Download or read book Understanding Ismailism written by Akbarally Meherally and published by Burnaby, B.C. : A.M. Trust. This book was released on 1988 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Short History of the Ismailis written by Farhad Daftary and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite being one of the key Shi'i Muslim communities, the Ismailis were until recently studied primarily on the basis of the accounts of their enemies. This new introduction is the first to be based on modern scholarship, taking account of recently recovered Ismaili texts. It covers all the main developments in the major phases of Ismaili history, from the early formative period, through the Fatamid golden age and the Alamut and post-Alamut periods, to more recent history. Dealing only with the most important historical developments, this is a comprehensive and accessible survey for all newcomers to the subject.
Download or read book Understanding Sharia written by Raficq S. Abdulla and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sharia has been a source of misunderstanding and misconception in both the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. Understanding Sharia: Islamic Law in a Globalised World sets out to explore the reality of sharia, contextualising its development in the early centuries of Islam and showing how it evolved in line with historical and social circumstances. The authors, Raficq S. Abdulla and Mohamed M. Keshavjee, both British-trained lawyers, argue that sharia and the positive law flowing from it, known as fiqh, have never been an exclusive legal system or a fixed set of beliefs.
Download or read book Ismailism and Islam in Modern South Asia written by Soumen Mukherjee and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the evolution of a Shia Ismaili identity in late colonial South Asia.
Download or read book Faith and World written by Mohammad N. Miraly and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2016-09-30 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faith and World explores the way contemporary Ismaili institutions articulate the ethics of the Qur’an using the language of modern liberal discourse. It is the fi rst comprehensive study of contemporary Ismaili social and political thought. The Ismailis are a transnational Muslim community headed by the 49th Ismaili Imam, Aga Khan IV, who views liberal pluralism as supporting the tenets of ethical Islamic living in the present day. Contemporary Ismaili thought views the Ismaili tradition as connected to a historical past deriving from Qur’anic principles and the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad and his heirs, the Shi`a Imams. Thus, contemporary Ismailism’s focus on liberal values like democracy, pluralism, and education are seen as contemporary forms of eternal Qur’anic ethical principles. The book furthers Western understanding of Islam, a key to overcoming misconceptions about the interconnected relationships between today’s converging civilizations. Faith and World incorporates the following: • a review of both popular and academic literature about the Aga Khan and the Ismailis; • an exploration and explanation of the essentially Ismaili approach to Qur’anic exegesis; • a survey of the work of the AKDN in Afghanistan, serving as the basis to explore the Aga Khan’s ethical impetus for the existence and work of the network; • a look at the core liberal commitments that inform contemporary Ismaili thought, such as democracy, pluralism, and civic education; and • an examination of the emergence of the transnational Ismaili community and the role of the Imamate in fostering a sense of loyalty and unity among the diverse ethnocultural Ismaili communities.
Download or read book Beyond the Qur an written by David Hollenberg and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2016-10-20 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book-length study of ta'wil, a form of allegorical scriptural interpretation propagated by Ismaili-Shiite missionaries Ismailism, one of the three major branches of Shiism, is best known for ta'wil, an esoteric, allegorizing scriptural exegesis. Beyond the Qur'?n: Early Ismaili ta'wil and the Secrets of the Prophets is the first book-length study of this interpretive genre. Analyzing sources composed by tenth-century Ismaili missionaries in light of social-science theories of cognition and sectarianism, David Hollenberg argues that the missionaries used ta'wil to instill in acolytes a set of symbolic patterns, forms, and "logics." This shared symbolic world bound the community together as it created a gulf between community members and those outside the movement. Hollenberg thus situates ta'wil socially, as an interpretive practice that sustained a community of believers. An important aspect of ta'wil is its unconventional objects of interpretation. Ismaili missionaries mixed Qur'?nic exegesis with interpretation of Torah, Gospels, Greek philosophy, and symbols such as the Christian Cross and Eucharist, as well as Jewish festivals. Previously scholars have speculated that this extra- Qur'?nic ta'wil was intended to convert Jews and Christians to Ismailism. Hollenberg, departing from this view, argues that such interpretations were, like Ismaili interpretations of the Qur'?n, intended for an Ismaili audience, many of whom converted to the movement from other branches of Shiism. Hollenberg argues that through exegesis of these unconventional sources, the missionaries demonstrated that their imam alone could strip the external husk from all manner of sources and show the initiates reality in its pure, unmediated form, an imaginal world to which they alone had access. They also fulfilled the promise that their imam would teach them the secrets behind all religions, a sign that the initial stage of the end of days had commenced. Beyond the Qur'?n contributes to our understanding of early Ismaili doctrine, Fatimid rhetoric, and, more broadly, the use of esoteric literatures in the history of religion.
Download or read book Cyclical Time Ismaili Gnosis written by Henry Corbin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1983. The volume Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis brings together in English translation three of Henry Corbin's richest and most complex studies, originally presented at the Eranos conferences of 1951 and 1954 and another conference in 1956. Each of these three relatively early studies is built around a complex, highly creative 'comparison' of the phenomenological correspondences between texts (often highly fragmentary) from a vast range of spiritual traditions from late Antiquity (including Manichaenism and the sects of Sassanid Iran) - all 'gnostic' in the root Greek sense of that term favoured by Corbin, though not in the narrower historical sense used by most contemporary scholars - and comparable spiritual themes in an equally wide range of Islamic texts eventually preserved in the later Ismaili Shi'i tradition.
Download or read book Ismailism and Islam in Modern South Asia written by Soumen Mukherjee and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the evolution of a Shia Ismaili identity and crucial aspects of the historical forces that conditioned the development of the Muslim modern in late colonial South Asia. It traces the legal process that, since the 1860s, recast a Shia Imami identity for the Ismailis, and explicates the public career of Imam Aga Khan III amid heightened religious internationalism since the late-nineteenth century, the age of 'religious internationals'. It sheds light and elaborates on the enduring legacies of questions such as the Aga's understanding of colonial modernity, his ideas of India, restructured modalities of community governance and the evolution of Imamate-sponsored institutions, key strands in scholarship that characterized the development of the Muslim and Shia Ismaili modern, and Muslim universality vis-à-vis denominational particularities that often transcended the remits of the modular nation and state structure.
Download or read book Mediaeval Isma ili History and Thought written by Farhad Daftary and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-02-22 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents scholarship on Isma`ili history and thought from leading authorities in the field.
Download or read book Beyond the Mosque written by Rizwan Mawani and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-09-19 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I.B. Tauris in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies While mosques are the central house of worship for a majority of Muslims around the world, many of Islam's communities have developed their own distinctive religious spaces. These complementary spaces serve the different cultures, geographies and interpretations of Islam that continue to enrich the Muslim tradition. In this book, Rizwan Mawani encounters diverse communities and their sites of worship, from the mosque and husayniya to the khanaqah and jamatkhana. Readers are introduced to a variety of Muslim spaces, modest and elaborate – their distinct structures and the rituals practised within them, as well as the purposes they serve as community centres and markers of identity. Beyond the Mosque reveals architectural responses to evolving community needs and local environments, from Senegal and China to Iran and India. This illuminating survey celebrates the significant pluralism that characterises the living Muslim tradition today.
Download or read book The Aga Khan Case written by Teena Purohit and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-31 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An overwhelmingly Arab-centric perspective dominates the West’s understanding of Islam and leads to a view of this religion as exclusively Middle Eastern and monolithic. Teena Purohit presses for a reorientation that would conceptualize Islam instead as a heterogeneous religion that has found a variety of expressions in local contexts throughout history. The story she tells of an Ismaili community in colonial India illustrates how much more complex Muslim identity is, and always has been, than the media would have us believe. The Aga Khan Case focuses on a nineteenth-century court case in Bombay that influenced how religious identity was defined in India and subsequently the British Empire. The case arose when a group of Indians known as the Khojas refused to pay tithes to the Aga Khan, a Persian nobleman and hereditary spiritual leader of the Ismailis. The Khojas abided by both Hindu and Muslim customs and did not identify with a single religion prior to the court’s ruling in 1866, when the judge declared them to be converts to Ismaili Islam beholden to the Aga Khan. In her analysis of the ginans, the religious texts of the Khojas that formed the basis of the judge’s decision, Purohit reveals that the religious practices they describe are not derivations of a Middle Eastern Islam but manifestations of a local vernacular one. Purohit suggests that only when we understand Islam as inseparable from the specific cultural milieus in which it flourishes do we fully grasp the meaning of this global religion.
Download or read book Understanding Sharia written by Raficq S. Abdulla and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I.B.Tauris in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies Sharia has been a source of misunderstanding and misconception in both the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. Understanding Sharia: Islamic Law in a Globalised World sets out to explore the reality of sharia, contextualising its development in the early centuries of Islam and showing how it evolved in line with historical and social circumstances. The authors, Raficq S. Abdulla and Mohamed M. Keshavjee, both British-trained lawyers, argue that sharia and the positive law flowing from it, known as fiqh, have never been an exclusive legal system or a fixed set of beliefs. In addition to tracing the history of sharia, the book offers a critique concerning its status today. Sharia is examined with regard to particular issues that are of paramount importance in the contemporary world, such as human rights; criminal penalties, including those dealing with apostasy, blasphemy and adultery, commercial transactions, and bio-medical ethics, amongst other subjects. The authors show that sharia is a legal system underpinned by ethical principles that are open to change in different circumstances and contexts, notwithstanding the claims for `transcendental permanence' made by Islamists. This book encourages new thinking about the history of sharia and its role in the modern world.
Download or read book Devotion Religious Authority and Social Structures in Sindh written by Michel Boivin and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-03-21 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a context of rigidification of religious boundaries, especially between Hinduism and Islam, the book argues that many physical and non-physical sites of religious encountering are still at work, both in Pakistan and in India. In India, the Hindu Sindhis worshipped a god, Jhulelal, who is also venerated in Pakistan as a saint. In Sehwan Sharif, in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, there are Hindu Sufi masters who initiate Muslims to Sufism. This study is the first to involve both Muslim and Hindu communities in a comparative perspective, and to underscore that the process of constructing communities in South Asia follow the same social pattern, the patrilineal lineage (baradari or khandan). The study is based on an array of sources collected in three continents, such as manuscripts, printed and oral sources, as well as artefacts from material cultures, most of which was never published before.
Download or read book Acts of Faith written by Eboo Patel and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a new afterword Acts of Faith is a remarkable account of growing up Muslim in America and coming to believe in religious pluralism, from one of the most prominent faith leaders in the United States. Eboo Patel’s story is a hopeful and moving testament to the power and passion of young people—and of the world-changing potential of an interfaith youth movement.
Download or read book Faith and Ethics written by M. Ali Lakhani and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-12-22 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shi`i Ismaili Muslims are unique in following for centuries a living, hereditary Imam (spiritual leader), whom they believe to be directly descended from the Prophet Muhammad. The Imam's duty has been to guide his community on the basis of Islamic principles adapted to the needs of the time. In this insightful book, M. Ali Lakhani examines how the ideas and actions of the current Ismaili Imam, and fourth Aga Khan, Prince Karim al-Husseini, provide an Islamic response to the challenges that face Muslims in the modern era. Prince Karim's programmes, implemented mainly through the broad institutional framework of the Aga Khan Development Network, are aimed at improving the quality of human life among the disadvantaged, regardless of their religion or ethnicity. Addressing global issues ranging from healthcare and education to culture and civil society, the Aga Khan's initiatives are founded on core Islamic principles and values. This book is the first to provide an extensive survey of the Aga Khan's aspirations, showing how the values of integrity and dignity are at the forefront of his work, with the traditional Muslim concepts of cosmopolitanism and social justice guiding his response to the stark challenges of the modern age. At a time when criticisms and misrepresentation surrounding Islam abound, Faith and Ethics explores the religion's universal principles and values, which the author holds to be central to the spiritual and ethical issues facing both Muslims and non-Muslims in the rapidly changing modern world. The book will be of special interest to scholars researching Islam, Muslim faith and ethics and the Ismailis, and to general readers wanting a deeper understanding of Islam.
Download or read book Syrian Ismailism written by Nasseh Ahmad Mirza and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-24 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a welcome addition to an all too scant literature on the Ismaili communities of Syria. In addition to a wide reading of Arabic sources and a deep familiarity with the existing scholarly literature, Professor Mirza also brings to light new manuscripts illuminating this history. Syrian Ismailism tells the little-known story of the adaptability and survival of Ismailis in Syria in an era which seems as complex and difficult as our own. The late eleventh and twelfth centuries brought severe troubles, including the decline of the Fatimids, divisions among the Ismailis, the Saljuq-Sunni conquest of much of the Middle East, and the Crusades.
Download or read book Religions Mumbai Style written by and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-15 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of ethnographic essays on the city of Mumbai (erstwhile Bombay), the volume questions the city's claim of a 'self-projected' cosmopolitanism by exploring its relationship with religion.
