A fourteen centuries old consensus by Islamic religious authorities has upheld the belief that God has granted husbands the right to beat their wives. Previously, the only element up for debate was the degree of severity, the instrument of the beating, and the limit to the damage allowed. This startling assertion, which shocks human sensibilities, is confirmed by hundreds of Qur'anic commentaries and works of Islamic jurisprudence authored over the course of the past millennia and a half. Despite the lies of propagandists and the ignorance of apologists, who claim that "Islam prohibits domestic violence," the fact of the matter is that the Islamic Tradition and Law allow husbands to inflict corporal punishment on their wives. In fact, it was only in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that a small number of translators and scholars started to insist upon alternate interpretations. In this pivotal, courageous, and timely analysis, which works diligently and minutely to separate truth from falsehood, right from wrong, the moral from the immoral, and the ethical from the unethical, Dr. John Andrew Morrow provides an exhaustive study of the second part of the Quranic text, 4:34, the Wife Beating Verse. Like Titan, who bears the weight of the heavens upon his shoulders, Morrow takes on the entire corpora of Islamic Tradition. With scientific precision, he interprets the verse by the verse, itself, the verse by related verses, the verse in the light of the Qur'an, the verse in light of prophetic traditions that permit domestic violence, the verse in light of other traditions that expressly prohibit violence against women, the verse in its historical context, the verse in light of reformist reinterpretations, the verse in light of the spirit of Islam, the verse from a Sufi perspective, and the verse in light of Qur'anic variants. Along the way, the author delicately and defiantly dispels misogynistic misinterpretations of the Word of God while slashing and burning the sexist sayings that were attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. In so doing, he may well save Islam from those traditionalists and misogynists who claim to speak in God's name.

The spiritual life must obviously take psychology into account; if we want to do good and know truth, we will have to understand what in us supports this intent, and what stands in the way of it. But after Jungian Psychology, Humanistic Psychology, Transpersonal Psychology, and Ken Wilber's Integral Psychology, the reader may wonder what remains to be said vis-a-vis psychology and the Spiritual Path. In the author's opinion, what remains is to present a psychology rooted in traditional metaphysics, one that he has termed "Principial Psychology." This psychology is not essentially new; elements of it are to be found in every traditional path; but it has rarely been so explicitly defined. Principial Psychology does have certain affinities with Transpersonal Psychology, and with Integral Psychology as well; all three emphasize the attainment of self-transcendence. The difference is that Transpersonal and Integral Psychology draw various elements from the faith traditions, while Principial Psychology requires that we actually follow one of them. Principial Psychology is based on the premise that the different "faculties" of the psyche that the Scholastic psychologists studied-thought, feeling, will, memory, imagination-as well as the various "archetypes" that Jung discovered but didn't entirely understand, identifiable in some ways with the levels of the human psychospiritual makeup in Sufi doctrine-are psychic reflections of timeless spiritual or metaphysical principles that exist in a world beyond the psychic dimension entirely. In terms of the human microcosm, these principles are the loom upon which the psyche is woven, and the body as well; in terms of the macrocosm, they are the eternal designs that underlie, and guide, the greater universe of which we are a part. From the point-of-view of this science, the whole spectrum of mental illnesses and psychological "complexes" can be seen as based on various wrong or inverted relationships between the faculties of the psyche-imbalances that are produced by, and further reinforce, the misperception and veiling of the archetypal Principles by the tyrannical and deluded ego. Principial Psychology recognizes the goal of human development not simply as the healing of mental illness or a balanced adjustment to social norms, but as the attainment of a state of "ideal normalcy" based on a complete conformation of the psyche to the principles from which it springs-in other words, on the "salvation of the soul." Just as mental health is inseparable from moral development, so self-knowledge is impossible without self-transcendence.

As the poet T.S. Eliot said, 'Where is the wisdom lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge lost in information?' Our postmodern 'information culture' forces us to be over-cerebral, but it doesn't teach us to think; consequently it becomes nearly impossible for us to imagine a knowledge that is beyond information, much less a Wisdom that is beyond knowledge. We all know what it is to uselessly 'spin our wheels' in barren thought and fantasy; certain valid contemplative disciplines even have as their main goal the pacification of the 'monkey mind', the over-heated brain that prevents us from genuinely living our lives, from being fully present to the world, to each other, and to ourselves. But such pacification can also have a nihilistic side to it. It can subtly fool us into believing that the pursuit of meaning, the attainment of intellectual stability and certainty, is neither possible or desirable - a belief that is of great use to the political and economic Powers That Be in the emerging global society, who are always delighted to hear people express the opinion that there is no such thing as objective Truth, that we can't really know what is real, or if anything is real, beyond our own subjective experience. To the degree that the people start to believe that nothing can be known (our hidden masters reason), they will stop asking embarrassing and inconvenient questions. The notion of objective truth - not to mention Absolute truth - immediately suggests oppression, tyranny and fanaticism to the postmodern mind. Why? Because we have been systematically taught to see things this way by those Social Engineers who construct and impose the terms by which Reality is to be viewed. In order to break free from this socially-imposed subjectivism, we need to remember that Reality is not something determined by belief, but rather that belief is only true when it conforms itself to Reality. If we see nothing beyond this material/social world, we will be forced to take our own subjectivity as the only way to awaken from the social trance, and so fall even more deeply into that very trance, which is precisely a collective subjectivity. But if we know Objective Truth as metaphysical, beyond material nature and human society, then we have begun to catch a glimpse of the One Way Out. The traditional notion of Knowledge maintains that, 1) Truth can be known with certainty, and, 2) that the reason for knowing Truth is to transform our lives from a state of chaotic uncertainty, vulnerable to all the suffering that illusion and impermanence can produce, into one of eternal certainty and stability, where the knower becomes one with the Thing known - a state that goes by the name of bliss. To begin the path toward this bliss, however, we will need to know how to know; and this requires, as the necessary first step, that we know how to take knowledge seriously. As metaphysician Frithjof Schuon put it: 'Knowledge only saves us on condition that it enlists all that we are, only when it is a way and when it works and transforms and wounds our nature, even as the plough wounds the soil'. The shifting illusions of individual and collective subjectivity cannot protect us, and will always betray us. But if we are firmly rooted in that Truth which, in the words of Lew Welch, 'goes on whether we look at it or not', then we have a Protector - one Who is always there, upon Whom we can always rely, and to Whom we can always turn, when we can no longer remedy or deny or escape from the suffering and insecurity of conditional life. So let's begin.

Ever since the advent of "earth-based spiritualities" in our time, the call to realize the Divine Immanence, to see God in the forms of the natural world and the particular events of our lives, has become paramount. And yet, without a corresponding sense of the Divine Transcendence, we find ourselves drawn towards a kind of glamourized materialism, worshipping visible realities at the expense of the Invisible, taking as our deity a physical planet with a beginning and an end in time, instead of the living and eternal God, Who is before all beginnings and beyond all ends. This bias toward the Immanent as against the Transcendent (leading to the loss of both of them) has cast a shadow on the traditional religions, especially the Abrahamic ones: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It has hidden from us the dimensions of those religions wherein it is explicitly stated that "the heavens declare the Glory of God and the earth shows forth His handiwork." In this book, the author attempts to right this balance by showing the place of the contemplation of the natural world, and a respect for the Earth, in all the traditional religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the Native American spiritualities. Even the Lakota understand that this "Mother Earth" is not the absolute Reality, that behind her stands "Grandmother Earth," and behind her, Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery itself. To mistake the Earth for God is to place a burden upon her that she is unable to bear, to deplete her resources and ultimately jeopardize her survival. But if we can regain the ability to contemplate God as He is in Himself, then this living Earth, and the material universe around us, will take their proper place in this contemplative act. They will be revealed as God's icon, the ensemble of His placeless and eternal signs manifesting in space and time, appearing through the only medium capable of bringing God and His universe together into perfect union: the human form. Charles Upton is a serious thinker from whom I have learned much. His writing merits close attention. Huston Smith, author of The World's Religions, etc.

When poet Jack Gilbert, some time in the 1970's in San Francisco, asked his poetry class, "Who here aspires to write a masterpiece?," not one hand was raised. I, on the other hand, wanted to do just that; after reading Blake's Prophetic Books for the first time, as a naive youth, I said to myself: "Wow I'd like to write one of those " So I tried my best; it took me thirty-three years.The idol of "street language" that entered my art in the 1970's was of no interest to me; I wanted to write in a dense, heightened, magical, poetic language such as ear of cabbie or bar-fly had never heard. I respect those poets who, like my mentor Lew Welch, can bring high poetic diction and "the common speech of the Tribe" seamlessly together; in many ways I like that kind of poetry better than I do my own. But I was given to write in a certain style, to fill in a certain blank square on the map of the English language, and so I complied. The Muse assigns styles as God assigns fates, and thus - to paraphrase the Hindu scriptures - "it is better to write one's own poetry, no matter how poorly, than to try and write somebody else's, no matter how well."Much of the poetry in this book hails from a collective psychic era of great and chaotic imaginative force, whose ruins we are in many ways still poking around in today, looking for shards, coins, and old photographs. It was written over a period of around 40 years; it's all the verse (apart from what appears in my books Panic Grass, Time Raid, and Doorkeeper of the Heart, and the few scattered poems in Hammering Hot Iron: A Spiritual Critique of Bly's Iron John; Findings in the Arts of Metaphysics, Cosmology and the Spiritual Path, and Shadow of the Rose: The Esoterism of the Romantic Tradition) that is really worth preserving. Not much of a harvest for a 40-year crop, a dearth which I believe is explained by the fact that I am basically not a poet but a metaphysician. And although it is rather short on "personal history," in reality it is my only autobiographical work - the story of the soul known as Charles Upton, or at least some of the more darkly idealistic aspects of it, which is one of the many, many souls God always knew He was going to create, with all its strengths, weaknesses, imbalances, and challenges. This book is the story of that soul's entry into and emergence from an essentially Neo-Pagan worldview, derived from the American counterculture, and its debarkation on the shores of a traditional sacred worldview and a living spiritual Path.

The Traditionalist or Perennialist School of metaphysics, esoterism, and comparative religion, 'founded' by Ren Gunon and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, and carried on by such figures as Frithjof Schuon, Titus Burckhardt, and Martin Lings, produced a body doctrine of rare depth and comprehension, effectively re-introducing to the modern and postmodern West the perennial wisdom of the human race. For the past twenty years, the author has immersed himself in these teachings, and made his own modest contribution to them. The three fundamental pillars of 'classical' Traditionalism / Perennialism are, (1) That God has sent more than one revelation to humanity, established more than one version of the Path by which the spiritual traveler may return to Him, each revelation being a providential branch of the great tree known as the Primordial Tradition; (2) That while certainly there is a Sophia Perennis, a unanimous and perennial wisdom given by God and transmitted from the dawn of humanity down to the present day, there cannot in our time be a Religio Perennis, a single universal doctrine and practice based on the Primordial Tradition; consequently the seeker must seek his vehicle among one of the living orthodox revealed traditions, not in some "revival" of a universal faith, or the fragments of it, from ages dead and gone; (3) Given that the present cycle of manifestation is rapidly approaching dissolution, the seeker's perennial duty to break identification with the system of collective egotism known as This World, and give his allegiance to God Alone, must now be seen in light of the fact that This World is about to end. Some presently associated with the Traditionalist/Perennialist School, however, no longer hold to "classical Traditionalism/Perennialism" as I have defined it. I have written this book partly to articulate some of the basic tenets of the first two generations of the Traditionalist School, so as to provide interested readers with a relatively stable point of reference that will hopefully allow them to see just how, and how much, that School has changed in the first years of the 21st century.

Sufism is the practice of remaining aware of the real presence of God in every circumstance, until Certainty is reached. The dizzying complexity of Sufi metaphysics, the passionate beauty of Sufi poetry, and the profound Sufi science of spiritual psychology, are all based on this. The Sufi Path is the process of spiritual transformation, ultimately resulting (God willing) in self-transcendence, produced by the Certainty of God's presence. In traditional Muslim society, many different moral, intellectual and spiritual functions were performed by those 'estates' responsible for maintaining them. Parents, imams and 'grammar school' teachers transmitted the fundamental ritual and moral principles of Islamic society. The madrasas took care of such traditional sciences as Qur'anic exegesis and the study of prophetic ahadith. The schools of fiqh maintained and applied the shari'ah. The mutakallimiin developed and taught kalam, Islamic 'scholastic theology'. The falasifa or philosophers carried on an intellectual tradition largely inherited from the Greeks. The ishraqiyyun developed a mystical theosophy based on direct spiritual insight. Physicians employed systems of healing derived in part from metaphysics. Poets often transmitted sophisticated spiritual lore; many other traditional craftsmen did the same. The mathematicians, astronomers and other scientists sought to uncover the Signs of God in numbers, in geometrical shapes, and in the heavens. And the alchemists worked on the reconstitution of the original human form (al-fitra) in psycho-physical terms. So when a seeker applied for admittance to a Sufi tariqa, he likely knew his Goal. The lower rungs of the ladder of moral, intellectual and spiritual aspiration were clearly defined and largely taken care of; consequently the aspirant to Sufi initiation could be more certain than he was seeking God Alone. In modern 'semi-Muslim' societies, however, things are not so clear. And as for those Sufi tariqas that have emigrated to the West, and the individuals who seek admittance to them, the situation is even more ambiguous. The traditional supports for a collective worldview that places God first and sees His hand in everything are no longer readily available, and no one whose worldview is basically secular can follow the Sufi path as the great Sufis of the past once did. In the secular West especially, Sufi tariqas lack the exoteric religious culture in relation to which they could be truly esoteric; without the Zahir, one might say, there can be no Batin. Therefore This book is not so much a text on Sufism itself as an attempt - woefully inadequate-to indicate certain elements of the original context that allowed Sufism to be what it is.

Charles Upton: Human love has fallen on hard times; it has been "officially discredited." Even liberal humanitarianism is not what it used to be; how then can romantic love, which in its origins is essentially aristocratic (in Meister Eckhart's sense when he said "the soul is an aristocrat") find any place in today's world? The truth is, it cannot. The world is too small for it. The place of romantic love is nowhere in this world; its place is in the human soul, whose own proper place is in the eternal self-knowledge of God. Jennifer Doane Upton: The love of God is always secret. For most of us it is so secret that we are not even aware of it. All manifestations that appear around this love are false in a sense, and tend to mis-direct us. To look for the love of God itself within manifest conditions is always to go astray. We spend our time in the world being attracted to this and repulsed by that, and all the while we are blind to this one secret love.

In the last century, authors and psychologists like Robert Graves, Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell reminded us that folklore is often full of deep symbolic truths, truths that the 'folk' themselves are usually unaware of. And they also taught us - just as Plato did, 2400 years ago -- that myth and folklore constitute a 'philosophical' language, where images (as in dreams, holy icons, and symbolic poetry) can carry a great burden of meaning. Few seem to realize, however, that certain works of art conventionally considered to be unconscious products of the 'folk imagination' were quite consciously and deliberately constructed, by highly-informed individuals, to transmit specific items of spiritual lore. Among these 'few' was Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, who said: The content of folklore is metaphysical. Our failure to recognize this is primarily due to our own abysmal ignorance of metaphysics and of its technical terms.. The true folklorist must be not so much a psychologist as a theologian and metaphysician, if he is to 'understand his material'.. Traditional man lived in a natural environment he could read like a book - a book written in primordial symbols of Divine Reality (the Sun, the Rain, the Mountain, the Eagle) - as well as in a man-made environment that was in large part deliberately constructed to remind him of that Reality, and teach him the nature of it (just as our own human world, with its 'weapons of mass distraction', seems ingeniously contrived to make us forget it). Through song, dance, gesture, poetry, architecture, proverbs, jokes, riddles, stories, games, toys, medicine, painting, sculpture, weapons, tools, scriptures, sacred rites, and the traditional forms and rhythms of daily life, we were always in the presence of reminders of the Sacred; all fingers (or almost all) pointed to the Moon. That deliberately-constructed sacred environment is now largely a thing of the past. Dedicated artists may work to keep traditional arts and crafts alive, but the cultural context that could reveal their relevance and tap their spiritual power is usually missing; even the 'folk memory' itself has now largely been replaced by the Internet. However, it is still possible to approach ancient artistic constructions, like the traditional ballads which are the subject of this book, in spiritually fruitful ways. The great myths, such as are transmitted by certain 'folk' songs, were received in the Age of Revelation -- now, however, we live in the Age of Exegesis. As the profound meanings of these songs are unwrapped, they escape from our hands like freed birds, back to the Source they came from. And they challenge us to follow them.

Mulla Nasrudin, called Hodja Nasrudin in India and Turkey, is the major comic figure in Islamic folklore. Both 'mulla' and 'hodja' mean master, with the connotation teacher; Nasrudin, if he ever existed, was an educated man. The tales of Nasrudin were never told by any great Sufi masters, but somehow the common man began to identify with him. And as various modern writers have pointed out, the tales contain both spiritual symbolism and the sort of paradoxical narrative that can break down our habitual view of reality (rather like the Zen koan) and re-form it on a higher level. This work is aimed at using a collection of what superficially can be considered jokes for education and development of insight, and at the same time bringing two vastly different Eastern and Western cultures to a better mutual understanding.

In the religion of Islam the character of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, is the model of human virtue. Orphan, exile, contemplative, successful businessman, long-time faithful husband to one wife, husband to several wives in his later years, statesman, judge, warrior, conqueror, lawgiver, peacemaker, spiritual teacher, Muhammad is the complete man, the exemplar of broad and balanced character whose sunnah (habitual and characteristic way of acting) is the ideal of human behavior for the traditional Muslim world. Dar-al-Islam is presently under ruthless attack from the forces of secular modernization, as well as those of the Islamicist reaction; both sides are attempting to trim Islam down to fit their own shrunken ideologies. Under such damaging blows, young Muslims need to remember not just the Holy Book, but the man whose character was the perfect mirror of that Book. Both modernizers and Islamicists want to narrow down, marginalize, and perhaps even do away with the example of the Prophet; he was too complete and genuine a human being to fit into their increasingly inhuman agendas. Human life requires heroism in any time, and the duties of self-development and self-mastery call for a greater degree of heroism than any other struggle, which is why the Prophet called the war against the sub-human aspects of one's own soul 'the greater jihad'. Alone of all creatures, human beings are not simply established as themselves by God, but are required by God to become themselves. It is easy to throw one's life away, either in the name of a cause or at the ever-present command of the vices and passions; much harder and requiring an even greater degree of courage is the struggle to grow and live, so as to become a human being. We must be prepared to sacrifice life at any time if God commands it; we must also be prepared to nurture and develop life, both for our own salvation and in the name of future generations. This unity of heroic abandon with painstaking and compassionate care is the essence of the traditional Muslim character, which is nowhere more clearly visible than in the character of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, who said: 'Even if you know that the world will end tomorrow, plant a tree.' Charles Upton is a serious thinker from whom I have learned much. His writing merits close attention. Huston Smith, author of The World's Religions, etc.

Whether the world ends tomorrow or lasts for centuries, we all exist in a 'climate' of the End of Days. As Thomas Merton wrote, 'We live in an age of two superimposed eschatologies: that of secular anxieties and hopes, and that of revealed fulfillment. Sometimes the first is merely mistaken for the second, sometimes it results from complete denial and despair of the second.' The 'end of time' obviously relates to history, but-just as obviously-it cannot be contained within it. Legends of the End have always been with us; every spiritual tradition that has a story of the beginning of things must also have one of their final end-the end of the earth, of the universe, of time itself. And just as all such myths symbolize invisible realities, so every historical event is precisely an invisible reality made visible and tangible. This book takes a look at eight Legends of the End: Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hopi, and Lakota. When these stories are placed side-by-side, great differences and startling similarities become apparent-similarities both in broad outlines and in minute details. In light of this traditional lore, the author begins and concludes with a penetrating spiritual meditation on the meaning of the End. Without a grasp of this meaning, to date the End is impossible. With such a grasp, even the most accurate dating is irrelevant, for to know the meaning of the End of Days is already to be beyond it. 'Charles Upton is a serious thinker from whom I have learned much. His writing merits close attention.' - Huston Smith, author of The World's Religions, etc.

Can we really know what UFO's are? The answer is Yes-but only if we study them armed with a kind of knowledge that explains the true and complete structure of the universe-spiritual, psychic, and material-a knowledge that only traditional metaphysics can provide. Science can supply one piece of the puzzle, detective work another, psychic investigation still another. But only metaphysics can put the puzzle together, and give us a complete and satisfying picture of the UFO phenomenon. Cracks in the Great Wall analyzes of the findings of UFO researcher Jacques Vallee and some of his colleagues in light of the teachings of Ren Gunon, particularly as expressed in his prophetic masterpiece The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. According to Gunon, one of the signs of the End Times is the erosion of the energy barrier or 'Great Wall' between the material plane and the world of subtle realities-which is why our world is now being invaded by 'infra-psychic forces' of a terribly destructive nature. Author Charles Upton shows how one of the most obvious examples of this invasion is the UFO phenomenon, including the experience of 'alien abduction'. A lifetime student of comparative religion and mysticism, he explains the true nature of UFOs, the quality of the world they come from, and also something about the agenda these beings, or some of them, are trying to impose upon our world. If you want to remain merely mystified or fascinated by the UFO phenomenon, this book is not for you. But if you want to understand it, Cracks in the Great Wall will give you the conceptual tools you need. With the help of UFOlogists Jacques Vallee and John E. Mack, Christian writers C.S. Lewis and Seraphim Rose, Kaballah authority Leo Schaya, and traditionalist writers Ren Gunon and Whitall Perry, Charles Upton has provided the most comprehensive explanation of the UFO phenomenon yet written. It is difficult to be objective in areas outside our collective view of reality-but if, as the author contends, his argument is based on sound principles, it deserves serious consideration by all who are interested in theUFO phenomenon and its effect on our world.. "Charles Upton is a serious writer from whom I have learned much. His writing deserves close attention." -Prof. Huston Smith, author of The World's Religions, etc.

Investigates the present religious and cultural scene from the standpoint of traditional metaphysics and critiques the New Age spiritualities. Presents lore relating to the 'latter days' and the Antichrist from various religious traditions. Drawing on the writings of the leading perennialist thinkers Ren Gu non and Frithjof Schuon, sketches the particular quality of spirituality proper to apocalyptic times-both its dangers and the opportunities open to it.