Seminar: “Missionaries as Cultural Intermediaries”
Dennis Halft (Aquinas Scholar, PIMS)
Missionaries as Cultural Intermediaries: The Arrival of Medieval Arabic Bible Translations in Safavid Persia and their Reception by Muslim Scholars
Dennis Halft was born in Bonn, Germany and currently lives in Mainz. He joined the Northern German province of Dominican Friars in 2008 and is a member of the Institut dominicain d' etudes orientales in Cairo. He is a graduate of the Free University of Berlin, having specialized in Islamic, Iranian and Comparative Religious Studies. His current research focuses on the reception of Arabic Bible translations by Twelver Shiite scholars in Safavid, Persia. He has several publications on medieval and pre-modern Mulsim polemical works against Judaism and Christianity.