Memoirs of a Dervish

Memoirs of a Dervish PDF Author: Robert Irwin
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1847654045
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
In the summer of 1964, while a military coup was taking place and tanks were rolling through the streets of Algiers, Robert Irwin set off for Algeria in search of Sufi enlightenment. There he entered a world of marvels and ecstasy, converted to Islam and received an initiation as a faqir. He learnt the rituals of Islam in North Africa and he studied Arabic in London. He also pursued more esoteric topics under a holy fool possessed of telepathic powers. A series of meditations on the nature of mystical experience run through this memoir. But political violence, torture, rock music, drugs, nightmares, Oxbridge intellectuals and first love and its loss are all part of this strange story from the 1960s.

Memoirs of a Dervish

Memoirs of a Dervish PDF Author: Robert Irwin
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1847654045
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the summer of 1964, while a military coup was taking place and tanks were rolling through the streets of Algiers, Robert Irwin set off for Algeria in search of Sufi enlightenment. There he entered a world of marvels and ecstasy, converted to Islam and received an initiation as a faqir. He learnt the rituals of Islam in North Africa and he studied Arabic in London. He also pursued more esoteric topics under a holy fool possessed of telepathic powers. A series of meditations on the nature of mystical experience run through this memoir. But political violence, torture, rock music, drugs, nightmares, Oxbridge intellectuals and first love and its loss are all part of this strange story from the 1960s.

Memoirs of a Dervish

Memoirs of a Dervish PDF Author: Robert Irwin
Publisher: Profile Books(GB)
ISBN: 9781861979919
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Robert Irwin's fascinating journey between London and Algeria into the spirit and adventure of the 1960's

Ibn Khaldun

Ibn Khaldun PDF Author: Robert Irwin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691197091
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
"Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) is generally regarded as the greatest intellectual ever to have appeared in the Arab world--a genius who ranks as one of the world's great minds. Yet the author of the Muqaddima, the most important study of history ever produced in the Islamic world, is not as well known as he should be, and his ideas are widely misunderstood. In this groundbreaking intellectual biography, Robert Irwin provides an engaging and authoritative account of Ibn Khaldun's extraordinary life, times, writings, and ideas. Irwin tells how Ibn Khaldun, who lived in a world decimated by the Black Death, held a long series of posts in the tumultuous Islamic courts of North Africa and Muslim Spain, becoming a major political player as well as a teacher and writer. Closely examining the Muqaddima, a startlingly original analysis of the laws of history, and drawing on many other contemporary sources, Irwin shows how Ibn Khaldun's life and thought fit into historical and intellectual context, including medieval Islamic theology, philosophy, politics, literature, economics, law, and tribal life. Because Ibn Khaldun's ideas often seem to anticipate by centuries developments in many fields, he has often been depicted as more of a modern man than a medieval one, and Irwin's account of such misreadings provides new insights about the history of Orientalism. In contrast, Irwin presents an Ibn Khaldun who was a creature of his time--a devout Sufi mystic who was obsessed with the occult and futurology and who lived in an often-strange world quite different from our own"--Jacket.

Selected Papers of Salman Akhtar

Selected Papers of Salman Akhtar PDF Author: Salman Akhtar
Publisher: Phoenix Publishing House
ISBN: 1800131577
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 4296

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Book Description
Salman Akhtar is a Professor of Psychiatry, a Training and Supervising Analyst, a member of numerous editorial boards, winner of many awards, including the highly prestigious Sigourney Award, a writer of several hundred articles, a poet, and the author or editor of over one hundred books. A modern-day Renaissance man, his elegant writing is simultaneously scholarly and literary and brings a light touch to profound material. Phoenix Publishing House is proud to present his most inspiring works in a stunning ten-volume hardback set, fit to grace the shelves of collectors and libraries with its high-quality finish.

Loyal Enemies

Loyal Enemies PDF Author: Jamie Gilham
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199377251
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
First account of the history and remarkable lives of British converts to Islam during the heydey of Empire.

Iran's Troubled Modernity

Iran's Troubled Modernity PDF Author: Ali Mirsepassi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108476392
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
Mirsepassi uses interviews with thirteen individuals to relate the colourful life and times of Ahmad Fardid and his intellectual legacy.

Rethinking Ibn 'Arabi

Rethinking Ibn 'Arabi PDF Author: Gregory A. Lipton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190684518
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
The thirteenth century mystic Ibn `Arabi was the foremost Sufi theorist of the premodern era. For more than a century, Western scholars and esotericists have heralded his universalism, arguing that he saw all contemporaneous religions as equally valid. In Rethinking Ibn `Arabi, Gregory Lipton calls this image into question and throws into relief how Ibn `Arabi's discourse is inseparably intertwined with the absolutist vision of his own religious milieu--that is, the triumphant claim that Islam fulfilled, superseded, and therefore abrogated all previous revealed religions. Lipton juxtaposes Ibn `Arabi's absolutist conception with the later reception of his ideas, exploring how they have been read, appropriated, and universalized within the reigning interpretive field of Perennial Philosophy in the study of Sufism. The contours that surface through this comparative analysis trace the discursive practices that inform Ibn `Arabi's Western reception back to the eighteenth and nineteenth century study of "authentic" religion, where European ethno-racial superiority was wielded against the Semitic Other-both Jewish and Muslim. Lipton argues that supersessionist models of exclusivism are buried under contemporary Western constructions of religious authenticity in ways that ironically mirror Ibn `Arabi's medieval absolutism.

Visioning New and Minority Religions

Visioning New and Minority Religions PDF Author: Eugene V. Gallagher
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315317885
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Rather than being ephemeral fads, new religious movements (NRMs) have always been and will always be with us. So will their study. Offering an assessment of the state-of-the-field of the study of NRMs, Visioning New and Minority Religions begins by considering the analytical tools for the study of new or minority religions, drawing on the perspectives of diverse academic disciplines. The second part focuses on individual groups in a variety of geographical settings. Chapters in this section review the histories of particular groups in order to extrapolate future developments. They cover new religions that have persisted well past the first generation, such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Christian Scientists, and groups with comparatively shorter histories, such as various forms of contemporary Paganism, Soka Gakkai, and the Diamond Way Buddhist group. This volume will be of interest to scholars from across religious studies and sociology, as well as members of new and minority religious groups and those in "cult watching" groups.

Global Sufism

Global Sufism PDF Author: Francesco Piraino
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 178738344X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Sufism is a growing and global phenomenon, far from the declining relic it was once thought to be. This book brings together the work of fourteen leading experts to explore systematically the key themes of Sufism's new global presence, from Yemen to Senegal via Chicago and Sweden. The contributors look at the global spread and stance of such major actors as the Ba 'Alawiyya, the 'Afropolitan' Tijaniyya, and the Gülen Movement. They map global Sufi culture, from Rumi to rap, and ask how global Sufism accommodates different and contradictory gender practices. They examine the contested and shifting relationship between the Islamic and the universal: is Sufism the timeless and universal essence of all religions, the key to tolerance and co-existence between Muslims and non-Muslims? Or is it the purely Islamic heart of traditional and authentic practice and belief? Finally, the book turns to politics. States and political actors in the West and in the Muslim world are using the mantle and language of Sufism to promote their objectives, while Sufis are building alliances with them against common enemies. This raises the difficult question of whether Sufis are defending Islam against extremism, supporting despotism against democracy, or perhaps doing both.

The different aspects of islamic culture

The different aspects of islamic culture PDF Author: UNESCO
Publisher: UNESCO Publishing
ISBN: 9231039091
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 926

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Book Description
This publication examines art, the human sciences, science, philosophy, mysticism, language and literature. For this task, UNESCO has chosen scholars and experts from all over the world who belong to widely divergent cultural and religious backgrounds.--Publisher's description.