Conversion in Late Antiquity: Christianity, Islam, and Beyond - 9781409457381

Taylor & Francis

The papers in this volume investigate the two important movements of conversion that frame late antiquity: Christianity and Islam. Despite their historical significance, those two movements of conversion have never been systematically compared to each other, and this volume attempts to do this by studying the various issues at stake in conversion for both religions. Some perspectives from the rise of Buddhism in East Asia at roughly the same period have been included so as to avoid remaining within purely Mediterranean and monotheistic models. > The papers in this volume were presented at a Mellon-Sawyer Seminar held at the University of Oxford in 2009-2010, which sought to investigate side by side the two important movements of conversion that frame late antiquity: to Christianity at its start, and to Islam at the other end. Challenging the opposition between the two stereotypes of Islamic conversion as an intrinsically violent process, and Christian conversion as a fundamentally""