Author: Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi
Publisher: Anqa Publishing
ISBN: 1905937024
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 138
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Book Description
A major work of mystical literature, this account focuses on 14 visions in the form of dramatic conversations with the divine, interspersed with dazzling visionary episodes regarding the nature of existence, humans' relationship with reality, and the way to achieve true happiness. The introduction presents a resume of Ibn 'Arabi's life and examines in detail the style and symbolism of the contemplations. Presented for the first time in English, this work is a superb example of Ibn 'Arabi's inimitable style and deep perception.
Author: Yaron Friedman
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004178929
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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Book Description
Friedman offers new and updated research on the Nusayr - Alaw sect, today a leading group in Syria, covering a variety of aspects and focusing on the Middle Ages. A century after Dussaud's "Histoire et religion des Nosair s" (1900), he reviews the history and religion of the sect in the light of old documents used by orientalists in the nineteenth century, documents that became available in the twentieth century, and later sources of the Nu ayr - Alaw sect published most recently in Lebanon. Also studied in depth for the first time is the question of the identity of the sect through the Alaw -Sunn -Sh triangle.
Author: Dona S. Straley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313058881
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
This companion provides information on the lives and works of about 150 authors who write primarily in Arabic, covering the first known works of Arabic literature in the 5th and 6th centuries A.D. to the present day. While concentrating on literary authors, writers from the fields of history, geography, and philosophy are also represented. The individuals represented were chosen primarily from the Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature. Among the major authors are Najib Mahfuz, the 1988 Nobel laureate; Nawal Saadawi, the Egyptian physician who is the leading female literary author in the Arab world and the most frequently translated into English; Abu al-Ala' al-Ma'arri, the 11th century poet whose verses are taught to every Arab schoolchild; and Avicenna, the great physician and philosopher, transmitter and interpreter of Aristotle, whose work on medicine was long the standard not only in the Middle East but also (in Latin translation) in Europe. In addition, entries will be included for the anonymous romances so common in Arabic literature, such as The Arabian Nights, a cycle of stories perhaps even better known in the West than in the Arab world. Interest in the history and culture of the Arab world at U.S. universities has taken a quantum leap since the events of September 11, 2001. In this book, the author demonstrates that at least three major, distinct literary and cultural traditions are included within the fields of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies—Arabic, Persian, and Turkic. The Arabic tradition is the oldest, largest, and most widely dispersed. Undergraduate courses in Arabic literature and culture are now being taught at both lower- and upper-levels at many universities. Such courses are often used by undergraduates to fulfill basic educational requirements for their degrees. Students in such courses often have difficulty finding information on Arab writers, and this volume fills the void.
Author: Frank Griffel
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004307494
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 364
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Book Description
Al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) is one of the most influential thinkers of Islam. There is hardly a genre of Islamic literature where he is not regarded as a major authority. Islamic Law, Sufism, ethics, philosophy, and theology are all deeply shaped by him. Yet in the past thirty years, the field of Ghazālī-studies has been shaken by the realization that Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, d. 428/1037) and other philosophers had a strong influence on him. Now, after the 900th anniversary at his death, the field emerges stronger than ever. This second volume of Islam and Rationality: The Impact of al-Ghazālī brings together twelve leading experts on al-Ghazālī who write about his thought and the impact it had on later Muslim thinkers. Contributors are: Anna Ayşe Akasoy, Ahmed El Shamsy, Kenneth Garden, Frank Griffel, Jules Janssens, Damien Janos, Taneli Kukkonen, Stephen Ogden, M. Sait Özervarlı, Martin Riexinger, Ulrich Rudolph, and Ayman Shihadeh.
Author: Michael Muhammad Knight
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101547588
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
A thoughtful, insider view of The Five Percenters-a deeply complex and misunderstood community whose ideas and symbols influenced the rise of hip-hop. Misrepresented in the media as a black parallel to the Hell's Angels, portrayed as everything from a vicious street gang to quasi- Islamic revolutionaries, The Five Percenters are a movement that began as a breakaway sect from the Nation of Islam (NOI) in 1960s Harlem and went on to impact the formation of hip-hop. References to Five Percent language and ideas are found in the lyrics of wide-ranging artists, such as Nas, Rakim, the Wu-Tang Clan, and even Jay-Z. The Five Percenters are denounced by white America as racists, and orthodox Islam as heretics, for teaching that the black man is Allah. Michael Muhammad Knight ("the Hunter S. Thompson of Islamic literature" -The Guardian) has engaged this culture as both white and Muslim; and over the course of his relationship with The Five Percenters, his personal position changed from that of an outsider to an accepted participant with his own initiatory name (Azreal Wisdom). This has given him an intimate perch from which to understand and examine the controversial doctrines of this influential movement. In Why I Am a Five Percenter, Knight strips away years of sensationalism to offer a serious encounter with Five Percenter thought. Encoded within Five Percent culture is a profound critique of organized religion, from which the movement derives its name: Only Five Percent can act as "poor righteous teachers" against the evil Ten Percent, the power structure which uses religion to deceive the Eighty- Five Percent, the "deaf, dumb, and blind" masses. Questioning his own relationship to the Five Percent, Knight directly confronts the community's most difficult teachings. In Why I Am a Five Percenter, Knight not only illuminates a thought system that must appear bizarre to outsiders, but he also brilliantly dissects the very issues of"insiders" and "outsiders," territory and ownership, as they relate to religion and privilege, and to our conditioned ideas about race.
Author: Elliot R. Wolfson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004449345
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 799
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Book Description
No one theory of time is pursued in these essays, but a major theme that threads them together is Wolfson’s signature idea of the timeswerve as a linear circularity or a circular linearity, expressions that are meant to avoid the conventional split between the two temporal modalities of the line and the circle. The conception of time elicited by Wolfson from a host of philosophical and mystical sources—both Jewish and non-Jewish—buttresses the contention that it is precisely structural invariability that engenders interpretive variation. This hermeneutical axiom is justified, in turn, by the presumption regarding the cadence of time as the constant return of what has always been what is yet to be. The telling of time wells forth from the time of telling. One cannot speak of the being of time, consequently, except from the standpoint of the time of being, nor of the time of being except from the standpoint of the being of time.
Author: J.S. Krüger
Publisher: AOSIS
ISBN: 1928396593
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 570
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Book Description
Signposts to Silence provides a theoretical map of what it terms ‘metaphysical mysticism’: the search for the furthest, most inclusive horizon, the domain of silence, which underlies the religious and metaphysical urge of humankind in its finest forms. Tracing the footsteps of pioneers of this exploration, the investigation also documents a number of historical pilgrimages from a variety of cultural and religious backgrounds. Such mountaineers of the spirit, who created paths trodden by groups of followers over centuries and in some cases millennia, include Lao-Tzu and Chuang-Tzu, Siddhattha and Jesus, Sankara and Fa-tsang, Plato and Plotinus, Isaac Luria and Ibn Arabi, Aquinas and Hegel. Such figures, teachings and traditions (including the religions of ‘Judaism’, ‘Christianity’ and ‘Islam’; ‘Hinduism’, ‘Buddhism’ and ‘Taoism’) are understood as, at their most sublime, not final destiny and the end of the road, but signposts to a horizon of ultimate silence. The hermeneutical method employed in tracking such pioneers involves four steps: • sound historical-critical understanding of the context of the various traditions and figures • reconstruction of the subjective intentional structure of such persons and their teachings • design, by the author, of a theoretical map of the overall terrain of ‘metaphysical mysticism’, on which all such journeys of the spirit are to be located, while providing a theoretical context for understanding them tendentionally (i.e. taking the ultimate drift of their thinking essentially to transcend their subjective intentions) • drawing out, within the space available, some political (taken in a wide sense) implications from the above, such as religio-political stances as well as ecological and gender implications. Continuing the general direction of thought within what the author endorses to be the best in metaphysical mysticism in its historical manifestations, the book aims to contribute to peace amongst religions in the contemporary global cultural situation. It relativizes all claims to exclusive, absolute truth that might be proclaimed by any religious or metaphysical, mystical position, while providing space for not only tolerating, but also affirming the unique value and dignity of each. This orientation moves beyond the stances of enmity or indifference or syncretism or homogenisation of all, as well as that of mere friendly toleration. It investigates the seemingly daunting and inhospitable yet immensely significant Antarctica of the Spirit, the ‘meta’-space of silence behind the various forms of wordy ‘inter’-relationships. It affirms pars pro toto, totum pro parte, and pars pro parte: that each religious, mystical and metaphysical orientation in its relative singularity represents or contains the whole and derives value from that, and that each represents or contains every other. This homoversal solidarity stimulating individual uniqueness is different from and in fact implies criticism of the process of globalisation. While not taking part in a scientific argument as such, Signposts to Silence aims at promoting an understanding of science and metaphysical mysticism as mutual context for each other, and it listens to a number of voices from the domain of science that understand this.
Author: A. S. Lazikani
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030599248
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 279
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Book Description
This book offers a comparative study of emotion in Arabic Islamic and English Christian contemplative texts, c. 1110-1250, contributing to the emerging interest in ‘globalization’ in medieval studies. A.S.Lazikani argues for the necessity of placing medieval English devotional texts in a more global context and seeks to modify influential narratives on the ‘history of emotions’ to enable this more wide-ranging critical outlook. Across eight chapters, the book examines the dialogic encounters generated by comparative readings of Muhyddin Ibn ‘Arabi (1165-1240), ‘Umar Ibn al-Fārid (1181-1235), Abu al-Hasan al-Shushtarī (d. 1269), Ancrene Wisse (c. 1225), and the Wooing Group (c. 1225). Investigating the two-fold ‘paradigms of love’ in the figure of Jesus and in the image of the heart, the (dis)embodied language of affect, and the affective semiotics of absence and secrecy, Lazikani demonstrates an interconnection between the religious traditions of early Christianity and Islam.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Sufism
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
Author: Julio Savi
Publisher: George Ronald Publisher Limited
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 602
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Book Description
During his sojourn in Sulaymaniyah in the 1850s Baha'u'llah came into contact with eminent Sufi leaders. In the Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys, epistles revealed for two of them, He sets forth the foundations of a renewed spiritual path. 'Abdu'l-Baha described the Seven Valleys as 'a guide for human conduct'. This major new study focuses on the historical, doctrinal and literary background of the Seven Valley and the Four Valleys, and on Baha'u'llah's revision of Sufi concepts in the light of the teachings of His new Revelation."
