The Well-Tempered Reader: The Legitimization of Adab in the Arabic Literary Tradition – Sarah R bin Tyeer

Preface with the onset of colonial modernity to handle the perceived overabundance of new knowledge. The Well-Tempered Reader is therefore attentive to the study of this cultural grammar of the formation of the subject, to which adab as praxis and application is an attestation. It advances an analysis of the virtue-ethic murūʾa, or the ideal human, demonstrating its immanent structure in premodern Arabic culture and the formation of the subject as a legitimization of the existence of adab and its transformative power. The book argues for adab’s acceptation and function as praxis through its own legitimization by way of an examination of reading and literary practices to unearth adab’s critical grammar. Through advancing a critical grammar of adab, The Well-Tempered Reader posits adab as a generative literary, analytical, and cultural framework and a discursive force for analyzing literary acts owing to adab’s participatory role in knowledge systems.

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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 said, humility can be conceived in two complementary ways in the Muslim tradition. When viewed through the lens of a dualistic theology that separates God from the world, humility involves a shift on a spectrum away from the soul’s natural inclination toward feelings of conceit and self-importance. This movement, however, must halt somewhere near the center-point of humility, and not extend into the domain of self-loathing, since the latter is marked by a narcissism of self-hate and self-denigration, unlike pride, which is marked by a narcissism of self-aggrandizement. In Islamic mysticism, particularly from the vantage point of the doctrine of the unity of being, the movement of self-naughting must continue, but now it must do so vertically, upward, toward self transcendence, self-forgetting, and ultimately self-effacement in the divinity. Only then is humility obtained in its fullness as a state of nothingness before the all-consuming in unity of God. This is not a nothingness where the ego is abased as much a nothingness where the ego, like a mirage, is recognized to be unreal. There is a humorous story of an imam of a mosque who, for some reason or another, was overcome one day by a feeling of great humility. It became so intense that it caused him to fall into prostration. As he was on the ground, with his forehead on the prayer rug, he kept repeating, “Oh God, I am nothing. Oh Lord, I am nothing. ” The muezzin (the individual commissioned with the task of making the call to prayer five times a day)

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al-Haya: The Dignity of Shame By Oludamini Ogunnaike

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 an indirect role in its development,7 does not have a single, exact equivalent in classical Islamic discourse, but ḥayāʾ covers much of the same ground. At first blush this appears to be a paradox, as dignity and shame are often described as oppo- sites: shame has been described as a violation of dignity, and a dignified person is not ashamed. However, even in English, this issue is more complicated, as illustrated by another seeming paradox: shameless people do the most shameful of deeds. Indeed, the early Sufi author al-Qushayrī (d. 465/1072) wrote that “One of the signs of those who possess shame is that one will never see them in a shameful condition.” Thus, in the face of the brazen shameless- ness of recent political and business leaders and practices, numerous social campaigns—from the non-violent, coercive protest movements of Gandhi, mlk Jr., and the Civil Rights movement to the more recent environmental, social justice, and anti-war shame campaigns and boycotts targeting companies to the #MeToo movement—have attempted not only to deploy shame to change behaviors and conditions, but (especially in the cases of Gandhi and the civil rights movement) to reinstitute the principles of moral shame in domains dominated by shamelessness in order to restore or safeguard the dignity of both oppressed and oppressors.

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Mysticism and Ethics in Islam (open access) (Sheikh Zayed Series for Arabic and Islamic Texts and Studies; American University of Beirut Press, 2022)

Free publication

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Armando Montoya Jordán’s Review of Orfali, Khalil, and Rustom (eds.), Mysticism and Ethics in Islam (Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies, 2024)

Is the science of ethics entirely separate from mysticism, or might mysticism be the foundation of ethics? Or, conversely, might mysticism be the fruit of a higher ethics? these and other such questions come to the fore in a variety of ways in this important volume, a commendable attempt to produce a historical and conceptual survey of the intersections between mysticism and ethics in Islam.

The book addresses the parameters of ethics within the Muslim tradition through the analyses of a variety of authors who wrote in languages as diverse as Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Russian, and Chinese. Many of them, we learn, were not necessarily bound to the postulates of Greek philosophy, even though the latter did exert a tremendous influence on the
development of ethics in Islam by defining some of the key problems in the discipline.

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Al-Daghistani, R. (2023): “Tawwakul and rajāʾ The Concepts of Trust and Hope (in God) from an Islamic-Mystical Perspective”

Abstract:

This article illustrates the concepts of trust (tawakkul) and hope (rajā’) from an Islamic- mystical perspective. To do so, I will first reflect on the term »Islamic mysticism« and methodologically question its legitimacy. Given this background I will then approach the term »Sufism« (taṣawwuf) and try to briefly highlight its main character as a »spir- itual science« and »mystical way«, consisting of different »states« and »stations«, among which »trust«and »hope« occupy important positions. I will next attempt to illuminate trust and hope in the context of Islamic mysticism (Sufism), by referring to some classical Sufi authors and their understandings of both terms. The study will finish with some concluding remarks on trust and hope.

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Justice, Nonaggression, and Military Ethics in Islam – Asma Afsaruddin

“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 well as in the Nuremberg Charter of 1943 that deals with war crimes. In his legal work, de Vitoria explicitly identified those who should be considered noncombatants and given protection during military combat: women and children, agricultural laborers, travelers, and the civilian population in general. In his conception of a universal law, the seventeenth-century Spanish jurist Las Casas similarly emphasized the need to protect women and children, religious functionaries, serfs, and other noncombatants during war. Interestingly, the requirement that these categories of noncombatants should be protected during armed combat was already well entrenched within the Islamic law of nations or international law (known as siyar in Arabic) that had crystallized by the eighth century”

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Maratib al-Taqwa: Sa’id al-Din Farghani on the Ontology of Ethics

“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, “created upon the form of God,” concluded that ethical perfection amounted to the soul’s harmonious conformity with the Real Existence (al-wujūd al-ḥaqq). Early on, philosophers tended to keep ontology separate from ʿilm al-akhlāq, the science of ethics, but they used expressions like al-tashabbuh bi’l-ilāh, “similarity to the God,” and taʾalluh, “deiformity,” to designate the state of human perfection. Achieving perfection demanded transformation of khulq“

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Some honest talk about Non-Indigenous Education; Our Schools Our Selves. Winter 2011. Vol.20, No.2, pp.19-34

Abstract:

This narrowness is not by accident — it is by design. Big “E”Education has to limit who gets in and what it does in order tobe able to confer both valuable credentials on its graduates, andlegitimacy on the subjects under its gaze.Ask the Oppenheimerfamily how DeBeers made its fortune with diamonds: to makesomething valuable you have to make it scarce.If we read between the lines of thi sAccord,

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Application instituting proceedings and request for the indication of provisional measures THE HAGUE – The International Court of Justice (ICJ)

Abstract:

“Proceedings instituted by South Africa against the State of Israel on 29 December 2023 – Request for the indication of provisional measures – Public hearings to be held on Thursday 11 and Friday 12 January 2024”

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Atonement, Returning, and Repentance in Islam – Atif Khalil

Abstract:

“The aim of this article is to demonstrate how in Islam the principle mechanism for atonement lies in tawba(returning, repentance). Divided into four sections, and drawing primarily on the literature of classical Sufism, the analysis begins by defining some key terms related to the idea of atonement, with special attention to the language of the Quran. Then it outlines three conditions of returning, repentance, and atonement, delineated by classical Muslim authorities, before turning to a brief overview of the concept of amending wrongs or settings matters aright. It concludes with some final remarks about the possibilities of atonement available until death, and the soteriological role divine mercy is believed to play in the posthumous states of the soul“

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