Search results for ""author brannon wheeler""

Nineteenth-century philologist and Biblical critic William Robertson Smith famously concluded that the sacred status of holy places derives not from their intrinsic nature, but from their social character. Building upon this insight, "Mecca and Eden" uses Islamic exegetical and legal texts to analyze the rituals and objects associated with the sanctuary at Mecca. Integrating Islamic examples into the comparative study of religion, Brannon Wheeler shows how the treatment of rituals, relics, and territory is related to the more general mythological depiction of the origins of Islamic civilization. Along the way, Wheeler considers the contrast between Mecca and Eden in Muslim rituals, the dispersal and collection of relics of the prophet Muhammad, their relationship to the sanctuary at Mecca, and long tombs associated with the gigantic size of certain prophets mentioned in the Quran. "Mecca and Eden" succeeds, as few books have done, in making Islamic sources available to the broader study of religion.

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It is almost universally recognized that the Middle East and Asia constitute two of the most important regions today when thinking about international relations, energy and sustainable development, economics, religion, culture, and the so called 'clash' or 'dialogue' of civilizations. Both the Middle East and Asia are, independent of one another, significant sources of natural resources, military conflict, cultural production, human migration and political attention. Despite the high level of international interest in the Middle East and Asia, there have been relatively few publications focused on the interactions of the two regions and how the two regions are inextricably linked in the economic and political impact they have on the rest of the world. East by Mid-East provides a multi-disciplinary and trans-regional approach to the historical roots and continued development of ties between the Middle East and Asia, from Muslim-Confucian relations to nuclear technology exchange between China and Saudi Arabia. The contributors include academics, policy makers and consultants, leaders in international business, law professionals and military.

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In the religious systems of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Mediterranean, gods and demigods were neither abstract nor distant, but communicated with mankind through signs and active intervention. Men and women were thus eager to interpret, appeal to, and even control the gods and their agents. In Prayer, Magic, and the Stars in the Ancient and Late Antique World, a distinguished array of scholars explores the many ways in which people in the ancient world sought to gain access to—or, in some cases, to bind or escape from—the divine powers of heaven and earth. Grounded in a variety of disciplines, including Assyriology, Classics, and early Islamic history, the fifteen essays in this volume cover a broad geographic area: Greece, Egypt, Syria-Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Persia. Topics include celestial divination in early Mesopotamia, the civic festivals of classical Athens, and Christian magical papyri from Coptic Egypt. Moving forward to Late Antiquity, we see how Judaism, Christianity, and Islam each incorporated many aspects of ancient Near Eastern and Graeco-Roman religion into their own prayers, rituals, and conceptions. Even if they no longer conceived of the sun, moon, and the stars as eternal or divine, Christians, Jews, and Muslims often continued to study the movements of the heavens as a map on which divine power could be read. The reader already familiar with studies of ancient religion will find in Prayer, Magic, and the Stars both old friends and new faces. Contributors include Gideon Bohak, Nicola Denzey, Jacco Dieleman, Radcliffe Edmonds, Marvin Meyer, Michael G. Morony, Ian Moyer, Francesca Rochberg, Jonathan Z. Smith, Mark S. Smith, Peter Struck, Michael Swartz, and Kasia Szpakowska. Published as part of Penn State's Magic in History series, Prayer, Magic, and the Stars appears at a time of renewed interest in divination and occult practices in the ancient world. It will interest a wide audience in the field of comparative religion as well as students of the ancient world and late antiquity.

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