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1. Christianity 1.1. General remarksIn the history of Christianity, the term  religious reform movements comprises those religious movements (Social movements, religious) that aspire to bring about a purifying change in conditions or an improved restructuring in the church or some of its aspects (e.g. devotion, liturgy, monasticism [Order (association)]). These can be contrasted with anti-reformatory or “reactionary” movements that seek to prevent changes or to reverse innovations. Although etymologically reform (from Latin  reformare, “reshape,” “restore”) also …

1. General considerations 1.1. Terminology In religious and cultural history conversion (Lat. conversio; “turn-about,” “transformation”) means a person's change of religion or confession. Conversion between religions and confessions is not always easily distinguishable from the experience of conversion per se: while the latter is more to do with commitment to a (more) spiritual life and a turn to God, conversion between religions is a conversion with the acknowledgment of a new religious truth, often associated with a new confession of faith [2] (Faith; Confession of faith…

1. Introduction By the dawn of the early modern period, Islam was the religion of the overwhelming majority of the populations of its historic heartlands in the Near and Middle East and North Africa. It was also growing in South and Southeast Asia as far as China, and in sub-Saharan Africa. It was also represented in Europe in Spain, the Balkans, and the Tatar Khanates. Prior to the end of Islamic rule in Spain (1492) and the beginning of European expansion and the Christian mission in the America…

1. IntroductionThe Arabic royal title  sulṭān (originally “power, authority”) came into use from the 10th century onwards in the Abbasid Caliphate for military rulers, who were increasingly exercising effective power, formally endorsed by the Caliph acting as the supreme religious and legal head of the Islamic realm [5. 849–851]; [6]. The title became officially established, and began appearing on coins around the middle of the 11th century under the Seljuks (1038–1194) and Ghaznavids (977–1186).As the title given to the sovereign head of state, the term “sultan”…

1. Introduction The beginnings of a project to “conquer nature” that became apparent in European science and technology from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and the sense of superiority this engendered, distorted views of the accomplishments of non-European civilizations (World perception) [2. 81 ff.]. This was particularly true of perceptions of and attitudes towards the countries of Asia and the “Orient” as a whole (Orientalism). During the 16th and 17th centuries, this region of the world had found its way to an albeit volatil…

1. Sharia and fiqhIn common Muslim usage, the term Sharia (Arabic  šarī‘a, Ottoman Turkish  şerī‘at) denotes the totality of the norms of belief, ethics, and  justice in Islam given by God through the Quran and the Prophet Muḥammad. The term includes the corpus of normative Islamic texts (i.e. the Quran and the tradition of the Prophet) together with their learned interpretation, systematization, and updating, as well as their application by judges or rulers in the institutions of administration of justice. It is closely related to  fiqh, Islamic jurisprudence, which…

1. IntroductionTo be considered first in this exploration of the non-European literate cultures are the various manuscript cultures that developed independent dynamics in many parts of Asia and Africa and among the indigenous cultures of Central and South America (American indigenous peoples; see below, 3.). Specific interrelations with oral forms of textual culture are evident here. Also important is the issue of the spread of printing with movable type, which reached other continents from Europ…

1. Terminology and preceptsSlaves are people who are subject to the power of other people or institutions. Slavery is an institution of dominance that makes available the labor, services, and bodies of slaves for slave keepers and owners. The slave trade consists of the transportation of and trade in slaves (human trafficking) and the accrual of capital through the exchange, purchase, and sale of people (Slave abduction; Slave market). “Slaving” comprised the hunting, abduction, transportation, cap…

1. History and culture 1.1. IntroductionTradition (Latin traditio, via Old French  tradicion, “handing over,” “delivery”) denotes customs, beliefs, and the like, that are “handed down” from generation to generation. In theory, it is understood as a specific reservoir of knowledge, techniques, technologies, mores, customs, perspectives, attitudes, norms, and institutions residing within a community and passed down relatively unchanged by one generation to the next, thereby lending continuity and identity to…

1. BackgroundThe term Sufism is an umbrella term for mystical and ascetic tendencies within Islamic religious teaching and piety. Its beginnings go back to the 9th century; they underwent extensive doctrinal systematization beginning in the 11th century [19]; [22]. Initially shaped strongly by the affective piety of the Shia (Shia, Shi’ite), mysticism also developed into a significant aspect of religious life within Sunni Islam. Between the 12th and 15th centuries, it provided the foundation for the emergence of a hierarchicall…

1. General survey 1. Definition and functionToday the word school (from Latin  schola, from Greek  scholḗ, “freedom from tasks”; see Leisure) denotes a public or private institution charged with using systematic instruction to convey knowledge, insight, and the ability to reach reasoned conclusions – primarily to children and adolescents, but also to adults. The functions of a school thus involve the acquisition of qualifications, adaptation to socio-cultural systems (socialization), screening by means of tes…

1. Introduction 1.1. PrinciplesA literary language, also known as an official, high, standard, cultural, or art language, language of literature, etcetera, is a language used in literature shaped by aesthetic considerations. The development of literary languages in the early modern period displays two fundamental dimensions. First, in the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern period there was an increasing use of the vernacular in place of Latin in literary texts, and secondly specifi…

1. Introduction The term cultural contact was long taken to mean the meeting of different cultural units that was homogenous and static in themselves. Modern approaches to an understanding of the concept proceed on the basis of a different idea of culture, seeing it as a “self-woven web of meaning” [3. 9] in human consciousness, subject to perpetual change in dynamic processes of the construction of symbols. Interpretations are thus made both individually and collectively, and these give rise to meanings and identities. This interpretation br…

1. Christian Europe 1.1. ConceptTwo types of religious war can be identified in the history of early modern Christian Europe: one, a war among the various Christian confessions, and the other between (parts of) western Christendom and the non-Christian, particularly Islamic world (Turkish Wars). The German Religionskrieg is used alongside frequent synonyms, such as  Konfessionskrieg (confessional war), Glaubenskrieg (war of faith), and  konfessioneller Bürgerkrieg (confessional civil war), which to some extent serve to establish a reference to the cult…

1. Europe 1.1. Concept and researchThe verb “travel” in the sense of “go from one place to another” or “make a journey,” is unique to English, deriving from the Middle English  travailen, which originally meant “to toil” or “to labor,” suggesting an association with the difficulty of travel in the Middle Ages. The Romance languages express the concept with terms derived from the Latin  via (road, way, travel; e.g. French  voyager; Italian  viaggiare). German evolved the verb  reisen from an original sense (OHG  reisa, MHG  reise; compare English “rise”) of “to get up and go,”…

1. Problems of perceptionMuch as in Christian Europe, there was great continuity in forms of Muslim society and culture from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. European travelers and observers at the time generally made no such distinction of period. Indeed, growing contacts between Europeans and Muslim regions engendered in Europeans, through their exchanges, an image of Islam that incorporated the entire Islamic past in an effectively timeless perception. Even in the late 17th century, t…

1. IntroductionIt is striking in the context of the world history of the early modern period and the global interaction that characterized it that the dominance of nomadic and cattle-farming societies over sedentary peasant societies waned from around the 15th century. Nomads had become strong in Asia and Africa thanks to the military superiority of their mounted armies, generally in combination with the recruitment of sedentary peasants [28], the conquest of cities, the seizure of administrative structures, and the securing of major transregional tradin…

1. Early Islam“The Rightly-Guided One” (Arabic  al-mahdī) in Islam is an attribute of the prophet and his first successors, the Caliphs, whose “right guidance” (Arabic  al-hudā) by God was generally recognized by early Muslims. This consensus collapsed in the course of the rapid expansion of the Caliphate and in the deep conflicts of interest that came with the construction of state institutions and the distribution of profits from conquest. For a time, these led to the splitting of the Caliphate and two early Muslim civil wars (656-661, 683-692 CE).The hope for the restoration…

1. History and functionsThe mosque (Arabic  masjid, “place of prostration for prayer”) [4] as a building for mandatory community prayers, especially Friday prayers, was already developing into the central religious and cultural institution of Islamic communities in the earliest phase of Islam, used for an abundance of communal and political functions (e.g. political addresses, announcements, and consultations, administration of justice, accommodation of guests). Along with the large, central Friday mosques (Arabic  jami`), the growth of Muslim cities spawned a p…

1. Descendants of the Prophet as a religious group In many early modern Muslim societies and states, the descendants of the Prophet Muḥammad played an important role in social and cultural life (Tradition). Their various genealogical lineages were traced back through the grandsons of the Prophet Ḥasan and Ḥusayn to Fāṭima (died 632), Muḥammad’s daughter, who was married to his cousin ‘Alī b. Abī Ṭālib. The terms  sharif (from Arabic  saraf, plural  asraf, “noble”) and  sayyid (Arabic  sayyid, plual  sāda, “lord”) came to be used in parallel for the descendants of …