Richard Foltz
Biographic Data
| ID | 1246094 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Richard Foltz |
| GIVEN NAMES | Richard |
| FAMILY NAME | Foltz |
| SIGNATURE | FOLTZ R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Concordia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8754-776X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 89 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
History of the Caucasus, v. 2: In the Shadow of Great Powers, by Christoph Baumer
Review of: Christoph Baumer, History of the Caucasus, v. 2: In the Shadow of Great Powers, London: “I.B. Tauris-Bloomsbury”, 2024.—376 pp
The Eurasian Steppe: People, Movement, Ideas, written by Warwick Ball
Review of: Warwick Ball, The Eurasian Steppe: People, Movement, Ideas, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 414 + xix pp. ISBN: 978-1-4744-8806-8, £19.99 (pbk)
The Survival of Ossetians in Turkey
The migration of North Caucasian peoples into Ottoman Anatolia during the early 1860s included some five thousand Muslim Ossetes who settled first in the Sarıkamış district and later moved further west. While today the descendants of these migrants may number as many as 60,000, most now live in the major urban centres of Istanbul and Ankara and have largely become assimilated into modern Turkish society. However, three villages in the Yozgat dist…
Tales of the Narts: Ancient Myths and Legends of the Ossetians
Fazlun M. Khalid, Signs on the Earth: Islam, Modernity and the Climate Crisis
Fazlun M. Khalid, Signs on the Earth: Islam, Modernity and the Climate Crisis (Markleld, UK: Kube, 2019), 249 pp., $18.95 (pbk), ISBN: 978-1847740755
Scythian Neo-Paganism in the Caucasus: The Ossetian Uatsdin as a ‘Nature Religion’
The Scythians, a warlike, pastoral-nomadic, Iranian-speaking people who dominated the Eurasian steppes throughout the first millennium BCE, are known to us through the accounts of Herodotus and other Greek writers of antiquity. The Scythians’ language and many of their cultural customs survive today among the Ossetes of the Central Caucasus, among whom an attempt to revive the ancient religion has been underway since the fall of the Soviet Union …
The Rekom Shrine in North Ossetia-Alania and its Annual Ceremony
The Rekom Shrine located in the Tsey Valley of North Ossetia-Alania is one of the most important sites in the Ossetian popular religion, which in modern times is often referred to as the Uatsdin. The shrine is dedicated to Uastyrdzhi, an Ossetian cultic figure associated with the Christian St. George. Rekom is the site of a major festival held in mid-June, called Rekomy Bærægbon (Рекомы бæрæгбон), where certain aspects of the ritual may date back…
Muslim Environmentalisms: Religious and Social Foundations. By Anna M. Gade
This is the first ever book-length critical scholarly treatment of discussions on the relationship of Islamic values to environmental ones. Within the field variously known as “religion and ecology” or sometimes “religion and nature” that has been taking shape over the past two decades, sincere efforts have been made by those framing the discourse (almost exclusively Westerners or westernized others) to be inclusive of all the world’s religious t…
From Zanzibar to Zaytun: Iranian Merchants across the Indian Ocean Basin
The role of Iranian merchants in the maritime trade of the Indian Ocean basin from antiquity up to the 16th century is often underestimated. From scholarly histories to popular culture the “Muslim sailor” is typically portrayed as being an Arab. In fact, from pre-Islamic times the principal actors in Indian Ocean trade were predominantly Persian, as attested by the archaeological data, local written records, and the names of places and individual…
The “Original” Kurdish Religion? Kurdish Nationalism and the False Conflation of the Yezidi and Zoroastrian Traditions
The religion of the Yezidi Kurds, which has often been inaccurately characterized as “devil-worship,” has been claimed by Kurdish nationalists since the 1930s as the “original” religion of the Kurdish people. It has likewise been asserted that the Yezidi faith is a form of Zoroastrianism, the official religion of Iran in pre-Islamic times. These notions have won official support from most Kurdish political organizations and have broadly penetrate…
Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions
Islam is the religion of over one billion people and is practiced in virtually every country on earth. The articulation of an Islamic environmental ethic in contemporary terms is all the more urgent because Western-style conservation efforts do not fit all cultural and philosophical traditions. This volume outlines the Islamic view of the cosmic order and reviews the ways an Islamic world view can be interpreted, reassessed, and applied to such e…
Silk Road and migration
The term “Silk Road” was coined in the late 19th century by German explorer Ferdinand von Richthofen to describe the network of overland trade routes which linked the Mediterranean world with China across the central Eurasian land mass since at least the 2nd century BCE . However, archaeological evidence suggests human migrations along this west–east corridor dating back even earlier, beginning 4,000 years ago or even more. The prehistoric migran…
Zoroastrians in Iran: What Future in the Homeland
Zoroastrianism, a religion which arose among Iranian peoples some 3,000 years ago, was the religion of the majority of Iranians prior to the Arab conquests of the mid-7th century. Since that time, a steady process of conversion to Islam has left a small Zoroastrian minority of 20,000 or less in Iran today. While community leaders are making efforts to keep the religion alive, factors such as emigration, intermarriage, and low birth rates now put …
Buddhism and the Silk Road
Sometime from the seventh to the fourth century BCE in northeastern India lived a man named Siddhartha Gautama, who came to be known as the Buddha, or “Enlightened One.”1 A spiritual reformer who sought a “Middle Path” between worldliness and asceticism, the Buddha preached a message based on Four Noble Truths: that life is suffering, that there is a cause of that suffering, namely, desire, that there is a way to end suffering, and that the way i…
A Refuge of Heretics: Nestorians and Manichaeans on the Silk Road
It was during the first five centuries of the Common Era that the major religions of West Asia defined themselves and began to take the shape in which we recognize them today. To a large extent this was a process resulting from mutual antagonisms: in the Eastern Roman world between Christians and Jews and among proponents of diverse interpretations of Christianity, and in the Iranian sphere, between the caretakers of traditional Ahura Mazda-based…
Ecumenical Mischief
Echoes and rumors of the Qara-khitai exploits reached the Frankish Crusaders in the Levant, who, through a bit of creative phonetics, interpreted the ruler’s title, Gür-khan, as “Prester John” (Syriac: Yuhanan) and developed the myth of a Christian king from the East who would come to join forces with them in the Holy Land and help to crush Islam there. 1 This myth was to persist for nearly two centuries, as the persona of Prester John came optim…
Epilogue: The Religion of the Market
As noted in chapter One, the patterns underlying contemporary globalization are nothing new. Historians such as Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein, André Gunder Frank, Jerry Bentley, and others have demonstrated that the Eurocentric view—according to which world systems supposedly first emerged with the European “discoveries” of the fifteenth century—is excessively narrow. And this book has sought to make the case that for as long as global ne…
The Silk Road and Its Travelers
During the latter decades of the nineteenth century, popular European fascination with the world beyond reached an all-time high. The British and French empires spanned the globe, and their colonial agents sent home exotic goods and stories. Poets and painters put their own visions of the seductive Orient onto paper and canvas. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be update…
A Melting Pot No More
By the time the Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French began their sea-borne encounters with Asian civilization, the Silk Road’s 2,000-year-long role in transmitting cultural traditions was ending. A popular form of Islam, linked to Sufi orders such as the Yasaviyya and the Naqshbandiyya, was the main religious presence throughout Central Asia, reaching even the last holdouts of steppe paganism among the Turkic nomads. By the sixteenth century th…
Religion and Trade in Ancient Eurasia
Archaeological evidence suggests that urban-based political structures in the Oxus region began to develop from the early part of the first millennium BCE. To the north, within the vast swath of steppelands reaching across the Asian continent from above the Black Sea all the way to the frontiers of China, the culture was mainly nomadic or seminomadic. As urbanization developed, the pastoral peoples of the Eurasian steppe entered into a long, rock…
The Islamization of the Silk Road
Peer-reviewed
Zoroastrian Attitudes toward Animals
The ancient religion of Zoroastrianism devotes considerable attention to relations between human and nonhuman animals. All animal species are seen as being in one of two categories—either beneficent or malevolent, aligned either with the forces of good or with the forces of evil in an ongoing cosmic battle. Humans should treat each species accordingly, zealously protecting “beneficent” species while ruthlessly exterminating “malevolent” ones. Zor…
Buddhism in the Iranian World
The “Iranian World,” defined as the Iranian plateau and adjacent regions historically inhabited by Iranian-speaking peoples or influenced by their culture, played an important role in the development and transmission of Buddhism especially during the early centuries. Like other world religions, Buddhism spread via trade routes and absorbed local influences along the way.2 A Pali legend suggests that the first individuals to spread the Buddha’s te…
Religions of the Silk Road: Premodern Patterns of Globalization
Drawing on the latest research and scholarship, this newly revised and updated edition of Religions of the Silk Road explores the majestically fabled cities and exotic peoples that make up the romanti
Iranian Zoroastrians in Canada: Balancing Religious and Cultural Identities
Canada, now the number-one destination for Iranian migrants, is home to one of the world's most dynamic Zoroastrian communities, in which Iranians are increasingly represented and are playing ever more visible roles in maintaining and transforming the tradition. While exile has in some ways reunited Iranian and Parsi (South Asian) Zoroastrians after more than 1,000 years of separation, cultural and in some cases religious differences mean that th…
Religions of the Silk Road: Premodern Patterns of Globalization
Drawing on the latest research and scholarship, this newly revised and updated edition of Religions of the Silk Road explores the majestically fabled cities and exotic peoples that make up the romanti
Mughal India and Central Asia
Iran's Water Crisis: Cultural, Political, and Ethical Dimensions
Is Zoroastrianism an Ecological Religion
In recent years a number of Zoroastrian scholars have sought to characterize Zoroastrianism as the ‘world’s first environmental religion’, pointing to a number of rituals and injunctions aimed at safeguarding nature from activities seen as polluting. However, while the tradition does indeed enjoin Zoroastrians to respect and protect many aspects of nature, pollution is seen in ritual terms, not ecological ones. Moreover, in the dualistic Zoroastr…
Animals in Islamic Tradition and Muslim Cultures
Preface xi Introduction: Islam, Muslims, and Non-human Animals 1 Muslims and Islam: Some Facts and Definitions 8 1 Animals in Islamic Source Texts 11 2 Animals in Islamic Law 29 3 Animals in Philosophy and Science 47 4 Animals in Literature and Art 65 5 Contemporary Muslim Views on 6 Towards an Islamic Vegetarianism 105 7 Muslim Attitudes Towards Dogs 129 Conclusions 145 Notes 153 Bibliography 173 Organizations 181 Index 184
Mormon Values and the Utah Environment
Although there has been little if any discussion of Mormon environmentalism outside the tradition, it is increasingly apparent that such an ethic does exist - though whether this ethic is with or against the current of formal LDS teaching is less clear. This article provides an overview of contemporary Mormon ecological thought and its roots within the LDS tradition, and highlights some of the tensions connected with environmental issues within t…
Is There an Islamic Environmentalism
Contemporary Muslim writers have demonstrated that an environmental ethic can be derived from the scriptural sources of Islam. However, at present, the impact of this type of interpretation within the Muslim world appears to be minimal. The most promising prospects for disseminating an environmental awareness based on Islamic principles have come from governments, such as those of Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, which claim Islam as a basis for…
Zoroastrians in Iran: What Future in the Homeland
Zoroastrianism, a religion which arose among Iranian peoples some 3,000 years ago, was the religion of the majority of Iranians prior to the Arab conquests of the mid-7th century. Since that time, a steady process of conversion to Islam has left a small Zoroastrian minority of 20,000 or less in Iran today. While community leaders are making efforts to keep the religion alive, factors such as emigration, intermarriage, and low birth rates now put …
Religions of the Silk Road: Overland Trade and Cultural Exchange from Antiquity to the Fifteenth Century
The Silk Route and its Travellers Religion and Trade in Ancient Eurasia The Rise and Spread of Buddhism Heresies in Flight: Nestorian Christianity and Manichaeism Islam and the Silk Route Ecumenical Mischief Under the Mongols A Melting Pot No More
The Mughal Occupation of Balkh 1646-1647
Zoroastrian Attitudes toward Animals
The ancient religion of Zoroastrianism devotes considerable attention to relations between human and nonhuman animals. All animal species are seen as being in one of two categories—either beneficent or malevolent, aligned either with the forces of good or with the forces of evil in an ongoing cosmic battle. Humans should treat each species accordingly, zealously protecting “beneficent” species while ruthlessly exterminating “malevolent” ones. Zor…
The Religion of the Market: Reflections on a Decade of Discussion
By the mid-1990s scholars of religion had begun to analyze the ideologies associated with global capitalism as a new, hegemonic world faith system, which some referred to as the Religion of the Market. Many have taken polemical positions, either arguing that it is a "false faith" which needs to be exposed, or that it is the appropriate faith for our times. Still others refuse to see global capitalism as a religion and reject the analytical paradi…
Environmental initiatives in contemporary Iran
Iran's environmental crisis is one of the severest in the world. At the same time, environmental initiatives there at both the government and private levels are unique not only among Muslim countries, but in the developing world in general. Iran's constitution contains the strongest environmental statement of any contemporary national charter. During the 1990s environmental NGOs proliferated in Iran, and have generally worked well with the Islami…
The Tajiks of Uzbekistan
Peer-reviewed
The Central Asian Naqshbandi Connections of the Mughal Emperors
Tales of the Narts: Ancient Myths and Legends of the Ossetians
The Rekom Shrine in North Ossetia-Alania and its Annual Ceremony
The Rekom Shrine located in the Tsey Valley of North Ossetia-Alania is one of the most important sites in the Ossetian popular religion, which in modern times is often referred to as the Uatsdin. The shrine is dedicated to Uastyrdzhi, an Ossetian cultic figure associated with the Christian St. George. Rekom is the site of a major festival held in mid-June, called Rekomy Bærægbon (Рекомы бæрæгбон), where certain aspects of the ritual may date back…
The “Original” Kurdish Religion? Kurdish Nationalism and the False Conflation of the Yezidi and Zoroastrian Traditions
The religion of the Yezidi Kurds, which has often been inaccurately characterized as “devil-worship,” has been claimed by Kurdish nationalists since the 1930s as the “original” religion of the Kurdish people. It has likewise been asserted that the Yezidi faith is a form of Zoroastrianism, the official religion of Iran in pre-Islamic times. These notions have won official support from most Kurdish political organizations and have broadly penetrate…
Buddhism in the Iranian World
The “Iranian World,” defined as the Iranian plateau and adjacent regions historically inhabited by Iranian-speaking peoples or influenced by their culture, played an important role in the development and transmission of Buddhism especially during the early centuries. Like other world religions, Buddhism spread via trade routes and absorbed local influences along the way.2 A Pali legend suggests that the first individuals to spread the Buddha’s te…
Iranian Zoroastrians in Canada: Balancing Religious and Cultural Identities
Canada, now the number-one destination for Iranian migrants, is home to one of the world's most dynamic Zoroastrian communities, in which Iranians are increasingly represented and are playing ever more visible roles in maintaining and transforming the tradition. While exile has in some ways reunited Iranian and Parsi (South Asian) Zoroastrians after more than 1,000 years of separation, cultural and in some cases religious differences mean that th…
Nature in Asian Traditions: The State of the Field
Two Seventeenth-Century Central Asian Travellers to Mughal India
Among the few published Central Asian sources of the seventeenth century are two very unusual Persian-language accounts by Central Asians of their stays in Mughal India: the memoirs of Mutribi al-Asamm Samarqandi, and the travelogue of Mahmud b. Amir Wali. Written in stylistically different but distinctly personal voices untypical for their time, these accounts offer the modern reader valuable first-person insight into the minds and outlooks of t…
Psychometric properties of two instruments to measure quality decision making
The results of testing two instruments for consequential decision making are reported: a screening instrument, the Decision Making Quality Scale (DMQS), which assesses the degree to which a person adheres to seven quality criteria of decision making; and a diagnostic measure, the Decision Making Quality Inventory (DMQI), which assesses an individual's dominant decision‐making style through six sequential stages of the process. The instruments are…
Two Seventeenth-Century Central Asian Travellers to Mughal India
Among the few published Central Asian sources of the seventeenth century are two very unusual Persian-language accounts by Central Asians of their stays in Mughal India: the memoirs of Mutribi al-Asamm Samarqandi, and the travelogue of Mahmud b. Amir Wali. Written in stylistically different but distinctly personal voices untypical for their time, these accounts offer the modern reader valuable first-person insight into the minds and outlooks of t…
The Tajiks of Uzbekistan
Peer-reviewed
The Mughal Occupation of Balkh 1646-1647
The Central Asian Naqshbandi Connections of the Mughal Emperors
Mughal India and Central Asia
Mormon Values and the Utah Environment
Although there has been little if any discussion of Mormon environmentalism outside the tradition, it is increasingly apparent that such an ethic does exist - though whether this ethic is with or against the current of formal LDS teaching is less clear. This article provides an overview of contemporary Mormon ecological thought and its roots within the LDS tradition, and highlights some of the tensions connected with environmental issues within t…
Religions of the Silk Road: Overland Trade and Cultural Exchange from Antiquity to the Fifteenth Century
The Silk Route and its Travellers Religion and Trade in Ancient Eurasia The Rise and Spread of Buddhism Heresies in Flight: Nestorian Christianity and Manichaeism Islam and the Silk Route Ecumenical Mischief Under the Mongols A Melting Pot No More
Is There an Islamic Environmentalism
Contemporary Muslim writers have demonstrated that an environmental ethic can be derived from the scriptural sources of Islam. However, at present, the impact of this type of interpretation within the Muslim world appears to be minimal. The most promising prospects for disseminating an environmental awareness based on Islamic principles have come from governments, such as those of Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, which claim Islam as a basis for…
Reply to George Handley and Thomas Alexander
Environmental initiatives in contemporary Iran
Iran's environmental crisis is one of the severest in the world. At the same time, environmental initiatives there at both the government and private levels are unique not only among Muslim countries, but in the developing world in general. Iran's constitution contains the strongest environmental statement of any contemporary national charter. During the 1990s environmental NGOs proliferated in Iran, and have generally worked well with the Islami…
Iran's Water Crisis: Cultural, Political, and Ethical Dimensions
Animals in Islamic Tradition and Muslim Cultures
Preface xi Introduction: Islam, Muslims, and Non-human Animals 1 Muslims and Islam: Some Facts and Definitions 8 1 Animals in Islamic Source Texts 11 2 Animals in Islamic Law 29 3 Animals in Philosophy and Science 47 4 Animals in Literature and Art 65 5 Contemporary Muslim Views on 6 Towards an Islamic Vegetarianism 105 7 Muslim Attitudes Towards Dogs 129 Conclusions 145 Notes 153 Bibliography 173 Organizations 181 Index 184
Nature in Asian Traditions: The State of the Field
The Religion of the Market: Reflections on a Decade of Discussion
By the mid-1990s scholars of religion had begun to analyze the ideologies associated with global capitalism as a new, hegemonic world faith system, which some referred to as the Religion of the Market. Many have taken polemical positions, either arguing that it is a "false faith" which needs to be exposed, or that it is the appropriate faith for our times. Still others refuse to see global capitalism as a religion and reject the analytical paradi…
Is Zoroastrianism an Ecological Religion
In recent years a number of Zoroastrian scholars have sought to characterize Zoroastrianism as the ‘world’s first environmental religion’, pointing to a number of rituals and injunctions aimed at safeguarding nature from activities seen as polluting. However, while the tradition does indeed enjoin Zoroastrians to respect and protect many aspects of nature, pollution is seen in ritual terms, not ecological ones. Moreover, in the dualistic Zoroastr…
Muslim "Orientalism" in medieval travel accounts of India
Since the late 1970s the term "orientalism" has most often been used to assert the existence of an exoticised, romanticised and often hegemonic European view of the non-Western Other. A similar approach can be seen in travelogues of India written by Middle Eastern and Central Asian Muslims during the pre-modern period. This observation suggests that such approaches to the Other are not unique to Europeans, but may be characteristic of hegemonic c…
Iranian Zoroastrians in Canada: Balancing Religious and Cultural Identities
Canada, now the number-one destination for Iranian migrants, is home to one of the world's most dynamic Zoroastrian communities, in which Iranians are increasingly represented and are playing ever more visible roles in maintaining and transforming the tradition. While exile has in some ways reunited Iranian and Parsi (South Asian) Zoroastrians after more than 1,000 years of separation, cultural and in some cases religious differences mean that th…
Buddhism and the Silk Road
Sometime from the seventh to the fourth century BCE in northeastern India lived a man named Siddhartha Gautama, who came to be known as the Buddha, or “Enlightened One.”1 A spiritual reformer who sought a “Middle Path” between worldliness and asceticism, the Buddha preached a message based on Four Noble Truths: that life is suffering, that there is a cause of that suffering, namely, desire, that there is a way to end suffering, and that the way i…
A Refuge of Heretics: Nestorians and Manichaeans on the Silk Road
It was during the first five centuries of the Common Era that the major religions of West Asia defined themselves and began to take the shape in which we recognize them today. To a large extent this was a process resulting from mutual antagonisms: in the Eastern Roman world between Christians and Jews and among proponents of diverse interpretations of Christianity, and in the Iranian sphere, between the caretakers of traditional Ahura Mazda-based…
Ecumenical Mischief
Echoes and rumors of the Qara-khitai exploits reached the Frankish Crusaders in the Levant, who, through a bit of creative phonetics, interpreted the ruler’s title, Gür-khan, as “Prester John” (Syriac: Yuhanan) and developed the myth of a Christian king from the East who would come to join forces with them in the Holy Land and help to crush Islam there. 1 This myth was to persist for nearly two centuries, as the persona of Prester John came optim…
Epilogue: The Religion of the Market
As noted in chapter One, the patterns underlying contemporary globalization are nothing new. Historians such as Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein, André Gunder Frank, Jerry Bentley, and others have demonstrated that the Eurocentric view—according to which world systems supposedly first emerged with the European “discoveries” of the fifteenth century—is excessively narrow. And this book has sought to make the case that for as long as global ne…
The Silk Road and Its Travelers
During the latter decades of the nineteenth century, popular European fascination with the world beyond reached an all-time high. The British and French empires spanned the globe, and their colonial agents sent home exotic goods and stories. Poets and painters put their own visions of the seductive Orient onto paper and canvas. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be update…
A Melting Pot No More
By the time the Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French began their sea-borne encounters with Asian civilization, the Silk Road’s 2,000-year-long role in transmitting cultural traditions was ending. A popular form of Islam, linked to Sufi orders such as the Yasaviyya and the Naqshbandiyya, was the main religious presence throughout Central Asia, reaching even the last holdouts of steppe paganism among the Turkic nomads. By the sixteenth century th…
Religion and Trade in Ancient Eurasia
Archaeological evidence suggests that urban-based political structures in the Oxus region began to develop from the early part of the first millennium BCE. To the north, within the vast swath of steppelands reaching across the Asian continent from above the Black Sea all the way to the frontiers of China, the culture was mainly nomadic or seminomadic. As urbanization developed, the pastoral peoples of the Eurasian steppe entered into a long, rock…
History (30 works) · Philosophy (23 works) · Political science (22 works) · Ancient history (21 works) · Eurasian Exchange Networks (20 works) · History (19 works) · Law (19 works) · Geography (18 works) · Archaeology (17 works) · Islam (17 works)