The Aḥmadiyya Movement in Islam is a modern Muslim messianic movement established in 1889 by Ghulām Aḥmad in Qādiyān, a town in the Indian Punjab province. The Aḥmadī Movement became one of the most controversial and most active movements in modern Islam. The movement was accused of rejecting the Muslim dogma asserting the finality of Muḥammad’s prophethood, and therefore aroused fierce opposition of the Sunnī Muslim mainstream. After the partition of India in 1947, the Aḥmadī issue became a major constitutional problem in Pakistan. The Sunnī Muslim mainstream demanded the formal exclusion of the Aḥmadīs from the Muslim fold. This objective was attained in 1974: against fierce opposition of the Aḥmadīs, the Pakistani parliament adopted a constitutional amendment declaring them non-Muslims. In 1984, within the framework of the general trend of Islamization in Pakistan, a presidential “Ordinance no. XX of 1984” transformed the religious observance of the Aḥmadīs into a criminal offense, punishable by three years of imprisonment and a fine. Following its promulgation, the headquarters of the Aḥmadī Movement moved from Rabwa (in Pakistan) to London.
The article explains the Aḥmadī interpretation of the dogma relating to the finality of Muḥammad’s prophethood, the reinterpretation of the jihād idea and the substantial change that it introduced into the Muslim beliefs concerning Jesus. It also describes the ideological roots of the split between the Qādiyānī and Lāhorī sections of the movement. A substantial part of the article is devoted to the expansion of the movement in numerous countries of the world.
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The Aḥmadiyya Movement in Islam
Yohanan Friedmann
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Ainu Religion
Takeshi Kimura
The Ainu people are indigenous to Japan (the term Ainu means “human”). They have lived mainly in Hokkaido (called Ainu mosir by the Ainu people) and the Tokyo Metropolitan area. Previously, they also lived in Sakhalin (formerly Karafuto) and the Kuril Islands (including the Chishima Islands). In the early 21st century, aspects of the Ainu people’s social lives were no different from those of other Japanese people because of historical colonization and forced cultural assimilation. However, Ainu religious practices have changed dramatically. The historical influences that have formed the Ainu culture and religion have been debated from various perspectives.
There are two main external influences on the historical formation of the Ainu religion. One is Okhotsk cultural influences, since similar designs are found among the Ainu and some ethnic minorities along the Amur River in the Siberian area, and the other is Japanese cultural influence.
Admittedly, the term religion is not appropriate to describe the Ainu religion and spirituality, which is based on the Ainu people’s close relationship with the kamuy (gods, deities) world through nature and by performing rituals and reciting sacred narratives. Ainu religion and spirituality was the fundamental principle guiding their lives as hunter- gatherers. At any specific historical moment, Ainu religion represents the accumulated social and historical expressions of the Ainu people accommodating and negotiating with traditional, inherited religious symbols and notions.
Aspects of the Ainu religion include domestic rituals of prayer to the goddess of fire, rituals for ancestral spirits, designs of clothes, tattooing, dancing and music, oral narratives, ritual hunting and communal ceremonies, shamanistic practices, and funeral rites. There are gendered aspects of the Ainu life and religion. While the Ainu men were responsible for offering prayers and performing these rituals, the Ainu women were known for shamanism and narrating kamuy-yukar, songs of kamuy, and offering prayers to ancestral spirits.
The Ainu religion is known for its ritual killing of a bear, that is, Iyomante in Ainu language. Iyomantemeans “sending it off,” signifying that the ritual sends the soul of the ritually slain animal back to the world of kamuy (deity or spirit). In order to grasp what it means, it is important to pay close attention to the Ainu’s indigenous religious notions about the relationship between kamuy and animals. Animal bodies or animal flesh are gifts for humans which kamuy embodies or wears in visiting the human world. Iyomante is often translated into “bear ceremony” in English or Japanese, but it is important to grasp the significance of the fact that the Ainu people use the term kamuy for both “bear” and “deity or spirit.” The Ainu people use the term Iyomante not only for the ritual killing of a bear, but also for ritual killings of other animals, such as a fox and an owl.
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Birthing Islam: The New Muslim Midwifery in Mexico, 1987–2024
Camila Pastor
As women convert to Islam in Mexico and go on to become pregnant, give birth, and care for their infants as Muslims, a number of them have trained as midwives, birth attendants, and lactation consultants with the intention of serving their communities. They attend births in homes, birth centers, and some clinical settings, provide postpartum care for mothers and infants, and support breastfeeding. Attending to Muslim converts as healers and midwives invites recognition of new birthing practices among women socialized into what they narrate as emancipatory understandings of corporeality through conversion. My ethnographic exploration of their practice draws on key insights from the anthropology of birth inaugurated by Brigitte Jordan and the core questions developed by her students around childbirth and the construction of authoritative knowledge about pregnancy, birth and nursing These include recognizing the cultural definition of these processes and the ideological status of such definitions in guiding how decisions and routines are conducted around preparation for birth, attendants and support systems, birth territory, the use of technology and medication, and the allocation of decision making. Descriptions and analyses of the role that spiritual practice and religious tradition plays in these processes are surprisingly absent from this rich literature, as key contributors such as Sheila Kitzinger have recognized .
The construction of midwifery practices that sacralize and naturalize pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding in convert experience occur at a peculiar transnational node of corporeal knowledge. Convert midwifery has flourished in the context of a wider rebirth and professionalization of midwifery in urban Mexico . The creation and legal recognition of modern midwifery schools and birth centers in Chiapas, Michoacán, Oaxaca, Guerrero, and San Miguel Allende have been achieved in conversation with global midwifery associations and funding partners, within the larger context of movements asserting women’s sexual and reproductive rights and championing the female subject’s autonomy. Converts’ commitment to midwife-assisted births partly originated in the preference for home birth among the Spanish Murabittun community in San Cristobal de las Casas since they began proselytizing there in 1994. Many of the new Muslim midwives narrate long family histories of healing expertise in different regional indigenous or rural traditions however, which are also mobilized by the new professionalized midwifery at large along with other practices labeled holistic, natural, or traditional and which include herbal medicine, prenatal yoga, meditation, acupuncture, Chinese medicine, and placental therapies. Muslim midwives’ repertoires include therapeutic recourses that reference historically Muslim healing traditions, such as prophetic medicine, hiyama, or Quranic recitation, dua, and dhikr as accompaniment to birth. I argue that these midwives and the women they assist are bodies archiving assemblages of aggregate authoritative knowledges about being inhabited by new lives and the transcendental experience of birthing them.
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Churches, Grand Retables, and Ceiling Paintings in Portugal during the 16th and 17th Centuries
Giuseppina Raggi
Religious and military architecture represented the core of early modern Portuguese architectural and artistic culture. Churches and fortresses are still the main architectural and symbolic landmarks of Portuguese history, closely related to the country’s maritime explorations and its colonial empire. Thus, religious architecture still plays a crucial role in the Portuguese landscape and cultural environment. Foremost among these is the monastery of Jerónimos near Lisbon. Its construction spanned the entire 16th century, yet in the 19th and 20th centuries, historiography fixed its image as an icon of the so-called Manueline style, associating it with the Portuguese maritime power developed during the reign of Manuel I (1495–1521). Since the late 20th century, Portuguese scholars have rethought the vision, challenging the term Manueline and unveiling the manifold artistic and architectural confluences and transformations. This is evidenced by the main chapel’s reconstruction by architect Jerónimo de Ruão in the latter half of the 16th century under the regency of the Queen Catherine of Austria. Her architectural patronage served as a model of patronage for women as the powerful Princess Mary of Portugal, who commissioned the main chapel of the church of Luz, and the very wealthy Simõa Godinha of African birth, who sponsored the current main chapel of the church of Conceição Velha (ex-chapel of Holy Spirit).
The vast religious complex of the Order of Christ, as well as the balanced architecture of the chapel of Our Lady of Immaculate Conception, both situated in Tomar, reflected the circulation in Portugal of 16th-century Italian architectural treatises, which contributed to the cultural renewal of architects as João de Castilho or sculptors as Nicolas Chanterene. The architectural works of Francesco da Cremona in Northern Portugal and of Miguel de Arruda in Évora also spread the Renaissance architectural culture. In the 16th century, monumental portals and grand retables share a similar taste for magnificence and sculpted details, while in the 1580s, the architecture painted on the ceiling of the Jesuit church of Saint Roque in Lisbon was a very disruptive pictorial experimentation.
During the Union of Iberian Crowns (1580–1640/1668), the consolidation of the classicist erudition of Portuguese architects underpinned the building of main churches as São Vicente de Fora in Lisbon or the Jesuit church in Coimbra (after the Jesuits’ expulsion from Portugal in 1759, it was transformed into the New Cathedral). Simultaneously, from the latter half of 16th century through the 17th century, simplified typologies of religious architecture proliferated in both Portugal and its colonial territories. Coined for the first time (1972) by George Kubler as “plain architecture”—rendered in Portuguese as arquitetura chã (1988)—this concept gained significant traction among scholars but was subsequently rethought by José Eduardo Horta Correia. Simplified patterns, the resource economy, and the use of models by Serlio’s treatise characterized a panoply of buildings, from the extensive horizontal mass of the Santa-Clara-a-Nova monastery in Coimbra to the classicist erudition of the chapel of Onze Mil Virgens in Alcácer do Sal, encompassing the five new cathedrals (Leiria, Portalegre, Miranda do Douro, Angra do Heroismo, and Goa) built during this time.
The shift toward Baroque sensibility and culture gradually unfolded within 17th-century Portuguese architectural spaces. On one hand, they maintained exterior sobriety, increasing the opulence of the interior decorations thanks to magnificent gilded wood-carved grand retables and walls covered by azulejos. On the other hand, certain central-plan sacred spaces exhibited externally curved and undulating walls, as seen in the church of Sant’Engracia in Lisbon. It was built by the architect João Antunes, who also was used to designing colored marble retables with Solomonic columns. His art aimed to change the artistic and architectonic Portuguese tradition prevalent up to that time.
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Conversions to Islam in Mexico
Camila Pastor
Conversion to Islam in Mexico has accelerated in the early 21st century, thanks to both increased migration from Muslim-majority countries and the expanding global, regional, and local networks among Islamic religious communities. Despite there being no mosques in the country until the 1980s, official figures from Mexican censuses show the number of Muslims doubling between 2000 and 2010 and again in 2020. Though many communities were built in urban centers, outreach and proselytizing activities have extended into rural regions as well and have included Shia and Sufi as well as Sunni groups. Thus, the establishment of Muslim communities in Mexico has become a transnational phenomenon, with implications for the wider diaspora. This is demonstrated through an exploration of the historiography and ethnography of Islam and by drawing from data collected during the Ethnographic Census of Muslims in Mexico (2011–2014) and using interviews with converts, migrants, and diplomatic personnel to identify some of the core characteristics and consequences of Mexican Islam as convert Islam.
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Estevanico de Dorantes
Hsain Ilahiane
One of the most fascinating, and least understood, men in the history of the American Southwest was the Moroccan “slave” known as Estevanico de Dorantes in sixteenth-century Spanish accounts of New Spain. Estevanico was one of the four survivors of the Pànfilo de Narváez expedition, which sailed from Spain in 1527 with the objective of conquering Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. The survivors were stranded on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico and soon captured by Native Americans. After eight years of slavery, the expedition members escaped and traveled west, across western Texas, through the southwestern borderlands, and arrived in Culiacán, Mexico, in the spring of 1536. Three years later, Estevanico led the first Spanish expedition to Zuni lands and was the first Moroccan and African and non-Native American to set foot in what became Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. In the sixteenth century, Portugal occupied Morocco. Famine drove thousands of Moroccans to Spain and Portugal in various forms of servitude. The inhabitants of Azemmour—Estevanico’s home on the Atlantic coast—received permission from the Portuguese king, Don Manuel, to emigrate to Spain. People left Morocco in search of a better life in the Iberian Peninsula. This suggests that Estevanico might have emigrated as a servant, an indentured laborer, or an employee in search of economic opportunities. He may not have been a slave at all but instead a political or economic refugee since the Azemmouri people sided with the Portuguese invaders. Despite Estevanico’s role in Spain’s age of exploration and imperialism in the Americas, historical accounts are silent about him except to note that he was a slave who accompanied Fray Marcos De Niza on his travels through the American Southwest. Nevertheless, Estevanico remains an important figure in the social history of Pueblo Native Americans.
Article
Iconophobia and Iconophilia
Davor Džalto
Iconophobia (the fear of images) and iconophilia (the love of images) can be found, in a variety of forms, across different cultures and historical periods. Both iconophobia and iconophilia are related to another crucial concept—idolatry (the worship of images/idols)—and the corresponding practices of image veneration and image destruction (iconoclasm). Contrary to the popular view that Judaism and Islam are, by definition, aniconic and iconophobic, while Christianity (especially Orthodox Christianity and Roman Catholicism) is iconophilic, all three major monotheistic traditions have demonstrated iconophilic, iconophobic, and iconoclastic tendencies. Some Judaisms, Christianities, and Islams have been using images in a variety of ways and have been defending them with theological arguments. Other Judaisms, Christianities, and Islams have rejected images, formulating iconophobic theologies, and the most radical tendencies within these traditions have also been physically destroying images that they perceived as “idols.”
In order to understand the phenomena of iconophilia, iconophobia, iconoclasm, and idolatry, it is necessary to situate them within broader historical, cultural, and religious contexts. Within, formally speaking, one and the same tradition (e.g., Rabbinic Judaism or Sunni Islam), one comes across different positions on these issues, depending on the cultural and political climate, the broader set of issues that individual authors were trying to address, as well as on author’s personal preferences.
In the history of Europe, all these tendencies have left their trace. Among the most important episodes in the history of iconophilic and iconophobic tendencies in the West are early disputes on images within the Christian communities of the 1st century ce, iconoclasm in the Eastern Roman Empire in the 8th–9th centuries, as well as the Western responses to this crisis, in the form of Libri Carolini and the Council of Frankfurt (794). The character of modern approaches to both religious and non-religious images, and the development of modern image theories, were under a strong influence of the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation movement. These were not only religious but also broader cultural movements, exhibiting their iconophilic and iconophobic aspects. Other cultural and political developments, most notably the French Revolution (1789), also exhibited their iconoclastic and iconophilic dimensions, which contributed to the development of modern aesthetics and the concept of “fine arts.” In this sense, in addition to traditional religiously motivated iconophobias, one can also speak of modern secular-religious iconophobia associated with the modern concept of the “artwork” and the phenomena of “disappearance” and “emptiness” in the history of modern art and aesthetics. Many late modern or postmodern concepts and phenomena, such as “simulacrum” or the destruction of monuments associated with political ideologies, religions, or imperial heritage, demonstrate contemporary iconophilic and iconophobic tendencies.
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Islamic World Studies in North America
Nisa Muhammad
Islamic studies as an academic discipline and its genesis in American universities is a fascinating tale of challenges and complications woven into the vagaries of geopolitics. Exploring the evolution of Islamic studies into Islamic world studies at a premier US Catholic university pays homage to Oriental, Near Eastern, and Middle Eastern studies and its direct forerunner in Islamic studies, highlighting the accomplishments of foundational Islamic scholars who blazed a trail leading to the development of an Islamic world studies program. As the name implies, Islamic world studies is a study of where Muslims live as majorities or minorities, thus exploring the religious tradition of Islam and its expressions in various cultures. The program in Islamic world studies was unique in another way—its founder was a highly trained Islamic scholar who just so happened to be an African American Muslim woman.
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Mahmoud Ayoub and Christian-Muslim Relations
Imtiyaz Yusuf
Mahmoud Mustafa Ayoub was the foremost North American Muslim scholar of Muslim-Christian relations and interreligious dialogue in the modern age who offered new interpretations concerning the roots of conflict between Islam and Christianity. He also offered a new theological approach for building better Muslim-Christian understanding. Ayoub also made methodologically original contributions to the study of Shi’i Islam, tafsir al-Qur’an—Qur’anic exegesis, and building Taqrib al-Madhahib—Sunni-Shi’i ecumenism.
Ayoub was born in a Shii Muslim family, he converted to Christianity, and then returned to Islam. Such a biographical background and scholarly formation enabled him to address Christological issues based on deep insights into the Qur’an and knowledge of Christianity, its theology, and spirituality. Though Ayoub remained committed to Shiism, for him Islam was an integrated religious tradition whose sectarian trends were not an obstacle to being a holistic Muslim.
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Sufism in North America
William Rory Dickson
Sufism in North America is exceptionally diverse, reflecting its heterogenous origins and complex transnational dynamics. It can be found as an essential, if at times subtle, element of Muslim devotional practice, with several North American Muslim networks and organizations integrating Sufism into their teachings. It manifests more explicitly in various Sufi orders, normally led by a lineage-holding shaykh or shaykha, with a spectrum of approaches to Islamic identity and practice. Sufism has further been drawn upon as a niche resource for literature and commodity within the broader spiritual marketplace, intersecting with popular culture. Sufism in North America is thus an integral aspect of Muslim devotional practice, a distinct spiritual path embodied in various lineages and orders, and a literary phenomenon and popular spiritual commodity.
