This book explores how Sufis approach their faith as Muslims, upholding an Islamic worldview, but going about making sense of their religion through the world in which they exist, often in unexpected ways. Using a phenomenological approach, the book examines Sufism as lived experience within the Muslim lifeworld, focusing on the Muslim experience of Islamic history. It draws on selected case studies ranging from classic Sufism to Sufism in the contemporary era mainly taken from biographical and hagiographical data, manuscript texts, and treatises. In this way, it provides a revisionist approach to theories and methods on Sufism, and, more broadly, the category of mysticism.
Philosophy flourished in the Islamic world for many centuries, and continues to be a significant feature of cultural life today. Now available in paperback, The Biographical Encyclopedia of Islamic Philosophy covers all the major and many minor philosophers, theologians, and mystics who contributed to its development. With entries on over 300 thinkers and key concepts in Islamic philosophy, this updated landmark work also includes a timeline, glossary and detailed bibliography. It goes beyond philosophy to reference all kinds of theoretical inquiry which were often linked with philosophy, such as the Islamic sciences, grammar, theology, law, and traditions. Every major school of thought, from classical Peripatetic philosophy to Sufi mysticism, is represented, and entries range across time from the early years of the faith to the modern period. Featuring an international group of authors from South East Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, the Middle East and North Africa, Europe and North America, The Biographical Encyclopedia of Islamic Philosophy provides access to the ideas and people comprising almost 1400 years of Islamic philosophical tradition.
Peter Lamborn Wilson proposes a set of heresies, a culture of resistance, that dispels the false image of Islam as monolithic, puritan, and two-dimensional. Here is the story of the African-American noble Drew Ali, the founder of “Black Islam” in this country, and of the violent end of his struggle for “love, truth, peace, freedom, and justice.” Another essay deals with Satan and “Satanism” in Esoteric Islam; and another offers a scathing critique of “Authority” and sexual misery in modern Puritanist Islam. “The Anti-caliph” evokes a hot mix of Ibn Arabi’s tantric mysticism and the revolutionary teachings of the “Assassins.” The title essay, “Sacred Drift,” roves through the history and poetics of Sufi travel, from Ibn Khaldun to Rimbaud in Abyssinia to the Situationists. A “Romantic” view of Islam is taken to radical extremes; the exotic may not be “True,” but it’s certainly a relief from academic propaganda and the obscene banality of simulation. "This is my brand of Islam: insurrectionary, elegant, dangerous, suffused with light – a search for poetic facts, a donation from and to the tradition of spiritual anarchy." —Hakim Bey "Peter Lamborn Wilson, in his book Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam, offers an interesting window into the early evolution of Islamic ideas among African Americans." —Abbas Milani, New Republic Peter Lamborn Wilson lives in New York and works for Semiotext(e) magazine, Pacifica Radio, and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. A long decade in the Orient (1968-1981) inspires his writing, including The Drunken Universe: An Anthology of Persian Sufi Poetry and Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy. He also investigates Celtic psychoactive plants in his book Ploughing the Clouds which is also published by City Lights Publishers.
Preliminary Material /Annemarie Schimmel -- Foreword /Annemarie Schimmel -- Abbreviations /Annemarie Schimmel -- The Indian Scene in the Eighteenth Century /Annemarie Schimmel -- Khwaja Mir Dard of Delhi (1721-1785) /Annemarie Schimmel -- Dard's Life and Teaching /Annemarie Schimmel -- Dard and the Art of Speech /Annemarie Schimmel -- Dard and the Problem of Prayer /Annemarie Schimmel -- Shah Abdul Latif of Bhit (1689-1752) /Annemarie Schimmel -- Shah Abdul Latif's Life and Teaching /Annemarie Schimmel -- Sufis and Yogis in Shah Abdul Latif's Poetry /Annemarie Schimmel -- The Islamic Background of Shah Abdul Latif)s Poetry /Annemarie Schimmel -- To Sum Up /Annemarie Schimmel -- Appendix /Khwaja Mir Dard -- Bibliography /Annemarie Schimmel -- Index of Quranic Quotations and Hadith /Annemarie Schimmel -- Index of Proper Names and Technical Terms /Annemarie Schimmel.
Attitudes toward homosexuality in the pre-modern Arab-Islamic world are commonly depicted as schizophrenic—visible and tolerated on one hand, prohibited by Islam on the other. Khaled El-Rouayheb argues that this apparent paradox is based on the anachronistic assumption that homosexuality is a timeless, self-evident fact to which a particular culture reacts with some degree of tolerance or intolerance. Drawing on poetry, biographical literature, medicine, dream interpretation, and Islamic texts, he shows that the culture of the period lacked the concept of homosexuality.
This unique portrait of the great Andalusian mystic uses his own writings to tell the story of his life and teachings. Chapters of biography are interwoven with chapters portraying the central elements of his thought and are supplemented with photographs and maps.
The definitive biography of one of the world's most popular writers Bushrui and Jenkins have produces a biography that meticulously explores the complex intricacies of this philosopher-poet. Offering fresh insights into his life, times and work, this unique book sets new criteria in evaluating Gibran.
Analyzing the intersection between Sufism and philosophy, this volume is a sweeping examination of the mystical philosophy of Muḥyī-l-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 637/1240), one of the most influential and original thinkers of the Islamic world. This book systematically covers Ibn al-ʿArabī’s ontology, theology, epistemology, teleology, spiritual anthropology and eschatology. While philosophy uses deductive reasoning to discover the fundamental nature of existence and Sufism relies on spiritual experience, it was not until the school of Ibn al-ʿArabī that philosophy and Sufism converged into a single framework by elaborating spiritual doctrines in precise philosophical language. Contextualizing the historical development of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s school, the work draws from the earliest commentators of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s oeuvre, Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī (d. 673/1274), ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Kāshānī (d. ca. 730/1330) and Dawūd al-Qayṣarī (d. 751/1350), but also draws from the medieval heirs of his doctrines Sayyid Ḥaydar Āmulī (d. 787/1385), the pivotal intellectual and mystical figure of Persia who recast philosophical Sufism within the framework of Twelver Shīʿism and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (d. 898/1492), the key figure in the dissemination of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s ideas in the Persianate world as well as the Ottoman Empire, India, China and East Asia via Central Asia. Lucidly written and comprehensive in scope, with careful treatments of the key authors, Philosophical Sufism is a highly accessible introductory text for students and researchers interested in Islam, philosophy, religion and the Middle East.
