The Sea of Precious Virtues
Author: Julie Scott Meisami
Publisher:
Published: 1991
Total Pages: 480
ISBN-13:
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The History of Islamic Political Thought
Author: Antony Black
Publisher: Psychology Press
Published: 2001
Total Pages: 404
ISBN-13: 9780415932431
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe History of Islamic Political Thought offers a full description and an interpretation of political philosophy from early Islam to the current age of Fundamentalism (622 AD to 2000 AD). Antony Black takes the same approach as scholars usually do for the history of Western political thought, examining the mentality, cultural milieu, and political background of thinkers and statesmen. He covers the relationship of politics to religion, law, ethics, philosophy, and statecraft, as expressed through treatises, occasional writings, official rhetoric, popular slogans, and other evidence of how people thought about authority and order.
Sacred Pain
Author: Ariel Glucklich
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2003-10-30
Total Pages: 289
ISBN-13: 0198030401
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhy would anyone seek out the very experience the rest of us most wish to avoid? Why would religious worshipers flog or crucify themselves, sleep on spikes, hang suspended by their flesh, or walk for miles through scorching deserts with bare and bloodied feet? In this insightful new book, Ariel Glucklich argues that the experience of ritual pain, far from being a form of a madness or superstition, contains a hidden rationality and can bring about a profound transformation of the consciousness and identity of the spiritual seeker. Steering a course between purely cultural and purely biological explanations, Glucklich approaches sacred pain from the perspective of the practitioner to fully examine the psychological and spiritual effects of self-hurting. He discusses the scientific understanding of pain, drawing on research in fields such as neuropsychology and neurology. He also ranges over a broad spectrum of historical and cultural contexts, showing the many ways mystics, saints, pilgrims, mourners, shamans, Taoists, Muslims, Hindus, Native Americans, and indeed members of virtually every religion have used pain to achieve a greater identification with God. He examines how pain has served as a punishment for sin, a cure for disease, a weapon against the body and its desires, or a means by which the ego may be transcended and spiritual sickness healed. "When pain transgresses the limits," the Muslim mystic Mizra Asadullah Ghalib is quoted as saying, "it becomes medicine." Based on extensive research and written with both empathy and critical insight, Sacred Pain explores the uncharted inner terrain of self-hurting and reveals how meaningful suffering has been used to heal the human spirit.
Love's Subtle Magic
Author: Aditya Behl
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-07-01
Total Pages: 416
ISBN-13: 0190628820
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe encounter between Muslim and Hindu remains one of the defining issues of South Asian society today. It began as early as the 8th century, and the first Muslim kingdom in India, the Sultanate of Delhi, was established at the end of the 12th century. This power eventually reduced to vassalage almost every independent kingdom on the subcontinent. In Love's Subtle Magic, a remarkable and highly original book, Aditya Behl uses a little-understood genre of Sufi literature to paint an entirely new picture of the evolution of Indian culture during the earliest period of Muslim domination. These curious romantic tales transmit a profound religious message through the medium of adventurous stories of love. Although composed in the Muslim courts, they are written in a vernacular Indian language and involve Hindu yogis, Hindu princes and princesses, and Hindu gods. Until now, they have defied analysis. Behl shows that the Sufi authors of these charming tales sought to convey an Islamic vision via an Indian idiom. They thus constitute the earliest attempt at the indigenization of Islamic literature in an Indian setting. More important, however, Behl's analysis brilliantly illuminates the cosmopolitan and composite culture of the Sultanate India in which they were composed. This in turn compels us completely to rethink the standard of the opposition between Indian Hindu and foreign Muslim and recognize that the Indo-Islamic culture of this era was already significantly Indian in many important ways.
Prayer in Islamic Thought and Practice
Author: Marion Holmes Katz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2013-05-06
Total Pages: 255
ISBN-13: 0521887887
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOffers a broad historical survey of the rules, values and interpretations relating to Salāt, the five daily prayers of Islam.
Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia
Author: Thomas T. Allsen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2004-03-25
Total Pages: 268
ISBN-13: 9780521602709
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the thirteenth century, the Mongols created a vast transcontinental empire that functioned as a cultural 'clearing house' for the Old World. Under Mongol auspices various commodities, ideologies and technologies were disseminated across Eurasia. The focus of this path-breaking study is the extensive exchanges between Iran and China. The Mongol rulers of these two ancient civilizations 'shared' the cultural resources of their realms with one another. The result was a lively traffic in specialist personnel and scholarly literature between East and West. These exchanges ranged from cartography to printing, from agriculture to astronomy. The book concludes by asking why the Mongols made such heavy use of sedentary scholars and specialists in the elaboration of their court culture and why they initiated so many exchanges across Eurasia. This is a work of great erudition which crosses new scholarly boundaries in its analysis of communication and culture in the Mongol empire.
National Endowment for the Humanities ... Annual Report
Author: National Endowment for the Humanities
Publisher:
Published: 1984
Total Pages: 192
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMuslims and Crusaders
Author: Niall Christie
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-06-27
Total Pages: 250
ISBN-13: 1317682785
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMuslims and Crusaders supplements and counterbalances the numerous books that tell the story of the crusading period from the European point of view, enabling readers to achieve a broader and more complete perspective on the period. It presents the Crusades from the perspective of those against whom they were waged, the Muslim peoples of the Levant. The book introduces the reader to the most significant issues that affected their responses to the European crusaders, and their descendants who would go on to live in the Latin Christian states that were created in the region. This book combines chronological narrative, discussion of important areas of scholarly enquiry and evidence from primary sources to give a well-rounded survey of the period. It considers not only the military meetings between Muslims and the Crusaders, but also the personal, political, diplomatic and trade interactions that took place between Muslims and Franks away from the battlefield. Through the use of a wide range of translated primary source documents, including chronicles, dynastic histories, religious and legal texts and poetry, the people of the time are able to speak to us in their own voices.
Handbook of Medieval Studies
Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 2010-11-29
Total Pages: 2822
ISBN-13: 3110215586
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis interdisciplinary handbook provides extensive information about research in medieval studies and its most important results over the last decades. The handbook is a reference work which enables the readers to quickly and purposely gain insight into the important research discussions and to inform themselves about the current status of research in the field. The handbook consists of four parts. The first, large section offers articles on all of the main disciplines and discussions of the field. The second section presents articles on the key concepts of modern medieval studies and the debates therein. The third section is a lexicon of the most important text genres of the Middle Ages. The fourth section provides an international bio-bibliographical lexicon of the most prominent medievalists in all disciplines. A comprehensive bibliography rounds off the compendium. The result is a reference work which exhaustively documents the current status of research in medieval studies and brings the disciplines and experts of the field together.
Justifying Transgression
Author: Gijs Kruijtzer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Published: 2023-11-20
Total Pages: 358
ISBN-13: 3111218015
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"How do people justify what others see as transgression? Taking that question to the Persian-Muslim and Latin-Christian worlds over the period 1200 to 1700, this book shows that people in both these worlds invested considerable energy in worrying, debating, and writing about proscribed practices. It compares how people in the two worlds came to terms with the proscriptions of sodomy, idolatry, and usury. When historians speak of the gap between premodern practice and the legal theory of the time, they tend to ignore the myriad of justifications that filled this gap. Moreover, a focus on justification evens out many of the contrasts that have been alleged to exist between the two worlds, or the Muslim and Christian worlds more generally. The similarities outweigh the differences in the ways people came to terms with the various rules of divine law. The level of flexibility of the theologians and jurists in charge of divine law varied more over time and by topic than between the two worlds. Both worlds also saw the development of ever more sophisticated justifications. Amid the increasing complexity of justifications, a particular kind of reasoning emerged: that good outcomes are more important than upholding rules for their own sake"--Publisher's description.
