Arc: The Journal of the School of Religious Studies

Discontinuities in the Vision of Islam Between Medieval France and Castile

Daniel Salas — 2025-08-22

The following article examines the differing perspectives and understandings of Islam held by two related texts, each representing specific layers of French and Castilian societies in the times of Crusades. A careful and detailed comparison of the twelfth century French epic Les Chétifs and its late thirteenth-century Castilian version reveals significant interpolations and glosses that upset the notion of a faithful medieval translation. The textual variations here identified and discussed highlight problematic differences in the understanding of certain aspects of Islamic worship and theology from the perspective of late medieval French and Castilian texts, making clear that the alleged common enemy of both Christian societies is not identical. After a thorough social context of the production of the Castillian manuscript, this paper approaches this problem with a word-for-word comparison of certain excerpts from both texts, and then proceeds to interpret their differences within the literary and historical background of production. This paper is strongly inclined towards the study of the Hispanic text, as it focuses on the variations found in the unedited and oldest copy of the Castilian version. However, these variations are examined before a scrupulous reading of the French text and are solely dedicated to Islamic references.

Who Infected Whom?

Hiruni Fernando — 2025-08-22

The COVID-19 crisis was a major global health issue and a humanitarian crisis of modern times which called for global and national level multi-sectoral and coordinated responses. In Sri Lanka, the spread of the virus and the subsequent management of the pandemic was governed by a ‘caretaker’ government between the period of 2019-2020. Under this government led by Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, who ascended to power after the electoral defeat of the 'Yahapalanaya' regime, the pandemic became instrumentalized for domestic political consolidation and legitimization. Before this crucial government change, in the year 2019, the Islamic State-inspired Easter Sunday Attacks killed at least 269 people. In a Sinhala-Buddhist majoritarian nation, the pandemic period served as a site of symbolic contestations of the religio-political construction of the ‘other’, marked by practices such as denying religious burial rites for Muslims. This paper answers the question of “how did the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in the aftermath of the Easter Sunday Attacks contribute to the construction of the ‘other’ particularly in terms of religious othering in Sri Lanka during the period of 2019-2021?”. To answer this question, I use Jonathan Smith’s third model in ‘Differential equations on constructing the other’ to explain Buddhist and Islamic alterities and Talal Asad’s concept of site of symbolic contestations. The methodology is to use secondary sources of data and rhetorical analysis of speech acts by government actors and key social media posts to map the discourse surrounding the pandemic.

Qur’anic Phenomenology

Seyed Mohammad Houshisadat — 2025-10-24

The cornerstone of research (taḥqīq) is topic identification, which emerges from the primary research question. Qur’anic phenomenology provides criteria for selecting a perceivable and describable research topic and delineates conditions for the researcher (moḥaqīq) to approach and uncover the truth (ḥaqīqah) of the topic under investigation. Accordingly, the primary question of this paper is: How does Qur’anic phenomenology facilitate the identification of an authentic research topic and guide the researcher toward uncovering its epistemological and ontological dimension? The proposed hypothesis claims that the Islamic, and particularly Qur’anic, phenomenology provides an epistemological framework that facilitates the identification of authentic research topics through the dynamic interaction between the researcher (subject) and the empirical world (object), integrating both ontological (sharīʿah) and epistemological (ṭarīqah) dimensions. This approach emphasizes experiential engagement, intellectual reflection, and heartfelt intuition with the material and immaterial aspects of phenomena or topic, aiming to uncover deeper truths (ḥaqīqah) beyond the limits of sensory perception. This study employs a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach rooted in Qur’anic phenomenology, which integrates ontological (sharīʿah) and epistemological (ṭarīqah) dimensions in the pursuit of truth (ḥaqīqah). The methodology emphasizes interpretive engagement with both textual and experiential phenomena, drawing on Qur’anic instructions to observe, reflect, and intuit. Primary data were derived from Qur’anic verses and classical commentaries, complemented by relevant philosophical and scientific literature. Qur’anic phenomenology offers an epistemological and ontological model that may inform both the selection of authentic research topics and the methodological uncovering of their deeper realities. Yet, its specific contributions to these processes remain largely unexplored. This article aims to address this gap and is anticipated to contribute to prevailing research paradigms, especially those pertaining to phenomenology.

Honouring All of Our Relations:

Ellen Dobrowolski — 2025-12-17

Western studies of Indigenous religious traditions have historically been rooted in colonial systems of knowledge, dominated by Eurocentric understandings of both “religion” and “civilization.” The application of these categories in studies of Indigenous religious traditions has resulted in major misrepresentations or misinterpretations of Indigenous religions. The resulting studies have also often been used to police the "authenticity" of Indigenous traditions, falsely identifying any "modern" aspects of Indigenous traditions (including engagements with Christianity) as evidence of the deterioration of Indigenous religious and cultural practices. These misrepresentations of Indigenous religious traditions demonstrate the need in religious studies to de-center settler colonial categories of religion. The following paper presents a case study of misrepresentations of Métis religion through an examination of works on Métis historical and religious figure, Sœur Marguerite-Marie, née Sara Riel, who was one of the first Métis Grey Nuns, the first Métis missionary in the Northwest, and sister of famed Métis leader, Louis Riel. The ways in which Riel’s religious affiliations have been analyzed and misrepresented is illustrative and symptomatsanic of deep-seated conventions within Western scholarship on mixed-heritage Indigenous peoples and syncretic Indigenous religions specifically, and of all Indigenous religions more generally. Examining the misinterpretations of Riel’s religiosity provides a concentrated look into how the employment of Western categories of religion can result in the overlooking, and simultaneous undermining, of Indigenous expressions of both religious and national identity.