Entries by simar

The Tranquility of Remembrance (From Razi to Ibn al-Qayyim) in I of the Heart (Leiden: Brill, 2025), 183-198. Edited by Muhammad U. Faruque, Atif Khalil, Mohammed Rustom

At its heart, prayer is the soul’s effort to communicate with and build a relationship with its Divine origin. Viewed this way, Islam recognizes three primary modes of prayer. The first is the canonical, ritual prayer known as ṣalāt. This is the familiar practice involving specific movements, postures, and recited verses performed by devout Muslims at […]

Wisdom as the Sublime Measure: A New Epistemology of Hikma – By Mukhtar H Ali

This paper advances a new epistemology of ḥikma (wisdom) by reexamining its function as a foundational mode of knowing in the Islamic tradition. Drawing upon Qurʾānic usage, Prophetic sayings, classical philosophical definitions, and Sufi insights, the study argues that ḥikma is not merely eloquent or ethical speech, but a self-evident and sublime truth that transcends […]

Alienation and the Quest for Meaning By Samuel Bendeck Sotillos

By Samuel Bendeck Sotillos The widespread estrangement felt by human beings in the present day has led to what has been called an “epidemic of loneliness.” Although a plethora of studies have explored this theme in an attempt to address the problem, effective solutions have proved elusive. Some will no doubt claim that alienation has always […]

Inscriptions of Wisdom: The Sufism of Ibn al-ʿArabī in the Mirror of Jāmī By Mukhtar H Ali

Inscriptions of Wisdom brings together, for the first time in English, two pivotal Sufi texts that illuminate Ibn al-ʿArabī’s (d. 1240) celebrated work Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam. The first, Naqsh al-Fuṣūṣ (The Inscription of the Fuṣūṣ), is Ibn al-ʿArabī’s own distillation of Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, presenting a concise yet profound articulation of its core teachings. The second, Naqd […]

Humility, Self-Naughting, and Self-Transcendence: A View from the Islamic Mystical Tradition, in Humility: A History, ed. J. Steinberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025), 93-106 By Atif Khalil

Muslims understand humility (Arabic: khushu’ /tawadu’) to be inseparable from the servitude to God (‘ubudiyya) that is demanded of them by their faith. The defining place of the virtue in Islamic ethics is underscored by the fact that the sin of the two archetypes of wrongdoing in the Quran–Pharoah and Iblis (Satan)–was pride. With that […]

From one empire to the next: The reconfigurations of “Indian” literatures from Persian to English translations By Claire Gallien

This article focuses on the first translations of Sanskrit literature into English in the late eighteenth century and how they can be contrasted with pre-existing cultures of translation in India, and in particular with Mughal precedents. Following a brief survey of Sanskrit and Persian theories of translation, the article offers a study of British reconfigurations […]

The Extension of Reality: The Emergence of Mind-Independent Reality in Islamic Philosophy By Bilal Ibrahim

By Bilal Ibrahim Avicenna’s distinction between external existence and mental existence is seminal to logic and philosophy in the Islamic tradition. This article examines philosophers who depart from Avicenna’s external-mental existence framework. They view the former as failing to support a general analysis of reality and truth, as mental existence is neither necessary nor sufficient for […]

In the End Will be Consciousness: Farghani on the Ontology of the Soul

By Rahim Acar and Hümeyra Karagözoğlu Özturan If some historians have downplayed or sidestepped the identity of conscious- ness and being in Islamic philosophy, this may be because they have paid little attention to the literal meaning of the word wujūd, which is the standard Ara- bic term for being or existence. Dictionaries tell us that the verbal […]

Perceiving Nature: Rūmī on Human Purpose and Cosmic Prayer

How do we perceive the natural world? According to the famous Persian Sufi poet Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (d. 672/1273) the answer to this question tells us not only something about nature but also something about our own humanity. A crucial component of his thought on this matter centers upon the tension between, on the one […]

Tirmidhi’s Kitāb al-‘Ilal – annotated translation By Jonathan Brown

Abū ʿĪsā Muḥammad b. ʿĪsā al-Tirmidhī is one of the most influential figures in the Sunni hadith tradition. Born in about 210/825 near the city of Tirmidh on the northern bank of the Oxus River in modern-day Uzbekistan, he traveled widely in northeastern Iran, Iraq, and the Hejaz to study with the most sought-af ter […]

The Cruelty of the Way and the Afflictions of Dīn: a Study of ʿAttar’s The Speech of the Birds’ Climactic Moment

Farid al-Din ʿAttar’s Mantiq al-tayr (The Speech of the Birds) has arguably the most celebrated conclusion in Persian Sufi allegorical literature: Thirty birds (sī-murgh) discover that they are the sublime entity that they seek, the mythological Sīmurgh. This article provides an analysis that considers this conclusion in light of ʿAttar’s vision of dīn (religion, or […]