Download or read book Knowledge and Beauty in Classical Islam written by Giovanna Lelli and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-18 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers an aesthetic reading of the Muqaddima by Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406), a text that has been studied up to the present as a work on historiography. It argues that the Muqaddima is also a comprehensive treatise on classical Arab-Islamic culture and provides a picture of classical Arab-Islamic aesthetics in its totality. The theme of the book is the intrinsic connection between beauty and knowledge in the Muqaddima. Whenever Ibn Khaldūn deals with the problem of knowledge and science, he also deals with the problem of sensual beauty as an instrument or an obstacle to attain it. Ibn Khaldūn’s philosophy of history is necessarily also an aesthetics of history. His key-notion of “group feeling”, the physical, ethic and aesthetic virtue of Bedouin societies, is at once the origin of the ascent of centralised States and the cause of their ruin. It represents a tragic contradiction that applies to the history of the Maghreb but then takes a universal value. It reflects a range of other contradictions inherent to the "system" of classical Arab-Islamic aesthetics. These contradictions undermine the aesthetic system of the Muqaddima from within and provide decisive elements for the emergence of modern aesthetics. Offering a comparative approach, the volume is a key resource to scholars and students interested in Arabic and Islamic studies, philosophy, aesthetics and global history.
Download or read book Knowledge and Education in Classical Islam Religious Learning between Continuity and Change 2 vols written by Sebastian Günther and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-07-13 with total page 1174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Knowledge and Education in Classical Islam: Religious Learning between Continuity and Change offers fascinating new insights into key issues of learning and human development in classical Islam, including their shared characteristics, influence, and interdependence with historical, non-Muslim educational cultures.
Download or read book Conference of the Books written by Khaled Abou El Fadl and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abou El Fadl (Islamic law, UCLA School of Law) wrote the 62 brief essays here over the course of five years. Through a combination of musings and critical reflections on classical Muslim authors, he both traces Muslim intellectual history and also confronts questions of ethics, faith, law, politics, culture, and modern identity. He ranges over many facets of Islam in the contemporary world, exploring censorship, political oppression, terrorism, the veil and the treatment of women, marriage, parental rights, the dynamics between law and morality, the character of the prophet Muhammad, and other topics. About half the essays first appeared in The minaret magazine. c. Book News Inc.
Download or read book Aesthetics in Arabic Thought written by José Miguel Puerta-Vilchez and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-07-10 with total page 954 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Aesthetics in Arabic Thought from Pre-Islamic Arabia through al-Andalus José Miguel Puerta Vílchez analyzes the discourses about beauty, the arts, and sense perception that arose within classical Arab culture from pre-Islamic poetry and the Quran (sixth-seventh centuries CE) to the Alhambra palace in Granada (fourteenth century CE). He focuses on the contributions of such great thinkers as Ibn Ḥazm, Avempace, Ibn Ṭufayl, Averroes, Ibn ʿArabī, and Ibn Khaldūn in al-Andalus, and the Brethren of Purity, al-Tawḥīdī, al-Fārābī, Avicenna, Alhazen, and al-Ghazālī in the East. The work also explores literary criticism, calligraphy, music, belles-lettres (adab), and erotic literature, and highlights the contribution of Arab humanism to shaping the field of Aesthetics in the West.
Download or read book Mathematics and Physics in Classical Islam written by Giovanna Lelli and published by Crossroads - History of Intera. This book was released on 2022 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book highlights the emergence of a new mathematical rationality and the beginning of the mathematisation of physics in Classical Islam. Exchanges between mathematics, physics, linguistics, arts and music were a factor of creativity and progress in the mathematical, the physical and the social sciences. Goods and ideas travelled on a world-scale, mainly through the trade routes connecting East and Southern Asia with the Near East, allowing the transmission of Greek-Arabic medicine to Yuan Muslim China. The development of science, first centred in the Near East, would gradually move to the Western side of the Mediterranean, as a result of Europe's appropriation of the Arab and Hellenistic heritage. Contributors are Paul Buell, Anas Ghrab, Hossein Masoumi Hamedani, Zeinab Karimian, Giovanna Lelli, Marouane ben Miled, Patricia Radelet-de Grave, and Roshdi Rashed"--
Download or read book The Classical Heritage in Islam written by Franz Rosenthal and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-12-16 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The influence of classical antiquity on the religious disciplines, theology, mysticism and law of Islam cannot be overestimated. This work demonstrates the significance of the classical heritage by drawing together a great range of literary renderings, paraphrases, commentaries and imitations, as well as independent Islamic elaborations. Professor Rosenthal's collection includes the work of early authors, authors of the Golden Age and later writers who imitated their works. The Classical Heritage in Islam reveals that the Muslim adoption of and dependence on classical texts was not blind imitation or a casual compounding of traditions, but rather an original synthesis and therefore a unique achievement.
Download or read book Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam written by Asma Sayeed and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asma Sayeed's book explores the history of women as religious scholars from the first decades of Islam through the early Ottoman period. Focusing on women's engagement with hadīth, this book analyzes dramatic chronological patterns in women's hadīth participation in terms of developments in Muslim social, intellectual and legal history. It challenges two opposing views: that Muslim women have been historically marginalized in religious education, and alternately that they have been consistently empowered thanks to early role models such as 'Ā'isha bint Abī Bakr, the wife of the Prophet Muhammad. This book is a must-read for those interested in the history of Muslim women as well as in debates about their rights in the modern world. The intersections of this history with topics in Muslim education, the development of Sunnī orthodoxies, Islamic law and hadīth studies make this work an important contribution to Muslim social and intellectual history of the early and classical eras.
Download or read book Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West written by Makdisi George Makdisi and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-05 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging beliefs about intellectual culture, Makdisi reaffirms the links between Western and Arabic thought and shows that although scholasticism and humanism have long been considered to be exclusive to the Western world, they have their roots in the medieval Islamic world.
Download or read book Classification of Knowledge in Islam written by Osman Bakar and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dr. Richard I. Evans interviews Jung about his relationship to Freud and his differences with Freudian theory, his views of the unconscious, introversion-extroversion theories, his concept of archetypes, and his responses to some of the contemporary challenges to psychology.
Download or read book Beauty and Islam written by Valerie Gonzalez and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2001-08-24 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Beauty and Islam' explores aspects of aesthetics in classical Islamic thought in the light of contemporary theories, offering new perspectives on Islamic art and architecture with examples ranging from the Qur'an and the Alhambra to the works of present day artists and philosophers. Tracing the roots of Islamic aesthetics back to the works of the great philosophers of the Middle Ages such as Avicenna and Averroes, Valerie Gonzalez finds that aesthetic theory in Islam must be seen within the much wider context of parallel thinking on theology, ethics, physics and metaphysics.
Download or read book Faith and Practice of Islam written by William C. Chittick and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1992-10-22 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translations and analyses of three Persian Sufi texts, offering a perspective on Islam that is rarely met in modern works.
Download or read book Anthropomorphic Depictions of God written by Zulfiqar Ali Shah and published by International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). This book was released on 2012 with total page 765 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monumental study examines issues of anthropomorphism in the three Abrahamic Faiths, as viewed through the texts of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Qur’an. Throughout history Christianity and Judaism have tried to make sense of God. While juxtaposing the Islamic position against this, the author addresses the Judeo-Christian worldview and how each has chosen to framework its encounter with God, to what extent this has been the result of actual scripture and to what extent the product of theological debate, or church decrees of later centuries and absorption of Hellenistic philosophy. Shah also examines Islam’s heavily anti-anthropomorphic stance and Islamic theological discourse on Tawhid as well as the Ninety-Nine Names of God and what these have meant in relation to Muslim understanding of God and His attributes. Describing how these became the touchstone of Muslim discourse with Judaism and Christianity he critiques theological statements and perspectives that came to dilute if not counter strict monotheism. As secularism debates whether God is dead, the issue of anthropomorphism has become of immense importance. The quest for God, especially in this day and age, is partly one of intellectual longing. To Shah, anthropomorphic concepts and corporeal depictions of the Divine are perhaps among the leading factors of modern atheism. As such he ultimately draws the conclusion that the postmodern longing for God will not be quenched by pre-modern anthropomorphic and corporeal concepts of the Divine which have simply brought God down to this cosmos, with a precise historical function and a specified location, reducing the intellectual and spiritual force of what God is and represents, causing the soul to detract from a sense of the sacred and thereby belief in Him.
Download or read book Knowledge in Later Islamic Philosophy written by Ibrahim Kalin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study looks at how the seventeenth-century philosopher Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi, known as Mulla Sadra, attempted to reconcile the three major forms of knowledge in Islamic philosophical discourses: revelation (Qur'an), demonstration (burhan), and gnosis or intuitive knowledge ('irfan). In his grand synthesis, which he calls the 'Transcendent Wisdom', Mulla Sadra bases his epistemological considerations on a robust analysis of existence and its modalities. His key claim that knowledge is a mode of existence rejects and revises the Kalam definitions of knowledge as relation and as a property of the knower on the one hand, and the Avicennan notions of knowledge as abstraction and representation on the other. For Sadra, all these theories land us in a subjectivist theory of knowledge where the knowing subject is defined as the primary locus of all epistemic claims. To explore the possibilities of a 'non-subjectivist' epistemology, Sadra seeks to shift the focus from knowledge as a mental act of representation to knowledge as presence and unveiling. The concept of knowledge has occupied a central place in the Islamic intellectual tradition. While Muslim philosophers have adopted the Greek ideas of knowledge, they have also developed new approaches and broadened the study of knowledge. The challenge of reconciling revealed knowledge with unaided reason and intuitive knowledge has led to an extremely productive debate among Muslims intellectuals in the classical period. In a culture where knowledge has provided both spiritual perfection and social status, Muslim scholars have created a remarkable discourse of knowledge and vastly widened the scope of what it means to know. For Sadra, in knowing things, we unveil an aspect of existence and thus engage with the countless modalities and colours of the all-inclusive reality of existence. In such a framework, we give up the subjectivist claims of ownership of meaning. The intrinsic intelligibility of existence, an argument Sadra establishes through his elaborate ontology, strips the knowing subject of its privileged position of being the sole creator of meaning. Instead, meaning and intelligibility are defined as functions of existence to be deciphered and unveiled by the knowing subject. This leads to a redefinition of the relationship between subject and object or what Muslim philosophers call the knower and the known.
Download or read book Classical Islam written by Lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies Norman Calder and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-03 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This sourcebook presents more than fifty new translations of key Islamic texts. Edited and translated by three leading specialists it illustrates the growth of Islamic thought from its seventh-century origins to the end of the medieval period.
Download or read book Sufi Commentaries on the Qur an in Classical Islam written by Kristin Sands and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-07-13 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meeting the ever increasing interest in Islam and Sufism, this book is the first comprehensive study of Sufi Qur’anic commentaries and includes translations of many writings previously unavailable in English. It examines the shared hermeneutical assumptions of Sufi writers and the diversity in style of Sufi commentaries. Some of the assumptions analyzed are: * the Qur’an is a multi-layered and ambiguous text open to endless interpretation * the knowledge of deeper meanings of the Qur’an is attainable by means other than transmitted interpretations and rational thought * the self is dynamic, moving through states and stations which result in different interpretations at different times. The styles of Sufi commentaries are explored, which range from philosophical musings to popular preaching to literary narrative and poetry. Other commentaries from the classical period are also investigated to provide context in understanding Sufi approaches and exegetical styles.
Download or read book The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition written by Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time in English, a catalog of the world through fourteenth-century Arab eyes—a kind of Schott’s Miscellany for the Islamic Golden Age An astonishing record of the knowledge of a civilization, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition catalogs everything known to exist from the perspective of a fourteenth-century Egyptian scholar and litterateur. More than 9,000 pages and thirty volumes—here abridged to one volume, and translated into English for the first time—it contains entries on everything from medieval moon-worshipping cults, sexual aphrodisiacs, and the substance of clouds, to how to get the smell of alcohol off one’s breath, the deliciousness of cheese made from buffalo milk, and the nesting habits of flamingos. Similar works by Western authors, including Pliny’s Natural History and Diderot’s Encyclopédie, have been available in English for centuries. This groundbreaking translation of a remarkable Arabic text—expertly abridged and annotated—offers a look at the world through the highly literary and impressively knowledgeable societies of the classical Islamic world. Meticulously arranged and delightfully eclectic, it is a compendium to be treasured—a true monument of erudition. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Download or read book The Formation of Post classical Philosophy in Islam written by Frank Griffel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, scholars have come to recognize the importance of classical Islamic philosophy both in its own right and in its preservation of and engagement with Western philosophical ideas. At the same time, the period immediately following the so-called classical period has often beenseen as a sort of dark age, in which Islamic thought entered a long period of decline. In this monumental new work, Frank Griffel seeks to overturn this conventional wisdom, arguing that what he calls the "post-classical" period has been unjustly maligned and neglected by previous generations ofscholars.The Formation of Post-Classical Philosophy in Islam is a comprehensive study of the far-reaching changes that led to a re-shaping of the philosophical discourse in Islam during the twelfth century. Earlier Western scholars thought that Islam's engagement with the tradition of Greek philosophy endedduring that century. More recent analyses suggest that Islamic thinkers instead integrated Greek thought into the genre of rationalist Muslim theology (kalam). Griffel argues that even this view misses a key point. In addition to the integration of Greek ideas into kalam, Muslim theologians pickedup the discourse of philosophy in Islam (falsafa) and began to produce books on philosophy. Books in these two genres, kalam and philosophy, argue for opposing teachings on the nature of God, the world's creation, and on the afterlife - even when written by the same authors. Griffel explains theemergence of a new genre of philosophical books called "hikma," works that stand opposed to Islamic theology and at the same wish to complement it. Offering a detailed history of philosophy in Iraq, Iran, and Central Asia during the twelfth century, together with an analysis of the way philosophywas practiced during this time, Griffel shows how works of falsafa, written by major Muslim theologians such as al-Ghazali developed step-by-step into critical assessments of philosophy that try to improve philosophical teachings, and eventually become fully fledged philosophical summas in the workof Fakhr al-Din al-Razi. Griffel's examination of the different methods of kalam and hikma demonstrate both the coherence and ambiguity of a Muslim post-classical philosopher's oeuvre.A work of extraordinary breadth and depth, The Formation of Post-Classical Philosophy in Islam will be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Philosophy or the history of Islam.
