In discussing Islamic banking and finance (IBF), I first provide a brief overview of its development in Gulf monarchies, before turning to an investigation of particularities of its form and substance. I address a set of issues related to, on the one hand, the adoption, governance and regulation of IBF and on the other hand, the conformity of its practice with its alleged purposes. My aim is to uncover the actual goals of IBF, that has become prominent in the Gulf (and in the global economy) in recent decades. The analysis shows that IBF is a means for regimes to both appease their restive populations and respond positively to the material interests of key segments of society. Thus, ruling priorities related to enrichment and social management cohere; these are the principal purposes, even though ruling elites cloak their intentions in religiosity and ethical commitments. Like the other institutionalized practices discussed in this book, IBF represents the conjoined instrumentalization of (oil) wealth and Islamic doctrine for the sake of social control, and beyond that, the ongoing political domination and material enrichment of the royal family.

This chapter turns to anxieties about the motivations of crusaders, focusing on the romance of Guy of Warwick. In fourteenth-century Europe, an ideology of “chivalric crusading” that sought to harmoniously combine courtly love, worldly self-advancement, and service to God gained wide popularity, disseminated by works such as Guillaume de Machaut’s La Prise d’Alixandre and the Livre des fais of Marshal Boucicaut. But this ideology was not without its critics: writers including John Gower, Philippe de Mézières, and Henry of Grosmont seized upon the notion of crusading as love-service to articulate complex critiques of the worldly ambitions of crusaders. Guy of Warwick intervenes in this debate by exploring the practical and experiential implications of fighting for worldly love and pious motives.

This chapter begins with the families of Hannibal and Scipio. Hannibal’s mother is unknown; the name of Scipio’s abnormally pious mother, Pomponia, is preserved only in a Latin epic poem by Silius Italicus (first century CE). The older male relatives of both Hannibal and Scipio were distinguished soldiers. Hannibal married an Iberian woman; Scipio, a member of the Cornelian gens (group of families), married the daughter of another Roman aristocrat, from the Aemilian gens. Carthaginian and Roman naming habits are explained. Hannibal’s surname Barca is a family name, not an ‘ethnic’ – indicator of local origin – from the Greek city Barce. (A contrary argument is rejected in Appendix 2.1.) The childhood and youth of Hannibal and Scipio are discussed, including Hannibal’s famous oath in Iberia never to be friendly to the Romans, the events of the 230s and 220s are narrated, and pre−220 Roman and Carthaginian history and society are analysed.

Saxony, home of Martin Luther, was the first country to be divided over the issue of the Protestant faith. While Ernestine Saxony became the heartland of the Reformation, the neighbouring principality of Albertine Saxony saw the beginnings of the Counter-Reformation. The two Saxonies provide almost perfect laboratory conditions for comparing contrary reactions to the Reformation. By investigating the lives, piety and politics of the Wettin princes, Frederick the Wise, John the Constant and George of Saxony the Reformation is revealed to have been a true game changer. Christian humanism, attempts at church reform and sympathy for the Reformation did not correlate neatly. Rather, the dynamics of religious conversion disrupted lines of continuity from the Middle Ages into the early modern era. That disruption testifies to the groundbreaking impact of Protestant ideas. At the same time, early resistance to Luther in Electoral Saxony proves that even in his homeland, Reformation and Catholic reform were alternatives right from the very beginning.

This chapter examines the Laudian account of the relation between faith, hope and charity, and thus of that between faith and works. The Laudian answer to the question of how far, in this life, fallen humanity could fulfil the law of God is addressed.

This chapter argues that, unlike Dio in his Euboean Oration, in which the countryside is always presented positively and the city almost wholly negatively, Longus does not make his rustics entirely virtuous or his city-dwellers wholly bad. I differentiated between virtues of ἦθος, ‘character’, and virtues of πρᾶξις, ‘action’, illustrating the differences between those of the country and of the city by an analytical table. I noted especially Longus’ presentation of piety and impiety, of deception and of artifice, and of fear and boldness, concluding that the country’s vices prompt readers to reflection as much as do its virtues.

The chapter highlights the place of spiritual purification in the Islamic ethos and its relation to physical jihād. Tracing such ideas from early Islam, the chapter considers the jihād in the era of the Crusades and the ways in which pietistic motifs were essential components of jihād preaching and practice.

This chapter distils a massive reservoir of discourses of heresy against Abu Hanifa to document the capaciousness of the proto-Sunni traditionalist effort to marginalise him and his followers. It identifies the multifarious nature of criticisms against him: proto-Sunni traditionalists assailing him on account of his jurisprudence, expertise in hadith, theology, and piety. This chapter closes with a discussion of the social regulation of heresy and orthodoxy in the eighth to tenth centuries.

This chapter argues that, just as the opening of the dialogue repeatedly alluded forward to the theories Socrates goes on to develop, Socrates’ death scene repeatedly refers back to these theories. It does so by showing Socrates living in accordance with the views he has defended over the course of the dialogue about the soul, courage, temperance, how to act toward the gods, and the correct way to interpret them. Scholarship on the death scene, especially in the last thirty years, has been dominated by Socrates’ famous last words: “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. All of you must pay what is owed and not be careless” (118a7–8). Given its obscurity and the temptation to project our own desired message back onto these words, it is especially important to place them within their context in the death scene and the dialogue as a whole. My procedure is first to set up constraints within which an interpretation should operate, and then suggest a series of interrelated possibilities that fit within these constraints. Doing so provides the opportunity to review some of the dialogue’s major ideas.

Previous studies of Lebanese Salafism have neglected the analysis of the local adaptation of global Salafism to the Lebanese context. This chapter seeks to fill that gap by exploring how Salafism found a foothold in Tripoli in the 1990s and how local repertoires and identities were instrumental in popularizing Salafism among the local poor. Northern Lebanon and Tripoli constituted as the primary cradle of Lebanese Salafism; the Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon constituted as a further Salafi hotspot.

Lebanese Salafi in the Tripoli discourse had distinct characteristics. More pragmatic and more business-oriented than Salafism in other Arab countries, it depended on financial patronage from the Gulf. The Lebanese Salafis’ lack of religious autonomy created an opening for jihadi underground organizations. Although Salafi ideology is important in explaining why males joined jihadi groups in Tripoli, social factors often played an even more decisive role. This chapter explores how jihadi groups could readily gain a foothold in poor quarters, taking advantage of the prevailing informality and making these hiding places for outlaws and armed groups.

Religious differences also shaped the voluntary social interactions that formed the basis of the burgeoning culture of eighteenth-century England. Chapter 4 looks at some of these practices – drinking, dancing, and coffeehouse culture – through the lens of Dissenting engagement with them in a context of continuing religious stereotyping. Although Dissenters were not excluded from the social practices of the eighteenth century, religious affiliation was an important determinant of how contemporaries interpreted their own, and others’, social interactions. Looking at Dissenters’ differing engagements with contemporary culture, and how others reacted to them, helps us to recognise the diverse ways in which contemporaries could make meaning from the common cultural modes and spaces of eighteenth-century England. This approach not only encourages a more expansive understanding of the varieties of cultural interaction in eighteenth-century England, but also highlights some of the crucial ways in which awareness of religious differences shaped social and cultural behaviour.

A polite social order emerged out of significant demographic, economic, and political changes in the early to mid-eighteenth century, and was established according to novel ideas about personal virtue, piety, and white masculinity. Members of an exclusive merchant elite embraced new models of personal deportment and constructed physical spaces, both public and domestic, in which to practice and display their gentility. Shared values, including an ethos of polite speech, united this elite and linked them with their English counterparts. Polite speech was explicated in conduct and courtesy books, in popular periodicals, in personal conversation with fellow gentlemen – and as distinct from vulgar speech, increasingly associated with particular types of people. Linguistic and social hierarchies proved to be mutually reinforcing, and, for the genteel, it was increasingly impolite (not ungodly or sinful) speech that posed the greater threat to good social order or “the peace.” That new social order would be enforced and enacted through law, the statutes, and procedures by which impolite speech was criminalized, prosecuted, and punished.

This essay considers the implied self-portrait of the Christian scholar that Origen offers in his response to Celsus. That self-portrait both shows the Christian scholar to be one whose panoply of skills should be recognized as the equal of the non-Christian scholar, and yet also the Christian scholar claims a place within a community of those – including the martyrs – who can only but seem irrational and quintessentially unscholarly to Celsus.

The early caliphate adopted the political organisation predominant in the late antique Middle East – imperial monarchy, sanctioned by divine power – but with a distinctively Islamic ideology of leadership involving kinship, piety, victory and justice. The prime location for the performance of royal power was the court, particularly for caliphal accessions or successions. The warrior rulers filling the caliphal vacuum after 945 adopted Islamic means of legitimisation, including oaths of loyalty, honorific titles, robes of honour, and being named on coinage and in Friday prayers; while the ʿulamaʾ increasingly claimed spiritual authority as ‘heirs of the Prophet’. The new Turco-Mongol elites from the thirteenth century on found a role for military strongmen, incorporating the nomadic virtues of strong leadership, good fortune and royal genealogy into a fluid mixture of ideologies. Performance of power encompassed the hajj, hunting parties, public sessions dispensing justice and rituals designed to bind the palaces of the court more closely to the towns wherever they were based.

Overviews the church–state relationship across time and nations, drawing attention to countries and circumstances in which the neutrality principle does not apply. Explores the origins of the doctrine, traces its developmental history in relation to religion in various countries, explains key concepts and identifies some different academic interpretations. Discusses the public/private dimensions to religious belief and their balancing within the Western liberal democratic model of government. It gives an overview of the law relating to religious freedom.