'The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a line Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.' In the 'rubaiyat' (short epigrammatic poems) of the medieval Persian poet, mathematician, and philosopher Omar Khayyam, Edward FitzGerald saw an unflinching challenge to the illusions and consolations of mankind in every age. His version of Omar is neither a translation nor an independent poem; sceptical of divine providence and insistent on the pleasure of the passing moment, its 'Orientalism' offers FitzGerald a powerful and distinctive voice, in whose accents a whole Victorian generation comes to life. Although the poem's vision is bleak, it is conveyed in some of the most beautiful and haunting images in English poetry - and some of the sharpest- edged. The poem sold no copies at all on its first appearance in 1859, yet when it was 'discovered' two years later its first admirers included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Swinburne, and Ruskin. Daniel Karlin's richly annotated edition does justice to the scope and complexity of FitzGerald's lyrical meditation on 'human death and fate'. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Liu Zhi (c.1662-c.1730), a well-known Muslim scholar writing in Chinese, published outstanding theological works, short treatises, and short poems on Islam. While traditional Arabic and Persian Islamic texts used unfamiliar concepts to explain Islam, Liu Zhi translated both text and concepts into Chinese culture. In this erudite volume, David Lee examines how Liu Zhi integrated the basic religious living of the monotheistic Hui Muslims into their pluralistic Chinese culture. Liu Zhi discussed the Prophet Muhammad in Confucian terms, and his work served as a bridge between peoples. This book is an in-depth study of Liu Zhi's contextualization of Islam within Chinese scholarship that argues his merging of the two never deviated from the basic principles of Islamic belief.

In The Glance of the Medusa, Laszo F. Foeldenyi offers a mesmerizing examination of the rich history of European culture through the lens of mythology and philosophy. Embracing the best traditions of essay writing, this volume invites readers on a spiritual and intellectual adventure. The seven essays bear testimony to Foeldenyi's encyclopedic knowledge and ask whether it is possible to overcome our fear of passing away. In doing so, they illuminate moments of mystical experience viewed in a historical perspective while inviting readers to engage with such moments in the present by immersing themselves into the process of reading and thinking. Rather than providing firm answers to burning questions, The Glance of the Medusa highlights the limits of definition, conjuring up situations in which Man partakes of unutterable experiences-such as passion, pleasure, fear, poetry, or disgust-suggesting that moments of ecstasy cannot be pinned down or captured, only drawn a little closer.

In Egocentricity and Mysticism, Ernst Tugendhat casts mysticism as an innate facet of what it means to be human-a response to an existential need for peace of mind. This need is created by our discursive practices, which serve to differentiate us from one another and privilege our respective first-person standpoints. Emphasizing the first person fuels a desire for mysticism, which builds knowledge of what binds us together and connects us to the world. Any intellectual pursuit that prompts us to "step back" from our egocentric concerns harbors a mystic kernel that manifests as a sense of awe, wonder, and gratitude. Philosophy, the natural sciences, and mathematics all engender forms of mystical experience as profound as any produced by meditation and asceticism. One of the most widely discussed books by a German philosopher in decades, Egocentricity and Mysticism is a philosophical milestone that clarifies in groundbreaking ways our relationship to language, social interaction, and mortality.

Sacred Knowledge is the first well-documented, sophisticated account of the effect of psychedelics on biological processes, human consciousness, and revelatory religious experiences. Based on nearly three decades of legal research with volunteers, William A. Richards argues that, if used responsibly and legally, psychedelics have the potential to assuage suffering and constructively affect the quality of human life. Richards's analysis contributes to social and political debates over the responsible integration of psychedelic substances into modern society. His book serves as an invaluable resource for readers who, whether spontaneously or with the facilitation of psychedelics, have encountered meaningful, inspiring, or even disturbing states of consciousness and seek clarity about their experiences. Testing the limits of language and conceptual frameworks, Richards makes the most of experiential phenomena that stretch our understanding of reality, advancing new frontiers in the study of belief, spiritual awakening, psychiatric treatment, and social well-being. His findings enrich humanities and scientific scholarship, expanding work in philosophy, anthropology, theology, and religious studies and bringing depth to research in mental health, psychotherapy, and psychopharmacology.

This account of evil takes the Book of Job as its guide. The Book of Job considers physical pain, social bereavement, the origin of evil, theodicy, justice, divine violence, and reward. Such problems are explored by consulting ancient and modern accounts from the fields of theology and philosophy, broadly conceived. Some of the literature on evil - especially the philosophical literature - is inclined toward the abstract treatment of such problems. Bringing along the suffering Job will serve as a reminder of the concrete, lived experience in which the problem of evil has its roots.

What did ancient Jews believe about demons and angels? This question has long been puzzling, not least because the Hebrew Bible says relatively little about such transmundane powers. In the centuries after the conquests of Alexander the Great, however, we find an explosion of explicit and systematic interest in, and detailed discussions of, demons and angels. In this book, Annette Yoshiko Reed considers the third century BCE as a critical moment for the beginnings of Jewish angelology and demonology. Drawing on early 'pseudepigrapha' and Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls, she reconstructs the scribal settings in which transmundane powers became a topic of concerted Jewish interest. Reed also situates this development in relation to shifting ideas about scribes and writing across the Hellenistic Near East. Her book opens a window onto a forgotten era of Jewish literary creativity that nevertheless deeply shaped the discussion of angels and demons in Judaism and Christianity.

This book seeks to examine how Sufi thought might provide critical understanding of contemporary life and a pathway towards the recovery of a more meaningful existence. Rumi's mystical teachings are of great value at a time of rampant materialism and indiscriminate consumerism, and have the potential to illuminate the precarious state of the world, as well as revitalise contemporary social critique, ecophilosophy and biosemiotics in what is increasingly being regarded as a post-secular age.

Martin Buber was one of the most significant religious thinkers of the twentieth century. In this short and remarkable book he presents the essential teachings of Hasidism, the mystical Jewish movement which swept through Eastern Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Told through stories of imagination and spirit, together with Buber's own unique insights, The Way of Man offers us a way of understanding ourselves and our place in a spiritual world. 'There is something', he suggests, 'that can only be found in one place. It is a great treasure, which may be called the fulfilment of existence. The place where this treasure can be found is the place on which one stands.' Challenging us to recognize our own potential and to reach our true goal, The Way of Man is a life-enhancing book.

Table of Contents

PREFACE -- 1 Heart-Searching -- 2 The Particular Way -- 3 Resolution -- 4 Beginning With Oneself -- 5 Not to be Preoccupied With Oneself -- 6 Here Where One Stands.

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.

Within the complex religious landscape of modern India, the community of Sindh stands out as a powerful example of interfaith relations. This Hindu community moved to India and practiced Sufism following Sindh's inclusion to Pakistan in the 1947 partition. Drawing on a close analysis of literature and poetry, interviews with key informants, and a reading of historic rituals and architectures, Michel Boivin demonstrates that this active religious minority has managed to retain its unique Hindu-Sufi identity amidst the rigidification of official religions in both India and Pakistan. Of particular significance, Boivin argues, was the creation of sacred spaces called darbars. These shrines include a religious building where the Hindu Sindhis worship Sufi saints, chant Sufi poetry and perform Sufi rituals. In looking at this vibrant community as a trans-religious culture capable of navigating the challenges of the modern nation state, this book is an important contribution to understanding the Muslim-Hindu encounter in India.

Between 1300 and 1500 C.E. a new form of Sufi Islam took hold among central Islamic peoples, joining individuals through widespread networks resembling today's prominent paths and orders. Understanding contemporary Sufism requires a sophisticated analysis of these formative years. Moving beyond a straight account of leaders and movements, Shahzad Bashir weaves a rich history around the depiction of bodily actions by Sufi masters and disciples, primarily in Sufi literature and Persian miniature paintings of the period.

Focusing on the Persianate societies of Iran and Central Asia, Bashir explores medieval Sufis' conception of the human body as the primary shuttle between interior ( "batin") and exterior ( "zahir") realities. Drawing on literary, historical, and anthropological approaches to corporeality, he studies representations of Sufi bodies in three personal and communal arenas: religious activity in the form of ritual, asceticism, rules of etiquette, and a universal hierarchy of saints; the deep imprint of Persian poetic paradigms on the articulation of love, desire, and gender; and the reputation of Sufi masters for working miracles, which empowered them in all domains of social activity.

Bashir's novel perspective illuminates complex relationships between body and soul, body and gender, body and society, and body and cosmos. It highlights love as an overarching, powerful emotion in the making of Sufi communities and situates the body as a critical concern in Sufi thought and practice. Bashir's work ultimately offers a new methodology for extracting historical information from religious narratives, especially those depicting extraordinary and miraculous events.

Rabbinic hermeneutics in ancient Judaism reflects this multifaceted world of the text and of reality, seen as a world of reference worth commentary. As a mirror, it includes this world but perhaps also falsifies reality, adapting it to one's own aims and necessities. It consists of four parts:Part I, considered as introduction, is the description of the "Rabbinic Workshop" (Officina Rabbinica), the rabbinic world where the student plays a role and a reformation of a reformation always takes place, the world where the mirror was created and manufactured. Part II deals with the historical environment, the world of reference of rabbinic Judaism in Palestine and in the Hellenistic Diaspora (Reflecting Roman Religion); Part III focuses on magic and the sciences, as ancient (political and empirical) activities of influence in the double meaning of receiving and adopting something and of attempt to produce an effect on persons and objects (Performing the Craft of Sciences and Magic). Part IV addresses the rabbinic concern with texts (Reflecting on Languages and Texts) as the main area of "influence" of the rabbinic academy in a space between the texts of the past and the real world of the present.

In contrast to most introductory texts on Sufism, this work begins not with the historical past, but with the contemporary present. Beginning with Sufism as it is lived today, each chapter further unveils the complexities of Sufism, journeying through a variety of historical, political, and cultural contexts, moving deeper into the past, and closer to the origin and heart of Sufism. This geneological framework will enable the reader to understand the patterns of connection between contemporary manifestations of Sufism and past realities. To ensure that the full range of Sufism's varied expressions is taken into account, each chapter is divided into four sections: Politics and Power, Philosophy and Metaphysics, Arts and Culture, and Overview of Historical Developments. Dividing chapters into these four broad categories enables the book to highlight some of the ways in which Sufism has influenced Muslim politics, philosophy, art, and culture in each historical period. In each category the relevant issues are illustrated through detailed case studies, whether of a particular Sufi figure, place, artistic expression, or philosophical view. This allows the reader to develop a genuinely three-dimensional appreciation of Sufism, neither reducing it to a private mystical experience divorced from social expression, nor limiting the tradition to historical names and dates.

All known talks compiled from original sources.

With poetry which speaks across the ages, Sa'di (1210-1281) is a vital classical poet and a towering figure of the medieval Persian canon. In this essential new translation of Sa'di's work, leading expert on Iranian studies Homa Katouzian seeks to bring the poet's lyrics to a new readership. The book provides the Persian text and Katouzian's English translation side-by-side, creating an indispensable tool for students and enthusiasts of Iranian history, literature and culture.