Download or read book Divine Essence Baraka written by John-Roger and published by Mandeville Press. This book was released on 2001-12 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Merging Eastern concepts of devotion and the presence of the divine in everyday life with Western practicality, this book offers information on spirituality and relationships with God. Described is the lineage of each individual s direct connection to God, the process of working with a spiritual master, and methods of screening a spiritual master. "
Download or read book Jihad Beyond Islam written by Gabriele Marranci and published by Berg. This book was released on 2006-08-07 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By observing the current crisis of identity among ordinary Muslims, this book explores why, and in what circumstances Muslims speak of jihad. In the end, jihad is what Muslims say it is. Marranci offers us a nuanced and anthropolitical understanding of Muslims' lives beyond the predictable clichés.
Download or read book A Study of the Movement of Spiritual Awareness written by D. Tumminia and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-11-18 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: MSIA, the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, has been called the Cadillac of cults. Those interested in new religions may only know of MSIA from these kinds of labels. However, when looked at from a qualitative sociological perspective, a more complex story of religious innovation and cultural change can be told.
Download or read book Afghanistan written by Jonathan L. Lee and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 797 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A colossal history of Afghanistan from its earliest organization into a coherent state up to its turbulent present. Located at the intersection of Asia and the Middle East, Afghanistan has been strategically important for thousands of years. Its ancient routes and strategic position between India, Inner Asia, China, Persia, and beyond has meant the region has been subject to frequent invasions, both peaceful and military. As a result, modern Afghanistan is a culturally and ethnically diverse country, but one divided by conflict, political instability, and by mass displacements of its people. In this magisterial illustrated history, Jonathan L. Lee tells the story of how a small tribal confederacy in a politically and culturally significant but volatile region became a modern nation-state. Drawing on more than forty years of study, Lee places the current conflict in Afghanistan in its historical context and challenges many of the West’s preconceived ideas about the country. Focusing particularly on the powerful Durrani monarchy, which united the country in 1747 and ruled for nearly two and a half centuries, Lee chronicles the origins of the dynasty as clients of Safavid Persia and Mughal India: the reign of each ruler and their efforts to balance tribal, ethnic, regional, and religious factions; the struggle for social and constitutional reform; and the rise of Islamic and Communist factions. Along the way, he offers new cultural and political insights from Persian histories, the memoirs of Afghan government officials, British government and India Office archives, and recently released CIA reports and Wikileaks documents. He also sheds new light on the country’s foreign relations, its internal power struggles, and the impact of foreign military interventions such as the “War on Terror.”
Download or read book Violence and the Sacred in the Modern World written by Mark Juergensmeyer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-20 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is symbolic violence related to the real acts of religious violence around the modern world? The authors of this book, first published in 1992, explore this question with reference to some of the most volatile religious and political conflicts of the day: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Sikhs in India, militant Jewish groups in Israel, and Muslim movements from the Middle East to Indonesia. In addition to providing valuable insights into these important incidents, the authors – social scientists and historians of comparative religion – are responding to the theoretical issues articulated by René Girard in Violence and the Sacred (1977). The present volume is the first book of essays to test Girard’s theories about the social significance of religious symbols of violence against real, rather than symbolic, acts. In some cases his theories are found to be applicable; in other cases, the authors provide alternative theories of their own. In a concluding essay, co-authored by Mark Anspach, Girard provides a response.
Download or read book An Anthropology of the Qur an written by Ahmed Achrati and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an anthropological study of the Qur’an, offering an unprecedented challenge to some of the epistemological and metaphysical assumptions of the tawḥīdic discourses. Combining primary textual materials and anthropological analysis, this book examines transcendence as a core principle of the Qur’an, uniquely signified in the divine name al-Quddūs (the Holy). It shows how the tawḥīdic representations of Allah constitute an inversion of this attribute; examines how this inversion has been conceived, authorized, and maintained; and demonstrates how it has affected Islamic thinking and practices, especially as relates to authority. This book also explores how a return to the Qur’anic primacy of God’s otherness as al-Quddūs can influence Islamic thinking and practices moving forward. Therefore, it will be highly useful to scholars of Islamic Studies, philosophical theology, Qur’anic studies, political science, ethics, anthropology, and religious studies.
Download or read book Embattled Saints written by Kenneth P. Lizzio and published by Quest Books. This book was released on 2014-05-22 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2015 Benjamin Franklin Silver Award! In the West, Islam has replaced Communism as the new bugbear, while Sufism, Islam’s mystical dimension, is often dismissed as the delusions of an irrational and backward people. Ken Lizzio corrects such misperceptions in this firsthand account of the year he spent in 1991 living with the head of the Naqshbandis, Afghanistan’s largest Sufi order. He presents the order in all its dimensions—social, economic, political, and spiritual—at a pivotal moment in history. He also gives a rare glimpse of everyday life in an Afghan Sufi school and of how the school has coped with the upheavals in its country. Poignantly, the Naqshbandi way of life faces threats to its very existence. One threat lies in the creeping secularization of Islamic society, another in the dismissal of Sufism by various fundamentalist Islamic sects claiming the franchise on truth. But historically, Lizzio points out, Sufism has always been Islam’s wellspring for spiritual revival. And because Sufis deal in matters that transcend time and cultures, they help outsiders understand not only the true nature of Islam, but the deeper meaning of all religions. The sound of that meaning echoes throughout this eloquent and fascinating memoir.
Download or read book North Africa written by Mira Bartok and published by Good Year Books. This book was released on 1997-02 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Educational resource for teachers, parents and kids!
Download or read book The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion and Childhood written by Anna Strhan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From recent sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, to arguments about faith schools and religious indoctrination, this volume considers the interconnection between the actual lives of children and the position of children as placeholders for the future. Childhood has often been a particular site of struggle for negotiating the location of religion in public and everyday social life, and children's involvement and non-involvement in religion raises strong feelings because they represent the future of religious and secular communities, even of society itself. The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion and Childhood provides a rich resource for students and scholars of this interdisciplinary field, and addresses wider questions about the distinctiveness of childhood and its religious dimensions in historical and contemporary perspective. Divided into five thematic parts, the volume provides classic, contemporary, and specially commissioned readings from a range of perspectives, including the sociological, anthropological, historical, and theological. Case studies range from Augustine's description of childhood in Confessions, the psychology of religion and childhood, to religion in children's literature, religious education, and Qur'anic schools. - Religious traditions covered include Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, in the UK and Europe, USA, Latin America and Africa - An introduction situates each thematic part, and each reading is contextualised by the editors - Guidance on further reading and study questions are provided on the book's webpage
Download or read book The Hated Outsiders written by Jesse C. Newman and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2011-06-02 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The reason this book is being written is because three cultural histories have been left out of the standard texts used in the schools of America. What is African history as it relates to Black slave history in America? The Manifest Destiny created by the black slave revolt in Haiti will bring about the sale of what is now known as the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Secondly, what is the history of the Jews, and what is the history of the Jews in America? Jewish history is not just a few chapters in the Bible. It is 5771 years old and was accelerated in 1948 with the formation of Israel. Finally, Japan: Why did Japan attack Pearl Harbor? Why have the Emperors of Japan not laid a wreath on the U.S.S. Arizona? Answers to these questions are contained herein showing the three combined cultures’ impact is greater on today’s issues that affect this country - and world. The Puritan called America the ‘new Israel,’ as they pictured this land full of opportunities. Almost bankrupted by the Revolutionary War, having a low population, we will set a course across to the Mississippi River and start encountering cultures, peoples and histories that will be foreign to Europeans’ mindsets. Christianity and greed will be the new mantra as we will not stop at our Western shores, but by 1903 we will be at the front door of China. Looking back at these huge lands America acquired, will also show the problems we will layer over these non-Christian peoples. Wealth will be the stimulus and free trade a goal, so we will compete with the other Europeans. America will also show its dark side in the history of the 19th and 20th centuries at home, in Asia and the Middle East.
Download or read book Islam Is a Foreign Country written by Zareena Grewal and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considers the question: what does it mean to be Muslim and American? In Islam Is a Foreign Country, Zareena Grewal explores some of the most pressing debates about and among American Muslims: what does it mean to be Muslim and American? Who has the authority to speak for Islam and to lead the stunningly diverse population of American Muslims? Do their ties to the larger Muslim world undermine their efforts to make Islam an American religion? Offering rich insights into these questions and more, Grewal follows the journeys of American Muslim youth who travel in global, underground Islamic networks. Devoutly religious and often politically disaffected, these young men and women are in search of a home for themselves and their tradition. Through their stories, Grewal captures the multiple directions of the global flows of people, practices, and ideas that connect U.S. mosques to the Muslim world. By examining the tension between American Muslims’ ambivalence toward the American mainstream and their desire to enter it, Grewal puts contemporary debates about Islam in the context of a long history of American racial and religious exclusions. Probing the competing obligations of American Muslims to the nation and to the umma (the global community of Muslim believers), Islam is a Foreign Country investigates the meaning of American citizenship and the place of Islam in a global age.
Download or read book Quest for Conception written by Marcia C. Inhorn and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1994-08 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Quest for Conception, Marcia C. Inhorn portrays the poignant struggles of poor, urban Egyptian women and their attempts to overcome infertility. The author draws upon fifteen months of fieldwork in urban Egypt to present moving stories of infertile Muslim women whose tumultuous medical pilgrimages have yet to produce the desired pregnancies. Inhorn examines the devastating impact of infertility on the lives of these women, who are threatened with divorce by their husbands, harassed by their husbands' families, and ostracized by neighbors.
Download or read book The Publishers Weekly written by and published by . This book was released on with total page 1228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Divine Guide in Early Shi ism written by Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2016-03-22 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Imam, the Divine Guide, is the central point around which the Shi'ite religion turns. The power of Shi'ism comes from the actions of the Imam. This title is reserved exclusively for the sucessors of the prophets in their mission. The author shows that from the beginning of Shi'ite Islam until the tenth century, the Imam was primarily a master of knowledge with supernatural powers, not a jurist theologian. The Imam is the threshold through which God and the creatures communicate. He is thus a cosmic necessity, the key and the center of the universal economy of the sacred. The author presents Shi'ism as a religion founded on double dimensions where the role of the leader remains constantly central: perpetual initiation into divine secrets and continued confrontation with anti-initiation forces. Without esotericism, exotericism loses its meaning. Early Imamism is an esoteric doctrine. Historically, then, at the beginning of esotericism in Islam, we find an initiatory, mystical, and occultist doctrine. This is the first book to systematically explore the immense literature attributed to the Imams themselves in order to recover the authentic original vision. It restores an essential source of esotericism in the world of Islam.
Download or read book The Ark The Shroud and Mary written by Philip Gardiner and published by Red Wheel/Weiser. This book was released on 2007-02-16 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do the Ark of the Covenant, Mary's reliquary box, and Jesus' Coffer all have the same imagery? Was the Ark the container of the Covenant, the Ten Commandments, or the Chalice? Does the image of the Shroud of Turin contain a bioelectric field? These questions and others will be explored in The Ark, The Shroud, and Mary. Author Philip Gardiner recently won the acclaim of both scholars and the reading public with The Serpent Grail, which united three of the most mysterious objects known to man—the Grail, Elixir, and Philosophers Stone. Now, in this unique and thought-provoking work Gardiner proves that the Ark of the Covenant, the Shroud of Turin, and Mary are united in ways never before imagined. Travelling across the world, from Rome to India, Portugal to Egypt, Gardiner uncovers the trail of the Ark and finds that it does not lead to Ethiopia, as many believe, but instead in a direction that nobody could have imagined. The trail of the Ark takes Gardiner on a hunt into the very heart of an ancient secret society with clandestine meetings in far-off lands. Uniting the myth, tradition, and language of the Ark with the Shroud of Turin, Gardiner then goes on to re-date it, reveal how it was made, and identify whose image it actually recreates. Through his new-found contacts in the world of secret societies, Gardiner then shows how this incredible secret was protected by a dual brotherhood throughout time and was the secret source of the enlightenment spoken of by numerous orders from the Sufis to the Knights Templar. The Ark, The Shroud, and Mary outshines The Da Vinci Code for the simple reason that it is the factual story of one man's fight to uncover the truth.
Download or read book The Al Qaeda Discourse of the Greater Kufr written by Daurius Figueira and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2004-11 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the final text of the trilogy consisting of Jihad in Trinidad and Tobago and Exiting a Racist Worldview. The text presents a deconstruction of Islamic discourse with specific reference to jihad (military engagement) and the shahid (martyr). The Al Qaeda discourse of the greater kufr is deconstructed to expose its antecedents in militarist Islamic discourse born out of the contradiction between Islam and western capitalist colonial imperialism. Primary to the development of the discourse of military engagement with the west is the discourse of Pakistani thinkers deconstructed in the text. The discourse of Al Qaeda is then the product of contradiction between Islam and western imperialism and hegemony. Thereby constituting the most potent threat to Islam since the crusades as manifested in the discourse of Al Qaeda.
Download or read book Secrets of the Serpent in Search of the Sacred Past Special Revised Edition Featuring Two New Appendices written by Philip Gardiner and published by Reality Press. This book was released on 2008-11 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secrets of the Serpent: In Search of the Sacred Past - Special Revised Edition, Featuring Two New Appendices by Philip Gardiner. Across time and across the world, an ancient serpent cult once dominated mankind. Then a great battle ensued and Christianity stamped it's authority on the face of the planet. Now, after years of research, the real religious history of the world can be told. In Secrets of the Serpent, Philip Gardiner for the first time reveals the world's most mysterious places were once sacred to the Serpent Cult. The history and mythology of the so-called reptilian agenda and alien visitation in ancient times now has a solid opponent - giving answers for the many symbols and myths often confused by those who believe in such things. In Secrets of the Serpent, the author reveals the real "bloodline" spoken of by Dan Brown in the Da Vinci Code - it was in fact a serpent bloodline. Philip Gardiner is the international best selling author of The Shining Ones, The Serpent Grail, Gnosis: The Secret of Solomon's Temple Revealed and Proof - Does God Exist? He has appeared on hundreds of radio and television programs worldwide speaking on religion and propaganda. He has infiltrated various secret societies and been initiated into Orders many people had thought were long forgotten. Committed to the constant struggle to uncover the real history of mankind and the unraveling of manipulative propaganda, he has come up against many obstacles and yet in his book, The Serpent Grail he reveals a truth about the Holy Grail that gained the backing of academia and scholars. The truth shall be found in the Secrets of the Serpent.