Sometime between antiquity and the Middle Ages, the Alexander Romance – a fictional account of Alexander the Great’s adventures in Persia, India, and China originally composed in Greek around the 3rd c. CE and attributed to Pseudo-Callisthenes – was translated in Ge’ez, the literary language of premodern Ethiopia. This paper explores how the displacement and translation/rewriting of this text brought a specific cosmological vision into the Christian world of Ethiopia, offering resources to conceptualize the Other and the Unknown (exemplified in the text in the ‘East’ that Alexander discovers) as sites of both immense delight and unspeakable danger. By calling attention to the effects of the migration of this text, this analysis aims to augment contemporary conversations on the premodern imagination of the East in literary texts (i.e. work by Akbari, Kinoshita, and Bisaha), revealing how literature can perform complex restructurings of one’s cosmology that, in turn, suggest complex existential possibilities.
While most people know Khorasan as the heart of Shi’ism in Iran with a solid Islamic heritage, this region has a forgotten rich Christian history and heritage from the third century. Locating at the intersection of major trade routes made this region a mission destination for the Syriac-speaking Christian monks and merchants. However, natural disasters, war, and religious persecution by Muslim Mongols and Timur wiped out Christian communities in this region from the earth and the collective memory of Khorasan's inhabitants.
This research is an endeavor to trace any evidence of the existence of Christian communities in Khorasan and map them. Through library research and field visits, eight Christian monasteries, two churches, and 160 Jewish and Christian traces in Northern and Central Khorasan were discovered mainly in Sabzevar, Neishabour, Mashhad, and Torbate Heydarieh Counties in Central Khorasan and Maneh Va Samalghan County in Northern Khorasan.
The studies on the height and glory of the Mongol Empire at its rise, expansion, and institutionalization had become increasingly robust throughout the 20th century. With forthcoming sources such as the Secret History of the Mongols and compounding discoveries by admirers, scholars, and inheritors alike, had allowed for greater insight into the dutiful impact that this period left on the vast expanse of Central Asia and beyond. Amidst this complicated relationship with their history, the current inhabitants as well as direct descendants of the Mongolian nation steadily regard the prominence of the dynastic regime spurred by the successful conquests of Genghis Khan.
In this paper, I present the affinities of the Mongols’ expansion westward into the Middle East and Near East; their assimilation of the Eastern Churches; and the tolerance of religion as a function of the philosophical commonalities between Eastern Christianity and Mongolian imperial spiritualism.
The Mandaean scriptures have been the subject of sustained interest from non-Mandaean scholars for more than two centuries, beginning with Matthias Norberg’s pioneer edition and translation of the Genzā Rabbā or ‘Great Treasure’ in 1815. Those that followed his are considered banner examples of the philological enterprise, one that processes and thereby subsumes data from texts such as these into its own episteme toward a variety of uses. In Foucauldian terms, the ‘subjugated knowledge’ represented by the various philological editions and translations of this text yet paradoxically disguised within them presents an opportunity to critique those same works of scholarship and by extension the entire enterprise of scholarship on Mandaeans. Because of longstanding Mandaean engagements with the surrounding communities, these texts plainly have much to say about their history and other subjects of interest and relevance to historians working on an array of periods and places.
This paper investigates a relatively overlooked excerpt of ʿAbd al-Masīḥ b. Isḥāq al-Kindī's Epistle where he makes references to Zoroastrian, Hindu, and Buddhist beliefs and customs in support of the veracity of the Christian faith against Islam. While the ninth century apologetical tract continues to garner scholarly attention especially given its early witness to Islamic beliefs and practices, and particularly the question of the canonization of the Qurʾān, this study proposes to situate the Epistle against the backdrop of the vibrant intellectual scene of ninth-century Baghdad. To this end, this paper situates Kindī’s Christian “true religion apology” within the interreligious context of the caliphal capital and the corresponding enterprise of comparative religion that is part and parcel of the ʿAbbāsid intellectual project.