Made in God’s Image: A Contemporary Sufi Commentary on Surat al-Insan by the Moroccan Shaykh Mohamed Faouzi al-Karkari

Abstract: “The Karkariyya is a contemporary branch of the Shādhilī Sufi order (ṭarīqa) founded by Shaykh Mohamed Faouzi al-Karkari (b. 1974) in 2007 in the small northeastern Moroccan town of el-Aruit,near the coastal city of Nador.Despite its humble beginnings,the Karkariyyahas established itself as one of Morocco ’s most dynamic centers for the dissemination of Sufi teachings. It is based in a large Sufi lodge ( zāwiya) that accommodates thousands of visitors throughout the year and houses dozens of male and female resident disciples (mutajar-ridīn) who live with the Shaykh for extensive periods of rigorous spiritual training. The order’s largest branches are presently located in France, Algeria, Tunisia, and Oman, with a growing presence in various cities of Morocco, West Africa, and North America.The Karkariyya’s active outreach on social media platforms has contributed to its growth from a local Moroccan order to an internationally diverse, multicultural, and multilingual network of Sufi seekers”

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Qur’anic terminology, translation, and the Islamic conception of religion – Maria M Dakake

Abstract:

“A key question in the field of religious studies is the extent to which ‘religion’ as a concept ‘translates’ in various cultural contexts, with some arguing that it is a purely Western and academic construct. In this article, I argue that the Islamic understanding of religion as a universal category of human experience with various, distinct manifestations is similar to the concept of religion widely operative in the academic discipline of comparative religion; for this reason, Islamic terms related to religion can easily be translated into terminology broadly found in the study of religion, including the term ‘religion’ itself. I argue, however, that the apparent ease with which one can translate Islamic religious terminology may obscure some important nuances in the Islamic conception of religion that make it both distinct and internally coherent with its broader view of human nature and of its own particular religious system relative to others. Attentiveness to the semantic range and usage of some key terms in Qur’anic and Islamic terminology regarding religion yields a distinctly Islamic conception of religion that is independent of Western, academic theories of religion”

The Semantics of Gratitude (Shukr) in the Qurʾān – Joseph E. B. Lumbard College of Islamic Studies, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar

Abstract:

Since the publication of Toshihiko Izutsu’s The Structure of Ethical Terms in the Qurʾan in 1959, scholars of Islam have recognized that gratitude (shukr) is central to the ethicoreligious worldview conveyed by the Qurʾān. Izutsu further developed this analysis in God and Man in the Qurʾan and Ethico-Religious concepts in the Qurʾan. Ida Zilio-Grade enhances our understanding by providing linguistic analysis of shukr, and Atif Khalil examines the understanding of shukr in Sufi texts. This paper draws the connections between these three approaches. It expands upon Zilio-Grade’s linguistic analysis by examining the root sh-k-r and analyzing the differences between the uses of shākir (thankful) and shakūr (ever-grateful) when used in relation to the human being and when used in relation to God. It then demonstrates that expanding the analysis of contextual semantic fields employed by Izutsu to include intertextual semantic fields reveals how shukr is related to the cognitive faculties of the human being. The paper concludes by examining how authors such as a-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), al-Tilimsānī (d. 773/1291), and Aḥmad al-Tijānī (d. 1230/1815) addressed the paradoxes to which this Qurʾānic presentation of shukr gives rise.

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The Qur’an in the Thought of Ibn ‘Arabi (Routledge Companion to the Qur’an, 2022)

Abstract:

“Paul Nwyia once wrote that the early Sufis were engaged in “the Qur’anization of memory,”1 a process that Ibn ޏArabī (d. 1240) seems to have taken to its logical extreme. By his time the various fields of Islamic learning had become subdivided into many specialties, some of which had little apparent connection with the founding revelation. His immense and highly sophisticated output, energized by the vision of tawhīd, reintegrated and harmonized these sciences – especially jurisprudence, principles of jurisprudence, Sufism, Kalam, and philosophy – by tying them back explicitly to the Qur’an, even if he did not do this in any systematic manner. 2 Like the Qur’an, he writes, his style does not follow standard rational procedures, deriving instead from the very roots of reality itself.3 Although he constantly interprets Qur’anic verses and terminology, he does so from a variety of shifting standpoints, so the whole range of his explications did not fit into any specific genre (such as ishāra as exemplified by Qushayrī’s, d. 1074, Latā if al-ishārāt, or tawīl like the commentary of ޏAbd al-Razzāq Kāshānī, d. circa 1330). As for the systematic versions of his teachings that spread to every corner of the Islamic world, these were the work of his followers and tended to obscure the fact that his formulations were typically offered as explanations of the sacred text”

The Qur’an In The Thought Of Ibn ‘Arabi (Routledge Companion To The Qur’an, 2022)Download

Kur’an i sufizam –

“Sukladno autorovom mišljenju, suzam se ponajbolje može ra-zumjeti u odnosu na samo ustrojstvo islamske tradicije. Izrazitaodlika sujskog pristupa islamskoj tradiciji jest usredotočenje nastapanje duše s Božanskom Riječju, uvijek na osnovu obrascakoji je utvrdio Vjerovjesnik. Sujski učitelji su često govorili ocilju islamske tradicije u viduostvarenja koje zahtijeva preo-bražavanje samog bića tragaoca, pri čemu je nezaobilazna ulo-ga Kur’ana. Sažimajući prirodu puta ka Bogu, ti učitelji čestosu govorili o pročišćavanju duše (tezkijetu’n-nefs). Kao i drugimuslimani, sue ne samo da su visoko cijenili pamćenje i uče-nje Kur’ana te zazivanje Božijih imena sadržanih u Kur’anu,nego su svoja učenja, također, iskazivali kur’anskim jezikom”

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“The Grace of God” as evidence for a written Uthmanic archetype: the importance of shared orthographic idiosyncrasies – Marijn van Putten

Abstract:

“This paper takes a novel approach to the question of when and how the text of the Quran was codified into its present form, usually referred to as the Uthmanic text type. In the Quran the phrase niʿmat all āh/rabbi-ka “the grace of god/your lord” can spell niʿmat  “grace” either with t āʾ or  t āʾmarbūṭ ah. By examining 14 early Quranic manuscripts, it is shown that this phrase is consistently spelled using only one of the two spellings in the same position in all of these different manuscripts. It is argued that such consistency can only be explained by assuming that all these manuscripts come from a single written archetype, meaning there must have been a codification project sometime in the first century. The results also imply that these manuscripts, and by extension, Quran manuscripts in general, were copied from written exemplars since the earliest days”

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Sufi Commentaries on the Qur’an in Classical Islam – Kristin Zahra Sands

Abstract:

“The Quran, for Muslims, represents the word of God revealed to Muhammad. Its interpretation, then, requires a certain audacity. How can one begin to say what God “meant” by His revelation? How does one balance the praiseworthy desire to understand the meanings of the Qur1an with the realistic fear of reducing it to the merely human and individualistic? Is interpretation an art, a science, an inspired act, or all of the these? Sufi commentators living in the classical time period of Islam from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries answered these questions in their own unique way, based on their assumptions regarding the nature of the Qur1anic text, the sources of knowledge considered necessary for its interpretation, and the”

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Understanding the Qur’an – Muhammad Abdel Haleem

Abstact:

“Understanding the Qur’an is intended to help the general reader, and also the scholar, to understand the Qur’an by combining a number of ap- proaches: thematic, stylistic and comparative. Many English studies of the Qur’an tend to regard it as nothing more than a jumble of borrowed and rambling thoughts with no sense of direction. This approach has resulted in a series of unstudied theories which, instead of mapping out the Qur’anic world, have added more confused ideas to an already confused compre- hension.“

Abdel Haleem, Understanding The Qur’anDownload

The Sound of Silence -William Chittick

Abstract

“I tried to imagine how the authors of
the old texts that I read would have reacted
to the phrase “the silence of God.” Probably
they would have muttered, “Try listening
for once.” Or they might have quoted the
Qur’anic verse, “They have hearts but they
do not understand with them, they have
eyes but they do not see with them, they
have ears but they do not hear with them”
(7:179).
The word silence (in Arabic, śamt) is”

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The Qur’an and its Interpretive Tradition. By Andrew Rippin.

The Qur’an and its Interpretive Tradition. By Andrew Rippin. (Variorum
Collected Studies Series). Pp. 356. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2001. £62.50.
Each volume of the Variorum Collected Studies Series musters long term writings by
some noteworthy scholar (in this case, one of the biggest names in Qur’anic studies
in the West); by grouping articles on sundry fields, perhaps written over decades, it
allows a clear glimpse of the scholar’s development, their deeper presuppositions, the
methodological patterns and mental habits which undergird their work. Rippin’s cor­
pus is avowedly built on groundwork laid by John Wansbrough. Two whole chapters
(II and IV) of the book at hand are indeed given over to aspects of Wansbrough’s
work. The tell-tale framework of haggadic, halakhic, massoretic, rhetorical and alle­
gorical genres/phases in the elaboration of the Muslim scriptures is assumed through­
out the book, which brims with references to Quranic Studies and praise for its late………

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