Entries by simar

Realizing Islam: The Tijaniyya in North Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Muslim World – Zachary Valentine 

Abstract: Studies on eighteenth-century Islamic intellectual history tend to highlight the Wahhabi movement or “fundamentalist” movements. Few studies oer insights into less understood—though by no means less influential scholarly currents. One such book is Zachary Valentine Wright’s Realizing Islam The Tijaniyya in North Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Muslim World Focusing on the knowledge production of the modern Tijani Sufi order—one of the […]

An Elegy for Gaza

This poem was written to mourn the thousands of people killed in Gaza and millions more whose lives still hang in the balance. The poem references locations in Gaza as well as the Qur’an, the mu’allaqa of Imru’l-Qays, Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “Silence for the Sake of Gaza,”  and Dan Heymann’s anti-apartheid song, “Weeping.”

Decolonizing Quranic Studies –  Joseph E. B. Lumbard

Abstract: The legacy of colonialism continues to influence the analysis of the Quran in the Euro-American academy. While Muslim lands are no longer directly colonized, intellectual colonialism continues to prevail in the privileging of Eurocentric systems of knowledge production to the detriment and even exclusion of modes of analysis that developed in the Islamic world […]

Farghānī on the Muhammadan Reality – William C. Chittick

Abstract: Perhaps the closest parallel to the Johannine Logos in Islam is found in the notion of the “Muhammadan Reality” (al-ḥaqīqat al-muḥammadiyya). The term was probably first used by Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240), but the earliest detailed explanation of what it implies was provided by Saʿīd ibn Aḥmad Farghānī (d. 1300), an outstanding student of […]

The Student and the Sage – Mohammed Rustom

Abstract: Plagued by the problem of evil, a student of philosophy and religion finds himself in great despair, with many more annoying questions than satisfying answers. The student passes by a certain ḥakīm, or sage, as he takes his usual route to his early morning philosophy of religion seminar. Drawn towards the sage’s luminous presence, […]