Dominican Institute for Oriental Studies
Institut dominicain d’études orientales
Dennis Halft, Ismāʿīl Qazvīnī A twelfth/eighteenth-century Jewish convert to Imāmī Šīʿism and his critique of Ibn Ezra’s Commentary on the four kingdoms (Daniel 231‒45). Senses of scripture, treasures of tradition: The Bible in Arabic among Jews, Christians and Muslims, edited by M. L. Hjälm. Leiden: Brill, 2017. 280‒304.
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Dennis Halft, « Towards a New Perception of Islam: The Influence of Marie-Dominique Chenu’s Theology of Incarnation on Christian-Muslim Relations », in: M. Attridge, D. Dias, M. Eaton, and N. Olkovich, eds, The Promise of Renewal: Dominicans and Vatican II, Adelaide: ATF Theology, 2017, 225‒239.
Dennis Halft, “A Persian Gospel manuscript and the London Polyglot”, in M. Pehlivanian, Ch. Rauch, and R. Vollandt, eds, Oriental Bible manuscripts from the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – PK: An illustrated history, Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2016, 155‒157.
Dennis Halft, “The ‘Book of books’ in Persian”, in M. Pehlivanian, Ch. Rauch, and R. Vollandt, eds, Oriental Bible manuscripts from the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – PK: An illustrated history, Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2016, 150‒154.
Dennis Halft, « Hebrew Bible Quotations in Arabic Transcription in Safavid Iran of the 11th/17th Century: Sayyed Aḥmad ʿAlavī’s Persian Refutations of Christianity », Intellectual History of the Islamicate World, 1 (2013), p. 235–252.
In recent years, the Muslim perceptions of the Bible have attracted increasing scholarly attention. Under the influence of Catholic missionary agitation, translations of the Bible into Arabic reached early modern Iran and were intensively studied by Shiite scholars. Their reception of scriptural material in a context of interreligious polemic provides evidence for the importance of the Bible in Arabic in Persian-speaking lands.
Dennis Halft was born in Bonn in 1981, Germany, and lives between Berlin and Trier.
He is an Islamic scholar and a Christian theologian. He obtained his PhD in Islamic studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. In 2019, he was appointed Professor of Abrahamic Religions in the Department of Catholic Theology at the University of Trier.
He is a member of the Dominican Institute for Oriental Studies in Cairo (IDEO), as well as director of the publication of the periodical Mélanges de l’Idéo (MIDEO).
His research focuses on interreligious interactions. He has several publications on medieval and premodern Muslim polemic works against Judaism and Christianity as well as contemporary interreligious dialogue.