Discusses the work of a central, but poorly understood, figure in the development of Persian Sufism, A?mad al-Ghaz?l?. The teachings of A?mad al-Ghaz?l? changed the course of Persian Sufism forever, paving the way for luminaries such as R?m?, A???r, and ??fi?. Yet he remains a poorly understood thinker, with many treatises incorrectly attributed to him and conflicting accounts in the historiographical literature. This work provides the first examination of A?mad al-Ghaz?l? and his work in Western scholarly literature. Joseph E. B. Lumbard seeks to ascertain the authenticity of works attributed to this author, trace the development of the dominant trends in the biographical literature, and reconstruct the life and times of A?mad al-Ghaz?l? with particular attention to his relationship with his more famous brother, Ab? Hamid al-Ghaz?l?. Lumbards findings revolutionize our understanding of A?mad al-Ghaz?l?'s writings, allowing for focus on his central teachings regarding Divine Love and the remembrance of God.
The teachings of Aḥmad al-Ghazālī changed the course of Persian Sufism forever, paving the way for luminaries such as Rūmī, Aṭṭār, and Ḥāfiẓ. Yet he remains a poorly understood thinker, with many treatises incorrectly attributed to him and conflicting accounts in the historiographical literature. This work provides the first examination of Aḥmad al-Ghazālī and his work in Western scholarly literature. Joseph E. B. Lumbard seeks to ascertain the authenticity of works attributed to this author, trace the development of the dominant trends in the biographical literature, and reconstruct the life and times of Aḥmad al-Ghazālī with particular attention to his relationship with his more famous brother, Abū Hamid al-Ghazālī. Lumbard's findings revolutionize our understanding of Aḥmad al-Ghazālī writings, allowing for focus on his central teachings regarding Divine Love and the remembrance of God.
Religion of Love explores the life and work of the Persian Sufi poet and sage Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār. ʿAṭṭār changed the face of world literature, leaving his impact on all cultures that have valued Persian Sufi writings. Considered for the first time through the lens of religious studies, ʿAṭṭār's oeuvre offers much to contemporary readers. ʿAṭṭār's poems cast a light on the relationship between revelation and the intellect. They also encourage liberation from self-centeredness through the fiery path of love. Thus, Religion of Love considers one of Persian literature's greatest poets as more than just a poet, but as a thinker and a commentator on moral psychology, ethics, and the intellectual debates of his age, debates that shed light on today's religious complexities.
Revolutions of the Heart is a genre-bending book where literature, social activism, and mysticism intersect. In this follow-up to Lababidi's first essay collection, Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to Bellydancing (2010), the author is undergoing an inner change, as is the world around him. The multifaceted meditations in Revolutions—essays, poems, aphorisms, conversations, and even fiction—explore the edifying power of art, Islamophobia and its antidotes, the Egyptian Revolution and its aftermath, American popular culture, and much else in our complex modern world. A series of rich conversations with Lababidi, and his various provocative interlocutors, shed more intimate light on the subjects under discussion. At times serious, playful, and seriously playful, these exuberant exchanges chart the personal evolution of Lababidi from angst-ridden existentialist thinker, besotted with the life of the mind, to someone chastened, drawn to Sufism and seeking to surrender before the primacy of spiritual life. On a political level, as the work of an immigrant and Muslim (living in Trump's divided America and our wounded world), Revolutions is a book of hope and healing, arguing for nuance and compassion, as it attempts to present art as a form of cultural diplomacy and tool for transformation.
This volume is a new chapter in the future history of law. Its general perspective could not be more original and its critical ethical edge on the state of international law could not be timelier. It explores a compassionate philosophical approach to the genuine substance of law, criminal procedure, international criminal law and international criminal justice. It divides law into three interrelated disciplines, i.e. legality, morality and love. The norm love is derived from human reason for man’s advancement and the securing of natural law. It is more than a mere mandatory norm. Its goal is to generate a normative and positive, powerful result, therefore avoiding any impurity that may exist in the application of other norms because of political or juridical pressures - a one-eyed justice. The norm love also renders justice with the principles of legal accountability, transparency and the high moral, authentic values of humanity. The notion of justice cannot be trusted in the absence of the norm love. The volume indicates the conditions of its efficiency by proving the reasons for its existence in the context of fairness, objectivity and concern for all individuals and entities. The concept of the norm love should be the core academic corpus for lecturing law in all faculties of law. It is simply the enlightenment of the 21st century. A lawyer with requisite knowledge and skill is not a lawyer if he cannot understand that the law does not need a lawyer with ethical competence in its provisions for income purposes but one with knowledge of its essence for the advanced morality of justice and the sheer essence of love for justice.
Major new translation of a unique and important Persian treatise on divine names in the Islamic tradition. The Repose of the Spirits is a translation of one of the earliest and most comprehensive treatises on Sufism in the Persian language. Written by Aḥmad Sam‘ānī, an expert in Islamic law from a famous Central Asian scholarly family in about the year 1135, it is one of the handful of early Sufi texts available in English and is by far the most accessible. It also may well be the longest and the most accurately translated. Ostensibly a commentary on the divine names, it avoids the abstract discourse of theological nitpicking and explains the human significance of the names with a delightful mix of Quranic verses and sayings of the Prophet and various past teachers, interspersed with original interpretations of the received wisdom. Unlike the usual books on the divine names (such as that of al-Ghazali), The Repose of the Spirits reminds the reader of the later poetical tradition, especially the work of Rumi. The prose is richly embroidered with imagery and interspersed with a great variety of Arabic and Persian poetry. What is especially remarkable is the manner in which the author speaks to his readers about their own personal situations, explaining why they are driven by a love affair with God, a God who is full of compassion and good humor, whether they know it or not. William C. Chittick’s masterful new translation brings this work to an English-language audience for the first time. “This is a wonderful introduction to the particular style, imagery, terminology, and worldview of Sufism, as well as to the ways in which the Persian cultural milieu added important elements to the Arabic intellectual and spiritual tradition in Islam.” — Maria Massi Dakake, author of The Charismatic Community: Shi‘ite Identity in Early Islam
This book explores the way in which the study and practice of love creates a common ground for different faiths and different traditions within the same faith. For the contributors, “common ground” in this context is not a minimal core of belief or a lowest common denominator of faith, but a space or area in which to live together, consider together the meaning of the love to which various faiths witness, and work together to enable human flourishing. Such a space, the contributors believe, is possible because it is the place of encounter with the divine. This book is the fruit of a Project for the Study of Love in Religion which aims to create this space in which different traditions of love converge, from Islam, Judaism, and the Christianity of both East and West. Tools employed by the contributors in exploring this space of love include exegesis of ancient texts, theology, accounts of mystical experience, philosophy, and evolutionary science of the human. Insights about human and divine love that emerge include its nature as a form of knowing, its sacrificial and erotic dimensions, its inclination towards beauty, its making of community and its importance for a just political and economic life.
This book explores the institution of Sufism, the most dynamic face of Islam in the Indian subcontinent, as it sets out to study the mystical rituals and devotional practices that characterize Sufism's beliefs and traditions.
Despite his towering presence in premodern Persian letters, Shams al-Din Muhammad Hafiz of Shiraz (d. 1390) remains an elusive and opaque character for many. In order to look behind the hyperbole that surrounds Hafiz's poetry and penetrate the quasi-hagiographical film that obscures the poet himself, this book attempts a contextualisation of Hafiz that is at once socio-political, historical, and literary. Here, Hafiz's ghazals (short, monorhyme, broadly amorous lyric poems) are read comparatively against similar texts composed by his less-studied rivals in the hyper competitive, imitative, and profoundly intertextual environment of fourteenth-century Shiraz. By bringing Hafiz's lyric poetry into productive, detailed dialogue with that of the counterhegemonic satirist, 'Ubayd Zakani (d. 1371), and the marginalised Jahan-Malik Khatun (d. after 1391; the most prolific female poet of premodern Iran), our received understanding of this most iconic of stages in the development of the Persian ghazal is disrupted, and new avenues for literary exploration open up. Looking beyond the particular milieu of Shiraz, this study re-assesses Hafiz's place in the Persian poetic canon through reading his poems alongside those produced by professional poets in other major centres of Persian literary activity who enjoyed comparable fame in the fourteenth century. Recognising the aesthetic achievements of his contemporaries does not diminish the splendour of Hafiz's, rather it forces us to accept that Hafiz was but one member of a band of poets who jostled for the limelight in competing, often intersecting, patronage and reception networks that facilitated intense cultural exchange between the cities of post-Mongol Iran and Iraq. Hafiz's ghazals, characterised as they are by conscious and deliberate hybridity, ambiguity, and polysemy, are products of a creative mind bent on experimenting with genre. While in no way seeking to deny the mystical stratum of the Persian ghazal in its fourteenth-century manifestation, this study emphasises the courtly and profane dimensions of the form, and regards Hafiz through a sober lens with keen attention to his dynamic role at the heart of a vibrant poetic community that was at once both fiercely local and boldly cosmopolitan.
