste of time and resources...