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| Author | Harry Turtledove |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Alternate history |
| Publisher | Tor Books |
Publication date | September 18, 2018 |
| Pages | 320 |
| ISBN | 9780765379986 |
Through Darkest Europe (previously announced as God Wills It) is an alternate history novel by Harry Turtledove. [1] The book is set in an alternate present in which Islamic countries form a prosperous, democratic and progressive First World, while underdeveloped Christian countries suffer from religious fanaticism. [2]
In this alternate world, the dominating Muslim cultures of North Africa and the Middle East are "liberal, tolerant, and above all rich." Europe meanwhile is a hot spot of Christian fundamentalism, with assassinations, hijackings, and bombings committed by extremist groups such as the Aquinists. Senior Investigator Khalid al-Zarzisi is sent to Rome with his partner Investigator Dawud ibn Musa with the mission of protecting the Grand Duke (monarch of all Italy), the impoverished Pope, and preventing European instability from affecting the First World.
The alternate history's point of departure, as detailed in the first chapter, occurred between the 11th and 13th centuries due to different developments in Christian theology and Islamic theology. Thomas Aquinas, who in the real world sought to reconcile religion and reason, taught that Christianity and reason were incompatible, and that religious faith should override reason. Conversely, Al-Ghazali, who in the real world argued that Islamic faith was superior to philosophy and science, thought that the two were compatible.
The developed First World has advanced science, including Turkish Moon landings. Classical Arabic is used as a world language spoken by the educated and used in standard signs. Muslim culture, language, and style spread around the world with the spread of modernity.
Religion is a range of social-cultural systems, including designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements—although there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion. Different religions may or may not contain various elements ranging from the divine, sacredness, faith, and a supernatural being or beings.
Islamic philosophy is philosophy that emerges from the Islamic tradition. Two terms traditionally used in the Islamic world are sometimes translated as philosophy—falsafa, which refers to philosophy as well as logic, mathematics, and physics; and Kalam, which refers to a rationalist form of Scholastic Islamic theology which includes the schools of Maturidiyah, Ashaira and Mu'tazila.
Early Islamic philosophy or classical Islamic philosophy is a period of intense philosophical development beginning in the 2nd century AH of the Islamic calendar and lasting until the 6th century AH. The period is known as the Islamic Golden Age, and the achievements of this period had a crucial influence in the development of modern philosophy and science. For Renaissance Europe, "Muslim maritime, agricultural, and technological innovations, as well as much East Asian technology via the Muslim world, made their way to western Europe in one of the largest technology transfers in world history.” This period starts with al-Kindi in the 9th century and ends with Averroes at the end of 12th century. The death of Averroes effectively marks the end of a particular discipline of Islamic philosophy usually called the Peripatetic Arabic School, and philosophical activity declined significantly in Western Islamic countries, namely in Islamic Spain and North Africa, though it persisted for much longer in the Eastern countries, in particular Persia and India where several schools of philosophy continued to flourish: Avicennism, Illuminationist philosophy, Mystical philosophy, and Transcendent theosophy.
Christianity and Islam are the two largest religions in the world, with 2.8 billion and 1.9 billion adherents, respectively. Both religions are considered as Abrahamic, and are monotheistic, originating in the Middle East.
Islamic–Jewish relations refers to the human and diplomatic relations between Jewish people and Muslims in the Arabian Peninsula, Northern Africa, the Middle East, and their surrounding regions. Jewish-Islamic relations may also refer to the shared and disputed ideals between Judaism and Islam, which began roughly in the 7th century CE with the origin and spread of Islam in the Arabian peninsula. The two religions share similar values, guidelines, and principles. Islam also incorporates Jewish history as a part of its own. Muslims regard the Children of Israel as an important religious concept in Islam. Moses, the most important prophet of Judaism, is also considered a prophet and messenger in Islam. Moses is mentioned in the Quran more than any other individual, and his life is narrated and recounted more than that of any other prophet. There are approximately 43 references to the Israelites in the Quran, and many in the Hadith. Later rabbinic authorities and Jewish scholars such as Maimonides discussed the relationship between Islam and Jewish law. Maimonides himself, it has been argued, was influenced by Islamic legal thought.
Liberalism and progressivism within Islam involve professed Muslims who have created a considerable body of progressive thought about Islamic understanding and practice. Their work is sometimes characterized as "progressive Islam". Some scholars, such as Omid Safi, differentiate between "Progressive Muslims" and "Liberal advocates of Islam".
Christianity and other religions documents Christianity's relationship with other world religions, and the differences and similarities.
Māturīdism or Māturīdī theology is one of the main Sunnī schools of Islamic theology, founded by the Persian Muslim scholar, Ḥanafī jurist, reformer (mujaddid), and scholastic theologian Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī in the 9th–10th century.
Muḥammad ʿAbduh was an Egyptian Islamic scholar, judge, and Grand Mufti of Egypt. He was a central figure of the Arab Nahḍa and Islamic Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Aqidah is an Islamic term of Arabic origin that literally means "creed". It is also called Islamic creed and Islamic theology.
Islam is the second-largest religion in Europe after Christianity. Although the majority of Muslim communities in Western Europe formed recently, there are centuries-old Muslim societies in the Balkans, Caucasus, Crimea, and Volga region. The term "Muslim Europe" is used to refer to the Muslim-majority countries in the Balkans and parts of countries in Eastern Europe with sizable Muslim minorities that constitute large populations of native European Muslims, although the majority are secular.
Islam is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion centered on the Quran and the teachings of Muhammad. Adherents of Islam, called Muslims, number approximately 1.9 billion globally and are the world's second-largest religious population after Christians.
The Regensburg lecture or Regensburg address was delivered on 12 September 2006 by Pope Benedict XVI at the University of Regensburg in Germany, which sparked international reactions and controversy. The lecture entitled "Faith, Reason and the University – Memories and Reflections".
Growth of religion involves the spread of individual religions and the increase in the numbers of religious adherents around the world. In sociology, desecularization is the proliferation or growth of religion, most commonly after a period of previous secularization. Statistics commonly measure the absolute number of adherents, the percentage of the absolute growth per-year, and the growth of converts in the world.
Christians are people who follow or adhere to Christianity, a monotheistic Abrahamic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. The words Christ and Christian derive from the Koine Greek title Christós (Χριστός), a translation of the Biblical Hebrew term mashiach (מָשִׁיחַ). While there are diverse interpretations of Christianity which sometimes conflict, they are united in believing that Jesus has a unique significance. The term Christian used as an adjective is descriptive of anything associated with Christianity or Christian churches, or in a proverbial sense "all that is noble, and good, and Christ-like." It does not have a meaning of 'of Christ' or 'related or pertaining to Christ'.
Christian influences in Islam can be traced back to Eastern Christianity, which surrounded the origins of Islam. Islam, emerging in the context of the Middle East that was largely Christian, was first seen as a Christological heresy known as the "heresy of the Ishmaelites", described as such in Concerning Heresy by Saint John of Damascus, a Syriac scholar.
Medieval philosophy is the philosophy that existed through the Middle Ages, the period roughly extending from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century until after the Renaissance in the 13th and 14th centuries. Medieval philosophy, understood as a project of independent philosophical inquiry, began in Baghdad, in the middle of the 8th century, and in France, in the itinerant court of Charlemagne, in the last quarter of the 8th century. It is defined partly by the process of rediscovering the ancient culture developed in Greece and Rome during the Classical period, and partly by the need to address theological problems and to integrate sacred doctrine with secular learning.
The spread of Islam spans about 1,400 years. Muslim conquests following Muhammad's death led to the creation of the caliphates, occupying a vast geographical area; conversion to Islam was boosted by Arab Muslim forces conquering vast territories and building imperial structures over time. Most of the significant expansion occurred during the reign of the Rashidun from 632 to 661 CE, which was the reign of the first four successors of Muhammad. These early caliphates, coupled with Muslim economics and trading, the Islamic Golden Age, and the age of the Islamic gunpowder empires, resulted in Islam's spread outwards from Mecca towards the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and the creation of the Muslim world. The Islamic conquests, which culminated in the Arab empire being established across three continents, enriched the Muslim world, achieving the economic preconditions for the emergence of this institution owing to the emphasis attached to Islamic teachings. Trade played an important role in the spread of Islam in some parts of the world, such as Indonesia.
Education has played a central role in Islam since the beginnings of the religion, owing in part to the centrality of scripture and its study in the Islamic tradition. Before the modern era, education would begin at a young age with study of Arabic and the Quran. For the first few centuries of Islam, educational settings were entirely informal, but beginning in the 11th and 12th centuries, the ruling elites began to establish institutions of higher religious learning known as madrasas in an effort to secure support and cooperation of the ulema. Madrasas soon multiplied throughout the Islamic world, which helped to spread Islamic learning beyond urban centers and to unite diverse Islamic communities in a shared cultural project. Madrasas were devoted principally to study of Islamic law, but they also offered other subjects such as theology, medicine, and mathematics. Muslims historically distinguished disciplines inherited from pre-Islamic civilizations, such as philosophy and medicine, which they called "sciences of the ancients" or "rational sciences", from Islamic religious sciences. Sciences of the former type flourished for several centuries, and their transmission formed part of the educational framework in classical and medieval Islam. In some cases, they were supported by institutions such as the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, but more often they were transmitted informally from teacher to student.
Christine Schirrmacher is a German academic who specialises in Islamic studies. She is professor of Islamic studies at the University of Bonn and at the Evangelical Theological Faculty (ETF), Leuven.
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