Author: Martin LingsPublisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520021747
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 254
Book Description
Sufis and Saints' Bodies
Author: Scott KuglePublisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807872776
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 368
Book Description
Islam is often described as abstract, ascetic, and uniquely disengaged from the human body. Scott Kugle refutes this assertion in the first full study of Islamic mysticism as it relates to the human body. Examining Sufi conceptions of the body in religious writings from the late fifteenth through the nineteenth century, Kugle demonstrates that literature from this era often treated saints' physical bodies as sites of sacred power. Sufis and Saints' Bodies focuses on six important saints from Sufi communities in North Africa and South Asia. Kugle singles out a specific part of the body to which each saint is frequently associated in religious literature. The saints' bodies, Kugle argues, are treated as symbolic resources for generating religious meaning, communal solidarity, and the experience of sacred power. In each chapter, Kugle also features a particular theoretical problem, drawing methodologically from religious studies, anthropology, studies of gender and sexuality, theology, feminism, and philosophy. Bringing a new perspective to Islamic studies, Kugle shows how an important Islamic tradition integrated myriad understandings of the body in its nurturing role in the material, social, and spiritual realms.
The Divine Flood
Author: Rüdiger SeesemannPublisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195384326
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349
Book Description
This is a study of a 20th-century Sufi revival in West Africa. Seesemann's work evolves around the emergence and spread of the 'Community of the Divine Flood,' established in 1929 by Ibrahim Niasse, a leader of the Tijaniyya Sufi order from Senegal.
Author: Martin LingsThe Sufi Saint of Jam
Author: Shivan MahendrarajahPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108879497
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295
Book Description
The Sunni saint cult and shrine of Ahmad-i Jam has endured for 900 years. The shrine and its Sufi shaykhs secured patronage from Mongols, Kartids, Tamerlane, and Timurids. The cult and shrine-complex started sliding into decline when Iran's shahs took the Shiʿi path in 1501, but are today enjoying a renaissance under the (Shiʿi) Islamic Republic of Iran. The shrine's eclectic architectural ensemble has been renovated with private and public funds, and expertise from Iran's Cultural Heritage Organization. Two seminaries (madrasa) that teach Sunni curricula to males and females were added. Sunni and Shiʿi pilgrims visit to venerate their saint. Jami mystics still practice ʿirfan ('gnosticism'). Analyzed are Ahmad-i Jam's biography and hagiography; marketing to sultans of Ahmad as the 'Guardian of Kings'; history and politics of the shrine's catchment area; acquisition of patronage by shrine and shaykhs; Sufi doctrines and practices of Jami mystics, including its Timurid-era Naqshbandi Sufis.
Hidden Caliphate
Author: Waleed ZiadPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674248813
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 367
Book Description
Sufis created the most extensive Muslim revivalist network in Asia before the twentieth century, generating a vibrant Persianate literary, intellectual, and spiritual culture while tying together a politically fractured world. In a pathbreaking work combining social history, religious studies, and anthropology, Waleed Ziad examines the development across Asia of Muslim revivalist networks from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. At the center of the story are the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufis, who inspired major reformist movements and articulated effective social responses to the fracturing of Muslim political power amid European colonialism. In a time of political upheaval, the Mujaddidis fused Persian, Arabic, Turkic, and Indic literary traditions, mystical virtuosity, popular religious practices, and urban scholasticism in a unified yet flexible expression of Islam. The Mujaddidi ÒHidden Caliphate,Ó as it was known, brought cohesion to diverse Muslim communities from Delhi through Peshawar to the steppes of Central Asia. And the legacy of Mujaddidi Sufis continues to shape the Muslim world, as their institutional structures, pedagogies, and critiques have worked their way into leading social movements from Turkey to Indonesia, and among the Muslims of China. By shifting attention away from court politics, colonial actors, and the standard narrative of the ÒGreat Game,Ó Ziad offers a new vision of Islamic sovereignty. At the same time, he demonstrates the pivotal place of the Afghan Empire in sustaining this vast inter-Asian web of scholastic and economic exchange. Based on extensive fieldwork across Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan at madrasas, Sufi monasteries, private libraries, and archives, Hidden Caliphate reveals the long-term influence of Mujaddidi reform and revival in the eastern Muslim world, bringing together seemingly disparate social, political, and intellectual currents from the Indian Ocean to Siberia.
Two who Attained
Author: Aḥmad ibn Muṣṭafá ʻAlawīPublisher:
ISBN: 9781887752695
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Rare glimpses of two 20th-century Sufi saints are offered in this work: the eminent Shaykh al-Alawi and the lesser-known woman saint Fatima al-Yashrutiyya, both of whom continued on the Sufi path even as they watched their world crumble. Shaykh al-Alawi's influence was pivotal to the spiritual development of Thomas Merton, who looked to al-Alawi's writings and teachings in his own practice. Fatima al-Yashrutiyya is a rare example of a literate Muslim woman living a public spiritual life. Readers will see a new side of the Sufi Path from her uncompromising viewpoint, and can catch an uncommon glimpse of life in the early 20th century for a spiritual seeker, writer, and self-educated woman in the Muslim world. These essays represent Islam in its esoteric dimension and raise issues of regional unrest and colonial intervention that are still relevant. Through the words of these two saints the world of the Sufi brotherhood is opened, revealing an underlying theme of the oneness of Allah.
Against the Modern World
Author: Mark J. SedgwickPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195396014
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385
Book Description
Against the Modern World is the first history of Traditionalism, an important yet surprisingly little-known twentieth-century anti-modern movement. Comprising a number of often secret but sometimes very influential religious groups in the West and in the Islamic world, it affected mainstream and radical politics in Europe and the development of the field of religious studies in the United States, touching the lives of many individuals. French writer Rene Guenon rejected modernity as a dark age and sought to reconstruct the Perennial Philosophy - the central truths behind all the major world religions. Guenon stressed the urgent need for the West's remaining spiritual and intellectual elite to find personal and collective salvation in the surviving vestiges of ancient religious traditions. A number of disenchanted intellectuals responded to his call. In Europe, America, and the Islamic world, Traditionalists founded institutes, Sufi brotherhoods, Masonic lodges, and secret societies. Some attempted unsuccessfully to guide Fascism and Nazism along Traditionalist lines; others later participated in political terror in Italy. Traditionalist ideas were the ideological cement for the alliance of anti-democratic forces in post-Soviet Russia, and in the Islamic world entered the debate about the relationship between Islam and modernity. Although its appeal in the West was ultimately limited, Traditionalism has wielded enormous influence in religious studies, through the work of such Traditionalists as Ananda Coomaraswamy, Huston Smith, Mircea Eliade, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr.
Reassurance for the Seeker
Author: Ṣāliḥ ibn Muḥammad JaʻfarīPublisher: Three Spiritual Luminaries of
ISBN: 9781887752985
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
This book is a unique collection of 40 Prophetic Traditions by one of the most celebrated teachers and spiritual masters of the Azhar Mosque, Sunni Islam's leading institution of knowledge and its most authoritative voice. It provides a glimpse into the scholarly and spiritual traditions of Islam carried forth into our day. Some may have concluded that the saints and sages of Islam ended with such names as Rumi and Ibn Arabi. The knowledge and spiritual depth reached in past centuries does, in fact, continue into the present day. The book includes a biography of the author, a description of his main teachers, and a beautiful treatise by the author's main teacher on a single Prophetic statement in which the Prophet summarizes his own spiritual states. This volume also deals with death, the afterlife, the waking visions of the Prophet, his ability to pray for and intercede for those alive, and nearness to and friendship with God.
Three Early Sufi Texts
Author: Publisher:
ISBN: 9781891785375
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
The three previously untranslated works presented here originate from the pens of two of the most eminent figures of the Khorasanian tradition, Hakim Tirmidhi and Abu 'Abd al-Rahman al-Sulami al-Naysaburi.
