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This article addresses the challenge of conceptualizing the practice of religious proselytism in the context of international human rights law and its significance for the law of religious freedom. The author examines the evolving approach taken to religious proselytism within the landscape of human rights law, revealing that important aspects of religious freedom risk being lost given complex positive and negative views on proselytization. The author then explores the concept of human dignity and argues that there are relational and interactive dimensions associated with human dignity that are obscured in the international legal discourse of religious freedom. Recovering these dimensions of dignity will help address religious proselytization in international human rights law and reinvigorate the law of religious freedom.

There was racism in the ancient world, after all. This groundbreaking book refutes the common belief that the ancient Greeks and Romans harbored \"ethnic and cultural,\" but not racial, prejudice. It does so by comprehensively tracing the intellectual origins of racism back to classical antiquity. Benjamin Isaac's systematic analysis of ancient social prejudices and stereotypes reveals that some of those represent prototypes of racism--or proto-racism--which in turn inspired the early modern authors who developed the more familiar racist ideas. He considers the literature from classical Greece to late antiquity in a quest for the various forms of the discriminatory stereotypes and social hatred that have played such an important role in recent history and continue to do so in modern society. Magisterial in scope and scholarship, and engagingly written, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity further suggests that an understanding of ancient attitudes toward other peoples sheds light not only on Greco-Roman imperialism and the ideology of enslavement (and the concomitant integration or non-integration) of foreigners in those societies, but also on the disintegration of the Roman Empire and on more recent imperialism as well. The first part considers general themes in the history of discrimination; the second provides a detailed analysis of proto-racism and prejudices toward particular groups of foreigners in the Greco-Roman world. The last chapter concerns Jews in the ancient world, thus placing anti-Semitism in a broader context.

Who shares their faith with people who have different religious views? This article examines ‘faith sharing’ across 22 religiously diverse countries. To our knowledge, this is the first study of ‘faith sharing’ across national and religious contexts. Evangelism can be controversial, but both historically and in our data, it is widespread—including in societies that restrict religious liberty. ‘Faith sharing’ is lowest in Europe, Japan, Australia, and the US and highest in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia (excluding Japan). Within countries, there is no consistent pattern about which religious groups share their faith more. Previous research about ‘faith sharing’ focuses on Christians in the US, but the factors that predict ‘faith sharing’ in the US often do not generalize. In fact, the association with age, education, marital status, employment status, and immigration status is exactly the opposite in many societies. Because past comparative research ignores this topic and because so much of what we think we know about faith sharing is based on US Christians, we hope this article will spur further research and expand our understanding of religious persuasion and global religious change.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between satisfaction, congruence, nostalgic connections and trust with reference to brand attachment and behavioral loyalty. Behavioral loyalty was examined through the customer’s intention to continue the relationship, as well as proselytism and resistance upwards of the price in the luxury restaurant sector. Design/methodology/approach A questionnaire was developed and distributed via email and different Facebook groups which specialized in the luxury restaurant sector in Tunisia. A total of 310 questionnaires were completed and structural equation modeling with AMOS was used to test the hypothesis. Findings The findings suggest that brand attachment clearly explains the behavioral loyalty of consumers because it contributes toward maintaining the relationship with the brand in terms of repetitive buying behavior. Only satisfaction and nostalgic connection was found to influence brand attachment and satisfaction has a bearing on proselytism. Brand attachment in turn influences the intention to continue the relationship and the resistance to upward pricing, but not toward proselytism. Practicalimplications The managerial implications can guide managers toward enhancing the behavior loyalty of customers through better relational marketing practices. Originality/value The research is original in terms of conceptualizing and empirically testing the relation between brand attachment and behavior loyalty within the luxury restaurant sector with a specific focus on Tunisia. This study is one of the first to examine the relationship between brand attachment and behavioral loyalty in the restaurant sector.

In post-December Romania of 1989, after the fall of the communist regime, the presence of Christian Churches or groups in the public space became possible again. As a majority Church, the Romanian Orthodox Church (ROC) considered itself entitled to initiate new evangelization activities. At the same time, from the perspective of Western missionary groups, Romania was a terra missionis, which triggered a new wave of hetero-Orthodox missionary projects. Over the course of the last three decades, inter-Christian relations in Romania have gone through conflict, common witness and even dialogue. The primary objective of this research is to offer a revised understanding of the “new evangelization” paradigm in Romania in the late 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries, from a missiological perspective, considering the Romanian Orthodox–Evangelical relations. This research will also critically present the most important moments of the Christian dialogue, which moved from conflict to common witness and even to official and unofficial dialogue.

Debates about the ethics of humanitarianism increasingly recognize the significance of faith-based organizations in the provision of aid. Critics charge that the primary problem with faith-based groups, especially Christian organizations, is their propensity to proselytize. We agree that proselytism is problematic. However, we argue that the focus on religious agents alone indicates a secularist presumption and lack of knowledge about the complexity of religious ethics that a) tend to mask significant differences among Christian groups in their ethics of aid, and b) prevent scholars from addressing an additional form of undue pressure in aid provision. We call this undue pressure \"donor proselytism.\" Our interviews with Christian groups in Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and the United States demonstrate the contestation among Christian humanitarians about what constitutes proselytism. Our interviews and NGO conference observations also show how donor pressures shape aid to conform to neoliberal conceptions of efficiency, sustainability, and measurable results. Ultimately, we assert that donor proselytism is in fact the more pervasive of the two. Both scholars and policymakers, therefore, should take into account the complexity of religious ethics regarding proselytism as well as the power of donor proselytism to affect the lives of those receiving humanitarian assistance.

In the early fourteenth century, decades before the Ottomans became the sole rulers of Anatolia, the Germiyanid beylik stood as a dominant force among the principalities that had emerged in western Anatolia following the demise of the Seljuks (1307). Nonetheless, to date, the exact origins and ethno-cultural background of the Germiyanids remain unclear. This article re-evaluates previous theories and posits that the embryo of what eventually became the Germiyanids formed between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries in the lowlands between Malatya and Lake Van, and that the name “Germiyan” was of Kurdish origin. It also suggests that an intense proto-Yedizi proselytism took place in eastern Anatolia before the Germiyanids migrated to western Anatolia. Beyond its significance to the history of the Seljuks, the Ottomans, the Mongols, and Byzantium, this paper challenges the prevailing narrative that views the emergence of the beyliks as an exclusively Turkic phenomenon and sheds light on the role played by non-Turkic people, including Kurds and Arabs, in their formation.

Appearance of Islamic literature in the Lithuanian language is a rather recent phenomenon—its beginnings may be traced to the late 1990s and, to this day, it is exclusively translations of texts from other languages, chiefly English and Russian. Translators (as a rule, themselves religiously self-educated Lithuanian converts to Islam) have to grapple with Islamic religious terminology, which, save for a few commonly known words, has barely made its way into the normative language. Moreover, those Islamic terms that have been included into Lithuanian dictionaries and encyclopedias have been transliterated mainly from Russian and in their present form hardly correspond to their original (Arabic, Persian, or Turkish) phonetics. Therefore, the translators stand before the choice of either keeping English or Russian transcription/transliteration, reverting to one closer to the original or altogether translating the Islamic terms into Lithuanian (using familiar Christian terms or invented neologisms). The present article investigates the translators’ preferences in their rendering of Islamic terms and what they tell about the relation between language and faith. The analysis focuses on how transliteration of Islamic terms fits into competition among Muslims of different backgrounds as well as between Muslim and non-Muslim usage of Islamic terminology for the “ownership” or “possession” of religion through language, as the different strategies reveal cultural and even political affinities and preferences.

Globalization has been made responsible for a variety of (re)invented traditions with a trend toward a new religious foundation in and of societies. With Islamic proselytism having gone global, it may resemble religious resistance to the status quo, when pious Muslims instigate homogenizing daʿwa activities and attempt to endow them with moral obligations and normative superstructure. The proliferation of standards and fledgling processes of ideological framing are traceable in what is called fiqh al-daʿwa, which includes general theorizing and ostensibly legal reasoning on daʿwa. In reality, it is more of a missionary ideology given weight by being clothed in Islamic legal terminology. This paper investigates the fiqh of daʿwa in its global setting, with an emphasis on its radical Islamist articulations. It does so by examining fiqh al-daʿwa's legally, or rather ideologically and morally, charged treatises. In this way, the article reconstructs the genealogy of this rather new genre, as well as its social composition, its ideational grounding, and its normative potential. The condensed forms and derivatives of fiqh of daʿwa will be documented by means of certain rules, methods, and strategies of Islamist ideologues and organizations, particularly the post-Huḍaybī Muslim Brotherhood.1

Historically, in Romania, the relations between the Romanian Orthodox Church and the evangelical communities have been characterized by tension and mutual distrust. That is why, unfortunately, there has been no official dialogue between the two communities so far. The present article investigates the theoretical possibility for such an ecumenical dialogue to occur by analysing the contributions of several evangelical theologians who published research studies on theological topics specific to Eastern orthodox theology. Their positions were analysed from the perspective of an inclusive theology which allowed us to identify some common themes for both traditions: the authority in interpreting the Scriptures, salvation as a process, and the Church understood through the application of a perichoretic model. All these convergent themes could constitute the basis for a future official ecumenical dialogue between the evangelicals and the orthodox from Romania.