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 […]
“In the sixteenth century, the Spanish jurist Francisco de Vitoria helped de- velop the principle of noncombatant immunity in Europe, which today has become a hallmark of modern international law. This principle is foregrounded in the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols enacted in 1949 that form the core of in- ternational humanitarian law, as […]
“Michael Noble’s Philosophizing the Occult lies at the intersection of two recent developments in Islamic studies: (1) the renewed appreciation for the philosophical and theological thought of the Sunnī theologian and polymath Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210), a trend that has led to an exponential growth of studies devoted to this figure since the 2000s; […]
“Given the philosophical tradition’s explicit acknowledgment that “the Necessary in Existence” (al-wājib al-wujūd) is a proper designation for God per se, and given the fact that this acknowledgment came to be shared by various forms of Sufism and Kalam, it should come as no surprise that many scholars who investigated the reality of the human, […]
Samāʿ literature reveals a tension in premodern Islamicate societies. While musical practices were ubiquitous and practiced in many contexts, Islamic legal tradition regarded them with suspicion. Musical instruments occupied a central place in these discussions, perhaps, because as physical objects associated with what is otherwise in the non-tangible domain of sound they were seen as […]