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 […]
Following overland and maritime trade routes, early Muslims reached China within a century after the Prophet Muhammad (570-632) lived, when the Chinese and Islamic empires were the superpowers of their day, engaging each other in instances of both competition and collaboration: military, economic and diplomatic. Exchanges between China and the Islamic world have produced significant […]
Islam is widely spread throughout every corner of China, with the Hui people, the largest Muslim ethnic group in China, numbering over 10 million people, serving as its main carrier. Their culture types and local features exhibit great diversity across different provinces. The ceremony of Prophet’s Day or Mawlid al-Nabi in China, as one of […]
This chapter critically engages the transhumanist vision articulated by Ray Kurzweil in works such as The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), The Singularity Is Near (2005), and The Singularity Is Nearer (2024), wherein he predicts an imminent convergence of human and machine intelligence culminating in the advent of artificial superintelligence (ASI). Central to this vision […]
The conference from which the present volume has emerged was entitled Exegetical Crossroads. Unlike other contributions to this book, mine will not examine intersections between post-Biblical and post-Qur’ānic scriptural interpretation in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity; rather, I shall focus on processes of interpretive engagement with Qur’ānic passages that are traceable within the Qur’ān it- self. […]
Love, in Arabic term denotes hubb, iskiq, gariimah, wudd and hawaa. It semantically has more than thirty Arabic words denoting the same meaning.1 It has been a symbolic Interactive expression of feeling that has possessed quantum signi-ficance and values over the passage of time in both animate and inanimate beings. Extant research works on love […]
This article offers a translation and analysis of Nāṣir-i Khusraw’s seminal discourse on pleasure from his philosophical treatise The Pilgrims’ Provision (Zād al-musāfirīn), illuminating the intricate interplay between sensual and intellectual delights in Islamic thought. It situates Nāṣir-i Khusraw within the broader intellectual tradition, highlighting his critique of Muḥammad b. Zakariyyāʾ al-Rāzī’s Epicurean-influenced conception of […]
This paper examines the influence of Suhrawardī’s thought on Mughal intellectual landscape through a case study of the debate on human voluntary actions in Mīr Zāhid’s (d. 1689) super-commentary on Suhrawardī’s (d. 1191) Hayākil al-nūr. Central to this analysis is the relationship between cognitions, desires, and their role in the formation of will. I argue […]
This dissertation examines the mystical poetics of love in the works of Hamzah Fansuri (fl. 16th century), widely regarded as the earliest Sufi poet of the Malay world and a foundational figure in Southeast Asian Islamic intellectual history. Through close textual analysis, lexical comparison, and intertextual study, it demonstrates that Hamzah’s writings are not mere […]
By Oludamini Ogunnaike It is perhaps not accidental that the Arabic word and central Islamic concept of ḥayāʾ (often translated as “shame,” “modesty,” or “shyness”) is very difficult to translate into modern English, given the profound differences in the world-senses animating the two discourses. Likewise, the modern English notion of “dignity,” although Islamic sources have played […]
have transcribed some interesting passages in Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s work on astral magic, al-Sirr al-maktūm (The Hidden Secret) based on MS Majlis 6853, compared with some other MSS. These passages are taken from the philosophical and theological portions of the work. I also outline the Sirr’s content and method of inquiry. The transcribed passages are […]
It would not be an overstatement to say that the strand of thought now called Sufi metaphysics revolves around two interrelated doctrines, namely the oneness of being (waḥdat al-wujūd) and the perfect human (al-insān al-kāmil ). As is well-known, the expression waḥdat al-wujūd is controversial, which is composed of two words—waḥda and wujūd—both of which […]