Comparing Faiths
The Making of Religious Dialogue between the Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7797895 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Dilan Yildirim (0000-0002-9010-1846, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, corresponding author), Duygu Yıldırım (0000-0002-0223-0016) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 63 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 198-227 |
| Publication date | 2023-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History of Religions (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0018-2710 • E-ISSN: 1545-6935 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/726716 |
| OpenAlex | W4388818932 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 32 |
As an imperial city at the crossroads, Istanbul functioned as a window onto debates about the complex relation between faith and knowledge during an era of interreligious conflict and changing political allegiances. Taking seventeenth-century Istanbul as a case study, this article examines how and why religious conflict unintentionally led to a new form of religious dialogue that stimulated knowledge exchange between Muslims and Christians. The changing nature of interreligious dialogue between Ottomans and Europeans occurred in the context of ongoing religious crises on both sides: within Muslim communities and between Western and Eastern Christianities. It argues that confessional conflict ironically helped to develop grounds for a rapprochement between Ottoman and European intellectual worlds to redefine faith beyond the textual domains of theology. Through scholarly engagements, learned Europeans began to appreciate commonality with respect to matters of faith, while also becoming gradually aware that distinct individuals of the same religion vary on the nature of true faith. Faith eventually began to be understood in its own pluralities and irreconcilable conflicts through everyday encounters in Istanbul. By comparing faiths in Islam, early modern scholars faced the paradox of their own time: the irreducibility of religious difference within any one religion. Recapturing the genealogy of the comparative approach to faith in the form of dialogue, this study sheds light on the origins of religious relativism, which is conventionally associated with the European Enlightenment
Confessional · Context (archaeology) · Enlightenment · Faith · Islam · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Theology · Historical and Linguistic Studies · History · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious studies
The Birth of Orientalism
Confessionalization and/as Knowledge Transfer in the Greek Orthodox Church
A New Science
A Commerce of Knowledge
Crime and Punishment in Istanbul
The Qur'an in Comparison, and the Birth of ‘scriptures’
El Socinianismo, el islam y los usos radicales de la erudición árabe
Honored by the Glory of Islam
The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, 1453 to 1768
The Republic of Arabic Letters
A Missing Royal Mosque in Istanbul that Islamized a Catholic Space
“Those Heretics Gathering Secretly …”
Rearticulating a Christian-Muslim Understanding
Migration From Within and Without
Polemic Dialogues between Christians and Muslims in the Seventeenth Century
The Great Fire of 1660 and the Islamization of Christian and Jewish Space in Istanbul
Frank disputations
The Impossible Reformation
A critique of "religion" as a cross-cultural category1
Disenchanting Heaven
On the Very Idea of Religions (In the Modern West and in Early Medieval China)
Mehmed the Conqueror between Sulh-i Kull and Prisca Theologia
The Greek Orthodox Position on the Confession of Cyril Lucaris
Moral Revolutions
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |