In Twelver Shi'a Islam, the wait for the return of the Twelfth Imam, Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Mahdi, at the end of time, overshadowed the value of actively seeking martyrdom. However, what is the place of martyrdom in Twelver Shi'ism today? This book shows that the Islamic revolution in Iran resulted in the marriage of Shi'i messianism and extreme political activism, changing the mindset of the Shi'a worldwide. Suddenly, each drop of martyrs' blood brought the return of al-Mahdi one step closer, and the Islamic Republic of Iran supposedly became the prelude to the foretold world revolution of al-Mahdi. Adel Hashemi traces the unexplored area of Shi'i discourse on martyrdom from the 1979 revolution-when the Islamic Republic's leaders cultivated the culture of martyrdom to topple the Shah's regime-to the dramatic shift in the understanding of martyrdom today. Also included are the reaction to the Syrian crisis, the region's war with ISIS and other Salafi groups, and the renewed commitment to the defense of shrines. This book shows the striking shifts in the meaning of martyrdom in Shi'ism, revealing the real relevance of the concept to the present-day Muslim world.

How was Palestine destroyed? Did the great powers create Israel? Why has Lebanon suffered war after war? What role has religion played in the Middle East? When did the region become the hub of the world's ecological crisis? If you want answers to any of these questions, then you need this book. Since the Second World War, the Middle East has suffered a seemingly unending period of war, foreign domination, environmental devastation and mass resistance to the region's ruling classes. In this book, that resistance speaks in its own words. Roland Rance and Terry Conway have gathered together some of the most powerful articles written in the last sixty years by socialist, ecologist and anti-Zionist activists across the region. The topics in this book include: . The legacy of 1948, when Israel was created . The destruction of Palestine . Lebanon's experience of war after war . Iraq's devastation . The Zionist context . The contradictions of religion . What the 'New World Order' meant for globalisation, the environment and Zionism THE EDITORS - Roland Rance has been a socialist activist in Israeli, Palestinian and British politics since the 1970s. He is a former editor of News From Within and Return Magazine, and is the convenor of Jews Against Zionism. - Terry Conway is one of the editors of Socialist Resistance and also of International Viewpoint. She is a leading member of the Fourth International, the world socialist organization founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938.

Winner of the 2021 Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and International Understanding (category: translation from Arabic into English) This is an unabridged, annotated, translation of the great Damascene savant and saint Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya's (d. 751/1350) Madarij al-Salikin. Conceived as a critical commentary on an earlier Sufi classic by the great Hanbalite scholar Abu Isma'il of Herat, Madarij aims to rejuvenate Sufism's Qur'anic foundations. The original work was a key text for the Sufi initiates, composed in terse, rhyming prose as a master's instruction to the aspiring seeker on the path to God, in a journey of a hundred stations whose ultimate purpose was to be lost to one's self (fana') and subsist (baqa') in God. The translator, Ovamir ('Uwaymir) Anjum, provides an extensive introduction and annotation to this English-Arabic face-to-face presentation of this masterpiece of Islamic psychology.

In this magisterial cultural history of the Palestinians, Nur Masalha illuminates the entire history of Palestinian learning with specific reference to writing, education, literary production and the intellectual revolutions in the country. The book introduces this long cultural heritage to demonstrate that Palestine was not just a 'holy land' for the four monotheistic religions - Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Samaritanism - rather, the country evolved to become a major international site of classical education and knowledge production in multiple languages including Sumerian, Proto-Canaanite, Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew and Latin. The cultural saturation of the country is found then, not solely in landmark mosques, churches and synagogues, but in scholarship, historic schools, colleges, famous international libraries and archival centres. This unique book unites these renowned institutions, movements and multiple historical periods for the first time, presenting them as part of a cumulative and incremental intellectual advancement rather than disconnected periods of educational excellence. In doing so, this multifaceted intellectual history transforms the orientations of scholarly research on Palestine and propels current historical knowledge on education and literacy in Palestine to new heights.

If you are from the West, it is likely that you normally assume that you are a subject who relates to objects and other subjects through actions that spring purely from your own intentions and will. Chinese philosophers, however, show how mistaken this conception of action is. Philosophy of action in Classical China is radically different from its counterpart in the Western philosophical narrative. While the latter usually assumes we are discrete individual subjects with the ability to act or to effect change, Classical Chinese philosophers theorize that human life is embedded in endless networks of relationships with other entities, phenomena, and socio-material contexts. These relations are primary to the constitution of the person, and hence acting within an early Chinese context is interacting and co-acting along with others, human or nonhuman. This book is the first monograph dedicated to the exploration and rigorous reconstruction of an extraordinary strategy for efficacious relational action devised by Classical Chinese philosophers, one which attempts to account for the interdependent and embedded character of human agency-what Mercedes Valmisa calls "adapting" or "adaptive agency" (yin) As opposed to more unilateral approaches to action conceptualized in the Classical Chinese corpus, such as forceful and prescriptive agency, adapting requires heightened self- and other-awareness, equanimity, flexibility, creativity, and response. These capacities allow the agent to "co-raise" courses of action ad hoc: unique and temporary solutions to specific, non-permanent, and non-generalizable life problems. Adapting is one of the world's oldest philosophies of action, and yet it is shockingly new for contemporary audiences, who will find in it an unlikely source of inspiration to cope with our current global problems. This book explores the core conception of adapting both on autochthonous terms and by cross-cultural comparison, drawing on the European and Analytic philosophical traditions as well as on scholarship from other disciplines. Valmisa exemplifies how to build meaningful philosophical theories without treating individual books or putative authors as locations of stable intellectual positions, opening brand-new topics in Chinese and comparative philosophy.