Download or read book Sufism written by Alexander Knysh and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pathbreaking history of Sufism, from the earliest centuries of Islam to the present After centuries as the most important ascetic-mystical strand of Islam, Sufism saw a sharp decline in the twentieth century, only to experience a stunning revival in recent decades. In this comprehensive new history of Sufism from the earliest centuries of Islam to today, Alexander Knysh, a leading expert on the subject, reveals the tradition in all its richness. Knysh explores how Sufism has been viewed by both insiders and outsiders since its inception. He examines the key aspects of Sufism, from definitions and discourses to leadership, institutions, and practices. He devotes special attention to Sufi approaches to the Qur’an, drawing parallels with similar uses of scripture in Judaism and Christianity. He traces how Sufism grew from a set of simple moral-ethical precepts into a sophisticated tradition with professional Sufi masters (shaykhs) who became powerful players in Muslim public life but whose authority was challenged by those advocating the equality of all Muslims before God. Knysh also examines the roots of the ongoing conflict between the Sufis and their fundamentalist critics, the Salafis—a major fact of Muslim life today. Based on a wealth of primary and secondary sources, Sufism is an indispensable account of a vital aspect of Islam.
Download or read book Sufi Essays written by Seyyed Hossein Nasr and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1972-01-01 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book combines scholarly research into certain aspect of Sufi doctrines and history with a penetrating account of the spiritual and metaphysical message and significance of Sufism as a living spiritual tradition. In an original discussion, unlike anything that has appeared before in studies of Sufism, the author places special accent on the pertinence of Sufi teachings to the most acute contemporary problems. The book addresses itself to both the ever-increasing Western public interested in Sufism and to the Western-educated Muslim interested in his own spiritual heritage. Dr. Nasr draws on his intimate knowledge of the Sufi literature in Arabic and Persian as well as his first-hand knowledge of Sufi tradition itself to produce this further volume in his numerous studies on the different facets of Islam.
Download or read book Sufi Thought and Action written by Idries Shah and published by Octagon Press Ltd. This book was released on 1990 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an anthology of the extraordinary diversity of Sufi ideas and activities in many countries and cultures today. Nothing approaching this kind of survey has ever been assembled. In addition to first-hand accounts of Sufi learning methods, subjects covered include the Sufi meeting place, avoiding imitators, Sufi work enterprises, the idea of organic enterprises, entry into a Sufi group, the Sufi Adept and the projection of mind, extra-sensory perception, what the Sufis do not want us to know, and more.
Download or read book Attar and the Persian Sufi Tradition written by L. Lewisohn and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2006-11-22 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Farid al-Din Attar (d. 1221) was the principal Muslim religious poet of the second half of the twelfth century. Best known for his masterpiece "Mantiq al-tayr", or "The Conference of Birds", his verse is still considered to be the finest example of Sufi love poetry in the Persian language after that of Rumi. Distinguished by their provocative and radical theology of love, many lines of Attar's epics and lyrics are cited independently of their poems as maxims in their own right. These pithy, paradoxical statements are still known by heart and sung by minstrels throughout Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and wherever Persian is spoken or understood, such as in the lands of the Indo-Pakistani Subcontinent. Designed to take its place alongside "The Ocean of the Soul", the classic study of Attar by Hellmut Ritter, this volume offers the most comprehensive survey of Attar's literary works to date, and situates his poetry and prose within the wider context of the Persian Sufi tradition. The essays in the volume are grouped in three sections, and feature contributions by sixteen scholars from North America, Europe and Iran, which illustrate, from a variety of critical prespectives, the full range of Attar's monumental achievement. They show how and why Attar's poetical work, as well as his mystical doctrines, came to wield such tremendous and formative influence over the whole of Persian Sufism.
Download or read book Popular Sufism in Eastern Europe written by H T Norris and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-01-24 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a detailed description of the various Sufi orders and movements which entered into the Balkans, the Crimean peninsula and other parts of Eastern Europe following the Ottoman conquests. Many of the Sufis came from Christian societies, principally from an Eastern Orthodox background, but others, such as the Bosnians, from churches that were accused or suspected of heterodoxy of belief and of antinomianism. These beliefs, together with pre-Christian beliefs, influenced by Manicheanism, Dualism and pantheism, left their mark on Sufi Islam. The book concentrates on the Bosnians, Bulgarians, Albanians and Tatars. Their Sufism reflects their national aspirations, and their writings fuse their mysticism, national faith and folklore in a Sufism which is quite distinct from that in other regions of the Muslim world.
Download or read book Avicenna and I written by Manoucher Parvin and published by Ibex Publishers, Inc.. This book was released on 2006 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Avicenna and I" is a love saga spanning here and the hereafter; it is a journey of spirits toward immortality. Together two lovers explore the city of Hamadan in north-west of Iran, one of the oldest residences of civilisation, where the tomb of one of history's most remarkable thinkers, Avicenna, lies. To ascend from what they are to what they dream to be, the lovers seek and find the spirit of Avicenna. From him-the prince of medicine and the leading wise man-they learn how to heal the body, the mind, the spirit and even love, and how to tend to a wounded nature. They discover the path to immortality. "Avicenna and I" strips history naked of its pretensions and shatters the myth of the East as a place of unreason-deserving to be subjugated by the West -- and establishes that the Italian Renaissance was merely a continuation of the Persian Renaissance which occurred in the Golden Era of Avicenna. In this unforgettable novel the future and the past recreate one another and set the present afire with passion for immortal wisdom, and immortal love and truth. The reader is invited to view the mind and the universe, intuition and reason, science and faith, and life and death with a profoundly new understanding. The trials and tribulations of the characters, even history, on their transcendental journey are recounted with a pen searching for the beginning and the end of everything -- for the answers God never created. So humans must invent the answers as we have invented many things God did not create. This novel is a chapter in the book of answers.
Download or read book Call and Response written by Louis Rogers and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2006-11 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The teachings of the great spiritual masters have a strange effect on us. Inspirational, yes, to the extent that we understand them; devotional fervor, certainly, to the degree that we can live it; moral rectitude and ethical vigilance, undoubtedly, providing we can rationalize our doubts, sublimate our fears and benignly dismiss those suggestions that we give up the things of this world for those of the next. We feel an inner impulse to respond to the teachings, taking either the low road by walking a Sunday path, or the high roads of monastic isolation or mindfully self-aware spiritual righteousness. Or perhaps any road one wishes that lies between these two extremes of passion and commitment. But the impulse to respond is genuine and deeply moving, and Rumi's invitation to the Divine Caravan is compelling. Despite the pull and attachment of secular life that is constant throughout time and compelling in any era, he offers continual affirmation that no matter what the diversions, no matter how often we fail, the invitation is always open. The spiritual door to the house of God is never closed. Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times. Come, come yet again, come.
Download or read book Jawanmardi written by Lloyd Ridgeon and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-23 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first English translation of 3 major texts in medieval Sufi ethics.
Download or read book The Sufi Quarterly written by and published by . This book was released on 1925 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Arabic Disclosures written by Muhsin J. al-Musawi and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2022-06-15 with total page 682 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arabic Disclosures presents readers with a comparative analysis of Arabic postcolonial autobiographical writing. In Arabic Disclosures Muhsin J. al-Musawi investigates the genre of autobiography within the modern tradition of Arabic literary writing from the early 1920s to the present. Al-Musawi notes in the introduction that the purpose of this work is not to survey the entirety of autobiographical writing in modern Arabic but rather to apply a rigorously identified set of characteristics and approaches culled from a variety of theoretical studies of the genre to a particular set of autobiographical works in Arabic, selected for their different methodologies, varying historical contexts within which they were conceived and written, and the equally varied lives experienced by the authors involved. The book begins in the larger context of autobiographical space, where the theories of Bourdieu, Bachelard, Bakhtin, and Lefebvre are laid out, and then considers the multiple ways in which a postcolonial awareness of space has impacted the writings of many of the authors whose works are examined. Organized chronologically, al-Musawi begins with the earliest modern example of autobiographical work in Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s book, translated into English as The Stream of Days. Al-Musawi studies some of the major pioneers in the development of modern Arabic thought and literary expression: Jurjī Zaydān, Mīkḫāˀīl Nuˁaymah, Aḥmad Amīn, Salāmah Mūsā, Sayyid Quṭb, and untranslated works by the prominent critic and scholar Ḥammādī Ṣammūd, the novelist ʿĀliah Mamdūḥ, and others. He also examines the autobiographies of a number of women, including Nawāl al-Saʿdāwī and Fadwā Ṭūqān, and fiction writers. The book draws a map of Arab thought and culture in its multiple engagements with other cultures and will be useful for scholars and students of comparative literature, Arabic studies, and Middle Eastern studies, intellectual thought, and history.
Download or read book The Rose and the Lotus written by Yousef Daoud and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2009-10-31 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rose and the Lotus is a compendium of explorations of two of the world's largest wisdom traditions, Sufism and Buddhism, and what the practitioners of these two approaches have in common and may have to learn from each other. It includes chapters on important teaching texts, ancient and modern and the clues they give for practice, interviews with esteemed teachers such as Shaikh Kabir Helminski, Roshi Bernie Glassman, Tibetan philosopher Geshe Sonam Rinchen, as well as memories and reflections on teachers such as Javad Nurbakhsh, Idries Shah, and Inayat Khan. It includes a new look at the mystic works of Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing and their usefulness in contemplation practice. Yousef Daoud PhD, also published as Joe Martin, has been a practitioner of both Sufism and Buddhism. The author of eight books, he teaches meditation as well as spiritual performance practice. Though Sufism and Buddhism have long been treated as religious manifestations, in this fascinating book, Yousef Daoud (Joe) Martin places them squarely among the great wisdom traditions and explores a wide variety of topics relating to both Sufism and Buddhism. One of the most prolific authors for the journal "SUFI", he has done a real service for anyone concerned with spirituality and gnosis. -- Professor Jeffrey Rothschild, C.U.N.Y., Editor, SUFI On Rumi's MATHNAVI: A Stage Adaptation "Absolutely remarkable and memorable! It was as if I had gone to a party, and had been offered an entire pot of gourmet food ... but with every new bite I felt even hungrier [It] was endowed with a complex simplicity or a simple complexity! It was all very inspiring and enlightening ... It felt as if the actors analyzed Rumi's stories, lifting the veils one after another." --- Lida Saeedian, Author and co- translator of The Pocket Rumi On Parabola: Shorter Fictions "...through the tightly structured geometry of this metaphorically rich [work is] recognition of the search we undertake to fix a place for ourselves ... and try to make sense of a confusing, alienating and often combative world." Cheryl Pallant, High Performance
Download or read book A Psychology of Early Sufi Sam written by Kenneth S. Avery and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-08-05 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Avery explores the psychology of altered states among the early Sufis. It examines samâ` - listening to ritual recitation, music and certain other aural phenomena - and its effect in inducing unusual states of consciousness and behaviours. The focus is on the earliest personalities of the Islamic mystical tradition, as mediated by texts from the tenth to the twelfth centuries C.E. These unusual states are interpreted in the light of current research in Western psychology, and also in terms of their integration into historical Islamic culture. A Psychology of Early Sufi Samâ` provides new insights into the work of five Sufi authors, and a fresh approach to the relation between historical accounts of altered states and current psychological thinking.
Download or read book Sufi Heirs of the Prophet written by Arthur F. Buehler and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2022-10-18 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the sources and evolution of personal authority in one Islamic society Sufi Heirs of the Prophet explores the multifaceted development of personal authority in Islamic societies by tracing the transformation of one mystical sufi lineage in colonial India, the Naqshbandiyya. Arthur F. Buehler isolates four sources of personal authority evident in the practices of the Naqshbandiyya—lineage, spiritual traveling, status as a Prophetic exemplar, and the transmission of religious knowledge—to demonstrate how Muslim religious leaders have exercised charismatic leadership through their association with the most compelling of personal Islamic symbols, the Prophet Muhammad. Buehler clarifies the institutional structure of sufism, analyzes overlapping configurations of personal sufi authority, and details how and why revivalist Indian Naqshbandis abandoned spiritual practices that had sustained their predecessors for more than five centuries. He looks specifically at the role of Jama'at 'Ali Shah (d. 1951) to explain current Naqshbandi practices.
Download or read book Living Sufism in North America written by William Rory Dickson and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2015-09-11 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, William Rory Dickson explores Sufism as a developing tradition in North America, one that exists in diverse and beguiling forms. Sufism's broad-minded traditions of philosophy, poetry, and spiritual practice infused Islamic civilization for centuries and drew the attention of interested Westerners. By the early twentieth century, Sufism was being practiced in North America. Today's North American Sufism can appear either explicitly Islamic or seemingly devoid of Islamic religiosity. Dickson provides indispensable background on Sufism's relation to Islamic orthodoxy and to Western esoteric traditions, and its historical development in North America. The book goes on to chart the directions that North American Sufism is currently taking, directions largely chosen by Sufi leaders. The views of ten North American Sufi leaders are explored in depth and their perspectives on Islam, authority, gender, and tradition are put in conversation with one another. A more detailed picture of North American Sufism emerges, challenging previous scholarly classifications of Sufi groups, and highlighting Sufism's fluidity, diversity, and dynamism.
Download or read book Islamic Sufism written by Vāḥid Bak̲h̲sh Siyāl and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Biographical Encyclopaedia of Sufis written by N. Hanif and published by Sarup & Sons. This book was released on 2000 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
