Christoslavism

Michael Anthony Sells (Born in Butte MT, on May 8, 1949) is the John Henry Barrows Professor of Islamic History and Literature at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. Michael Sells studies and teaches in the areas of Qur'anic studies, Sufism, Arabic and Islamic love poetry, mysticism (Greek, Islamic, Christian, and Jewish), and religion and violence.

He completed a new and expanded edition of his 1999 book Approaching the Qur'an: the Early Revelations which was the center of the case Yacovelli v. Moeser about the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's summer program in 2002. He also published three volumes on Arabic poetry, Desert Tracings: Six Classic Arabian Odes, Stations of Desire, and The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, Al-Andalus, which he co-edited and to which he contributed. His books on mysticism include Early Islamic Mysticism, translations and commentaries on influential mystical passages from the Quran, hadith, Arabic poetry, and early Sufi writings, as well as Mystical Languages of Unsaying, an examination of apophatic language, with special attention to Plotinus, Duns Scotus, ibn Arabi, Meister Eckhart, and Marguerite Porete. His work on religion and violence includes The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia, and The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy which he co-edited and to which he contributed. He teaches courses on the topics of the Qur'an, Islamic love poetry, comparative mystical literature, Arabic Sufi poetry, and ibn Arabi.

Michael Sells argues that religious mythology played a crucial role in Bosnian genocide. He wrote about the religious ideology of Christoslavism:

In the nineteenth century, the three myths – conversion to Islam based only upon cowardice and greed, stable ethnoreligious groups down through the centuries, and complete depravity of Ottoman rule – became the foundation for a new religious ideology, Christoslavism, the belief that Slavs are Christian by nature and that any conversion from Christianity is a betrayal of the Slavic race.

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