This chapter considers the fraught and complex history of religion and poetry in Australia, given the context of settler – colonialism, Aboriginal understandings of Country, and Australia’s growing cultural diversity. Discerning that anti-religious sentiment has emerged through a perception of Christianity as too close to settler – colonialism, it argues for a broad understanding of religion to include major world faiths and Aboriginal spirituality. It considers how nineteenth-century poets responded to the crises of faith brought about by Darwin’s theory of evolution, and then how poets grappled with meaning-making and value-making following the two world wars. At the same time, it recognises that many poets; including Francis Webb, James McAuley, Vincent Buckley; and Les Murray; still shared an institutional understanding of religion. The chapter considers how recent poets have meditated on the relationship between the secular and the sacred. It analyses the mosaic quality of Fay Zwicky’s reflections on her Jewish ancestry, as well as the navigation of Buddhism in poets like Harold Stewart, Robert Gray; and Judith Beveridge; Christianity in the work of Kevin Hart and Lachlan Brown; and Islam in the work of Omar Sakr.

The introduction grounds African literary studies in practical and material considerations, and shows how print is a site of innovation and transformation. The print archive is shown to be full of texts which are now overlooked, but which enable us to understand much more about the literary productivity of the period, including what printed texts meant, socially and culturally, to their readers. An overview of the three sections of the volume is given, from Part I, which asks when independent African-owned printing presses emerged on the continent, what they published and where their readers were located, to Part II, which asks about the audiences for print culture and how they were convened, and Part III, which asks about the international networks of producers, distributors and readers behind the flows of texts on the continent. Emphasising specificities of language, religion and education, as well as the tangible social and political networks behind the circulation of texts, the introduction suggests that a locally sensitive approach to the study of print networks is essential to our understanding of global movements such as Black internationalism and Islam.

Before the twentieth century, to be literate in the Western Sahel meant to be literate in Arabic—or in other African languages written with the Arabic script. Yet works by West African Muslim scholars, composed largely in Arabic, are often overlooked in discussions of West African literature. This chapter highlights this gap by reconstructing the history of the region’s ‘Islamic literature’ and its relationship to print. Focusing on the literary production of two of the region’s major Sufi orders, the Tijaniyya and Muridiyya, it shows that printed works of Islamic erudition became increasingly important elements of public life across the twentieth century and continued to serve as one of the most frequent and readily available means of experiencing ‘literature’, even alongside the expansion of colonial and postcolonial educational institutions that employed European languages of instruction. Comprising some of the most common forms of reading material in West Africa today, they are the fruit of an encounter between a well-established Sufi literary tradition and newfound access to the affordances of print.

Article 9 ECHR protects the right to freedom of thought, conscience and belief. Traditionally the volume of case law has been low, but in recent years it has expanded significantly. The ECtHR has, however, been criticised for failing to engage with why religious freedom is important, thus leaving the right vulnerable to being displaced by other rights and interests. Difficult questions arise as to whether the ECtHR adequately protects Islam and how the Court deals with conflicts between religious beliefs and the rights of the LGBTQI+, as well as the Article 10 ECHR rights of those who wish to espouse views critical of faith. Given contemporary political discourse it is likely that there will be further case law in the future. In the UK the enactment of the HRA 1998 has resulted in Article 9 ECHR being upheld on some occasions, but the courts have also adopted a narrow approach to what constitutes an interference with the right, and it is questionable whether this is in line with Strasbourg. It is therefore likely that there will also be further domestic case law on the ambit of the right.

The courts of universal emperors presided over the spread of cosmopolitan elite cultures, literary, artistic and conspicuous. The Indologist Sheldon Pollock has studied this phenomenon for classical Sanskrit, but his vision of cosmopolitan and classical language cultures can easily be extended across Afro-Eurasia to comprise Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian and Classical Chinese, among others. Starting from the Alexander Romance and the image of Orpheus, the chapter explores how Greco-Roman literary culture created an elite language cosmopolis, much as the other examples mentioned here. Rather than studying Greek and Latin, as is often done, as the precursor of the modern Romance and national languages, it is rather in this context of imperial civilizational cosmopoleis that they should be analyzed. Themes include the formation of classical canons and elite distinction, the size of literary cultures based on manuscript rather than the printing press, and the development of transcendental and monotheist forms of religious belief such as Christianity, Buddhism and Islam.

Religious groups outside of the Christian tradition have slowly been incorporated into American civil religion. The chapter discusses four major world religions and their inclusion in the religious landscape of the United States: Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. The chapter also explores some new religious movements with distinctly American origins, Latter-day Saints, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christian Scientism.

Chapter 10 considers how descendants of nineteenth-century Africans remember their forebearers. It builds on Chapter 6’s discussion on the distinctiveness of liberated Africans by recovering some individual biographies, exploring how they constructed alternative narratives of return, and how the individuals remained close to Africa through their awareness of indentured histories and cultural traditions. These memories form a diasporic consciousness, shared with the descendants of a liberated African ancestor who was the great-grandfather of Malcolm X.

Women of the middle millennium were more mobile than we imagine, moving from one location to another for marriage, work, trade, worship, to visit family members, to take part in warfare, to settle in new lands, and—against their will—to be trafficked as slaves and sex workers. This picture of women on the move might contradict pervasive stereotypes of premodern women confined to the domestic sphere, or living out their whole lives within the context of one village or neighbourhood. Certainly, diverse religious and secular edicts ordered women to remain confined to domestic spaces and denigrated ‘wandering’ women as harlots of loose character. Many women of elite status were constrained to obey such orders and found themselves subject to strict control over movement. The majority of women who did travel probably did so less often and over shorter distances than their male peers. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to imagine half of humanity was absent from the roads, paths and ship-routes of the premodern world. It is not that women did not make journeys, but rather that travel was highly gendered in ideology and practice.

Mecca is the religious heart of Islam. Islam began here when the Prophet Muhammad received the first words of the Qur’an just outside Mecca and it is toward the Ka‘ba that every Muslim in the world is required to pray five times a day and complete at least one Hajj pilgrimage in a lifetime. In the vein of medieval travel this article will focus on three aspects in the context of Mecca: Finding the Qibla (direction of prayer towards the Ka‘ba in Mecca), pilgrimage (hajj) journeys to Mecca as recounted in a specialized travelogue genre known as ‘rihla’, and images of Mecca in hajj certificates and prayer manuals.Like Jerusalem, Mecca has been a religious nexus since time immemorial or so the story goes that the Ka‘ba, built by Adam and rebuilt by Abraham and Isma‘il [Qur’an 2:125−7], was a site of pilgrimage from ancient days. Stressing the omphalotic nature of the Ka‘ba, pre-Islamic Jahiliyya stories tell us that pagan pilgrims would rub their navels on a nail sticking out of the center of the floor of the Ka‘ba as a way of uniting with god and the cosmos.

This chapter offers an overview of the fascinating and complex world of Islamic Christology by using the Qur’an and Hadith, the primary sources of Islam, as a starting point. It condenses the wealth of literature that Muslim exegetes, philosophers, and mystics have produced on the Islamic representation of Jesus and Mary, examining what they consider to be authoritative Islamicized forms of Christian beliefs.

This chapter surveys a range of engagements with religion in the modernist theatre, from T. S. Eliot’s vision for a new Christian drama to Bertolt Brecht’s fascination with the Bible, and from Sylvia Wynter’s staging of Afro-diasporic ritual practices to Rabindranath Tagore’s dramatisation of Buddhist legend. Such works, this chapter shows, tend to favour syncretic and heterodox expressions of religious subjects, frequently drawing together multiple doctrinal or ritual traditions within a single performance. These modern dramas of religion are examined across four sections: ‘Modernist Iconoclasms’, on dramatists who sought to dismantle religion’s influence; ‘Temples of a Living Art’, on artists who sought to remake theatre in the image of religion; ‘Ritual and Sacrifice’, on theatre and metaphysics; and ‘Allegories and Parables of Renewal’, on the intersection of religious allegory with social change. Throughout these sections, the chapter illustrates the plural and paradoxical roles for religion assigned on the modernist stage.

The brief coda reflects on how the model developed in this book can be applied to later premodern societies.

Minoritized groups are often portrayed as “hard to reach” by policymakers yet face myriad obstacles in undertaking – and, in particular, shaping – climate action. For many minoritized communities, the pursuit of climate justice is inherently intertwined with achieving other goals, such as economic, gender, and/or social justice. In this chapter, we examine the experiences of climate actors from Muslim communities in the UK, finding that the politicization of climate action may shape the assumptions of policymakers behind the scenes, generating more effective and inclusive policy outputs. However, this strategy faces complex power inequalities, as Muslims face structural inequalities that hinder, or even threaten, involvement. Muslim communities face a higher probability of arrest when participating in political action, alongside worse conditions following such an arrest. Our interviewees tell us that a wider pursuit of societal justice and alternative forms of politicization beyond protests are integral to achieving more representative and effective climate action for Muslim communities.

Numerous Christian authors from the seventh century to the twenty-first have classified Islam as a Christian heresy. Writers from John of Damascus in the seventh century to Hilaire Belloc in the twentieth have seen Muhammad as a heresiarch who forged a heresy based on elements of Judaism, Christianity and Paganism. Comparison between Muhammad and earlier heresiarchs (such as Arius or Nestorius) allowed Christian authors to denigrate and dismiss Islamic doctrine. Such comparison also facilitated the denunciation of new heretics closer to home: Luther and Calvin, for Catholic polemicists of the sixteenth century, or on the contrary the ‘papists’, for Protestant writers.