Maulvi in meditation, Indischer Maler, ca. 1630 Islam holds humans to be a special creation. Ennobled by God, they are His vicegerent on earth and look forward to a sublime destiny. Their ancestor Adam was the exalted creature in whose direction God ordered the angels to prostrate, even while his splendor drew the envy of […]
Abstract In this paper, I discuss Ibn ʿArabī’s view on the nature of the Qur’ānic text, as it appears through its relation to the central notion of “perplexity” (ḥayra). My aim is to show how the Shaykh al-Akbar uses this notion to define the peculiar nature of the Qur’ānic language and its very purpose, and […]
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Abstract: Ḥadīth literature is rich with its references to women from the ancient past as well as those from the Prophet Muḥammad’s contemporary period. A study of the way in which women are portrayed and referenced in ḥadīth texts provides a unique glimpse into the roles women played for the narrators of these prophetic traditions. […]
Abstract: The search for knowledge has been central to the Islamic tradition from its inception in the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (ahadith). The injunctions to obtain knowledge and contemplate the signs of God in all things undergird a culture of ultimate questions in which there was an underlying epistemic unity among […]
Ayn al-Qud~t on Satan as Tragic Lover Abstract: Like every student of Sufism, I have always benefited from Professor Danner’s scholarship, particularly his pathbreaking translation of and commentary upon Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh’s Ḥikam or Aphorisms. I also spent a good deal of time as a graduate student reading his 1970 Harvard University PhD thesis on […]
Muhammad Faruque is the Inayat Malik Assistant Professor and a Taft Center Fellow at the University of Cincinnati and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University. He is the author of Sculpting the Self: Islam, Selfhood, and Human Flourishing (2021).
“This paper introduces Ibn ʿArabī’s depictions of, encounters with, and responses to the preeminent Islamic theological school, Muʿtazilism. Ibn ʿArabī fourished during the eclipse of Muʿtazilism, yet his corpus demonstrates close familiarity with their theological claims. Therefore an analysis of his depic- tions of Muʿtazilism gives us important insights on the trans- mission and reception […]
“Contemporary Islamic legal studies—both inside and outside the Muslim world— commonly relies upon a secular distortion of law. In this article, I use translation as a metonym for secular transformations and, accordingly, I will demonstrate how secular ideology translates the Islamic tradition. A secular translation converts the Islamic tra- dition into “religion” (the non-secular) and […]
“The author highlights three interrelated aspects of Jewish law: that it is a non-state legal tradi- tion, it is neither secular nor religious, and its application within Israeli law results in a secular hybridization of Jewish law. That is, Hebrew law combines aspects of the Jewish tradition and secularism. Using historicist and critical approaches, the […]
“As the blessed Prophet’s words indicate, the cloud is connected to the “space” wherein God resides, and which transforms into the rain of mercy (raḥma) that pervades all things. As a metaphysical reality, Ibn ʿArabī explains that the primordial Cloud (ʿamāʾ) is the ontological, basis of the Muhammadan Reality (ḥaqīqa Muḥammadiyya) and directly corresponds to […]