Interreligious encounters pose a pressing challenge for religious communities’ self-understanding and trigger complex processes of negotiating the past. History constitutes one of the most important cultural tools to make sense of religious plurality, to establish identity, and to define otherness. Given that most religions assert exclusivity in their interpretations of the past and often attribute them a degree of sacrality (canonical texts, sacred tradition, revelation), confrontations with other religiously informed readings of the past can become particularly contentious. Of special interest are practices of coping with religious diversity that can be described as interreligious appropriations, a term that formed the conceptual framework of the conference under review that took place at the Leibniz Institute of European History.
According to the organizers of the conference, the term interreligious appropriations designates processes of sensemaking in which communities give meaning to and reinterpret the past of another religious tradition and in doing so incorporate it into their own historical narratives. So understood, interreligious appropriations accompany Christianity throughout its whole history and find their expression in a multitude of forms, be it polemical treaties, historiographical works, collections of canons, liturgical texts, or iconography.
The conference aimed to bring a novel perspective to the debate on interreligious appropriations in two ways. First, it took a long historical view on the history of Christianity by examining acts of appropriation from the 2nd to the 21st centuries and thus helped contextualize the contemporary discourse. Second, it assumed a global perspective by bringing western and eastern sources into dialogue, thereby prompting a reevaluation of the hitherto western dominated discourse.
STANISLAU PAULAU (Halle-Wittenberg) and PHILIP FORNESS (Leuven) opened the conference by reflecting on the global history of Christianity in relation to the phenomenon of cultural/religious appropriation. They also addressed the connection of the present conference to the broader discourse surrounding appropriation – usually defined as an act of dominant cultures in which the practices of minority cultures are taken over – as well as the moral implications associated with such acts.
BENEDICT TOTSCHE (Mainz) drew attention to Athenagoras, who unlike other apologists of the 2nd century CE, saw pagan gods as non-existent. Athenagoras formulated his ideas in a way that required his pagan contemporaries to turn away from their previous beliefs and their previous actions, but at the same time offered them the opportunity to save face, since they might have felt that they were the victims of a faulty interpretation of the past and the present. In doing so, he drew heavily on the pagan writers and interpreted them in such a way that they seemed to support his Christian view.
LI TANG (Cambridge/Salzburg) then discussed interreligious encounters among Christianity, Buddhism and Manichaeism in China from the 7th to the 14th centuries. Drawing upon the repertoire of medieval Christian, Buddhist, and Manichean theological texts written in Chinese, Syriac, and Turkic languages which were discovered in the last century in the Dunhuang Cave and the Turfan Oasis of China, Tang particularly investigated the formation of religious terminology, loanwords, as well as interreligious encounters and conflicts expressed in the texts. Manicheans and Christians in medieval China learned to explicate their own religious core messages and principles despite being influenced by Buddhist vocabulary and style of writing.
JONATHAN STUTZ (Munich) gave a presentation on the so-called Coptic Arabic Renaissance of the 13th century and showed how members of the cultural elite of the Coptic community engaged with the theological works of some of the most influential Muslim intellectuals of their time, such as al-Ghazali and in particular Fakhr al-Din al-Razi. Focusing on the theological problems related to God’s attributes and their relation to God’s essence, Stutz looked at how Christian theologians borrowed, adapted and at times also critiqued ideas that were debated among Muslim thinkers, thus individuating different strategies of appropriation which allowed Coptic theologians of the late Ayyubid and early Mamluk period to become part of the intellectual world of Islamic Egypt.
SOPHIA DEGE-MÜLLER (Hamburg) highlighted the manuscript tradition of the Beta Israel (the Ethiopian Jews), and how it developed along the neighboring Christian community, while forming its own and distinctive style. She further presented the text “Gadla Susanna” (Life of Susanna), a reworked and adapted version of the Christian “Dersane Mikael” (Homily of Michael), which in itself is an adaptation of the biblical Book of Daniel. Her talk showed the fluidity of texts and their transmission across religious boundaries, and how this can be seen as a positive form of religious appropriation, which is hence not only reserved for the powerful.
EMY MERIN JOY (Vienna) introduced an 18th-century Garshuni Malayalam manuscript found in St Joseph’s CMI Monastery Mannanam (MS Mannanam Syr. 74), Kerala, India, attributed to the legendary indigenous Roman Catholic bishop, Joseph Kariattil. The manuscript contains among others the “Paravur Dialogues”, consisting of five dialogues between a Rabbi of the Synagogue of North Paravur, a Jew, a Hindu (“Pagan”), a Christian and a Muslim on various theological topics, set in the Paravur Synagogue in central Kerala. The dialogues portray the non-Christians as knowing Christian teaching and applying it to their own belief systems, thus the Christian author writes a practice of interreligious appropriation into his text.
MÒNICA COLOMINAS APARICIO (Groningen) focused on Justino Antolínez de Burgos (1557–1637), a defender of the authenticity of a series of discoveries in and around Granada, which for him gave clear evidence of the Christian roots of Iberia. In his “Historia Eclesiástica de Granada”, Antolínez de Burgos navigated between the undeniably sustained proximity between Christianity and Islam in the territories on the one hand, and the ideologically-based claim on the other, that, despite everything, Muslim domination had not changed the course of Iberian Christianity, but rather had reinforced its original look. For Antolínez de Burgos, the way Christians under Muslim rule coped with the conditions of being a minority attested to this reinforcement. Hence Antolínez de Burgos appropriated Muslim history.
JÜRGEN HEYDE (Leipzig) offered a migrant perspective to interreligious appropriation, which is about writing oneself into the story, drawing mainly from the travelogue of Simeon Lehaci, an Armenian from L’viv on a ten-year-long pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The account of Lehaci’s visit to Istanbul and especially to the Ayasofia mosque (former Byzantine Orthodox Cathedral Hagia Sophia) at the beginning of his journey shows how he appropriated elements of Greek Orthodox as well as Muslim heritage. In his travelogue, he described not the “actual” mosque but the Church of Hagia Sophia, which to him was present in a sort of “mystic reality”. Discovering remnants of the former Church, he described them vividly, bringing them to life for the readers of his account. The encounter with Islam lead him to reflect on his own identity and that of Armenians in general. His religious gaze enabled him to look “behind the factual” and to sense the “underlying” divinity of the Church of Hagia Sophia, reappropriating the building in this way.
SERGEI ZOTOV (Coventry) showed how the medieval alchemical tradition of the Islamic world influenced the European one. Islamic illuminators reused symbols from various religious backgrounds, such as Egyptian and Christian iconography in their visual corpus, while European alchemical imagery actively used the motifs borrowed from Islamic books, making appropriation a two-way street. In this way, Islamic alchemists interpreted Christian symbols in miniatures, which in turn were reinterpreted in a Christian context, introducing some unexpected motifs to late medieval and early modern European alchemical imagery, such as alchemical acrobats inside a vial, Jesus crucified on an eagle, or four Evangelists as symbols of the four elements.
SEBASTIAN ELSÄSSER (Kiel) introduced the 1938 Personal Status Code in comparison with Muslim law of the time. The Personal Status Code was the first codification of Coptic Orthodox family law in Egypt, which triggered a long and ongoing struggle within the Coptic Orthodox community over family law regulations, especially concerning the question of divorce. While “progressives” have argued that Egyptian citizens of Christian religion cannot be withheld the legal divorce rights enjoyed by their Muslim compatriots, “conservatives” have argued that any alignment of Christian family law with Muslim law contradicts the Bible and threatens to dilute Coptic Christian identity. With this case study, Elsässer showed how interreligious appropriations can be endorsed or rejected for a variety of conflicting and even paradoxical motives.
Finally, LUKAS PIEPER (Göttingen) discussed Paulos Mar Gregorios, a leading figure of the ecumenical movement in the 20th century and at the same time a major thinker of Saint Thomas Christianity. Mar Gregorios sought to establish an identity of an Indian Christianity in post-colonial India and wanted to – as one might say with Hannah Arendt – bridge the “gap between past and future”. Interreligious appropriation, including of Hindu thought, was a central tool in how Mar Gregorios reimagined what he understood to be an authentic Indian Christianity.
Two responses followed the presentations. HARTMUT LEPPIN (Frankfurt am Main) began by showing how Christianity depended on appropriation to an even higher degree than other religions, since the early Christians had neither tradition nor a temple of their own. Appropriation as understood at the conference is not necessarily the result of superiority in terms of power. Leppin summarized forms of appropriation, like supersession, joining, adoption, unconscious incorporation, as well as bricolage (the recombination of various elements), intercultural mimesis, enculturation, accommodation, and assimilation. The stages of appropriation, he suggested, are affordance, encounter, debate, and the act of appropriation in a narrow sense.
MANFRED SING (Freiburg/Mainz) remarked that religions couldn’t be understood as closed off units; hence the term interreligious appropriation will only make sense from an observer’s point of view. Further, it occurs together with cultural appropriation, visible in objects like buildings and images, and throughout all historic periods down to the present. He summarized how religious actors oftentimes appropriate to make an argument against another tradition.
The conference concluded with a discussion on the concept of (interreligious) appropriation, its connotations, methods, and possible alternatives. The presentations and discussions showed how phenomena of interreligious appropriation can be found in diverse places and times between Christian and multiple others religious traditions and in various power relations. In context of contemporary debates on appropriation, the conference offered an insight into the complex and even fruitful (re-)appropriations that can be found in the religious sphere and how appropriation has been used to build, bridge, or fence off religious identities and to enable exchange between different traditions. Recognizing the diverse contexts and effects of appropriations will broaden the conversation and shed new light on this phenomenon beyond the widespread discussion centered on its moral implications.
Conference overview:
Benedict Totsche (Mainz): “The Philosophers are Witnesses”. Athenagoras of Athens on Gods, Angels and Demons
Li Tang (Cambridge/Salzburg): Jesus, Mani, and Buddha in Medieval Chinese Religious Texts
Jonathan Stutz (Munich): Seeking Islamic Wisdom: The Legacy of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi and the Coptic Arabic Renaissance
Sophia Dege-Müller (Hamburg): The ›Life of Susanna‹ in the Light of the Beta Israel Manuscript Tradition
Emy Merin Joy (Vienna): The ›Paravur Dialogues‹: Introducing the First Early Modern Interreligious Dialogue in Kerala, South India
Mònica Colominas Aparicio (Groningen): The Conditions of Christian Minorities in Muslim Iberia and Interreligious Appropriation in Justino Antolínez de Burgos’ Historia Eclesiástica de Granada (1557–1637)
Jürgen Heyde (Leipzig): Uncovering the Hagia Sophia: An Armenian Traveler’s Visit to Istanbul in the Seventeenth Century
Sergei Zotov (Coventry): Islamic Evangelists and Christian Hermes: Reinterpretations of Religious Otherness in Arabic and European Alchemical Illumination
Sebastian Elsässer (Kiel): The 1938 Personal Status Code of the Orthodox Copts: An Illegitimate Appropriation from Muslim Family Law?
Lukas Pieper (Göttingen): Paulos Mar Gregorios, Indian Religions, and the Re-Imagination of Saint Thomas Christianity in Post-Colonial India
Responses by Hartmut Leppin (Frankfurt am Main) and Manfred Sing (Freiburg/Mainz)