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Islamische Theologie in Deutschland: Ein Modell für Europa und die Welt (Islamic Theology in Germany: A Model for Europe and the World) Edited by Mouez Khalfaoui and Jean Ehret While aware of secular and religious criticisms of the establishment of Islamic theology departments, they believe that their establishment could be an opportunity to revive subjects long neglected in the Islamic world such as scholastic theology. One of the most significant developments in the contemporary history of European Islam has been the institutionalization of Islamic theology in German public universities. [Extracted from the article]

The relationship between religion and nutrition (diets) can be thought of in two ways: diet in religions or diet as religions. The field of food and religion has traditionally been dominated by questions of dietary rules, ritual food sacrifices, and fasting practices, but has currently gained new importance in the context of global sustainability debates. To highlight this contextualisation specifically to Shin Buddhism, I also investigated aspects of the essential phrases within Shin Buddhist history and clarified that the decision to use the contemporary version resulted from an attempt to show the difference between Shin Buddhism and other Buddhist sects in Japan and Christianity. As Graham Harvey has emphasized and elaborated, food and foodways should be the central topics of research in the study of religions, because in this way more accurate statements can be made about lived religion than with an orientation towards the cognitive definition of religion. [Extracted from the article]

Turkish literary historiography seems to have espoused the definition of “Turkishness”, established at the time of independence in 1923, which regarded as Turkish any person of Muslim faith residing within the borders of the country, regardless of their ethnic origin and mother tongue, and has imposed it retrospectively on the multicultural world of Ottoman Turkish literature. Indeed, non‑Muslim authors writing in Turkish have been excluded from the history of literature. However, as is highlighted in the first part of this article, many exchanges took place between the Turkish Muslim intelligentsia and non‑Muslim Turkish‑speaking intellectuals. Addressing the issue of minor literature in the Ottoman context, the second part presents Armeno‑Turkish, Karamanli Turkish, Judeo‑Turkish and Syro‑Ottoman literatures in dialogue with Ottoman Turkish literary culture. Noting that non‑Muslim writers writing with the Perso‑Arabic alphabet are also largely absent from literary histories, the article addresses in the third part the impact of the “revolution of the letters”, the adoption of the Latin alphabet in 1928. This contributed not only to the occultation of the minor literatures of Ottoman Turkey, but also to that of women’s and popular literatures as well as of the Turkish Ottoman progressive tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Widely recognized by nationalists, Islamists and conservatives as the heroine of the Turkish Right in the twentieth century, Sâmiha Ayverdi influenced the renaissance of right-wing politics in Turkey as an important leader of the Rifaî order, a prolific author, an unyielding anti-communist, and finally as an institution-builder for right-wing causes. This article focuses on the apparent paradoxes in Ayverdi's long career, such as her modernist interpretation of Islam, her relationship with her sufimaster, preference for memoirs, and her unabashed elitism. Such characteristics defy clichés associated with the stereotypical conservative/nationalist/Islamist intellectual in Cold War Turkey. Our in-depth study of Ayverdi's works thus reveals the complexity of right-wing identities, and the fact that our protagonist is an outspoken woman intellectual also adds an important twist to the story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]