Tag Archive for: Islam

Mullā Ṣadrā – Mukhtar H Ali: Introduction

Abstract:

Ṣadr ad-Dīn Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm ash-Shīrāzī (1571–1640/980–1050), popularly known as Mullā Ṣadrā, is considered the culminating figure of Islamic philosophy in Persia. Born into an aristocratic family in Shīrāz, he was given the best education from an early age in the city of his birth. He then traveled to Isfahan to study under two of the greatest scholars of his time, Mīr Muḥammad Bāqir Dāmād Astarābādī (d. 1631/1041), with whom he studied philosophy and theology, and the enigmatic sage and jurist, Shaykh Bahāʾ ad-Dīn ʿĀmilī known as Shaykh Bahāʾī (d. 1620–21/1030) with whom he studied transmitted sciences and Qurʾānic exegesis. Having mastered both intellectual and transmitted sciences, he retreated to Kahak, a village outside of Qum, Iran, where he composed his magnum opus, al-Ḥikma al-mutaʿāliya fi l-asfār al-ʿaqliyya al-arbaʿa (Transcendent Philosophy on the Four Intellectual Journeys), popularly known as al- Asfār al-arbaʿa (The Four Journeys). He composed more than fifty works, but it was in the Asfār that he formulated a comprehensive philosophical system that integrated reason, revelation, and mystical experience. Mullā Ṣadrā’s school of “Transcendent Philosophy” (al-Ḥikma al-mutaʿāliya) synthesized several major streams of Islamic thought, including scholastic theology (kalām), Avicennan (d. 1037/428) Peripatetic philosophy (mashshāʾ), Suhrawardī’s (d. 1191/587) Illuminationist philosophy (ḥikmat al-ishrāq), and the Sufism of Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 1240/638).

The Divine Roots of Human Love – William C. Chittick

Abstract:

Ibn al-‘Arabi begins his long chapter on love (mahabba) in the Futuhat al-Makkiyya – as he begins most of the book’s 560 chapters – by citing relevant Qur’anic verses and prophetic sayings (II 322.16). He points out first that love is a divine attribute, and he lists several of the Qur’anic verses in which God is the subject of the verb ‘to love’. Fourteen of these verses mention those whom God loves and another twenty­three mention those whom God does not love. In every case, the objects of God’s love or lack of love are human beings. Indeed, the Qur’an associates love only with human beings among all creatures. Hence love is a key term if we are to understand what differentiates human beings from other created things. Most other divine attributes – such as life, knowledge, desire, power, speech, generosity, justice, mercy, and wrath – have no necessary connection with the human race.

Pripovijedanje kao filozofskapedagogija: primjer Suhrawardīja

Abstract:

Sažetak: Ovo je prijevod teksta koji tretira možda najpoznatiju simboličku pripovijest Shihāb al-Dīna Suhrawardīja (u. 587/1191), a to je njegovo djelo Āwāz-i par-i Jibrā’īl (Odjek Džibrilovog krila). Naime, među spisima Suhrawardīja, osnivača Škole prosvjetljenja i ključne ličnosti u postibnsīnāovskoj islamskoj filozofiji, nalazi se niz vizionarskih kazivanja, jer je korištenje

Ibn Khaldūn Between Legal Theory and Legal Practice – Mourad Laabdi

Beyond his prevailing reputation as an historian of imposing stature, Abd al-RaAm:n Ibn Khald<n (d. 808/1406) was recognized by his contemporaries for his mastery of several other scholarly domains. A close friend and rival, Lisan al-Din Ibn al-Khatib(d. 776/1374), attributed to him books on logic and arithmetic, a commentary on a poem he had written on legal theory, and ‘several summaries of the books of Ibn Rushd, Ibn al-Kha3;b also appreciated his book on Islamic mysticism Shifa al-sa’il li-tahdh;b al-mas:8il (Healing of the seeker), and his commentary on Fakhr al-D;n al-R:z;’s (d. 606/1210) MuAaBBal afk:r al-mutaqaddim;n wa-l-muta8akhkhir;n min al-‘ulam:8 wa-l-Aukam: wa-l-mutakallim;n (Gleanings from the ideas of the early and late scholars, philosophers, and theologians). Ibn Khald<n’s fascination with

La Grande chaîne de la conscience – Par Mohammed Rustom

Dans son Essai sur l’homme, le poète britannique Alexander Pope proposait au XVIIIèsiècle une formulation succincte d’une ancienne doctrine philosophique de la réalité. Cette doctrine, à laquelle Arthur Lovejoy a donné le nom de “grande chaîne des êtres,” soutient que l’existence est une structure organique, entremêlée et hiérarchisée, reposant sur les degrés décroissants d’états de l’existence. La réalité vient de Dieu et elle part de Lui, l’Être Suprême; et elle vient trouver sa fin dans la plus infinitésimale des formes d’existence. Chaque élément du cosmos, y compris le cosmos lui-même, nourrit un lien vital avec les autres éléments qui en composent la grande chaîne. Pour citer Pope:

NEKI SAVJETI I OPOMENE U POGLEDU ISLAMSKIH NAUKA1 – Mohammed Rustom, S engleskog preveo Haris DUBRAVAC

Sažetak: U ovom nevelikom tekstu Mohammed Rustom, redovni profesor islamskih nauka na Carleton univerzitetu
(Kanada), upućuje savjete koji su u vezi s napredovanjem kroz različite faze akademskog života u islamskim
naukama. Često su ti savjeti iz praktičnog domena zbog čega onome ko se osposobljava kao proučavalac mogu
biti od iznimne koristi, naročito studentima islamskih nauka. Pažljivom čitaocu neće promaći to da se kroz ovih
sedamdeset naputaka povremeno mogu vidjeti proplamsaji spoznaja stečenih autorovim marljivim proučavanjem
klasičnih tekstova iz islamske filozofije i sufizma, s tim što su iskazane na savremen način. Ovaj rad je objavljen u
dva različita časopisa i preveden je na perzijski jezik.

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.

Why Self-Care Is Not Enough: The Nature of True Well-Being – Samuel Bendeck Sotillos

The notion of self-care—like its precursor, self-help—has emerged due to a spiritual vacuum in the contemporary world. The burgeoning mental health crisis that is prevalent today appears inseparable from the broader existential predicament facing humanity. Mainstream psychology and its therapies have not been able to address these challenges, in response to which we have seen the inevitable rise of self-care remedies. Across humanity’s diverse spiritual cultures, these have always been available, yet they were invariably grounded in a religious tradition and its sacred psychology. The more we are marginalized from such roots, the more self-care is required our current obsession with which is the unacknowledged search for wholeness due to modern people having lost their sense of the sacred

Metaphysical Institutions: Islam and the Modern Project – Caner K Dagli

What is real, possible, and good when it comes to human beings thinking together about the real, the possible, and the good? In this book, these ultimate questions will be explored on their own terms, and will be made particular through a question that is often limited to history, anthropology, and religious studies, namely, “What is Islam?” is latter topic continues to attract a great deal of scholarly attention oriented toward establishing a “useful concept” of Islam or a guideline by which to judge something “Islamic,” but it has deep metaphysical implications far beyond this defini- tional question’s relevance to any particular research program. At root, the work at hand is both a philosophical treatise about shared thinking that uses the encounter between the Modern Project and Islam as an illustrative example, and also an exploration of the conceptualization of Islam in light of the metaphysics of consciousness and meaning.

The Cosmo-Eschatology of Saints and Mahdis. In Sufi Cosmology, Handbook of Sufi Studies Vol. 2, eds. Alexander Knysh and Christian Lange. Leiden: Brill, 2022:250-274

As discussed in Chapter 1 of this volume, Sufi thought on the structure of the cosmos is deeply intertwined with ideas about death, the end of the world, and the afterlife, giving rise to what can be termed a Sufi cosmo-eschatology. Drawing on various aspects of the Qurʾān and ḥadīth, including the complex body of apocalyptic logia that emerged from the internecine  conflicts of  the Umayyad and early ʿAbbāsid periods (malāḥim wa-fittan, as well as some eschatological  akhbār of the Shīʿī Imams), Sufi  thinkers dwelt frequently on the secrets of the Unseen world(s) (al-ghayb) said to underlie the merely apparent reality of this one, urging aspirants on the path to die to this world so as to gain the other. While the “inward turn” of early Sufissm—a newfound focus on introspection and personal salvation (Karamustafa, 2, 17, 21)—helped domesticate the theological and political fervor of early Islamic apocalypticism, Sufi think- ers nonetheless retained claims to types of quasi-prophetic/visionary spiritual authority that frequently discomfited and sometimes outraged religious specialists of other stripes, as is most evident in controversies around Sufi notions of sainthood (wilāya). Sufi claims of spiritual authority sometimes spilled over into implicit or explicit