22/05/2024 08:30 - 10:45

HALL: FATESI - STURZO

Proponent: Hintersteiner N., Manteghi H.

Chair: Manteghi H.

Speaker: Gusella F., Halft D., Manteghi H., Sherman W.E.B.

While the idea of paradigm shifts is not foreign to Mission Studies and cognate fields in order to describe the history and changes in the understanding of Christian mission (cf. David Bosch, "Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission" [Orbis 1991]), this panel explores such in the context of 17th cent. Indo-Persian Catholic mission as related to a particular cycle of Christian-Muslim apologetics and polemics having evolved therein around the genre of "mirrors of truth". Here, the paradigm of mirror and "mirror of truth" in Christian mission is met prominently in Spanish Jesuit missionary Jerome Xavier's opus magnum A?ina-yi ?aqq-nama (Truth-Revealing Mirror, 1609), composed during the so-called third Jesuit Mission to the Mughal court (1595-1617). The lengthy treatise engages Islam - in dialogical format and with high competence of cross-cultural translation and interreligious mirroring throughout the text - on doctrinal and practical levels, paired with apologetic demonstrations of Christian faith (demonstration fidei). While the text did not receive much debate at the Mughal court, when reaching Safavid Persia, it sparked a distinct resistance to the Catholic missionary's effort of interreligious theological engagement with the Muslim world, most outstanding in a work of the Isfahani Shi?a scholar Sayyid A?mad ?Alavi (d. 1644 or 1650) titled Mi?qal-i Safa? dar tajleya va ta?feya-yi A?ina-yi ?aqq-numa (Polisher of the Truth-revealing Mirror, 1622), confronting Jerome Xavier's mirror of truth. This triggered in turn a response by Catholic Arabic and Islam scholar Filippo Guadagnoli in Rome, with his work Apologia pro christiana religione (1631), and by Jesuit missionary in Isfahan Aimé Chézaud, with his Masih Mi?qal-i Safa-i A?ina-yi ?aqq-numa (1656) (Corrector to The Mirror-Polisher of the Truth-Revealing Mirror), reacting on behalf of the Vatican's Propaganda Fidei to ?Alavi and in defense of Jerome Xavier, followed by a number of Shia-Catholic apologetic and interreligious controversies over the seventeenth century across these same worlds. Including also an Augustinian missionary in Isfahan, who converted to Islam: 'Ali-Quli Jadid al-Islam; he again pursued a confronting mirror to the Catholic protagonists of this interreligious controversy towards the end of the 17th century, promoting once more the arguments of A?mad ?Alavi. Recent research on this Indo-Persian mission and the polemical cycle between Jesuits and Muslims in Mughal and Safavid courts by the panelists fruitfully examines the competing mirrors and explores them in view of paradigm shifts evolving from them for the understanding of Indo-Persian missions, the history of (counter)scriptural reasoning and interreligious exchange. How can this cycle of inter-religious and apologetical exchange offer us new understandings in early modern conceptions of mission, cross-cultural translation, revelation, scripture, language, and the religious arts?