Download or read book Sufi Institutions written by Alexandre Papas and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-11-30 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume describes the social and practical aspects of Islamic mysticism (Sufism) across centuries and geographical regions. Its authors seek to transcend ethereal, essentialist and “spiritualizing” approaches to Sufism, on the one hand, and purely pragmatic and materialistic explanations of its origins and history, on the other. Covering five topics (Sufism’s economy, social role of Sufis, Sufi spaces, politics, and organization), the volume shows that mystics have been active socio-religious agents who could skillfully adjust to the conditions of their time and place, while also managing to forge an alternative way of living, worshiping and thinking. Basing themselves on the most recent research on Sufi institutions, the contributors to this volume substantially expand our understanding of the vicissitudes of Sufism by paying special attention to its organizational and economic dimensions, as well as complex and often ambivalent relations between Sufis and the societies in which they played a wide variety of important and sometimes critical roles. Contributors are Mehran Afshari, Ismail Fajrie Alatas, Semih Ceyhan, Rachida Chih, Nathalie Clayer, David Cook, Stéphane A. Dudoignon, Daphna Ephrat, Peyvand Firouzeh, Nathan Hofer, Hussain Ahmad Khan, Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, Richard McGregor, Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, Alexandre Papas, Luca Patrizi, Paulo G. Pinto, Adam Sabra, Mark Sedgwick, Jean-Jacques Thibon, Knut S. Vikør and Neguin Yavari

Download or read book Sufi City written by Eric Ross and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2006 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book about contemporary urban design, a metaphysical worldview and a cultural process that transcends the pre-colonial/colonial/post-colonial divides. Sufi City: Urban Design and Archetypes in Touba is a geographical study of the modern Muslim holy city of Touba in Senegal, capital of the Mouride Sufi order. Touba was founded in 1887 by a Sufi shaykh in a moment of mysticillumination. Since the death of the founder in 1927, the Mouride order has designed and built the entire city. Touba is named for Tûbâ, the "Tree of Paradise" of Islamic tradition. This archetypal tree articulates Islamic conceptions of righteous life on earth, divine judgment, and access to the Hereafter; the city of Touba actualizes this spiritual construct. Important aspects of its configuration, such as the vertical and horizontal alignment of its monumental central shrine complex, its radiating avenues and encircling ring roads, and the actual trees that mark its landscape relate directly to the archetypal tree of Sufi theosophy. The relationship between the spiritualarchetype and its earthly actualization as a city is explained by recourse to Sufi methodology. The book employs a semiotic analysis of urban form, cartography, hermeneutics, field investigation and analysis of satellite imagery in order to relate contemporary urban design issues to overarching metaphysical concepts. Sufi City also explores the history of urban networks in Senegal since the emergence of autonomous Muslim towns in the seventeenth century. Finally, the layout of Senegal's modern Sufi cities is related to the monumental palaver trees that marked that country's historic settlements. Eric S. Ross is a cultural and urban geographer who holds a degree inIslamic Studies. Since 1998 he has been Assistant Professor of Geography at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco. Apart from research on Sufi orders and Muslim towns in Senegal, he has studied cultural tourism and urban planning in Morocco.

Download or read book A Saint in the City written by Allen F. Roberts and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Saint in the Cityexamines the elaborate visual culture of the Mourides, a Senegalese Sufi movement based upon the mystical teachings of Sheikh Amadou Bamba (1953-1927). In the boldly visual city of Dakar, images abound despite the fact that Senegal is largely a Muslim country. Vibrant street murals, calligraphy and calligrams, didactic posters, drawings that protect and heal, advertising images, colourful clothing, Web sites, intricate glass paintings, and innovative architecture all attest to the transformative potency that expressive culture has for Mourides. One image is ubiquitous throughout urban Senegal: the portrait of Sheikh Amadou Bamba, based upon a colonial photograph from 1913. Sacred images "work" for Mourides, and as Bamba is a saint (Wali Allah, or "Friend of God" in Arabic), his portrait actively conveys powerful blessings called baraka that help people to address everyday difficulties, challenges, and goals.The Mouride Way is observed by over four million Senegalese and thousands more around the globe including increasing numbers of African Americans and others converting to this most African of Islamic paths. Amadou Bamba's pacifism, dignity, and self-reliance, as well as his emphasis on the sanctity of work, offer a view of Islam quite different from those currently suggested by Western media. Indeed,A Saint in the Cityreminds us that there are many faces of Islam in Africa and throughout the world. It also assists readers to reconsider misconceptions concerning the prohibition of images in Islam in light of the explosion of visual culture derived from a single photograph of Sheikh Amadou Bamba.A Saint in the Citygrows from a decade of interdisciplinary research and focuses upon nine contemporary artists who base their works upon the spiritual teachings of Amadou Bamba, regardless of their particular backgrounds, training, or styles. The book boldly transgresses the boundaries normally enforced between local and global, fine and popular arts, gallery and streets, historical and contemporary circumstances. An emphasis upon Mouride artists' own voices further decenters the narrative.Allen F. Roberts is professor of world arts and cultures and director of the James S. Coleman African Studies Center at UCLA. Mary Nooter Roberts is deputy director and chief curator of the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History.

Download or read book Medicine and the Saints written by Ellen J. Amster and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2013-08-15 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The colonial encounter between France and Morocco in the late nineteenth century took place not only in the political realm but also in the realm of medicine. Because the body politic and the physical body are intimately linked, French efforts to colonize Morocco took place in and through the body. Starting from this original premise, Medicine and the Saints traces a history of colonial embodiment in Morocco through a series of medical encounters between the Islamic sultanate of Morocco and the Republic of France from 1877 to 1956. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources in both French and Arabic, Ellen Amster investigates the positivist ambitions of French colonial doctors, sociologists, philologists, and historians; the social history of the encounters and transformations occasioned by French medical interventions; and the ways in which Moroccan nationalists ultimately appropriated a French model of modernity to invent the independent nation-state. Each chapter of the book addresses a different problem in the history of medicine: international espionage and a doctor's murder; disease and revolt in Moroccan cities; a battle for authority between doctors and Muslim midwives; and the search for national identity in the welfare state. This research reveals how Moroccans ingested and digested French science and used it to create a nationalist movement and Islamist politics, and to understand disease and health. In the colonial encounter, the Muslim body became a seat of subjectivity, the place from which individuals contested and redefined the political.

Download or read book Jihad in the City written by Raphaël Lefèvre and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-06 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tawhid was a militant Islamist group which implemented Islamic law at gunpoint in the Lebanese city of Tripoli during the 1980s. In retrospect, some have called it 'the first ISIS-style Emirate'. Drawing on two hundred interviews with Islamist fighters and their mortal enemies, as well as on a trove of new archival material, Raphaël Lefèvre provides a comprehensive account of this Islamist group. He shows how they featured religious ideologues determined to turn Lebanon into an Islamic Republic, yet also included Tripolitan rebels of all stripes, neighbourhood strongmen with scores to settle, local subalterns seeking social revenge as well as profit-driven gangsters, who each tried to steer Tawhid's exercise of violence to their advantage. Providing a detailed understanding of the multi-faceted processes through which Tawhid emerged in 1982, implemented its 'Emirate' and suddenly collapsed in 1985, this is a story that shows how militant Islamist groups are impacted by their grand ideology as much as by local contexts – with crucial lessons for understanding social movements, rebel groups and terrorist organizations elsewhere too.

Download or read book Sufi Encounters written by Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 809 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unparalleled exploration of Sufism as it is practised around the world, describing meetings with today's enlightened teachers as well as including wonderfully inspiring translations of the great Sufi masters of the past. Ultimately, this book acts as a guide to the Sufi path and offers wise insight into the meaning and purpose of life. A compelling view of Sufi history together with vivid personal remembrances of living mystics. This is an inspiring and at the same time beautifully subtle book, with light-filled insights on every page." – Saadi Shakur Chishti, author of The Sufi Book of Life The Sufi path described in this book leads the seeker past ordinary states of consciousness towards a new experience of infinitude that is the source of the universe. In this stage there is no duality or otherness, but instead infinitude, the Original Oneness, from which all dualities and attributes emanate. The book is at once an autobiography, a didactic treatise and a literary opus full of wonderful translations of the words of earlier Sufis, as well as the author's own poetry. It describes Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri’s life quest to connect today’s world with classical times, especially through his meetings with enlightened Sufis all over the globe. Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri also addresses profound Sufi teachings concerning the nature of humankind, the cosmos and God, using clear and simple language to address difficult doctrinal issues as only a master who has digested fully such knowledge could do. The book also reveals much about the present-day Islamic world where, despite the tragedies that are to be seen everywhere, tradition and spirituality survive. This is a metaphysical and spiritual guide to the Sufi path that ultimately offers insight into the meaning and purpose of life.

Download or read book The Journeys of a Taymiyyan Sufi written by Arjan Post and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Journeys of a Taymiyyan Sufi explores the life and teachings of ʿImād al-Dīn Aḥmad al-Wāsiṭī (d. 711/1311), a little-known Ḥanbalī Sufi master from the circle of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328). The first part of this book follows al-Wāsiṭī’s physical journey in search of spiritual guidance through a critical study of his autobiographical writings. This provides unique insights into the Rifāʿiyya, the Shādhiliyya, and the school of Ibn ʿArabī, several manifestations of Sufism that he encountered as he travelled from Wāsiṭ to Baghdad, Alexandria, and Cairo. Part I closes with his final destination, Damascus, where his membership of Ibn Taymiyya’s circle and his role as a Sufi teacher is closely examined. The second part focuses on al-Wāsiṭī’s spiritual journey through a study of his Sufi writings, which convey the distinct type of traditionalist Sufism that he taught in early eighth/fourteenth-century Damascus. Besides providing an overview of the spiritual path unto God from beginning to end as he formulated it, this reveals an exceptional interplay between Sufi theory and traditionalist theology.

Download or read book Cities and Saints Sufism and the Transformation of Urban Space in Medieval Anatolia written by and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Sufi Courtyard written by Sadia Dehlvi and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-03-05 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover the history of India's capital city through the fascinating lives and teachings of its Sufi saints The Sufi Courtyard takes you on a journey through the famous and lesser-known dargahs of Delhi. From the first Sufi centre established in Mehrauli by Khwaja Qutub Bakhtiar Kaki during the early days of the Delhi Sultanate to later nineteenth century Sufi retreats in the city, the author explores the spiritual, cultural and historical legacy of the Delhi Sufis, making this book as much about Delhi as it is about Sufism. For centuries, the dargahs of Delhi have attracted large numbers of devotees belonging to different countries, faiths and backgrounds who seek spiritual solace and grant of their wishes. The magnetism of dargahs emanates from the personalities of the extraordinary Sufis buried in the premises. Through a simple narrative, Sadia Dehlvi brings to life the philosophies and stories of their lives.

Download or read book Between East and West written by Muge Galin and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1997-07-31 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considers how Lessing's exposure to a particular aspect of tasawwuf, the classical Sufi Way, has shaped her work. Impresses upon the reader the degree to which Lessing is seriously offering her space-fiction utopias as plausible and even necessary alternatives to our present Western ways of life.

Download or read book Sufi Bodies written by Shahzad Bashir and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Bashir weaves a rich history of Sufi Islam around the depiction of bodily actions in Sufi literature and miniature paintings produced circa 1300-1500 CE. Focusing on the Persianate societies of Iran and Central Asia, he explores medieval Sufis' conception of the human body as the primary shuttle between interior (batin) and exterior (zahir) realities with particular attention to three arenas: religious activity in the form of rituals, rules of etiquette, asceticism, and a universal hierarchy of saints; the deep imprint of Persian poetic paradigms on the articulation of love, desire, and gender; and the reputation of Sufi masters for working miracles, which empowered them in all domains of social activity. Bashir ultimately offers a new methodology for extracting historical information from religious narratives"--Cover p. [4].

Download or read book Prayer in the City written by Patrick A. Desplat and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2014-03-31 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume envisions social practices surrounding mosques, shrines and public spaces in urban contexts as a window on the diverse ways in which Muslims in different regional and historical settings imagine, experience, and inhabit places and spaces as »sacred«. Unlike most studies on Muslim communities, this volume focuses on cultural, material and sensuous practices and urban everyday experience. Drawing on a range of analytical perspectives, the contributions examine spatial practices in Muslim societies from an interdisciplinary perspective, an approach which has been widely neglected both in Islamic studies and social sciences.

Download or read book Introduction to Sufi Doctrine written by Titus Burckhardt and published by World Wisdom, Inc. This book was released on 2008 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Titus Burckhardt's masterpiece, Introduction to Sufi Doctrine, explores the essence of Islamic mysticism, or Sufism, presenting its central doctrines and methods to a Western audience in a highly intelligible form.

Download or read book Sufism written by Gholamali Haddad Adel and published by EWI Press. This book was released on 2012-08-30 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sufism is one of the most ancient and widespread Islamic movements. A broad term, it is used to refer to a mystical and inward approach to faith. However, some Sufi groups have also had a significant impact on political or social developments in the Islamic world. This book discusses Sufism in virtually all regions of the Islamic world. Notable Sufi orders throughout history are described with a focus on their history, leaders, and distinguishing features. The relationship between Sufism and pre-Islamic traditions as well as other religions is also explored. This book is part of a series of translations from the Encyclopaedia of the World of Islam (EWI) which was originally compiled in Persian. Other entries from this encyclopaedia which are available in English include Hadith, Hawza-yi ‘Ilmiyya, History and Historiography, Muslim Organisations, Political Parties, Qur’anic Exegeses, and Education in the Islamic Civilisation.

Download or read book Sufi Warrior Saints written by Harry S. Neale and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-03-24 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a thematic collection of hagiographical stories of Sufi saints, often referred to as friends of Gods. Despite the diverse wealth of Sufi works, much of the rich, global and centuries old literature of Sufi warrior-saints, has yet to be translated into English. Examining hagiographical depictions of Sufi mujahids, Neale corrects frequent misunderstandings of the term jihad in relation to Sufi thought and practice. Using Sufi hagiography, treatises, travel narratives and Muslim histories, each chapter comprises the lives of Sufi saints during significant historical events, from the Crusades to the Mongol Invasion and in regions ranging from Islamic Spain to North Africa and India. Using Persian and Arabic sources, this compendium of translated hagiographies gives us a sense of the range, themes and global dissemination of the Sufi literature on war and heroism.

Download or read book Under the Sufi s Cloak written by Mohammad Ali Jamnia and published by Writers Inc. International. This book was released on 1995 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Night and Day written by Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Night and Day (1934), an unfinished dilogy by Uzbek author Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon, gives readers a glimpse into the everyday struggles of men and women in Russian imperial Turkestan. More than just historical prose, Cho’lpon’s magnum opus reads as poetic elegy and turns on dramatic irony. Though Night, the first and only extant book of the dilogy, depicts the terrible fate of a young girl condemned to marry a sexual glutton, nothing is what it seems. Readers find themselves questioning the nature of Russian colonialism, resistance to it, and even the intentions of the author, whose life and the second book of his dilogy, Day, were lost to Stalinist terror.