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Welcome to the new books network. Hello and welcome to the new books network. My name is Amani Antar and I thank you for listening in today. I'm so pleased to welcome Dr.
Heis Kruszur, whose book, Justifying Transgression, Muslim Christians in the Law 1200-1700, is the focus of our talk today. Since obtaining a PhD in history from Leiden University, Heis Kruszur has held postdocs at Yale University, Humboldt University, and the University of Vienna, and works as a lecturer and an archivist. His latest book is Justifying Transgression, Muslim Christians in the Law from 1200-1700. In the book that we will be discussing today, our author studies driven by a fascinating question.
How do people justify what others see as transgression? Taking the question to the Persian Muslim and Latin Christian worlds over the period 1200-1700, this book shows that people in both these worlds invested considerable energy in worrying, debating, and writing about proscribed practices. Through a comprehensive discussion, Dr. Kruszur compares how people in these two worlds came to terms with the prescriptions of sodony, idolatry, and usury.
When historians speak of the gap between pre-modern practice and the legal theory of the time, they tend to ignore the myriad of justifications that fill this gap. Moreover, a focus on justification evens out many of the contrasts that have been allowed to exist between the two worlds, or the Muslim and Christian worlds more generally. The similarities outweigh the differences in ways people came to terms with the various laws and rules of divine law. The level of flexibility of the theologians and jurists in charge of divine law varied more over time and by topic than between the two worlds.
Both worlds also saw the development of ever more sophisticated justifications. Amid the increasing complexity of justifications, a particular kind of reasoning emerged that good outcomes are more important than upholding rules for their own sake. With the help of a diversity of sources, this book will appeal to historians and non-historians alike, including those without religious expertise and those unfamiliar with the law during this period. Without further delay, I would like to welcome Dr.
Krista. Dr. Kluster, it's so nice to have you. Thank you for being here today.
How are you doing? Yes, I'm doing great. I thank you for having me, Amani. It's great to be here on the new books, podcasts, which is something that a lot of my friends talk about.
It's very good. Yes. Well, I'm so happy to have you here today, especially as a fellow early modern historian. It's always so wonderful to examine, discuss, and talk about the work.
I'm from such brilliant scholars. So let's dive right in prior to getting to kind of the substantive discussion and analysis of your book. I wanted to begin with understanding some of the personal trajectory of the author. So how did you become interested in early modern history, and particularly the Persian and Latin Native worlds?
Very often you find scholars who concentrate on one region in the early modern world, either Latin Christendom or the Asamiket. But you really take on both in this study. So I guess that's kind of a two-part question. How you became interested in early modern history, and also how you kind of came to explore the Persian and the Latin worlds in this particular work.
Yeah, that's such a thing. So it's also a question I could ask you of course because you're also early modernists. So that's something we share. We can talk about it later guys.
I was originally interested in industry of India broadly. And then I was in the history department at Lighting University in Lendlands. And one of the things one of the ways to do history of South Asia was through the Dutch East India Company archives. And those covered in something in 18th centuries, which is the early modern period.
So then I was smack-rang in the early modern periods. And then I realized that there was a lot of material that was really about the South Asian courts and the people in South Asia themselves in these records. And then I also realized that I needed to learn Persian to have another source base because a lot of the court chronicles and the state documents, official documents were in Persian. So I also needed to learn that.
So then I got into learning Persian and from there I sort of came into this Persian world. And from that, so yeah, my first book was about India in the 17th century. And then for this new book, I wanted to do comparison because I liked to do comparison because I'm more of a lumper than a splitter, I guess. And I like to look for the commonalities between people from different cultures.
And then Europe offered itself as a point of comparison because it's so densely studied, as you know. And also the basic Czech authority has warned us in his provincializing Europe that in Western-style academic writing, it is very hard to escape any implicit comparison to the history of Europe. Also I used to be about to Middle East and India that I know too implicitly or explicitly at some point somewhere in the United States they will make comparisons, running comparisons to what was going on in Europe. So I thought it was best to bring this comparison to the four fronts and make it very explicit.
Yeah, that's so fascinating and so appreciated and so kind of well illustrated in your work. So thank you for that response. So what led you to kind of specifying now, what led you to your interest in researching the history of transgression? I mean, we know that of course there's ample research and studies on a phonemic law, Sharia, different schools of thought, and also in the Christian world, works on canon law, the early church fathers.
I mean, but there's really kind of less, I would say, in my own kind of experience on transgressive modes of behavior. So what really kind of propelled that interest? Well, it was also started with a personal incident as you can read in the code out to the book. I had a personal run in with the law and the mitts, nalties.
It had something to do with me trying to get my luggage after hours from a locker at the central station here somewhere. I don't want to go into these details now because it's a bit of a story. But it's got me thinking about the various ways of interpreting rules. And that again made me think of what I already knew about Persian poetry, in which the description of transgression or a mere transgression, almost transgression is such a key figure already from the Middle Ages onwards.
And even up to even through the 19th century and up to today, even somebody like Khomeini, famous of the Iranian revolution, does a bit of poetry where he is sort of deling with transgression a little bit. That's of course very not very heavily but a little bit. And I was then, and I'm still a great fan of the work of the 14th century, Robert Hafiz, who is a master of don't think those who saw themselves as the guardians of the fine law. Yeah, that's so interesting.
Thank you, Hais, that's just, it's always really wonderful, I think, and I think very, you know, it makes a work kind of that much more profound when sometimes a part of it is coming from a personal incident. So I think that that's really interesting that you mentioned that. So you have kind of these four categories that kind of structure your analysis and conceptualizing transgression and how individuals went about justifying proscrabbed acts, circumvention, exception, compensation, and stridency. So can you really kind of elaborate on these modes of analysis for listeners and how they effectively elucidate the processes of transgression in the early modern period?
Yeah, so I do work with these four categories because they do in these elucidates how transgression was presented by the transgression and by those around them. I took a cue here from Pierre Bourget, who has pointed out that it makes great difference to societies with what intention one breaks the rules. The question is also, who decided that an act was transgressive? These are two important points.
But maybe I should go briefly over those four categories, not too much time on them, but just very briefly outlined them in one or two sentences. So in stridency, this is one of my categories, the transgression which is, Gresler openly breaks the rule and he opposes the system that upholds the rule as well. Or he purposely breaks the rule to oppose that system. In the Persian world, this could be part of a lifestyle that was often called the Hrendi.
And for a while, there was also such a lifestyle in the Latin world, which is called the Burtinage. And then the second category is compensation. This is the breaking of a rule without any attempt to hide that fact. But within attempts to placate the moral legal system of which the rule was apart.
And they would do this through paying a fine, doing penance, showing remorse, etc. This was also very much what Bourget was talking about. In certain conventions, the perceived intention of the transgression is to break the rule as other periods. There is a divergence between the norm of the hearing to the rule and the intention of not hearing.
Certain conventions does not aim to contest the rule. And then there's exception, this takes the rule to a higher level of extraction by relating to certain principles. The rule maker becomes a rule maker in this young right, actually, in this case. So these are the four categories.
And they are important for structuring the comparison. But at the same time, I don't want to reify them too much because there were many shades between them. There were many shades of action that seemed to be full somewhere between these categories. Or sometimes they had aspects of two of these categories.
For instance, in a more erotic poetry, one could, on the one hand, circumvent the law by pretending that the forbidden act was not engaged in. But on the other hand, there could be a strident rejection of the right of the self-appointed guardians of divine law to tell the poet of what he was not doing. But it looked like he was doing it. But he was pretending half pretending not to be doing it.
So this is in between circumvention and stridentity. And there was also much ambiguity on the level that an individual, which again gave rise to ambivalence on the level of the community, I think. Yeah, thank you, Haisa. And that really brings me to the next question, which I think is really kind of fascinating.
Is that kind of notion of ambivalence? It's in many ways kind of a notion that I think would really resonate with modern day readers. And even kind of people who identify with a certain type of faith or confession, in my estimation, many people from religious traditions approach the religiosity. I think contemporaneously and also maybe historically with that same kind of ambivalence that is kind of a recurring theme throughout your work.
It's even theorized in some ways by Stuart Schwartz, who argues in his all can be saved. And you also turn to his work, I mean, you cited that communities were far less rigid in their religious interpretations than if they were to acknowledge. So how does, I mean, you kind of alluded to it just now, how does ambivalence characterize religious praxis for some in this period? And how is it really integrated into the religious landscape of this era?
Yeah, well, first of all, you mentioned Stuart Schwartz. I do die in with his arguments where he detects some skeptical attitudes in rustic folks or rustic quote unquote, they were designated by the people who are persecuting them as rustic sometimes in the 16th century Iberian Peninsula. And they he finds some very skeptical attitudes with them and also tolerance attitudes. And just like Schwartz, I try to find out how the draw could be laid down by the authoritative writers of the age went down with the common people as difficult as it is to find traces of that thinking.
And then yeah, you mentioned the ambivalence. I think it's important to make a distinction between ambivalence and ambiguity. Ambivalence is a located in the ambiguity, the start of ambiguity, ambiguity is located in expressions and can give rise through multiple interpretations. Ambivalence is located in the mind of the individual or the collective consciousness of a community.
When a person makes an ambiguous expression, it doesn't necessarily mean that they are ambivalence, I think. Sorry, this is a bit of a distinction. And it can also mean that they quite set on one interpretation actually, that they have in mind the preferred interpretation of their expression, but they leave it ambiguous for people who may not share their view and to stay away from the controversial interpretation. I started to show this for some cases, especially this chapter on justifying sodomy, where I use evidence about the lives of certain artists to get a question of what would have been their preferred reading of their own ambiguous works.
So I tried to show that they did have a preferred reading. But what this ambiguity does point to is an ambivalence on the level of the community. Some in the community were pulling in the direction of strict interpretations, and some in the community were pulling in the direction of flexible interpretations of divine law. And this, yeah, the community level is created and creates ambivalence.
I think, but yeah, ambivalence on the individual level, it's much harder to establish. I see some cases of it in my work, but the ambivalence that comes out of my work is more about the community level. Visit BetMDM Casino and check out the newest exclusive, The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly, 19 plus a wager.
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BetMDM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Yeah, thank you, Haisen. That's such a really interesting distinction is that between ambiguity and ambivalence, so I appreciate you kind of explaining that. It's just very interesting.
And also that dynamic, of course, between the personal and the communal dimension. So moving on to kind of the geographic parameters of the book, the full kind of your study is in the Persian world and Latin Christendom broadly. So defining the Persian world seems to be more complicated than, for example, the defining of kind of parameters of Latin Christendom. So what really, can you kind of explain to us what's the language of exchange, the language of administration and why New York's spritis is the Persian world less defined, and how does your book kind of elucidate this further?
Yeah, so it's very good to clarify this language for the listener, because we jump kind of jumps right into things. But I mean, now we sort of need to delineate things a little bit. So what I mean by the Persian world is the, it's around, currently, it's around Central Asia and South Asia. And it's actually more correct as you were using the term Persian nates.
It's more, would be more correct than Persian, because not everybody there was Persian, but they were using Persian language and expressions and Persian nates culture. But I chose in the book, I chose to just go to Persian world because I didn't want to scare away readers who might find out a bit cumbersome, just sort of, so it's a bit academic. And then the other hand, the Latinate world, and that's Western and Central Europe. Yeah, a lot has been written about the definition of the Persian world's, Persianate world.
It's, it's, although some people like to define it by the soft power of Persian, and then it's, they look at Persian as the language of exchange. So, and then it becomes a very, very broad, and because really big region and it goes into Western China, well, what the accent, how is it present, the accent, ultimate, and even up to the bulk, it can even go to the Balkans. So, but I chose a bit narrow distinction, a bit narrower definition, which looks at the heart power also. And that was where the language, the places where I was used as a language of administration.
But there is, yeah, there are different schools, and there's a bit of a, quite a bit of a debate about how it should be find, etc. And then there are also people saying, was it a thing anyway, because Arabic was also important throughout this world, because it was also the language actually of juridical, this, some of the most of juridical discourse was actually Arabic, and theology also often. So, people are saying like, well, should we just consider one Muslim world and not divide it into Persian, Arabic, etc. worlds.
And then Latin, the Latin Christendom, the Latin world, it is, yeah, it is much more commonly used at, yeah, region, because it's, yeah, there did the right of the Latin church, consides with also the use of Latin as an official language in any case in the villages, although of course, of the villages, different actors start to be used more. So, it is more easy to define Latin worlds, because it's sort of there, the religious discourse and the power discourse has sort of coincide as far as Latin is concerned. Anyway, but I don't really have a stake in this debate about how to define these two worlds. I just needed to define them in some way that I could start my comparison.
And I must admit that I wanted to give the Persian world a little bit narrow, because otherwise there would be no answer to my research, really. Yeah, thank you, Reyes. And that's, yeah, it's important that, yeah, there's, I mean, you know, it can be handled in some way. I mean, the research that you already approached is, and that you utilize is very vast.
So, that's a thank you for that. So, now, kind of moving to the kind of more core of your work, in one of your chapters, and you kind of, you explained how Fis is poetry is something that has profoundly kind of impacted you. So, in a passage from one of your chapters, you begin with this kind of, with Hapha's poetry, and I'm just going to quote the excerpt. You say, well, Hapha says, bring wine into Hapha's hand to give first on condition that word does not go from the circle of friends to the door.
So, this is from his D. When. So, how does this really encapsulate some of the substantive features of this study, or kind of the tenor of the period in some ways, and why, I mean, did you find this quote revelatory? Yeah, this quote, thank you.
It's a very nice quote of my favorite poet. And I think it highlights two important strengths that came out in the research for this book. First of all, is that there was a separation of private and public spaces, which goes back much further than we, or some historians think that often historians think it goes back to the 18th century or so. But we see it in the emotional world, we see it going back much further.
I see it very explicitly already with its thinkers, like the 11th century Al-Hazali, who explicitly says, like, you should not really cross the door step of a place to investigate if somebody is translating the law, et cetera. And I don't know if the sally says that, but yeah, no, he does say that you should not go into a bath house, for instance, to take images out, for instance, if you're against adultery. And it's been some of the traditions of the period in the case study already. And then you see it also coming, especially in the post-reformation Europe, you also see that boundary of the home coming up as an important boundary for enforcing laws, especially also, again, the law on idolatry.
So people can't be have their idols at home, but the Protestants considered idols, which Catholics considered, images of saints, et cetera. Anyway, but that people in their post-stand lands could have their houses at home and then be left in peace by them. And yeah, you also see that in the body person, where that's very strong. So that's one, this distinction between private and public spirits is very important.
And then there's another distinction that I see coming out of a lot of the literature is that between sort of circles of people considered themselves elect or a lightens in a way. So there were a lot of transgressive poets in both the Persian world and later on from the 16th century onwards also in the Latin world. Describing all sorts of transgressive behaviors, but they were sort of saying like, you should keep it from the common folk. This is only for our people in our elected circles.
And you see that this is very recurrent. And you even see it among people who are quite stirring actually in interpretation of divine law, but then they say like, well, you know, the elect people, maybe they can do a little bit more and they can go a little further in certain practices, et cetera. So this is another distinction we see coming up. So because of this in this quote that you gave, he mentions the circle friends in much less, which was very important.
So you were keeping things in this much less gathering. Yeah, that's so interesting. I mean, that kind of distinction between kind of the common folk and the elect and also the fact that I think this would be very surprising for contemporary readers to to distinguish and to see that that distinction was made. And so I think that's really, really fascinating.
Thank you, Heis. So you I want to know, or you can kind of explain to listeners, what are the Allam Guirian sorry, you have to forgive my pronunciation, the Allam Guirian rulings and how did they reveal so much about the legal territory of this period? Yeah, it's a cute. So the actual title, it is just much a different version of the Fonteva Alam Guirian, which I translated as Allam Guirian rulings, the rulings of the Emperor Alam Guir.
And it's actually written in Arabic, this work, but it's actually given a version. And yeah, there's some debate on what it actually is actually, it's actually a lot of very few scholars are interested in this, what actually is it a code of which should be seen as a codification of the sort of the rules as they were set by the Hanafite school of law, which is the Hanafi school of law was the school, one of the four schools of law, and this was the school that was prevalent in Persian worlds. Or should we see it as just Fonteva, which is Fonteva's article in Jewish duties, the color of Les Bonsa, it's basically answers to questions from lay people, lay people would come like, can I do this on that occasion, or in this situation, can I do this, or can I do that, and then all things related to the injunctions of divine law, and what one could do in certain situations and in situations where it gets complicated. And so the the allum gimme and rulings are, they are only, they contain only the second part of the Fatah's basically, they don't contain the question parts, but they contain answers that scholars gave for certain situations.
And then there is a sort of a dynamic in the work that sort of doesn't put all these rulings by all these centuries of scholars, same food to this sort of tried to hire archives, then I'm sort of sort of trying to say like this is what we prefer, but there are also these and these other opinions that you leave the divergence opinions, they do leave them in, but they sort of give their own preference. So in that way, it was sort of a drive to unify what people should do, and especially churches should do with Sharia law if somebody came to court. Yeah, and it's mainly based on what jurisprudence scholars of Sharia law said in Central Asia and it's South Asia, but there's a few cases that come from outside, Central Asia, this one says one scholar who's quoted about the punishment for sodomy, I think, and that somebody from Egypt unified scholar from Egypt, but on the whole, it's all these great men from the Central Asian and South Asian traditional kind of fi jurisprudence. Yeah.
Thank you, that's fascinating. I actually hadn't even come across them before, so I really was interested to hear about them throughout the book. So my next question I wanted to ask you about transgression, I mean, this is kind of related to the question on Hafez that we began with. How is transgression related to poetry in this period?
And this is also someone who, I mean, I, I, I, I mean, I just love poetry, I love writing poetry, I love reading about poetry. So this is kind of inspired by that personal passion. So what does this tell us of kind of the poorest boundaries between the creative realm of literary discourse and also its impact on religious praxis? Yeah, so a key argument of the book is that the discourse of juris and theologians about the mind law was not so far removed from daily practices as some scholars of the periods, some scholars which constantly the period have suggested.
They often, they often suggest that people weren't really aware that we're doing all kinds of stuff, but they weren't really aware that it was forbidden in canon law or in Sharia, for instance, in that they were just going ahead oblivious to what was happening in the realm of all these juris groups who are just arguing among themselves. So I argue very much against that. I'm very very making clear that people were very much aware, very often, of the discourses of the theologians and the jurists about the divine law, but that they were making all kinds of justifications to make it's breathable for themselves and others what they were doing. And so poetry is one of the domains in which these two realms come together.
So they did the practice, because they wanted to do something, but they noticed it forbidden and they bring together this tension in the poem. I see that in a lot of these dis-phodering version worlds and we also see it in the 16th century also in some poetry in Latin worlds. So that's one thing that poetry does and the other thing poetry does, it was also a space where one could explore transgression in an ambiguous way. So while the example I already gave, so people could pretend to be doing something or they sort of could sort of hint at doing something but then pretend that they were not really doing it, so that anybody could explore the tension that divine law created in the lives of people who wanted to do the things that were forbidden.
And in the version of worlds, it's often sold themselves as contestants for the soul of Sharia. So they really sold themselves in competition with the theologians and the tourists of Sharia for defining what Sharia was exactly and how it should be interpreted. And they very much thought it should be viewed by the spirit, well, which we didn't, yeah, in the Latin world we have come to call the spirit of the law. So they were very much in favor of that.
And in the Latin world we also see a little bit of that, for instance we see that Teofield, the view in the early 17th century France. He was characterized by one of his detractors as someone who saw himself himself as a brand legislator, quote unquote. So he was really accused of precisely what a lot of poets, yeah, seem to be doing, which was irrigating to themselves the demands of the jurisprude. Yeah, thank you.
I appreciate that so much. And just even that kind of notion of poets as contestants with theologians I think is just really fascinating. I think that even listeners or contemporary readers of your work might not actually recognize when you think of early modern, the early modern historical landscape, that kind of sophistication, because people tend to really kind of see religious practitioners as very kind of monolithic in their search, kind of for soft. Yeah, thank you, Christ.
So in this study, I think the use of artwork is used as kind of a critical historical source. And I think this is maybe kind of similar to your other book on xenophobia in 17th century India, where you integrated the use of miniature paintings and stolen reliefs in your research. So in this case, how is the discourse around artwork distinct from that of textual sources? And what ways does it amplify some of the themes of your work more poignantly than perhaps kind of legal texts?
Yeah, thanks. That's a good, very good question. So in my field, there are two kinds of art historians. I hope they will not take this very unfavourably.
But there's one kind of art historian who is very much like, well, you can't really know what the intention of the the maker of the work was and what it's what it wants to express, etc. And then there's another strands of art historians are much more open to iconography and even iconology. Really going very far in interpreting what the artwork wants to tell us about the world and the ways of living, etc. And I cite some, the art historians' sites are mostly those who are very free in or they go quite far in interpreting, for instance, Ebakkok for their Persian world and Angela van Halen for Dutch arts, and the language arts.
And so I'm a fan of going a bit further in this interpretation. And for especially for the chapter on the justification of what some deemed to be idolatry, the visual arts were very important source because they were the expression of artists who were also the people who were often bored of the arguments that they were making about or that they were making idols. So I mean, these artists, they were the very people who got accused of making idols. And I found quite a few instances, I think, where artists were making a point in their paintings or their sculptures about why their work was acceptable and should not be considered idolatrous.
And so that's where I gave me, especially, but I also used it in other chapters a little bit. Yeah, I don't want to make too much of this as a methodology. I think we should just yeah, try to be a little bit more open to to sort of strong interpretations of artwork. Yeah, I appreciate that.
I mean, I think that that's really, especially for historians that, I mean, concentrate exclusively on textual works. I think that that's a kind of refreshing to kind of open ourselves to the possibility of exploring different sources in our works. I think you, for advice. So in your, you have this kind of section where you explore idolatry within these kind of four categories again of analysis and you explore how Muslims in South Asia in this period employed Shadiya Safiyu's language to justify the continuing function of temples.
So how was this done? If you could kind of let the listeners know, I think it's really interesting. Yeah, it was very much done in very steps and various ways. The first step was to equate samples with churches and synagogues of the people of the book, with the people of the book where the Jews and Christians and they were already from the early days of Islam seen as people who deserve protection.
And so if people worshiped temples, they in new South Asia, especially could be equated to them, then they also deserved protection along with their temples. But this protection came with the need for a conversation. So there my my my category of conversation comes in because the protected status depended on payment of the GISIA, the politics for non-muslims. And there were also some other special texts that were in some cases like the pilgrimage texts that were sometimes linked to this.
So that's one important mechanism to which temples, the continued usage of temples in South Asia was allowed in South Asia under the Muslim rulers. And then there was also another mechanism which was to make a distinction between old and new temples. So sometimes some rulers and jurisprudence said we should make a distinction between, it's not allowed to build new temples, but people can keep their old temples, old temples can stay. So that was another mechanism through which temples were allowed to exist.
Well, of course, I mean historians will say of course, because otherwise they couldn't have ruled South Asia, Muslims, Muslim monarchs. But in any case, these were the sort of justifications that theologians came up with, or scholars of straight law came up with to support the rule of this Muslim monarch in South Asia. Thank you, Christia. That's really interesting.
So in your section on idolatry, you explore how authorities in both Atlantic and Persian world focused on, I mean, the role and position of images. I mean, I think you can see that I was very interested in this chapter, I mean, just the whole concept of idolatry. And whether they pertain to the public or the private sphere and where they were in fact serving as objects of veneration. And I think that this is really a fascinating point, since I mean, many would kind of see this as just, you know, antithetical to Islamic praxis, historically and contemporaneously.
So for example, you explore how Rafiya de'ineshirazi in 16th century describes these cave temples as secular monuments, and that he actually admired the workmanship of these temples, and he criticized his predecessor for destroying these temples. So in doing so, I think that you kind of argue that he evacuated idol from its meaning of unbelief and immercated with kind of a new meaning of art and workmanship. So I just wanted to ask if this is kind of a recurring strategy. I don't know if I characterized it properly, but that was kind of how I read that.
Yeah, so there are various mechanisms that work here. There is this distinction between art and an idol, which is by scholars of European history, often seen as something that arises in Europe after the Reformation, when people start to take paintings out of the church and putting them in secular spaces. But we see it also in the context in the Islamic world, especially where the placement of images was already very important much earlier, like if you had images in a book, so that's why miniature paintings, which are such a good art, if you had them in a book, they were not in a position where they could be adored or venerated, so that was completely fine. But if you were to put them on the wall in a vertical position, then they were in a position where an idol could be and that was problematic.
And especially if they were in the line of vision when you were doing prayer. So there's a lot of quite a few jurists that are grittin' about this. We see this as a very low-level development, instead of this emphasis on placement on the other one hand, which is also important in Reformation Europe, where images were placed outside the church, and then this emphasis on appreciating images as art. We see this in both, I think we see this arising in both speeches of this period.
And then there's this whole neoprotonic distinction between the internal and the external, where people made the argument, and very much also in both worlds, which was both worlds were influenced by neoprotonic thoughts, where people made this distinction between what you do with the meaning of the image and what you do with its exterior presentation. And there was a lot of people making the claim both about idols in Hindu temples, but also about what the Protestants considered idols in Catholic church, that people were not venerating the image in itself, but what the image referred to the internal meaning of the sculpture. Yeah, that's so interesting. I really appreciate that response.
Thank you, so I'm just going to, I mean, you've been so generous with your time, so I don't want to take too much of it. So I'm just going to kind of move to some just kind of closing remarks on this really wonderful study. So I was kind of, I looked at a review of your work and they provided this very insightful comment on the enduring relevance and the contemporary implications of your study. And I wanted to highlight this.
I mean, the review explains how your study dismantles the perception that the West was this pure expression of European Christian or Judeo-Christian culture, but rather constitutes a manifestation of an Abrahamic cultural sphere that included Dada de Sam and is therefore as much African and West Asian as European and which had in the pre-modern era, the Mediterranean at its vital center. So, I mean, I wanted to kind of hear what you thought about that kind of assessment of your work and also I wanted to know if this was kind of like an organic product of the research that you carried out yourself when you kind of, yeah. Yeah, great question. So I think this is a lot of scholars have already pointed to this that this is really one world.
For instance, David Njönberg with the Büswerk, you've been familiar with, we just talked about it over from the Spain in the Middle Ages. He talks about when he talks about the Western tradition, he means Christian, Judaism and Islam as the Western tradition. So a lot of people have already seen that this is really one tradition. So that's not so new, but it's very important for my comparison because it's sort of because they're coming from one origin.
All these divine low prescriptions are coming from one source sort of, I think that makes it easier to compare these two worlds. And then there's another strand that is shared is the heritage of Greek philosophy and especially neo-platonism. And this is something that's been worked on a lot by Jose from the chapter on usury, which we've mentioned so far, but there's one chapter on usury and the taking of interesting loans. For instance, what people did in medieval Europe as well as in the medieval version world was dressing as a sale alone up as a sale.
So making a sale, sorry, making a loan look like a sale. And in that way, they could claim that they were not really taking interest, but it was a profit on sale. So in that way, they could disguise. That is a bit too far to explain all the details now.
It is very complicated construction, a lot of very complicated construction, but they're really exactly the same between the version worlds and the minerals. Yeah, that's so interesting. I have a lot more to say about that, but I'll save it for later, just that's fascinating. So my last two last questions, and then I will let you get on with your day and just appreciate your time so much, there's a kind of, I would interpret it and characterize it as a kind of ingenuity, inventiveness related to the ways in which transgression can be accomplished and kind of successfully deployed, how conventions are thwarted.
I think that would be just really surprising for people who are less familiar, I think, with the early modern period. So I wanted to know if you kind of agree with this assessment or what your thoughts are. Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, it's also something that surprised me that there's this endless creativity riffing of certain themes about the internal and the external or about the ways one could disguise things or claim or redefine things.
There were endless ways or the other endless ways in which people were able to do the bundle endless. They were always riffing of a few, they found a few points that they could attach their reasoning to, but then they sort of created endless different different strands of reasoning to get out from under search and prescriptions. Yeah, I agree with you. Yeah.
Thank you, Grace, for that response. And so now kind of, we've looked at this really fascinating work, and I appreciate your time. And I just wanted to know, I mean, what's next for you, are the projects that are on the horizon? What can we look forward to?
Yeah, thanks for it. It's good to go. Thanks for asking that. I have a question on the horizon.
So one of the core arguments of this book was that justifications are cumulative. So they build on each other. So all these, the entire variation, so we just talked about, they continue to build on each other. And at some point, certain justifications get discarded.
Some people say like, okay, well, you know, yeah, you're claiming that, but nobody's going to believe that anymore. And this is where for instance, it went for the neo-platonic conception of homo-rothecism in Italy in the 16th century. For instance, people were both were claiming that they were only interested in ways for their as a spiritual object, etc. But at some point, now we believe that anymore, like there is this really just carnal desire playing and simple.
So we see that some of these different ways, they don't work anymore. But one justification that we see rising and rising, way of justifying the rising periods was consequentialism, looking at the ethical and moral and legal dilemmas by their outcomes, judging them by their outcomes, rather than by saying that something was inherently good or evil, saying that you should look at the outcome. And we see this already with Hafiz. And we also see it rising in the Latin world.
We see this becoming more and more important, just way of reasoning. And this is what I want to develop in my next project. I'm actually in thinking of, well, I'm starting with articles, but I'm not thinking of making a global history of consequentialism, because there are some scholars of European history who claim that it's a European invention of the 17th or 18th century. Of course, it depends if you see consequentialism as a doctrine or just a mode of reasoning, like you can be in distinction between that maybe.
But if you see it as a mode of reasoning, I think it goes back to millennia before Christ, maybe we can even find it in the Greek Vedas. So I want to write a global history of that, just to show how broadly this was shared, but also to show that it was something that has become more important to which the close will become to modernity. And it was also, I think, the divine law of this Western tradition of Islam, Christendom, and Judaism did sort of spur own this consequentialism because there was so many rules that one could argue against or about in this context. Yeah, so that's going to be my new projects.
Well, thank you, Heisle. I look forward to hearing more about that and seeing the fruition of that work. And I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today and talking about this wonderful book. And we appreciate it so much.
Thank you. Great. Thank you for having me, and I would like to ask you some more more about your poetry and your, I hope that work on the early modern periods. We'll leave that for another time.
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