Download or read book The Garden and the Fire written by Nerina Rustomji and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Islamic conceptions of heaven and hell began in the seventh century as an early doctrinal innovation, but by the twelfth century, these notions had evolved into a highly formalized ideal of perfection. In tracking this transformation, Nerina Rustomji reveals the distinct material culture and aesthetic vocabulary Muslims developed to understand heaven and hell and identifies the communities and strategies of defense that took shape around the promise of a future world. Ideas of the afterworld profoundly influenced daily behaviors in Islamic society and gave rise to a code of ethics that encouraged abstinence from sumptuous objects, such as silver vessels and silk, so they could be appreciated later in heaven. Rustomji conducts a meticulous study of texts and images and carefully connects the landscape and social dynamics of the afterworld with earthly models and expectations. Male servants and female companions become otherworldly objects in the afterlife, and stories of rewards and punishment helped preachers promote religious reform. By employing material culture as a method of historical inquiry, Rustomji points to the reflections, discussions, and constructions that actively influenced Muslims' picture of the afterworld, culminating in a distinct religious aesthetic.
Download or read book Islam s Fire written by Joseph M. Pujals and published by Trafford Publishing. This book was released on 2010-06-08 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A frantic phone call from the president of World Bank jars Carl Lukin and Ann Curlin out of a restful vacation on the Hood Canal in Washington State. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been stolen from the bank, and the bank president wants to hire Lukin Investigations to find the money before the news gets out, causing the bank to collapse. As Carl and Ann follow the money, they realize that the theft is connected to a body Carl had discovered in the Hood Canal. The money trail leads to the terrifying realization that it has been stolen to finance an international terrorist organization called Islams Fire. Carls first allegiance is to the bank, but he feels compelled to notify the CIA of the terrorist connection. Before they can be stopped, the terrorists attack the power grid on the West Coast, blacking out more than half the country. Working with both the FBI and the CIA, Carl and Ann track the leaders of Islams Fire around the world. Before they can stop them, though, they manage to wreak havoc, causing death and destruction all across the country. Murder, terror, bombings, and personal tragedy all force Carl to face the unthinkable in his urgent quest to stop Islams Fire.
Download or read book Home Fire written by Kamila Shamsie and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Ingenious… Builds to one of the most memorable final scenes I’ve read in a novel this century.” —The New York Times WINNER OF THE 2018 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION FINALIST FOR THE 2019 INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE The suspenseful and heartbreaking story of an immigrant family driven to pit love against loyalty, with devastating consequences, from the author of Best of Friends Isma is free. After years of watching out for her younger siblings in the wake of their mother’s death, she’s accepted an invitation from a mentor in America that allows her to resume a dream long deferred. But she can’t stop worrying about Aneeka, her beautiful, headstrong sister back in London, or their brother, Parvaiz, who’s disappeared in pursuit of his own dream, to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew. When he resurfaces half a globe away, Isma’s worst fears are confirmed. Then Eamonn enters the sisters’ lives. Son of a powerful political figure, he has his own birthright to live up to—or defy. Is he to be a chance at love? The means of Parvaiz’s salvation? Suddenly, two families’ fates are inextricably, devastatingly entwined, in this searing novel that asks: What sacrifices will we make in the name of love?
Download or read book Crescent of Fire written by Muslim Ibn Muslim and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-01-22 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An arc of instability and conflict has seared the Islamic world, turning once peaceful communities into hotbeds of violence and bloodshed. This is in stark contrast to the rest of the globe, where the ideological and ethnic conflicts of the twentieth century have given way to a period of relative stability and growth, as the increase in human productivity, that began in the eighteenth century in the west, has moved out to other regions of the world. However, this wave of economic development appears to have missed the Islamic world, where many governments preside over corrupt and stagnating economies that provide no opportunities for advancement. A substantial portion of the Islamic world therefore faces a double punch of ideological conflict combined with economic retardation. Why have so many of these societies become so senselessly violent? What is the source of this instability and conflict? Is it just an extremist fringe, or is it simply the most prominent part of a larger and more fundamental problem? Why did it start, what is keeping it going, and how can it be resolved? How did a religion that at one time provide a framework for stability and intellectual advancement get so misinterpreted and perverted that it now instead provides a justification for the opposite? Even where there are no serious conflicts, why is it that Muslim countries seem incapable of achieving economic growth of the kind that has happened in the last few decades in Asia? Finally, and most importantly, what are the solutions? What should Muslim countries be doing in order to escape from this debilitating combination of instability and economic stagnation? This book, written by a Muslim who is concerned over the bigotry and narrow-mindedness that has gripped the Islamic world, uses a historical and holistic approach to answer these questions.
Download or read book The Honor Code How Moral Revolutions Happen written by Kwame Anthony Appiah and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-09-06 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[Appiah's] work reveals the heart and sensitivity of a novelist. . . .Fascinating, erudite and beautifully written."—The New York Times Book Review In this groundbreaking work, Kwame Anthony Appiah, hailed as "one of the most relevant philosophers today" (New York Times Book Review), changes the way we understand human behavior and the way social reform is brought about. In brilliantly arguing that new democratic movements over the last century have not been driven by legislation from above, Appiah explores the end of the duel in aristocratic England, the tumultuous struggles over footbinding in nineteenth-century China, the uprising of ordinary people against Atlantic slavery, and the horrors of "honor killing" in contemporary Pakistan. Intertwining philosophy and historical narrative, he has created "a fascinating study of moral evolution" (Philadelphia Inquirer) that demonstrates the critical role honor plays a in the struggle against man's inhumanity to man.
Download or read book The Cold Fire written by Lilly Mohsen and published by . This book was released on 2013-02-18 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The blazing flames reached the skies... It was the most horrifying punishment anyone could ever think of, and yet this brave man stared back at death with a smile... too busy to fear the hot-burning fire he was about to be thrown in... The miracle of Prophet Abraham is mind-boggling in every possible way... and what comes next is even more impossible to believe, yet fascinatingly true....
Download or read book Awakening Islam written by Stéphane Lacroix and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amidst the roil of war and instability across the Middle East, the West is still searching for ways to understand the Islamic world. Stéphane Lacroix has now given us a penetrating look at the political dynamics of Saudi Arabia, one of the most opaque of Muslim countries and the place that gave birth to Osama bin Laden. The result is a history that has never been told before. Lacroix shows how thousands of Islamist militants from Egypt, Syria, and other Middle Eastern countries, starting in the 1950s, escaped persecution and found refuge in Saudi Arabia, where they were integrated into the core of key state institutions and society. The transformative result was the Sahwa, or “Islamic Awakening,” an indigenous social movement that blended political activism with local religious ideas. Awakening Islam offers a pioneering analysis of how the movement became an essential element of Saudi society, and why, in the late 1980s, it turned against the very state that had nurtured it. Though the “Sahwa Insurrection” failed, it has bequeathed the world two very different, and very determined, heirs: the Islamo-liberals, who seek an Islamic constitutional monarchy through peaceful activism, and the neo-jihadis, supporters of bin Laden's violent campaign. Awakening Islam is built upon seldom-seen documents in Arabic, numerous travels through the country, and interviews with an unprecedented number of Saudi Islamists across the ranks of today’s movement. The result affords unique insight into a closed culture and its potent brand of Islam, which has been exported across the world and which remains dangerously misunderstood.
Download or read book Memories of Muhammad written by Omid Safi and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-11-17 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a professor of Islamic studies comes this look at the prophet of Islam who stands as the role model for millions of modern Muslims.
Download or read book Light without Fire written by Scott Korb and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of America’s first Muslim institution of higher education, Zaytuna College In the fall of 2010, anti-Muslim furor in the United States reached a breaking point, capping a decade in which such sentiment had surged. Loud, angry crowds gathered near New York’s Ground Zero to protest plans to build an Islamic cultural center, while a small-time Florida minister appeared on national television almost nightly promising to celebrate the anniversary of 9/11 with the burning of Korans. At the same time, fifteen devout Muslims quietly gathered in a basement in Berkeley, California, to execute a plan that had been coming together for over a decade: to found Zaytuna College, “Where Islam Meets America.” It would be the nation’s first four-year Muslim liberal arts college, its mission to establish a thoroughly American, academically rigorous, and traditional indigenous Islam. In Light without Fire, Scott Korb tells the story of the school’s founders, Sheikh Hamza Yusuf and Imam Zaid Shakir, arguably the two most influential leaders in American Islam, “rock stars” who, tellingly, are little known outside their community. Korb also introduces us to Zaytuna’s students, young American Muslims of all stripes who admire—indeed, love—their teachers in ways college students typically don’t and whose stories, told for the first time, signal the future of Islam in this country. From a heady theology classroom to a vibrant storefront mosque, from the run-down streets Oakland to grand ballrooms echoing with America’s most powerful Muslim voices, Korb follows Zaytuna’s students and teachers as they find their place and their voice. He ultimately creates an intimate portrait of the school and provides a new introduction to Islam as it is being lived and re-envisioned in America. It’s no exaggeration to say that here, at Zaytuna, are tomorrow’s Muslim leaders.
Download or read book The Garden and the Fire written by Nerina Rustomji and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides an analysis of how visions of the Garden and the Fire, or Heaven and Hell, within Sunni Islam changed between the seventh and thirteenth centuries, and looks at how Muslims used images to represent the Garden on Earth from the seventh to the nineteenth century.
Download or read book Miraculous Journey of Mahomet written by Marie Rose Seguy and published by George Braziller Publishers. This book was released on 2000-05-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Discovering Islam written by Akbar S. Ahmed and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-11 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This accessible work balances the image of Islam as aggressive and fanatical with an objective picture of the main features of Muslim history and the compulsions of Muslim society.
Download or read book Islam without Extremes A Muslim Case for Liberty written by Mustafa Akyol and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-07-18 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A delightfully original take on…the prospects for liberal democracy in the broader Islamic Middle East.”—Matthew Kaminski, Wall Street Journal As the Arab Spring threatens to give way to authoritarianism in Egypt and reports from Afghanistan detail widespread violence against U.S. troops and women, news from the Muslim world raises the question: Is Islam incompatible with freedom? In Islam without Extremes, Turkish columnist Mustafa Akyol answers this question by revealing the little-understood roots of political Islam, which originally included both rationalist, flexible strains and more dogmatic, rigid ones. Though the rigid traditionalists won out, Akyol points to a flourishing of liberalism in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and the unique “Islamo-liberal synthesis” in present-day Turkey. As he powerfully asserts, only by accepting a secular state can Islamic societies thrive. Islam without Extremes offers a desperately needed intellectual basis for the reconcilability of Islam and liberty.
Download or read book An Introduction to Islam for Jews written by Reuven Firestone and published by Jewish Publication Society. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Helping Jews understand Islam--a reasoned and candid view
Download or read book Defenders of Reason in Islam written by Richard C. Martin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This clearly written text explores the rational theology of Islam, the conflict between the "defenders of God" and the "defenders of reason", and the controversy's historical roots.
Download or read book Fire in the Unnameable Country written by Ghalib Islam and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The universe is shaking as Hedayat, the "glossolalist" narrator of Fire in the Unnameable Country is born on a flying carpet in the skies above an obscure land whose leader has manufactured the ability to hear every unspoken utterance of the nation. He records the contents of his citizens' minds onto tape reels for archival storage. Later in Hedayat's young life, as the unnameable country collapses into disarray around him, he begins an epistle, wherein, interspersed with accounts of contemporary terrorist attacks and the outbreak of a mysterious viral epidemic, he invokes the memories of his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents to revisit the troubled country's history and expose the roots of its crisis. Hedayat's dark world is entirely foreign but oddly familiar, echoing the banality of our daily diversions and adding a terrifying twist. The Mirror, a gruesome, never-ending reality show, turns the city of La Maga into a permanent Hollywood-style film set where people gamble body parts and live in fear of the Black Organs, the paramilitary manifestation of the eviscerators that threaten to infect the nation. Islam's vibrant, ingenious construction sends the plot twisting down rabbit holes and caterwauling through secret doorways to emerge anywhere from a domestic living room to a bomb technician's workshop to the deep recesses of the state's repressive political apparatus. An utterly remarkable debut, filled with original characters caught up in wonderfully imaginative circumstances and rendered in uniquely inventive language, Fire in the Unnameable Country is a book like no other.
Download or read book The Fire the Star and the Cross written by Aptin Khanbaghi and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2006-02-22 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary political events have generated a strong interest in minorities in the Middle East. Although today the region is mostly identified with Islam, it has been home to many other great cultures, and the civilization of the Islamic world is itself indebted to the various peoples that the Arabs subdued in the 7th and 8th centuries. Far from fading away after the Arab conquest, the inhabitants of the Iranian plateau and of Mesopotamia were central players in the lives of their regions. However, the magnitude of their contribution to the emergence of the early Islamic world has hitherto been neglected. In this fascinating and groundbreaking study, Khanbaghi offers a comprehensive discussion of those groups that resisted assimilation to the new Islamic order yet continued to participate actively in the socio-political life of their homeland. He concentrates on Iran, which due to its complex religious history offers unique opportunities for the study of non-Muslim communities, specifically of Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians. Aptin Khanbaghi has written an important and fascinating book which aims to present a thorough evaluation of the historical contributions made by religious minorities – Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians – to the societal and cultural physiognomy of the lands of Iran in pre-modern and early modern times. His general perspective and his broad treatment of the topic are quite new, while his use of sources and of the secondary literature is genuinely impressive. The Fire, the Star and the Cross makes a very significant and original contribution to our knowledge and understanding of Iranian history and civilization during an era when the foundations were laid for the emerging modern Iranian state.' BERT G FRAGNER, Director of the Institute of Iranian Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna
