Modern Texts for Studying Religion

The best you could do for Islam is look for (former/) Muslim scholars (secular and religious) and see what is available translated to your mother tongue or some tongue you speak. Of course, reading the al-Quran and the hadiths is relevant, even if translated. The more knowledge of Arabic you have, the better you will be able to understand Islam.
https://quran.com/
https://sunnah.com/

There is also this encyclopaedia I quite like, called Encyclopaedia Iranica. I haven't read much about Islam from it, so I don't know how its approach is. Atheist Iranians can have quite the negative bias towards Islam, while Muslim Iranians will obviously have a positive bias, but it is up to the reader to trust the scholars to remain as neutral as possible.
For example: https://iranicaonline.org/articles/eschatology-iii

Distinction between Sunni (majority), Shia (Persians especially), Sufi (Oman).
A Persian scholar might have a more shia perspective, while Saudi scholars may have otherwise. You will have to read from different sources and synthetise.

Perhaps it is interesting for you to look for the connection between Islam, pre-Islamic paganism, Nestorian Christianity, and Judaism. The whole praying to a certain direction and prostrating while praying existed in Christianity, and still exists in Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

Since we are a philosophy forum, it is useful to look into Neoplatonism and Aristotle in Islam, especially the Golden Age. The proclivity of empires in Central Asia to convert to Islam is also noteworthy.

Coptic grammatical influence on Egyptian Arabic:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/597639
TL;DR: not much.


In Belarus, in China.

For more modern affairs, secularisation of Turkey and Egypt and Central Asian and Caucasian countries, apostasy in theocratic Iran, coexistence of Christians and Muslims in Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Hezbollah and Hamas in the Near East, Boko Haram in Africa, the link between Taliban–Al-Qaeda–ISIS.

Whoever else hereabouts might simply recommend you some doctor of Islamic studies from Oxford called John McSmith who has never been to the Middle East and only understands written Classical Arabic.
Don't trust armchair scholars when it comes to things that are all about lived experience — language, culture, religion.

Reply to I like sushi

Perhaps Scott Atran's book, "In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion, Oxford University Press, 2002".

I read a book a long time ago called, "The History of God". I remember I liked it a lot at the time, but I can't remember much about it.

I really like Jordan Peterson's Biblical lecture series. But he treats the stories from a psychological standpoint rather than a literal one.

Quoting I like sushi

I am especially interested in something covering the history of Islam in more historical/anthropological terms too.

Religions of the Silk Road, by Richard Foltz

Quoting Brendan Golledge

I read a book a long time ago called, "The History of God".

I think you mean Karen Armstrong's, A History fo God. Armstrong is a former nun.

She is also one of the world's most popular writers on comparative religion. Amongst her works are a biography of Mohammad and a history of Islam.

Reply to frank That book does look a very interesting title indeed. I discovered the fascinating history of the Nestorian Christians and their scriptures called the Issa Sutras (‘Issa’ being the Asianised rendering of Jesus.) They fled religious persecution in Persia and fled 6,000 km along the Silk Road to China where they were given rights to build churches and to teach. The Issa Sutras told the story of Jesus in scroll format with imagery and symbolism similar to Buddhism. They were re-discovered by the intrepid Orientalist and explorer Aurel Stein in the 1920’s.

Reply to frank :up: Looks just like the kind of thing I was looking for.

Free Access here: https://archive.org/details/dli.pahar.3709/page/13/mode/2up

Reply to wonderer1 :up:

In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion,

Quoting Tom Storm

I think you mean Karen Armstrong's, A History fo God.

:up: Reading this and other books of hers has helped me in deconstructing my fundamentalist evangelical Christian upbringing. Definitely recommend this and others of hers to the OP.

Reply to Noble Dust That’s so interesting. Are you able to say something about how her work helped?

Reply to Tom Storm

Her book The Battle For God was helpful in understanding how the persecution of the early church by the Roman Empire was an important factor in the early church fathers creating a biblical cannon and a general sense of orthodoxy. The concept of the inerrancy of scripture was a huge part of my upbringing and an early turning point for me in the process of leaving religion. Understanding the history of the concept gave me context and helped me detach myself from that indoctrination.

As I’ve mentioned many times, I majored in Comparative Religion as a mature-age student (i.e. in my late 20’s). I was and am still interested in religious concepts of enlightenment (*not* in the sense of ‘the Enllightenment.) During those studies, I considered the idea that there was a very much more ‘Eastern’ oriented spirituality characterised by at least some of the Gnostic movements. (At the time, I was very much influenced by the kind of 60’s orientation that enlightenment was something immediately apparent or realisable through meditation, although in subsequent years I have found reason to question it.)

Anyway, what I saw as the gnostic element was centered around the kind of consciousness-oriented practices that characterised many of the ‘new religious movements’ of the 20th C. The idea was that some of the gnostic schools were very much more like for example the Eastern non-dualist teachings particularly Advaita Vedanta and Zen Buddhism. (Of course Alan Watts and D T Suzuki also figured in my formation of these views.) I formed the view that the victory of the so-called ‘pistic’ as distinct from ‘gnostic’ form of Christianity was to have gravely adverse consequences for the development of Western culture. This was based on the idea that the gnostic-oriented movements were much more experiential in nature, and so much more like Buddhist schools, in that they aimed at empowering the aspirant with insight, rather than compelling them to believe. I argued that they were more ‘centripedal’ than ‘centrifugal’, in that they were propagated through networks of enlightened teachers rather than the centralised authority structure constructed by the early Church which ruled by fear and demanded obedience. (Have a read of the treatment of the Cathars by the Pope in the Albigensian Crusades, one of the most bloodthirsty episodes in Christian history.)

One of the key authors in all this was Elaine Pagels, a professor of Comparative Religion at Princeton. She was an expert on the Nag Hammadi codex (which was a large collection of papyri discovered in the 1970s in Egypt by a peasant family who brought them home and actually started cooking on them before one of their number recognised they might be important and took them into the market.) Amongst these papyri were many gnostic texts and gospels, including the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, which has become a favourite amongst New Age and dissident Christians, known for its Zen-like aphorisms and oracular pronouncements.

Pagel’s contention, described in some of her books including Beyond Belief and The Gospel of Thomas, was that there was power struggle in the early church between the ‘Johanine’ (followers of the gospel of John) and Thomist factions, with the former representing ‘pistic’ Christianity (where ‘pistic’ means ‘belief’ or ‘faith’ as distinct from the ‘gnosis’ which represents ‘knowledge’ or ‘insight’.) The Johanine faction won out, and as the saying has it, history was then written by the victors. Indeed most of what was known of the Gnostics was due to the polemics of the Pistics, such as Tertullian, until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts.

I didn’t pursue it much beyond that point, although I did notice a book by a rather angry Protestant theologian called Against the Modern Gnostics which was protesting that the influx of New Age and Eastern belief systems in Western culture was a return of Gnosticism. Which I think is quite an accurate diagnosis, although I still also think that the victory of the so-called ‘pistic’ elements had some adverse consequences (although my views have changed somewhat in the intervening years.)

There’s a scandalous article that I’ve been aware of for years on some alt Christian website, Christianity has Pagan DNA. I say ‘scandalous’ because it makes a lot of very sweeping claims, and I don’t know how accurate many of them are. But I think it’s worth reading regardless, because it gives some hint at what might have happened if the experiential/gnostic elements of Christianity had had more influence on the way the faith unfolded over centuries.

Quoting Noble Dust

Understanding the history of the concept gave me context and helped me detach myself from that indoctrination.

Thank you.

Reply to Wayfarer

I've also read Beyond Belief and The Gnostic Gospels by Pagels. I think she's a bit more engaging of a writer than Armstrong. Additional books that were helpful for me, @Tom Storm.

Reply to Noble Dust Yes, I read Pagels back in the 1980's when Gnosticism was briefly trendy.

Reply to Wayfarer Yes, those churches are mentioned in that book. At first they couldn't tell if they were Christian or Buddhist.


Reply to I like sushi :up:

Reply to frank This is one book on the subject, The Lost Sutras of Jesus, Thomas More and Ray Riegert.

Reply to I like sushi
“The World’s Religions” by Huston Smith.

Quoting I like sushi

I am especially interested in something covering the history of Islam in more historical/anthropological terms too.

If you want to learn about islamic history then the first step is probably gonna be to read the time of prophet Muhammad pbuh because that's where it al kind of started. The book which perfectly analysis that time send talks about that period in detail is "Sealed Nectar". This book is great if you want to start your journey of reading islamic history. But if you want to go into more detail and want to study from the 1st prophet of islam prophet Adam to last prophet then I will recommend you a book "Al bidaya wan nihaya"(From beginning to the end) by ibn kathir.

Reply to QuirkyZen Do these cover the history from a secular perspective or are they laden with religious rhetoric? I am looking for more scholarly work that tries to be objective and provide facts rather than add speculative or religious connotations.

Thanks

Reply to Fire Ologist I was looking for something a little more specific. I have a broad enough knowledge and wish to learn more about the development and evolution of Islam specifically (within an anthropologic and political sense).

Reply to Wayfarer Interesting. Never heard of these scrolls before.

Reply to I like sushi Here’s the Wikipedia article on them https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingjiao_Documents

I read excerpts from Martin Palmer’s book on the subject whilst doing Buddhist Studies. They’re very beautiful decorated silk scrolls written in Classical Chinese with many Buddhist and Taoist symbols and allegories.