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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Non-Christian religions > Islam
Sufism is a centuries-old spiritual psychology. Drawing on the
words of the great Sufi poet Rumi, as well as traditional material
and personal experience, this book integrates the wisdom of Sufism
with the needs of contemporary life. LIVING PRESENCE shows how we
can bring spirituality and psychology into a balanced system that
honors and awakens the soul.
The second largest branch of Islam, with between 130 and 190
million adherents across the globe, Shi'i Islam is becoming an
increasingly significant force in contemporary politics, especially
in the Middle East. This makes an informed understanding of its
fundamental spiritual beliefs and practices both necessary and
timely. Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi is one of the most distinguished
scholars of Shi'i history and theology, and in this volume he
offers a wide-ranging and engaging survey of the core texts of
Shi'i Islam. Examining in turn the origins and later developments
of Shi'i spirituality, the author reveals the profoundly esoteric
nature of the beliefs which accrued to the figures of the early
Imams, and which became associated with their interaction between
the material and spiritual worlds. Many of these beliefs have
remained much misunderstood even within the wider Muslim world.
Furthermore, Western scholarship has tended to follow the lead of
the earlier orientalists and critics, viewing Shi'i teachings as
marginal. In this study the author shows, by contrast, how central
and creative the very nature of spirituality was to the development
of Shi'i Islam, as well as to classical Muslim civilisation as a
whole. In this comprehensive treatment, the esoteric nature of
Shi'i spirituality emerges as an essential phenomenon for
understanding Shi'i Islam.
The text of the Qur'an appears to many to be desperately muddled
and lacking any coherence. The Composition of the Qur'an provides a
systematic presentation of the writing processes (or rhetoric) and
argues that there is indeed a coherence to the Qur'anic text.
Michel Cuypers shows that the ancient Semitic texts, of which the
Qur'an is a part, do not obey the Greek rhetoric and that their
basic principle is therefore not progressive linearity, but
symmetry which can take several forms, following precise rules. He
argues that the knowledge of this rhetorical code allows for a
radically new analysis of the structure and rhetoric of the Qur'an.
Using copious amounts of examples from the text, The Composition of
the Qur'an provides a new theoretical synthesis of Qur'anic
rhetoric as well as a methodology for their application in further
exegesis. A landmark publication in the field of Qur'anic Studies,
this volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers in
Islamic Studies, Religious Studies and Arabic Studies.
The Muslim world is not commonly associated with science fiction.
Religion and repression have often been blamed for a perceived lack
of creativity, imagination and future-oriented thought. However,
even the most authoritarian Muslim-majority countries have produced
highly imaginative accounts on one of the frontiers of knowledge:
astrobiology, or the study of life in the universe. This book
argues that the Islamic tradition has been generally supportive of
conceptions of extra-terrestrial life, and in this engaging
account, Joerg Matthias Determann provides a survey of Arabic,
Bengali, Malay, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu texts and films, to show
how scientists and artists in and from Muslim-majority countries
have been at the forefront of the exciting search. Determann takes
us to little-known dimensions of Muslim culture and religion, such
as wildly popular adaptations of Star Wars and mysterious movements
centred on UFOs. Repression is shown to have helped science fiction
more than hurt it, with censorship encouraging authors to disguise
criticism of contemporary politics by setting plots in future times
and on distant planets. The book will be insightful for anyone
looking to explore the science, culture and politics of the Muslim
world and asks what the discovery of extra-terrestrial life would
mean for one of the greatest faiths.
It has long been argued that Islam liberated Muslim women by
granting them full rights as citizens. Yet in much of the Muslim
world women have been subjected to both cultural and political
oppression. Instances such as forced marriages, arbitrary divorces,
female mutilations and other abuses are common in the Muslim world,
as are restrictions on women's education and on their role in the
labour force.
Shireen Hunter provides a pragmatic analysis of relations
between Islam and the West, marked by specific cases from the
contemporary Islamic/Western divide. Her book gives a realistic and
accurate assessment of the relative role of civilizational factors
in determining the nature of the state and the prospects for
Muslim-Western relations (i.e., whether they will be conflictual or
cooperative). Hunter answers the question: Can an accommodation
between Islam and the West take place in a gradual and evolutionary
manner or will it happen only after conflict and confrontation?
And, contrary to Huntington's vaunted thesis in "The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" (Simon &
Schuster, 1996), she finds that the reality of modern Islam offers
room for hope.
Hunter challenges many of the prevailing Western views of the
Muslim world. For example, despite the widespread belief on the
specificity of Islam because of an assumed fusion of politics and
religion, in reality the fusion--of the spiritual and the
temporal--has not been greater in Islam than in other religions.
Therefore, Hunter asserts, the slower pace of secularization in
Muslim countries can not be attributed to IslaM's specificity. This
is a major study that will be of interest to concerned citizens as
well as scholars and students of the Middle East and Islam.
The commonly accepted wisdom is that nationalism replaced religion
in the age of modernity. In the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire,
the focus of Selim Deringil's book, traditional religious
structures crumbled as the empire itself began to fall apart. The
state's answer to schism was regulation and control, administered
in the form of a number of edicts in the early part of the century.
It is against this background that different religious communities
and individuals negotiated survival by converting to Islam when
their political interests or their lives were at stake. As the
century progressed, however, and as this engaging study illustrates
with examples from real-life cases, conversion was no longer
sufficient to guarantee citizenship and property rights as the
state became increasingly paranoid about its apostates and what it
perceived as their denationalization. The book tells the story of
the struggle for the bodies and the souls of people, waged between
the Ottoman State, the Great Powers, and a multitude of evangelical
organizations. Many of the stories shed light on current
flash-points in the Arab world and the Balkans, offering
alternative perspectives on national and religious identity and the
interconnection between the two."
The Old Turkic Yenisei Inscriptions have been significantly less
thoroughly investigated than the famous Orkhon Inscriptions, and
many paleographical, grammatical, and lexical aspects are still
insufficiently examined. This book is the first monograph study of
eight inscriptions found near the Uybat River in Khakassia, seven
of which are engraved in stone, one in the bottom of a silver
vessel. Although all but one of the inscriptions have been the
object of research, many problems regarding the glyphs and their
reading are unsolved. The present study collects and compares all
relevant information available on the Uybat Inscriptions and
provides a thorough, revised analysis of the texts. Every
inscription is presented in transliteration, transcription and
translation, with detailed metadata, exhaustive information on the
glyph inventory, and a comprehensive critical apparatus. The book
also contains a glossary of all identifiable lexemes and a
morphology index. Drawings, photographs and facsimiles are given in
the appendix. The study contributes to our understanding of the
language, script, and culture of the Old Turkic civilization in the
Yenisei area and can serve as a model for further studies on
individual inscription groups.
Dagestan – History, Culture, Identity provides an up-to-date and
comprehensive overview of Dagestan, a strategically important
republic of the Russian Federation which borders Chechnya, Georgia
and Azerbaijan, and its people. It outlines Dagestan’s rich and
complicated history, from 5th c ACE to post USSR, as seen from the
viewpoint of the Dagestani people. Chapters feature the new age of
social media, urban weddings, modern and traditional medicine,
innovative food cultivation, the little-known history of Mountain
Jews during the Soviet period, flourishing heroes of sport and
finance, emerging opportunities in ethno-tourism and a recent
Dagestani music revival. In doing so, the authors examine the large
number of different ethnic groups in Dagestan, their languages and
traditions, and assess how the people of Dagestan are coping and
thriving despite the changes brought about by globalisation, new
technology and the modern world: through which swirls an increasing
sense of identity in an indigenous multi-ethnic society.
STUDIES IN ISLAMIC MYSTICISM BY REYNOLD ALLEYNE NICHOLSON LITT. D.,
LL. D. LECTURER IN PERSIAN IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE FORMERLY
FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE CAMBRIDGE AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS I 92 I
TO EDWARD GRANVILLE BROWNE WHOSE TEACHING AND EXAMPLE FIRST
INSPIRED ME TO PURSUE THE STUDY OF ORIENTAL LITERATURE PREFACE As
was explained . in the preface to my Studies in Islamic Poetry, the
following essays conclude a series of five, which fall into two
groups and are therefore published in separate volumes. While
mysticism, save for a few casual references, found no place in the
studies on the Lubdbu l-Albdb of Awff and the Luzumiyydt of Abu VA1
al-Maarrf, in these now brought together it has taken entire
possession of the field. Ibnu l-Frid, indeed, is an exquisite poet
and the picture of Abii Safd ibn Abi 1-Khayr, drawn by pious faith
and coloured with legendary romance, may be looked upon as a work
of art in its way. But on the whole the literary interest of the
present volume is subordinate to the religious and philosophical. I
have tried to make the reader acquainted with three iifis famous in
the East and worthy of being known in Europe. Most of what has
hitherto been written concerning Abii Safd begins and ends with the
quatrains passing as his, though for the chief part, at any rate
they were neither composed nor recited by him. As to Jflf, the
masterly sketch in Dr Muhammad Iqbdls Development of Metaphysics in
Persia stands almost alone. Ibuu l-F ri J. had the misfortune to be
translated by Von Hammer, and the first intelligent or intelligible
version of his great Tdiyya appeared in Italy four years ago. It
will be seen that the subjects chosen illustrate different
aspectsof tifism and exhibit racial contrasts, of which perhaps the
importance has not yet been sufficiently recognised. Abii Safd, the
free-thinking free-living dervish, is a Persian through and
through, while Ibnu l-Fdri4 in the form of his poetry as well as in
the individuality of his spiritual enthusiasm display the narrower
and tenser genius of the Semite. Nearly a v third of this volume is
concerned with a type of iifism, which- vi Preface as represented
by Ibnu l- Arabf and Jfli possesses great interest for students of
medieval thought and may even claim a certain significance in
relation to modern philosophical and theological problems.
Mysticism is such a vital element in Islam that without some
understanding of its ideas and of the forms which they assume we
should seek in vain to penetrate below the surface of Mohammedan
religious life. The forms may be fantastic and the ideas difficult
to grasp nevertheless we shall do well to follow them, for in their
company East and West often meet and feel themselves akin. I regret
that I have not been able to make full use of several books and
articles published during the final stages of the war or soon
afterwards, which only came into my hands when these studies were
already in the press. Tor Andraes Die person Muhammeds in lehre und
glauben seiner gemeinde Upsala, 1917 contains by far the best
survey that has yet appeared of the sources, historical evolution
and general characteristics of the Mohammedan Logos doctrine. This,
as I have said, is the real subject of the Insdnu l-Kdmtt. Its
roots lie, of course, in Hellenism. Andrae shows how the notion of
the ffeio avQg rros passed over into Islam through the Shiites and
became embodied in theImdm, regarded as the living representative
of God and as a semi-divine person ality on whom the world depends
for its existence. Many Shiites were in close touch with iifism,
and there can be no doubt that, as Ibn Khaldiin observed, the Shf
ite Imdm is the prototype of the iifistic Qutb. It was inevitable
that the attributes of the Imm and Qutb should be transferred to
the Prophet, so that even amongst orthodox Moslems the belief in
his pre-existence rapidly gained ground...
Judaism, Christianity and Islam: An Introduction to Monotheism
shows how a shared monotheistic legacy frames and helps explain the
commonalities and disagreements among Judaism, Christianity and
Islam and their significant denominations in the world today.
Taking a thematic approach and covering both historical and
contemporary dimensions, the authors discuss how contemporary
geographic and cultural contexts shape the expression of monotheism
in the three religions. It covers differences between religious
expressions in Israeli Judaism, Latin American Christianity and
British Islam. Topics discussed include scripture, creation,
covenant and identity, ritual, ethics, peoplehood and community,
redemption, salvation, life after death, gender, sexuality and
marriage. This introductory text, which contains over 30 images, a
map, a timeline, chapter afterthoughts and critical questions, is
written by three authors with extensive teaching experience, each a
specialist in one of the three monotheistic traditions.
In Islamic History and Law, Labeeb Ahmed Bsoul undertakes an
extensive examination of Islamic intellectual history, covering
ages that witnessed different movements and doctrinal trends. While
political and geographical factors certainly influenced the Islamic
religious sciences, internal and intellectual factors exerted a
much more substantial influence. This study gives priority to
jurists' intellectual operations throughout the Muslim world,
covering the historical development of Islamic jurisprudence from
the middle of 4th century. Bsoul's examination of jurisprudential
advances takes into account the shifting dominance of particular
centers of legal scholarship in light of competing doctrines and
their adherents. This work sheds light on jurists of North Africa
and the Andalus, who are rarely mentioned in general modern works,
and also aims to demonstrate Muslim women's important role in the
history of jurisprudence, highlighting their participation in the
Islamic sciences. Bsoul relies mainly on Arabic primary sources to
give an impartial presentation of these jurists and produce an
accurate memory of the past based on objective knowledge.
Is it possible to rethink the multilayered and polyvalent
Christology of the Qur'an against the intersecting of competing
peripheral Christianities, anti-Jewish Christian polemics, and the
making of a new Arab state in the 7th-century Near East? To what
extent may this help us to decipher, moreover, the intricate
redactional process of the quranic corpus? And can we unearth from
any conclusions as to the tension between a messianic-oriented and
a prophetic-guided religious thought buried in the document? By
analysing, first, the typology and plausible date of the Jesus
texts contained in the Qur'an (which implies moving far beyond both
the habitual chronology of the Qur'an and the common thematic
division of the passages in question) and by examining, in the
second place, the Qur'an's earliest Christology via-a-vis its later
(and indeed much better known) Muhamadan kerygma, the present study
answers these crucial questions and, thereby, sheds new light on
the Qur'an's original sectarian milieu and pre-canonical
development.
The Muslim communities of Southeast Asia are diverse, complex and
increasingly influential in the broader Islamic world. However, the
extraordinary breadth of practices and views across the Muslim
world is not widely understood outside the region, often because of
the difficulty of locating and putting in context the material
produced by Muslims themselves. This is the first sourcebook to
present a wide selection of contemporary materials on Islam in
Southeast Asia, most of which have not previously been available in
English. The material covers six broad themes: personal expressions
of faith; Islamic law; state and governance; women and family;
jihad; and interactions with non-Muslims and the wider Muslim
world. The book looks at the ideological and doctrinal content of
Islam in Southeast Asia in all its facets, while also exploring the
motivations underlying different interpretations and viewpoints.
This is an essential book for anyone seeking to understand the
concerns, language and objectives of the main Muslim groups in
Southeast Asia.
This is a book about a writer, Islamic fundamentalism, mythmaking,
and international literary politics. It is the story of Taslima
Nasreen, a former medical doctor and protest writer who shot to
international fame in 1993 at the age of thirty-four after she was
accused of blasphemy by religious fanatics in Bangladesh and her
book Shame was banned. In order to escape a warrant for her arrest,
the controversial writer went underground and, as the official
story has it, fled to the West where she became a human rights
celebrity, a female version of Salman Rushdie. Taslima Nasreen's
name almost became a household word in 1994, when she was awarded
the Sakharov Prize by the European Parliament, and she was feted by
presidents, chancellors, mayors, and famous writers and
intellectuals around Europe for two years. She is still remembered
and widely admired as a modern-day feminist icon who fought the
bearded fundamentalists in her own country and whose life was in
danger. This is the official story that most people are familiar
with, and the one that is widely believed by Taslima supporters
around the world. However, as The Crescent and the Pen reveals, in
the style of a literary detective tale, the true story behind the
international campaign to save Taslima has bever been told until
now. Following on the trail of Taslima, Deen questions the
reasoning behind the international "crusade" to save her, in the
process debunking much of the current thinking that has shaped
Islam into the new global enemy. She discovers that the story of
what really happened to Taslima is a fascinating labyrinth where
memory and myth have merged, the tale having acquired a life of its
own with a hundred differentauthors.
Islamic jurisprudence has undergone many historical changes since
the time of Prophet Muhammad, and researchers have divided its
development into several historical stages. In Formation of the
Islamic Jurisprudence, Labeeb Ahmed Bsoul presents the history of
Islamic jurisprudence from its earliest period. Drawing upon a wide
variety of Arabic primary sources to provide an inclusive, unbiased
view of the history of jurisprudence, this book covers all the main
centers of legal scholarship in the Islamic world, addressing not
only the four well-known Sunni legal schools but also defunct Sunni
and sectarian legal schools. Bsoul makes intellectual history the
center of attention, recognizing the contributions of women to
legal scholarship, and avoids attributing academic developments to
the events of political history. This book presents a new reading
and understanding as Bsoul critically assesses the history,
development, and impact of Islamic jurisprudence in the Muslim
world.
Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (1148 - 1210) wrote prolifically in the
disciplines of theology, Quranic exegesis, and philosophy. He
composed treatises on jurisprudence, medicine, physiognomy,
astronomy, and astrology. His body of work marks a momentous
turning point in the Islamic tradition and his influence within the
post-classical Islamic tradition is striking. After his death in
1210 his works became standard textbooks in Islamic institutions of
higher learning. Razi investigates his transformative contributions
to the Islamic intellectual tradition. One of the leading
representatives of Sunni orthodoxy in medieval Islam, Razi was the
first intellectual to exploit the rich heritage of ancient and
Islamic philosophy to interpret the Quran. Jaffer uncovers Razi's
boldly unconventional intellectual aspirations. The book elucidates
the development of Razi's unique appropriation of methods and ideas
from ancient and Islamic philosophy into a unified Quranic
commentary-and consequently into the Sunni worldview. Jaffer shows
that the genre of Quranic commentary in the post-classical period
contains a wealth of philosophical material that is of major
interest for the history of philosophical ideas in Islam and for
the interaction of the aqli ("rational") and naqli ("traditional")
sciences in Islamic civilization. Jaffer demonstrates the ways Razi
reconciled the opposing intellectual trends of his milieu on major
methodological conflicts. A highly original work, this book
brilliantly repositions the central aims of Razi's intellectual
program.
The compilation of a decade of essays and online ideological
struggle with members of Lukman's e-mail chat group formed the
basis for "The Black Muslim Manifesto: From Inside the Belly of the
Beast." The continuation of that process has called "The Black
Muslim Manifesto II: A Luta Continua" into existence. Since the
publication of the first "Manifesto," Lukman has continued his
analysis of the unfolding global dynamic. Additionally, time has
born witness to the accuracy of some of the "Manifesto's"
prognostications. For example, we no longer have to speculate about
what Obama will do once he's in the WHITE House. Lukman is proud,
but not happy, to say that he was one of the few who was NEVER
deceived by the "Obama Ploy."
Lukman felt compelled to rush "A Luta Continua" to print because
much of his analysis, in "Manifesto II," has already proven to be
prescient. Events are moving forward at such a rapid pace that many
of his predictions have become history. Lukman didn't want to be
accused of that for which he condemns our "rearguard leadership";
namely, "Monday Morning Quarterbacking."
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