An infidel (literally "unfaithful") is a person who is accused of disbelief in the central tenets of one's own religion, such as members of another religion, or irreligion people.See:
Infidel is an Ecclesiology term in Christianity around which the Church developed a body of theology that deals with the concept of infidelity, which makes a clear differentiation between those who were baptized and followed the teachings of the Church versus those who are outside the faith. Christians used the term infidel to describe those perceived as the enemies of Christianity.
After the ancient world, the concept of otherness, an exclusionary notion of the outside by societies with more or less coherent cultural boundaries, became associated with the development of the monotheistic and prophetic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (cf. pagan).
In modern literature, the term infidel includes in its scope Atheism,
Polytheism,See:A willingness to identify other religious people as infidels corresponds to a preference for orthodoxy over pluralism.See:
Moreover, some translations of the Bible, including the King James Version, which is still in vogue today, employ the word infidel, while others have supplanted the term with nonbeliever. The term is found in two places:
A long line of Papal hierocratic canonists, most notably those who adhered to Alanus Anglicus's influential arguments of the Crusading-era, denied Infidel dominium, and asserted Rome's universal jurisdictional authority over the earth, as well as the right to authorize pagan conquests solely on the basis of non-belief because of their rejection of the Christian God.Williams, pp. 41, 61–64 In the extreme, the hierocractic canonical discourse of the mid-twelfth century, such as that espoused by Bernard of Clairvaux, the mystic leader of the Cisertcians, legitimized German colonial expansion and practice of forceful Christianisation in the Slavic Europe as a religious war against the Wends, arguing that infidels should be killed wherever they posed a menace to Christians. When Frederick the II unilaterally arrogated papal authority, he took on the mantle to "destroy convert, and subjugate all barbarian nations," a power in papal doctrine reserved for the pope. Hostiensis, a student of Innocent, in accord with Alanus, also asserted "... by law infidels should be subject to the faithful." John Wyclif, regarded as the forefather of English Reformation, also held that valid dominium rested on a state of Divine grace.Williams, pp. 61–64
The Teutonic Knights were one of the by-products of this papal hierocratic and German discourse. After the Crusades in the Levant, they moved to crusading activities in the infidel Baltics. Their crusades against the Lithuanians and Poles, however, precipitated the Lithuanian Controversy, and the Council of Constance, following the condemnation of Wyclif, found Hostiensis's views no longer acceptable and ruled against the knights. Future Church doctrine was then firmly aligned with Innocents IV's position.Williams, pp. 64–67
The later development of counterarguments on the validity of Papal authority, the rights of infidels, and the primacy of natural law led to various treatises such as those by Hugo Grotius, John Locke, Immanuel Kant and Thomas Hobbes.
The rights bestowed by Romanus Pontifex and inter caetera have never fallen from use, serving as the basis for legal arguments over the centuries. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1823 case Johnson v. McIntosh that as a result of European discovery and assumption of ultimate dominion, Native Americans had only a right to occupancy of native lands, not the right of title. In the 1831 case Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, famously described Native American tribes as "domestic dependent nations." In Worcester v. Georgia, the court ruled that the Native Tribes were sovereign entities to the extent that the U.S. federal government, and not individual states, had authority over their affairs.
Native American groups including the Taíno and Onondaga have called on the Holy See to revoke the bulls of 1452, 1453, and 1493.
Towards the early twentieth century, these movements sought to move away from the term "infidel" because of its associated negative connotation in Christian thought, and there is attributed to George Holyoake the coining of the term 'secularism' in an attempt to bridge the gap with other theist and Christian liberal reform movements.
In 1793, Immanuel Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, reflected the Enlightenment periods' philosophical development, one which differentiated between the moral and rational and substituted rational/irrational for the original true believer/infidel distinction.
In the Early Middle Ages, based on the idea of the superiority of Christians to infidels, regulations came into place such as those forbidding Jews from possessing Christian ; the laws of the further forbade Christians from entering the service of Jews, for Christian women to act as their nurses or midwives; forbidding Christians from employing Jewish physicians when ill; restricting Jews to definite quarters of the towns into which they were admitted and to wear a dress by which they might be recognized.
Later during the Victorian era, testimony of either self-declared, or those accused of being Infidels or Atheists, was not accepted in a court of law because it was felt that they had no moral imperative to not lie under oath because they did not believe in God, or Heaven and Hell.
These rules have now given way to modern legislation and Catholics, in civil life, are no longer governed by ecclesiastical law.
In the Quran, the term kafir is first applied to the unbelieving Meccans, and their attempts to refute and revile Muhammad. Later, Muslims are ordered to keep apart from them and defend themselves from their attacks.
In the Quran the term "people of the book" ( Ahl al-Kitāb) refers to Jews, Christians, and Sabians. In this way, Islam considers Jews and Christians as followers of scriptures sent by God previously."Infidel" in An Introductory Dictionary of Theology and Religious Studies, p. 630"Kafir" in An Introductory Dictionary of Theology and Religious Studies p. 702 The term people of the book was later expanded to include adherents of Zoroastrianism and Hinduism by Islamic rulers in Persia and India.
In some verses of the Quran, particularly those recited after the Hijra in AD 622, the concept of kafir was expanded upon, with Jews for disbelief in God's sign and killing prophets and Christians for believing the trinity and that Jesus was the son of God, which the Quran considers it to be idolatry.Campo, Juan Eduardo (2009). Encyclopedia of Islam. Infobase Publishing, New York, , see p. 421.Lewis, Bernard. The political language of Islam. University of Chicago Press, 1991.Waldman, Marilyn Robinson. "The Development of the Concept of Kufr in the Qur'ān." Journal of the American Oriental society 88.3 (1968): 442–55.Schimmel, Annemarie, and Abdoldjavad Falaturi. We Believe in One God: The Experience of God in Christianity and Islam. Seabury Press, 1979.
Some hadiths prohibit declaring a Muslim to be a kafir, but the term was nonetheless fairly frequent in the internal religious polemics of the age. For example, some texts of the Sunni Islam sect of Islam include other sects of Islam such as Shia Islam as infidel.Wilfred Madelung (1970), Early Sunnī Doctrine concerning Faith as Reflected in the" Kitāb al-Īmān", Studia Islamica, No. 32, pp. 233–54 Certain sects of Islam, such as Wahhabi movement, include as kafir those Muslims who undertake Sufi shrine pilgrimage and follow Shia teachings about .Williams, Brian Glyn. "Jihad and ethnicity in post‐communist Eurasia. on the trail of transnational islamic holy warriors in Kashmir, Afghanistan, Central Asia, Chechnya and Kosovo." The Global Review of Ethnopolitics 2.3–4 (2003): 3–24.Ungureanu, Daniel. "Wahhabism, Salafism and the Expansion of Islamic Fundamentalist Ideology." Journal of the Seminar of Discursive Logic, Argumentation Theory and Rhetoric. 2011.Marshall, Paul A., ed. Radical Islam's Rules: The Worldwide Spread of Extreme Shariʻa Law. Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Similarly, in Africa and South Asia, certain sects of Islam such as Hausas, Ahmadiyya, Akhbaris have been repeatedly declared as Kufir or infidels by other sects of Muslims.Mark Juergensmeyer (2011), The Oxford Handbook of Global Religions, Oxford University Press, , pp. 451, 519–23Patrick J. Ryan, Ariadne auf Naxos: Islam and Politics in a Religiously Pluralistic African Society, Journal of Religion in Africa, Vol. 26, Fasc. 3 (Aug., 1996), pp. 308–29H. R. Palmer, An Early Fulani Conception of Islam, Journal of the Royal African Society, Vol. 13, No. 52, pp. 407–14
The class of kafir also includes the category of murtadd, variously translated as apostasy or renegades, for whom Fiqh prescribes death if they refuse to return to Islam. On the subject of ritual impurity of unbelievers, one finds a range of opinions, "from the strictest to the most tolerant", in classical jurisprudence.Björkman, W., "Kafir". E. J. Brill's First Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1913–1936, Volume 4, ; pp. 619–20
Historically, the attitude toward unbelievers in Islam was determined more by socio-political conditions than by religious doctrine. A tolerance toward unbelievers prevailed even to the time of the Crusades, particularly with respect to the People of the Book. However, animosity was nourished by repeated wars with unbelievers, and warfare between the Safavid Empire and Ottoman Empire brought about application of the term kafir even to all in Ottoman .
In Sufism the term underwent a special development, as in a well-known verse of Abu Sa'id: "So long as belief and unbelief are not perfectly equal, no man can be a true Muslim", which has prompted various explanations.
The Hebrew term, kofer, cognate with the Arabic kafir, is reserved only for apostate Jews.
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