The Sufis are as diverse as the countries in which they've flourished--from Morocco to India to China--and as varied as their distinctive forms of art, music, poetry, and dance. They are said to represent the mystical heart of Islam, yet the term Sufism is notoriously difficult to define, as it means different things to different people both within and outside the tradition. With that fact in mind, Carl Ernst explores the broadest range of Sufi philosophies and practices to provide one of the most complete and comprehensive introductions to Sufism available in English. He traces the history of the movement from the earliest days of Islam to the present day, along the way examining its relationship to the larger world of Islam and its encounters with both fundamentalism and secularism in the modern world.

Mirigavati or The Magic Doe is the work of Shaikh Qutban Suhravardi, an Indian Sufi master who was also an expert poet and storyteller attached to the glittering court-in-exile of Sultan Husain Shah Sharqi of Jaunpur. Composed in 1503 as an introduction to mystical practice for disciples, this powerful Hindavi or early Hindi Sufi romance is a richly layered and sophisticated text, simultaneously a spiritual enigma and an exciting love-story full of adventures. The Mirigavati is both an excellent introduction to Sufism and one of the true literary classics of pre-modern India, a story that draws freely on the large pool of Indian, Islamic, and European narrative motifs in its distinctive telling of a mystical quest and its resolution. Adventures from the Odyssey and the voyages of Sindbad the Sailor-sea voyages, encounters with monstrous serpents, damsels in distress, flying demons and cannibals in caves, among others-surface in Suhravardi's rollicking tale, marking it as first-rate entertainment for its time and, in private sessions in Sufi shrines, a narrative that shaped the interior journey for novices. Before his untimely death in 2009, Aditya Behl had completed this complete blank verse translation of the critical edition of the Mirigavati, which reveals the precise mechanism and workings of spiritual signification and use in a major tradition of world and Indian literature.

The widespread view that 'mystical' activity in the Middle Ages was a rarefied enterprise of a privileged spiritual elite has led to isolation of the medieval 'mystics' into a separate, narrowly defined category. Taking the opposite view, this book shows how individual mystical experience, such as those recorded by Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, is rooted in, nourished and framed by the richly distinctive spiritual contexts of the period. Arranged by sections corresponding to historical developments, it explores the primary vernacular texts, their authors, and the contexts that formed the expression and exploration of mystical experiences in medieval England. This is an excellent, insightful introduction to medieval English mystical texts, their authors, readers and communities. Featuring a guide to further reading and a chronology, the Companion offers an accessible overview for students of literature, history and theology.

The widespread view that 'mystical' activity in the Middle Ages was a rarefied enterprise of a privileged spiritual elite has led to isolation of the medieval 'mystics' into a separate, narrowly defined category. Taking the opposite view, this book shows how individual mystical experience, such as those recorded by Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, is rooted in, nourished and framed by the richly distinctive spiritual contexts of the period. Arranged by sections corresponding to historical developments, it explores the primary vernacular texts, their authors, and the contexts that formed the expression and exploration of mystical experiences in medieval England. This is an excellent, insightful introduction to medieval English mystical texts, their authors, readers and communities. Featuring a guide to further reading and a chronology, the Companion offers an accessible overview for students of literature, history and theology.

Rabi'a, a female Sufi saint, was born in 717 CE and released from slavery to lead a life in pursuit of purity and perfect union with God. Her teachings and the numerous miracles attributed to her have made her an influential and revered figure in Sufi theology. This authoritative 1928 biography of the saint was written by Margaret Smith, who mastered numerous eastern languages, travelled extensively, and published a number of translations of important Arabic texts. Smith's linguistic skill and her immersion in the culture she studied has produced a book still considered an important account of Rabi'a's life. Smith also includes an incisive discussion of the role of women in early Islamic mysticism and an examination of Sufi doctrine, and examines the issues of celibacy and sainthood in Islam. A biography of one exceptional woman written by another.

This history of Sufi conceptions of the hereafter often imagined as a place of corporeal reward (Paradise) or punishment (Hell) is built upon the study of five medieval Sufi Qur'an commentaries. Pieter Coppens shows that boundary crossing from this world to the otherworld, and vice versa, revolves around the idea of meeting with and the vision of God; a vision which for some Sufis is not limited to the hereafter. The Qur'anic texts selected for study all key verses on seeing God are placed in their broader religious and social context and are shown to provide a useful and varied source for the reconstruction of a history of Sufi eschatology and the vision of God.

A penetrating analysis of the life and doctrines of the Spanish-born Arab theologian. A penetrating analysis of the life and doctrines of the Spanish-born Arab theologian. Originally published in 1969. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality, ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism. This volume examines Latin and vernacular writings that formed part of a flourishing culture of mystical experience in the later Middle Ages (ca. 1150-1400), including the ways in which visionaries within their literary milieu negotiated the tensions between personal, charismatic inspiration and their allegiance to church authority. It situates texts written in England within their wider geographical and intellectual context through comparative analyses with contemporary European writings. A recurrent theme across all of these works is the challenge that a largely masculine and clerical culture faced in the form of the various, and potentially unruly, spiritualities that emerged powerfully from the twelfth century onward. Representatives of these major spiritual developments, including the communities that fostered them, were often collaborative in their expression. For example, holy women, including nuns, recluses, and others, were recognized by their supporters within the church for their extraordinary spiritual graces, even as these individual expressions of piety were in many cases at variance with securely orthodox religious formations. These writings become eloquent witnesses to a confrontation between inner, revelatory experience and the needs of the church to set limitations upon charismatic spiritualities that, with few exceptions, carried the seeds of religious dissent. Moreover, while some of the most remarkable texts at the centre of this volume were authored (and/or primarily read) by women, the intellectual and religious concerns in play cut across the familiar and all-too-conventional boundaries of gender and social and institutional affiliation.

In exploring the social background of early Jewish mysticism, "Scholastic Magic" tells the story of how imagination and magic were made to serve memory and scholasticism. In the visionary literature that circulated between the fifth and ninth centuries, there are strange tales of ancient rabbis conjuring the angel known as "Sar-Torah," the "Prince of the Torah." This angel endowed the rabbis themselves with spectacular memory and skill in learning, and then taught them the formulas for giving others these gifts. This literature, according to Michael Swartz, gives us rare glimpses of how ancient and medieval Jews who stood outside the mainstream of rabbinic leadership viewed Torah and ritual. Through close readings of the texts, he uncovers unfamiliar dimensions of the classical Judaic idea of Torah and the rabbinic civilization that forged them.

Swartz sets the stage for his analysis with a discussion of the place of memory and orality in ancient and medieval Judaism and how early educational and physiological theories were marshaled for the cultivation of memory. He then examines the unusual magical rituals for conjuring angels and ascending to heaven as well as the authors' attitudes to authority and tradition, showing them to have subverted essential rabbinic values even as they remained beholden to them. The result is a ground-breaking analysis of the social and conceptual background of rabbinic Judaism and ancient Mediterranean religions. Offering complete translations of the principal "Sar-Torah" texts, "Scholastic Magic" will become essential reading for those interested in religions in the ancient and medieval world, ritual studies, and popular religion.

Originally published in 1996.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The German-born Gerhard (Gershom) Scholem (1897-1982), the preeminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, delved into the historical analysis of kabbalistic literature from late antiquity to the twentieth century. His writings traverse Jewish historiography, Zionism, the phenomenology of mystical religion, and the spiritual and political condition of contemporary Judaism and Jewish civilization. During his lifetime, he published over forty volumes and close to seven hundred articles and trained at least three generations of scholars of Jewish thought, many of whom still teach in Israel, Europe, and North America. Scholem famously recounted rejecting his parents' assimilationist liberalism in favor of Zionism and immigrating to Palestine in 1923, where he became a central figure in the German Jewish immigrant community that dominated the nation's intellectual landscape in Mandate Palestine until the World War II. Despite Scholem's public renunciation of Germany for Israel, Zadoff explores how life and work of Scholem reflect ambivalence toward Zionism and his German origins. Zadoff divides the book into three parts. He first examines how Scholem created new academic and social circles in Palestine, while at the same time continuing to publish in German and take part in Jewish cultural projects in his country of origin. Zadoff then turns to the reaction of Scholem to the Holocaust and its aftermath, which constituted a turning point in his life. The third part of the book deals with Scholem's gradual return to the German intellectual world after World War II. Zadoff's erudite interpretations of Scholem's scholarship, embedded in its rich social and cultural contexts, show anew the remarkable contested worlds Scholem inhabited, resisted, and accommodated to-sometimes in ways that ran counter to his own self-portrait.