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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. 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. 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. 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. 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 …

1. Prophetic sunnah and Sunni schools of jurisprudence In its general sense, the Arabic word sunnah denotes a manner of acting and a recognized precedent; in its narrower sense, it denotes the utterances and actions of the Prophet Muhammad, the first caliphs, and the prominent companions of the Prophet. In the early period of Islam, appeal to the sunnah of the Prophet served to legitimize norms of belief and jurisprudence as well as political practice. In contrast to the Shi‘ites (Shia, Shi‘ite), who considered only Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-la…

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Europe 1.1. Etymology and purposeLatin  peregrinatio (journey, pilgrimage) is derived from  per agrum (across the field, i.e. over land). The etymology suggests primarily an arduous path to a goal. The goal could be defined variously: the most important motives were probably thanksgiving, penance, petition, quest for religious companionship, and expectation of other religious benefits. This marked a change from the conception, still dominant in antiquity and late antiquity, that saw life itself as a pilg…

1. Dynasty, empire, stateBeginning in the 14th century, the Turkmen emirate of the “House of Osman” (Ottoman Turkish  Āl-i ʿOs̠mān) developed from a small Seljuk successor princedom into an expanding realm that brought various countries and regions of Asia Minor and southeastern Europe under its sway from northwestern Anatolia. With its conquest of Constantinople in 1453, this sultanate fell heir to the Byzantine imperial legacy of the northeastern Mediterranean, and became an enduring factor in the politics of th…

1. EuropeOccultism took institutional shape in Europe in 1875, with the foundation of the Theosophical Society by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott (Theosophy). At the same time, it developed as a theoretical system opposed to contemporary materialism and directed against the established churches, and closely associated with 19th-century esoterica. The essence of this theory was the assumption of immaterial, supra-sensory forces arising from a “fluid,” “astral light,” or “animal so…

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. 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. 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. Christianity 1.1. Preliminary noteOne of the unique aspects of Christianity is that from the very outset it developed a theology, and in order to explicate its own faith made use of the conceptual tools of contemporary (i.e. Greek and Roman) philosophy. This interweaving of theological and philosophical thought was constantly reflected quintessentially in the doctrine of God. A series of fundamental tensions pervaded the development of the idea of God even in the early modern period. These includ…

1. ConceptThe concept of style as developed in ancient rhetoric remained present throughout the European Middle Ages. The word derives from the Latin stilus (way of writing; originally “stylus” for writing). Beginning in the 15th century, the reception of classical antiquity in Renaissance Humanism also made style, in the sense of a totality of formal qualities, a subject of increasing interest in art, literature, and music (Antiquity, reception of). The term describes formal qualities as well as characterizing indiv…