The paper analyzes two artistic artefacts, one graphic reportage and one novel from and about post-Soviet Georgia, focusing on the problem of religious difference within Orthodox Christianity. In imperial history, the fact that Georgia is an Orthodox Christian country was employed by the Russian side to legitimate the Georgian Church’s inclusion into the Russian ecclesiastic hierarchy and, what is more, of Georgia into the Russian empire. Georgian Orthodoxy was thus at least partly and in certain periods denied its religious autonomy. This parallels other strategic renouncements of differences from the Russian side, as for instance in the contemporary usage of the concept “Russian World” that combines the claim of “unity in faith” with language use and cultural consciousness into a mobilizing nationalist trope. The analysis of Viktoria Lomasko’s travel feature about Georgia and of Lasha Bugadze’s documentary novel “A Small Country” shows how contemporary artists and writers reassess the question of Georgia’s religious heritage and its difference from the Russian religious heritage. Whereas Lomasko is critical of the Georgian Church’s moral authority, she also gives ample room for presenting Georgian Orthdoxy’s difference as advantageous with regard to the Russian Church. Bugadze, by contrast, scrutinizes the Georgian Church’s fatal entanglement with the state that engendered both, nationalism and an uncanny allegiance with Russia.


 This article explores how the regulations imposed during Germany’s first COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 impacted on gendered mosque spaces and the digital spheres relating to those spaces. Examining the call to prayer as a sensory form that establishes “aesthetic formations” (Meyer 2009), the article unpacks gender-specific Muslim perspectives on space within mosques and the contested position mosques occupy in German public space. Paying particular attention to the temporalities of the pandemic restrictions, the article reflects on women’s (digital) practices and relates them to ongoing debates about the contested presence of sonic markers of Muslim religiosity in public space in Germany. It argues that the heterogeneous digital practices and discourses that emerged in ‘pandemic times’ should not only be viewed as extraordinary responses to an exceptional situation, but as exemplary of ongoing debates over gendered Muslim spaces and publicness in Germany.

In this Introduction, the guest editors discuss the main themes of this special issue and relate them to the growing field of research on how the extraordinary social conditions of the Covid-19 pandemic affected the practices of religious individuals, groups, and institutions. As we suggest here, the pandemic revealed and catalysed important trends within religious traditions and also exacerbated the issues of specific religious identities as confronted against, or negotiated with, the dominant frame of secular state-controlled public health priorities, policies, and protocols.


 Buddhist Sogdian texts contain about 300 loanwords of Indian origin excluding the ones that are known also in Manichaean, secular, or Christian Sogdian texts. About sixty percent of these can easily be seen to be borrowed from Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit. A further twenty percent or so are not so easily recognized as from that source because they also reflect linguistic developments within Sogdian. Another twenty percent are from a Prakrit or show the intermediation of another language, such as Parthian (probably including pwty ‘Buddha’), Tocharian, or Chinese. About one percent has unclear sources. The Indian loanwords in Manichean, Christian and secular Sogdian texts, in contrast, are in the majority from a Middle Indian source. In Buddhist Sogdian, the narrative texts like the Vessantara Jātaka feature more of the less regular loan shapes, which suggests a different path of transmission and probably an earlier date. An appendix discusses the role of Buddism in Sogdiana from finds there: personal names reflect the divinity of the Buddha; a wooden plaque with a devotional scene was recently discovered in Panjakent; a seal from Kafir-kala depicts a Turkish noblewoman rather than a Boddhisatva. A study of place names indicates the presence of Vihāras (Nawbahār, Farxār) at the gates of several main cities in and around Sogdiana.

The origin of ancient Israel has been questioned and intensively discussed for almost two centuries by many researchers, from two main schools of thought. One believes the early Israelites came from outside the Land of Cana‘an and conquered it, while the other believes they rose from within Cana‘an, forming a new polity and culture. Scholars are likewise divided whether the Israelite God, Yhwh, originated from the Near Eastern cultural environment or from the desert. A multitude of studies has been dedicated to these two themes, usually separately. This article attempts to examine the connection between the two through several themes: desert roots in the culture of ancient Israel, the origin of Yhwh, Asiatics in Sinai and the Negev, desert tribes and the copper industry, the location of biblical Paran, Nabataean data from Sinai which illuminate biblical issues, and others. By including materials which were previously underutilized or overlooked, these themes may be integrated to form a reasonable scenario of a chapter in the history of early Israel.


 Despite its linguistic and physical distance from the Mesopotamian heartland, the Church of the East maintained its spiritual and theological heritage amongst its Iranian-speaking communities at Turfan. Psalters written in a wide variety of languages and bilingual lectionaries attest the efforts that were made to ‘reach out’ to the local communities, but it was through the Syriac liturgy that the intrinsic connection with Seleucia-Ctesiphon was maintained. Using MIK III 45, the most complete liturgical text from Turfan, consisting of 61 folios with a C14 dating (771–884 CE), the paper explores the role of liturgy as a tool of community memory. Of prime significance was the commemoration of Mart Shir, the Sassanid queen who eschewed her royal connections to become the evangelist of Marv. Here, the liturgy offers a very different perspective to the ninth-century Arabic Chronicle of Se’ert, in which she was subordinated to Baršabbā, the alleged first bishop of Marv. The prayer of Bar Sauma, bishop of Nisibis, recited plene during the rite for the consecration of a new church (altar), also recalled the close association that had been forged with the Sassanid realms.

Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis’ famous scientific expedition to Lapland (1736-1737) had a considerable impact on Enlightenment thought, but not only due to its groundbreaking results in the fields of geodesy and physics. Given the popularity of his journey, the few and rather prejudiced references to the Sámi people and their religion also gained some significance. In his reports and in his self-presentations, Maupertuis used certain elements of Sámi life and religiosity in order to communicate his scientific and social message to the academies and the salons of Paris. Accordingly, the references to the Sámi are indispensable elements of the self-representation and self-reference of Enlightenment mind, intended to enhance and clarify its own standing. The article examines a situation of contact of a formally and religiously operating language of scientific polemics with religious phenomena that it interprets as ‘primitive’ or ‘curious’ and that it appropriates to its particular form of discourse. Here, intellectual religion meets a ‘primitive’ one as an object of description, and makes an innovative use of its alien elements. The case study is concerned in particular with a special kind of application of the transcendence-immanence distinction involved in the contact situation, relating to the phenomenon of knowledge in form of the relation of the known and the unknown.

Using comparisons to disparage others is a technique we all know from everyday life. In discourses of religious diversity, such polemical comparisons also play a prominent role in the making and unmaking of inter- and intra-religious boundaries and hierarchies. Linking polemical comparisons to more general methodological questions, this conceptual piece provides an analytical framework for the different case studies to follow. It takes up the call for a “double hermeneutics” in addressing comparing both as historical and scholarly practice. By adopting such a reflexive perspective, the analysis of polemical comparisons is situated at the interstices between emic and etic perspectives on the religious field. I briefly outline the current state of debate on comparisons in general and in religious studies in particular and situate polemical comparisons within these debates. I then move on to provide a typology of polemical comparisons, proposing some basic terms and perspectives for studying such comparisons in different constellations.

Transcendence and its interrelation with immanence play an important role in all religions. For a believer, the transcendent reveals itself through religious practices and can be communicated to others via various means. But when a religion is extinct, the only way of learning about its transcendence is via remaining sources, which often reveal only a biased image. This article deals with the analysis of the transcendent of an ancient Philippine religion and its distinction to the immanent. This article discusses ways of approaching the transcendent with the help of three examples dealing with the consequences of divergent understandings of transcendence and immanence, with liminality, soul concepts, and death.