The Politics of Anti-Judaism || NYU

On April 25, 2024 NYU's Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies joined a conversation with Mohamad Ballan. The shared histories, entangled interpretative traditions and texts, and polemical encounters between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam was integral to the shaping of all three traditions during the medieval period. This process of religious co-production was integral to the shaping of sectarian discourses and identities in the medieval Islamic world. This lecture seeks to shed new light on how such religious co-production illustrates the ways in which the figures of Judaism (and, to a lesser degree, Christianity) played a key role in how medieval Muslims articulated their own theological and religious claims. It addresses this question by closely examining the Fatimid Ismāʿīlī tradition between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, focusing primarily on one particular historical document: the Hidāyah al-Āmiriyyah fī Ibṭāl al-Daʿwah al-Nizāriyyah (“The Guidance of the Imam al-Āmir in Eliminating the Nizārī Sect”). This text constitutes the most important surviving Fatimid polemic against their chief adversaries, the emerging Nizārī Ismāʿīlīs in Syria and Iran. It provides crucial insights into the interplay between dynastic politics, religious polemics, and the fashioning of sectarian identity in the medieval Islamic world.
You can learn more about the event here: as.nyu.edu/res...