Analyzing the intersection between Sufism and philosophy, this volume is a sweeping examination of the mystical philosophy of Muhyi-l-Din Ibn al-'Arabi (d. 637/1240), one of the most influential and original thinkers of the Islamic world. This book systematically covers Ibn al-'Arabi's ontology, theology, epistemology, teleology, spiritual anthropology and eschatology. While philosophy uses deductive reasoning to discover the fundamental nature of existence and Sufism relies on spiritual experience, it was not until the school of Ibn al-'Arabi that philosophy and Sufism converged into a single framework by elaborating spiritual doctrines in precise philosophical language. Contextualizing the historical development of Ibn al-'Arabi's school, the work draws from the earliest commentators of Ibn al-'Arabi's oeuvre, Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi (d. 673/1274), 'Abd al-Razzaq al-Kashani (d. ca. 730/1330) and Dawud al-Qaysari (d. 751/1350), but also draws from the medieval heirs of his doctrines Sayyid Haydar Amuli (d. 787/1385), the pivotal intellectual and mystical figure of Persia who recast philosophical Sufism within the framework of Twelver Shi'ism and 'Abd al-Rahman Jami (d. 898/1492), the key figure in the dissemination of Ibn al-'Arabi's ideas in the Persianate world as well as the Ottoman Empire, India, China and East Asia via Central Asia. Lucidly written and comprehensive in scope, with careful treatments of the key authors, Philosophical Sufism is a highly accessible introductory text for students and researchers interested in Islam, philosophy, religion and the Middle East.

A document of paramount historical importance, not only in terms of Christianity but also with respect to the development of Western religion. It chronicles the teachings of Jesus, who explains life's mysteries to his disciples and Mary Magdalene. Their discussions take place after Christ's resurrection and include accounts of his ascension into heaven.

Contemplative experience is central to Hindu yoga traditions, Buddhist meditation practices, and Catholic mystical theology, and, despite doctrinal differences, it expresses itself in suggestively similar meditative landmarks in each of these three meditative systems. In Yoga, Meditation and Mysticism, Kenneth Rose shifts the dominant focus of contemporary religious studies away from tradition-specific studies of individual religious traditions, communities, and practices to examine the 'contemplative universals' that arise globally in meditative experience. Through a comparative exploration of the itineraries detailed in the contemplative manuals of Theravada Buddhism, Patanjalian Yoga, and Catholic mystical theology, Rose identifies in each tradition a moment of sharply focused awareness that marks the threshold between immersion in mundane consciousness and contemplative insight. As concentration deepens, the meditator steps through this threshold onto a globally shared contemplative itinerary, which leads through a series of virtually identical stages to mental stillness and insight. Rose argues that these contemplative universals, familiar to experienced contemplatives in multiple traditions, point to a common spiritual, mental, and biological heritage. Pioneering the exploration of contemplative practice and experience with a comparative perspective that ranges over multiple religious traditions, religious studies, philosophy, neuroscience, and the cognitive science of religion, this book is a landmark contribution to the fields of contemplative practice and religious studies.

The Deoband movement-a revivalist movement within Sunni Islam that quickly spread from colonial India to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and even the United Kingdom and South Africa-has been poorly understood and sometimes feared. Despite being one of the most influential Muslim revivalist movements of the last two centuries, Deoband's connections to the Taliban have dominated the attention it has received from scholars and policy-makers alike. Revival from Below offers an important corrective, reorienting our understanding of Deoband around its global reach, which has profoundly shaped the movement's history. In particular, the author tracks the origins of Deoband's controversial critique of Sufism, how this critique travelled through Deobandi networks to South Africa, as well as the movement's efforts to keep traditionally educated Islamic scholars (`ulama) at the center of Muslim public life. The result is a nuanced account of this global religious network that argues we cannot fully understand Deoband without understanding the complex modalities through which it spread beyond South Asia.

This book analyzes and describes the development and aspects of imagery techniques, a primary mode of mystical experience, in twentieth century Jewish mysticism. These techniques, in contrast to linguistic techniques in medieval Kabbalah and in contrast to early Hasidism, have all the characteristics of a full screenplay, a long and complicated plot woven together from many scenes, a kind of a feature film. Research on this development and nature of the imagery experience is carried out through comparison to similar developments in philosophy and psychology and is fruitfully contextualized within broader trends of western and eastern mysticism.

This book demonstrates how a local elite built upon colonial knowledge to produce a vernacular knowledge that maintained the older legacy of a pluralistic Sufism. As the British reprinted a Sufi work, Shah Abd al-Latif Bhittai's Shah jo risalo, in an effort to teach British officers Sindhi, the local intelligentsia, particularly driven by a Hindu caste of professional scribes (the Amils), seized on the moment to promote a transformation from traditional and popular Sufism (the tasawuf) to a Sufi culture (Sufiyani saqafat). Using modern tools, such as the printing press, and borrowing European vocabulary and ideology, such as Theosophical Society, the intelligentsia used Sufism as an idiomatic matrix that functioned to incorporate difference and a multitude of devotional traditions-Sufi, non-Sufi, and non-Muslim-into a complex, metaphysical spirituality that transcended the nation-state and filled the intellectual, spiritual, and emotional voids of postmodernity.

Presenting lore that can spiritually enrich anyone's life, this one-of-a-kind encyclopedia is devoted to the esoteric in Judaism-the fabulous, the miraculous, and the mysterious. In this second edition, Geoffrey W. Dennis has added over thirty new entries and significantly expanded over one hundred other entries, incorporating more knowledge and passages from primary sources. Jewish esotericism is the oldest and most influential continuous occult tradition in the West. This comprehensive treasury of Jewish teachings, drawn from sources spanning Jewish scripture, Talmud, the Midrash, the Kabbalah, and other esoteric branches of Judaism, is exhaustively researched yet easy to use. It includes over one thousand alphabetical entries, from Aaron to Zohar Chadesh, with extensive cross-references to related topics. With a quick reference glossary and illustrations throughout, this encyclopedia puts thirty-five hundred years of wisdom in your hands.

"Everything that exists in reality, whether good or bad -- including even the most evil and damage-causing thing in the world -- has the right to exist, to the degree that destroying it and removing it completely from the world is forbidden. Rather, our duty is to only repair or fix it and to guide it towards goodness, for even a casual observation of any sort at the work of Creation that lies before us is enough [for us] to infer the high degree of perfection of Him Who has created it." In these short but powerful treatises, Rav Ashlag explains that evil (or that which is not good), is nothing more than a work in progress and that seeing something as evil is no more relevant than judging an unripe fruit before it's time. He awakens us to the knowledge that upon arrival at our final destination "all things", even the most damaged will be good. This remarkable perspective helps us to view with awe the system the Creator has given us to develop and grow, and to gain certainty in the end of the journey. How will the process work? For this information, you will want to read the second essay, "One Precept" and experience for yourself the route to consciousness that Rav Ashlag so aptly charts out for us. As the handwriting of a righteous person contains spiritual energy, "On World Peace" includes copies of Rav Ashlag's original writings. The book is nothing less than a gift to humanity.

The present volume honours Rabbi Professor Nehemia Polen, one of those rare scholars whose religious teachings, spiritual writings, and academic scholarship have come together into a sustained project of interpretive imagination and engagement. Without compromising his intellectual integrity, his work brings forth the sacred from the mundane and expands the reach of Torah. He has shown us a path in which narrow scholarship is directly linked to a quest for ever-broadening depth and connectivity. The essays in this collection, from his students, colleagues, and friends, are a testament to his enduring impact on the scholarly community. The contributions explore a range of historical periods and themes, centering upon the fields dear to Polen's heart, but a common thread unites them. Each essay is grounded in deeply engaged textual scholarship casting a glance upon the sources that is at once critical and beneficent. As a whole, they seek to give readers a richer sense of the fabric of Jewish interpretation and theology, from the history of Jewish mysticism, the promise and perils of exegesis, and the contemporary relevance of premodern and early modern texts.

The Kizilbash were at once key players in and the foremost victims of the Ottoman-Safavid conflict that defined the early modern Middle East. Today referred to as Alevis, they constitute the second largest faith community in modern Turkey, with smaller pockets of related groups in the Balkans. Yet several aspects of their history remain little understood or explored. This first comprehensive socio-political history of the Kizilbash/Alevi communities uses a recently surfaced corpus of sources generated within their milieu. It offers fresh answers to many questions concerning their origins and evolution from a revolutionary movement to an inward-looking religious order.

What cannot be said about God, and how can we speak about God by negating what we say? Traveling across prominent negators, denialists, ineffectualists, paradoxographers, naysayers, ignorance-pretenders, unknowers, I-don't-knowers, and taciturns, Unsaying God: Negative Theology in Medieval Islam delves into the negative theological movements that flourished in the first seven centuries of Islam. Aydogan Kars argues that there were multiple, and often competing, strategies for self-negating speech in the vast field of theology. By focusing on Arabic and Persian textual sources, the book defines four distinct yet interconnected paths of negative speech formations on the nature of God that circulated in medieval Islamic world. Expanding its scope to Jewish intellectuals, Unsaying God also demonstrates that religious boundaries were easily transgressed as scholars from diverse sectarian or religious backgrounds could adopt similar paths of negative speech on God. This is the first book-length study of negative theology in Islam. It encompasses many fields of scholarship, and diverse intellectual schools and figures. Throughout, Kars demonstrates how seemingly different genres should be read in a more connected way in light of the cultural and intellectual history of Islam rather than as different opposing sets of orthodoxies and heterodoxies.

Piety and Rebellion examines the span of the Hasidic textual tradition from its earliest phases to the 20th century. The essays collected in this volume focus on the tension between Hasidic fidelity to tradition and its rebellious attempt to push the devotional life beyond the borders of conventional religious practice. Many of the essays exhibit a comparative perspective deployed to better articulate the innovative spirit, and traditional challenges, Hasidism presents to the traditional Jewish world. Piety and Rebellion is an attempt to present Hasidism as one case whereby maximalist religion can yield a rebellious challenge to conventional conceptions of religious thought and practice.

This book presents an intellectual history of today's Muslim world, surveying contemporary Muslim thinking in its various manifestations, addressing a variety of themes that impact on the lives of present-day Muslims. Focusing on the period from roughly the late 1960s to the first decade of the twenty-first century, the book is global in its approach and offers an overview of different strands of thought and trends in the development of new ideas, distinguishing between traditional, reactionary, and progressive approaches. It presents a variety of themes and issues including: The continuing relevance of the legacy of traditional Islamic learning as well as the use of reason; the centrality of the Qur'an; the spiritual concerns of contemporary Muslims; political thought regarding secularity, statehood, and governance; legal and ethical debates; related current issues like human rights, gender equality, and religious plurality; as well as globalization, ecology and the environment, bioethics, and life sciences. An alternative account of Islam and the Muslim world today, counterbalancing narratives that emphasise politics and confrontations with the West, this book is an essential resource for students and scholars of Islam.

"Al-Ghazali on Conduct in Travel" is a translation of the seventeenth book of the "Revival of the Religious Sciences" (Ihya Ulum al-Din), which is widely regarded as the greatest work of Muslim spirituality. In "Al-Ghazali on Conduct in Travel", Abu Hamid al-Ghazali uncovers, as elsewhere in the "Revival", the mystical and religious dimension of one of humanity's most basic needs: in this instance, travel.---In Chapter One, Ghazali begins by providing the reader with the four reasons for travel, which include for the quest for knowledge and to flee from harm and danger. The advantages gained from travelling are also described by Ghazali-for example, the disciplining of the soul through exposure to the harsh conditions of travel as well as the acquisition of virtue and self-knowledge. Ghazali then explains what the seven proper conducts of travels-both outward conduct and inward conduct-consist of. In Chapter Two, Ghazali provides a practical chapter on the use of religious concessions while travelling, and concludes with a final chapter on how the traveller is to establish the proper direction and times for prayer. "Al-Ghazali on Conduct in Travel" will be of interest to all those wishing to explore the disciplining qualities of everyday activities applied here to the spiritual dimension of travelling.---In this new edition, the Islamic Texts Society has included the translation of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali's own Introduction to the "Revival of the Religious Sciences" which gives the reasons that caused him to write the work, the structure of the whole of the Revival and places each of the chapters in the context of the others.

This book is a study of the mystical nature of tradition, and the traditional nature of mysticism, and of St Symeon as both a highly personal and very traditional ecclesiastical writer. The teachings of St Symeon (949-1022) created much controversy in Byzantium and even led to a short-lived exile to Asia Minor in 1009. For the first time in modern scholarship these teachings are examined from within the tradition to which both St Symeon and Dr Alfeyev belong.

Bridges between Worlds explores Icelandic spirit work, known as andleg mal, which features trance and healing practices that span earth and spirit realms, historical eras, scientific and supernatural worldviews, and cross-Atlantic cultures. Based on years of fieldwork conducted in the northern Icelandic town of Akureyri, Corinne G. Dempsey excavates andleg mal's roots within Icelandic history, and examines how this practice steeped in ancient folklore functions in the modern world. Weaving personal stories and anecdotes with engaging accounts of Icelandic religious and cultural traditions, Dempsey humanizes spirit practices that are so often demonized or romanticized. While recent years have seen an unprecedented boom in tourist travel to Iceland, Dempsey sheds light on a profoundly important, but thus far poorly understood element of the country's culture. Her aim is not to explain away andleg mal but to build bridges of comprehensibility through empathy for the participants who are, after all, not so different from the reader.

Communicates the depth and power of the Christian 'wisdom tradition', and the promise of its dramatic rebirth in our time