Purloined letters: cultural borrowing and Japanese crime literature, 1868-1937

2008 ◽  
Vol 46 (02) ◽  
pp. 46-0728-46-0728
Keyword(s):  
Crime Literature ◽  
Cultural Borrowing ◽  
Purloined Letters

Islam: The Unpillaged Eastern Religion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Bruce
Keyword(s):  
Faith Community ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
Feng Shui ◽  
The West ◽  
Eastern Religion ◽  
Authoritative Text ◽  
Cultural Borrowing ◽  
Ways Of Life

Understanding why Islam has contributed little to contemporary religious and spiritual innovations allows us to see the principles underlying cultural borrowing. With its creator God, authoritative text, religious dogmas, and defined ways of life, Islam is too much like Christianity for cultural appropriation, and there is a considerable Muslim presence in the West that constrains borrowing. Such appropriation is easiest when ideas are not embedded in a large faith community (feng shui is an example), when they are retrieved from an ancient and undocumented past (as with Celtic Christianity), or when they are entirely fictional (as with the supposed characteristics of Atlantis).

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