In the year of 1999, a collection of articles was published that were to have a major impact on the study of interreligious polemic and apologetics: Majlis: Interreligious encounters in medieval Islam, edited by Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, Mark R. Cohen, Sasson Somekh and Sidney H. Griffith (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz). A total of nine articles that deal with true or fictional stories which analyze the religious, philosophical and even literary disputes and exchanges that supposedly took place at academic meetings and literary salons organized by political or religious leaders at the main sites in the Muslim world. Since then, a great deal of work has been done in this genre, and many new texts have been revealed which merit publishing and analysis.

The purpose of this congress is to present new knowledge about those texts which were already known and to explore new recently discovered texts, as well as new contexts that have emerged. The debates on which the focus has been placed up to now mainly involve what are known as the “religions of the Book,” or in other words, Islam, Christianity and Judaism. We also wished to include Zoroastrianism, and the thought of philosophers. Likewise, the conferences will discuss not only the polemics and apologetics between members of different communities, but also interreligious and interdisciplinary disputes. We are interested in the study of texts which focus on exchanges between members of different branches or schools within the same religious, which took place in the Islamic world, for instance, between the Ismai’ilis vs. Sunnis, Melkites vs. Nestorians, Karaites vs. Rabbinic Judaism and Samaritans, and Malikis vs. Hanafis.

The congress, with the cooperation of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Anneliese Maier Award 2014), the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas - CSIC, the University of Tel Aviv, the Max Planck Gesellschaft (Berlin) and Casa Árabe, is co-directed by Camilla Adang (Tel Aviv University), Sonja Brentjes (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science), Maribel Fierro (Instituto de Lenguas y Culturas del Mediterráneo-CSIC) and Sabine Schmidtke (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton).

Program