Abkhaz People - Religion

Religion

See also: Religion in Abkhazia

The Abkhaz people are principally divided into Orthodox Christian and Sunni Muslim communities but the indigenous non-Abrahamic beliefs have always been strong. Christianity was introduced, in the 6th century, by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, and further enforced under the kings of Georgia in the High Middle Ages. The Ottoman takeover in the 16th century, missionaries such as Sufi preachers and the pressure from the Adyghe tribes (most of whom had converted to Islam) from the North precipitated the decline of Christianity and the region became largely Muslim until the 1860s when muhajirism left Christians in majority.

  • Children waving miniature Abkhazian flags

  • Parade exhibiting Abkhazian flags

  • Abkhaz and Georgian generals

  • Conference of Abkhazian nobility in 1839

Read more about this topic:  Abkhaz People

Famous quotes containing the word religion:

    “Female Virtues are of a Domestick turn. The Family is the proper Province for Private Women to Shine in. If they must be showing their Zeal for the Publick, let it not be against those who are perhaps of the same Family, or at least of the same Religion or Nation, but against those who are the open, professed, undoubted Enemies of their Faith, Liberty, and Country.”
    —Joseph Addison (1672–1719)

    “Is there any religion but this, to know, that, wherever in the wide desert of being, the holy sentiment we cherish has opened into a flower, it blooms for me? If none sees it, I see it; I am aware, if I alone, of the greatness of the fact. Whilst it blooms, I will keep sabbath or holy time, and suspend my gloom, and my folly and jokes.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “Religion is doing; a man does not merely think his religion or feel it, he “lives” his religion as much as he is able, otherwise it is not religion but fantasy or philosophy.”
    —George Gurdjieff (c. 1877–1949)