Tag Archive for: Sufi

Desire, Determination and Action in Hayākil al-Nūr: Exploring the Legacy of Suhrawardī in Mughal India (1526-1857)

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 that for Suhrawardī, and subsequently Dawānī (d. 1502), volition is nothing more than an intense desire that dominates the soul. In contrast, Mīr Zāhid differentiates between desire and volition, positing that desire targets the goal of an action (e.g., being nourished), while volition pertains to the act itself (e.g., eating). By situating Mīr Zāhid’s argument within the broader context of engagement with Suhrawardī’s works in Mughal India, this paper contends that the study of the “Ishrāqī” legacy should not be articulated and pursued in terms of full adherence to Suhrawardī’s worldview. Instead, it should focus on how intellectuals in Mughal India responded to his arguments.

Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyá ibn Ḥabash ibn Amīrak al-Suhrawardī1 holds a prominent place in the history of Islamic philosophy, and his innovative ideas have left an indelible mark on various facets of philosophical discourse across the Islamicate world, a fact which is underscored by the survival of more than thirty commentaries on his works from Turkey, Iran, and India.2 Within the scope of the present study, which centers on Mughal India (1526–1857), the significance of Suhrawardī’s ideas for understanding the Mughal intellectual landscape

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Mystical language of love in Hamzah Fansuri’s poetry : Sufi poetics in the 16th-century Malay world By Kris Ramlan

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 adaptations of universal Sufi themes but constitute a distinctively Malay articulation of Akbarian metaphysics. His plurilingual idiom, shaped primarily through Malay and Arabic with traces of Persian and Sanskrit, serves as a performative medium for mystical ontology. Within this idiom, poetic sound, metaphor, and structural recursion function both as aesthetic expression and as epistemic disclosure. The study is divided into two parts. Part I reconstructs Hamzah’s intellectual formation and literary milieu, reassessing his chronology and situating his work within transregional Sufi networks and manuscript traditions. Part II offers the first sustained reading of love in his corpus, developing a typology across three registers—ontological, transformative, and experiential—each underpinned by a lexical-symbolic stratum. It further reconstructs the semantic field of Hamzah’s love lexicon within the wider Malay literary archive, demonstrates how poetic form itself operates as metaphysical pedagogy, and reframes the translation of Arabic Sufi terminology into Malay as a performative act of interlingual mystical articulation. The study also introduces the concept of symbolic transposition to explain how Hamzah reoriented select pre-Islamic motifs toward an Islamic metaphysics of Being and love. The findings show that Hamzah’s poetics enact rather than merely describe mystical realities. His verse creates a literary space in which divine love is experienced as the mode by which Being manifests, veils, and reveals itself. By transposing Sufi metaphysics into Malay, Hamzah expanded its expressive range as a vehicle for mystical thought and positioned Malay literature within a broader cosmopolitan tradition of Islamic poetics.

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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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“Sufism and the Anthropocosmic Self.” In I of the Heart: Texts and Studies in Honor of Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Islamic History and Civilization Series. Edited by M. Faruque, A. Khalil, and M. Rustom. Leiden: Brill, 2025, pp. 3–39.

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 were important in the Islamic intellectual tradition since early days. The word “waḥda” means “unity or oneness,” and is of the same root as “tawḥīd,” which means “to affirm unity.” As for wujūd, which is from the root w-j-d, it is customary to translate it as Being, being or existence, but what is important to note is that in the Sufi context it is also understood as “to find” or “to experience.” For instance, Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240) defines wujūd as “finding the Real in ecstasy” (wijdān al- ḥaqq fī l-wajd). Thus wujūd also has a mystical, first-person connotation, in addition to its regular ontological reference. In any event, waḥdat al-wujūd refers to the wujūd of the Real (al-ḥaqq), Who is self-evidently wāḥid (one), not to be denied by any Muslim. Hence there can only be one wujūd in reality. Understood thus, waḥdat al-wujūd implies that God or the Ultimate Reality is one, which is the essence of tawḥīd. But Sufi metaphysicians also discuss the complex nature of the muwaḥḥid (read “the perfect human”) or the affirmer of unity in the cosmic order. In doing so, they present a highly sophisticated analysis of the self, which is difficult to describe in simple terms. Building on the pioneering work of William Chittick, who uses the term “anthropocosmic vision” to describe the Islamic worldview, this study will explore the reality of the perfect human in terms of what it calls the “anthropocosmic self.” It will do so by principally drawing upon the School of Ibn ʿArabī and Sufi poets such as Rūmī (d. 672/1273) and Ḥāfiẓ (d. 791/1389).

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Devotion and Metaphysics in a Litany Ascribed to ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī

This article examines the status of Sufi devotional literature, a corpus still rarely considered in its own right within the study of Islamic thought. Focusing on the Ḥizb al-naṣr (Litany of Support) attributed to ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī (d. 1166) and still recited today within the Qādiriyya order, it argues that such devotional texts possess a distinctly doctrinal dimension, articulating metaphysical principles akin to those developed in the school of Ibn ʿArabī and his commentators. A close reading of the Ḥizb al-naṣr reveals a sophisticated theological and metaphysical background that contrasts sharply with the anti-intellectual image often associated with al-Jīlānī and his Ḥanbalī milieu. While the litany makes little explicit use of ontological terminology, its underlying vision resonates with Akbarian metaphysical themes and may reflect early intersections between Qādirī heritage and emerging doctrines of the Akbari tradition. By reconsidering the Ḥizb al-naṣr as an instance of “Sufi philosophy” in its own right, this study invites a broader reflection on the intellectual and doctrinal scope of Sufi devotional writing.

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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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Representations of Islam in Western Thought By Ian Almond

By Ian Almond

What do we understand by the term ‘representation of Islam’? What does it mean to investigate the depiction of the Muslim world – be it the faith, the cultures, the believers, the literature – in non- Muslim discourse? How would studies of the representation of Muslims by non-Muslims differ from their logical inverse – Muslim representations of Christians and Christianity in texts from Turkish or Arabic literature?

The term has, by now, practically established a genre of its own. Academic books and articles abound in the study of the Muslim world’s portrayal in areas as different as sixteenth century French literature, contemporary cinema, British children’s education syllabi, German drama, medieval thought, many of them preceding Edward Said’s landmark investigation of French and British Orientalist portrayals of their subjects. As a consequence, I’d like to consider some of the things I understand such studies to entail.

First of all, to examine the depiction of the Muslim in Western discourse is to examine the West. To consider the scimitar-bearing Turks and veiled women of Western Oriental landscapes is to consider the anxieties and desires of the gazer, not the gazed upon. This is not to say the Muslim is merely a blank screen upon which the West simply projects whatever facet of itself it happens to be

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Rethinking the Unio Mystica: From McGinn to Ibn Arabī By Arjun A Nair

By Arjun A Nair

Research into the unio mystica has revealed what seems to be an area of “real discussion” between scholars of different traditions of mysticism, particularly those of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Although this research serves as a promising start to the dialogue among scholars, it has also raised many questions about a “shared moment” that is nevertheless expressed in “irreducibly diverse” and distinct ways in each tradition. What purpose, for instance, can generic cross-cultural categories serve when they mean little or nothing to scholars in each tradition? By contrast, tradition-specific vocabularies are profuse and often difficult to represent in interlinguistic contexts without significant explanation. The challenge of translating mystical texts, imagery, and ideas across cultures and linguistic traditions raises obvious concerns about the misrepresentation and distortion of traditions in an environment of post-colonial critique. Nevertheless, the continued promise of dialogue calls for specialists of these traditions-particularly non-western and non-Christian traditions-to approach, assess, re-formulate, and even challenge the categories of mysticism from within the conceptual and theoretical horizons of the traditions that they research. The present study models such an approach to scholarship in mysticism. It offers a (re)formulation of the unio mystica from within the theoretical frame of the 12th/13thcentury Muslim/Sufi mystic, Ibn Arabī (d. 638/1240) and early members of his school of thought. By unpacking the primary terms involved in such an account-“God”, the “human being/self”, and “union”-from within the conceptual and theoretical horizons of that tradition, it problematizes the prevailing understanding of the unio mystica constructed from the writings of specialists in Christian mysticism. More importantly, it illustrates the payoff in terms of dialogue (incorporating the critique of existing theories) when each tradition operates confidently from its own milieu, developing its own theoretical resources for mysticism rather than prematurely embracing existing ideas or categories.

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God as Absolute Existence in Ibn ʿArabī: al-Taftāzānī’s Refutations of Akbarian Metaphysics [in Persian]

Throughout Islamic intellectual history, a wide range of conceptions of God have been articulated, among which the problematic view of Ibn ʿArabī-identifying God with Absolute Existence (al-wujūd al-muṭlaq)-stands out. Numerous critiques have been leveled against this identification, but the objections of Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī are particularly notable for their originality, clarity, and lasting influence on post-classical Islamic thought. In his Sharḥ al-Maqāṣid, al-Taftāzānī formulates several arguments against Ibn ʿArabī’s conception of God, focusing on the philosophical notion of Existence. Al-Taftāzānī regards Absolute Existence as a maʿqūl thānī (secondary intelligible), a universal concept in the mind with no extra-mental reality, which is instantiated only through its particular instances in the external world. He contends that this notion of Absolute Existence cannot be identical with God (or Necessary Existence), since God is an actual entity (ḥaqīqat fī al-khārij) and not merely a mental concept. This article critically examines al-Taftāzānī’s objections, arguing that his reading is misleading and that his refutation is grounded in a conception of Absolute Existence that differs significantly from that held by Ibn ʿArabī and his followers. Having contextualized al-Taftāzānī’s objections, I have sought to reconsider and rearticulate Ibn ʿArabī’s conception of God.

Introduction

Conceptions of God remain an understudied topic in the Persian-language academic literature on Islamic philosophy. Prevailing discussions typically focus on the existence of God, rather than on the more fundamental question of what, or who, the God is whose existence is being proven. In addition to the well-known conception of God as wholly distinct from the world, Islamic intellectual history presents alternative conceptions. Among these, the view advanced by Ibn ʿArabī has proven particularly problematic and controversial. This paper explores Ibn ʿArabī’s conception of God and critically engages with Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī’s well-known refutations. The analysis is based on a close study of the primary works of both Ibn ʿArabī and al-Taftāzānī, without recourse to later interpretations or receptions of their positions. Al- Taftāzānī’s critiques of Ibn ʿArabī have become classical, forming the metaphysical foundation for much of the subsequent criticism of Akbarian thought. Prominent followers of Ibn ʿArabī— including ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Ḥamzah Fanārī, ʿAlī b. Aḥmad Mahāʾimī, Muḥammad b. Rasūl Barzanjī, Ibrāhīm Kūrānī, and others—considered these refutations serious enough to warrant extensive responses. This article offers a detailed study of al-Taftāzānī’s objections to Akbarian metaphysics in Persian scholarship.

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Intellectual Hijra: Thinking In and Out of the BurningHouse of the Western Academy

This essay, which is an amalgamation of two presentations given at roundtables held by the Constructive Muslim Thought Seminar at the American Academy of Religion in 2022 and 2023, attempts to describe “constructive Muslim thought” in contexts both classical and contemporary, but focuses on delineating the continuing colonial context of this academy in which we are attempting to conduct this work and the consequences thereof. I argue that contemporary constructive Muslim thought in the Euro- American Academy (and its outposts in other lands) has much to learn from the model of Black studies and argue for a model of intellectual hijra or fugitivity, in which we strive to make a home in but not of the “burning house” of our modern academy.

From one point of view, “constructive Muslim thought” is nothing new, it is as old as Islam itself, but what is new is the institutional, political, and epistemic contexts that make constructive Muslim thought emerge as such. It is this new context that has created the separation between the “constructive” and the “descriptive,” marked out the “Muslim” as other than the default, and defined the parameters of “thought.” In the Abbasid context or that of the Mali or Ottoman empires, “Constructive Muslim Thought,” in its various branches of falsafa (philosophy), adab (belles lettres), uṣūl al- fiqh (jurisprudence), history, kalām (theology), or taṣawwuf (Sufism) would simply be “thought,” or more accurately

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 al-Nūr al-muḥammadi – the Light of the Prophet », Mohammed in History, Thought, and Culture

Al-nūr al-muḥammadī, the “Muḥammadan light”, is an Arabic expression which designates the inner and transcendent reality of the prophetic being, alluding thereby symbolically to the meta-historical significance of the Prophet Muḥammad, especially within Islamic soteriology, cosmology, spirituality and metaphysics. One of the foremost doctrinal implications of the Muḥammadan light is the Prophet’s primordial existence and his spiritual paternity over mankind. The Muḥammadan light is also understood as the universal principle of prophecy of which the pre-Islamic prophets were partial manifestations while the historic Muḥammad corresponded to its full manifestation. Above all, the concept of al-nūr al-muḥammadī plays a central role in Islamic spirituality. Being the light with which God illuminates the heart of his saints, it highlights the intrinsic relation between spiritual illumination, the Prophet and sainthood.

Content Overview:

Discusses the identity and selection of the Imam after Muhammad.

Explores the significance of praise poetry (madih) in Arabic culture, particularly in relation to Muhammad.

Highlights the , a famous praise poem by al-Busiri, detailing its themes and spiritual significance.

Examines early Byzantine literature’s references to Muhammad and Islam.

Describes the maghazi, military expeditions led by Muhammad during the Medinan period.

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Signs and Causes: Astro-Meteorology in Early Islamic Centuries By Razieh S. Mousavi

By Razieh S. Mousavi

Before the existence of weather stations, people relied on a variety of visible and invisible signs to predict the weather. Among Arabs, observing the regular motions of the stars was a common method for weather forecasting, both before and after the rise of Islam. How did they perceive the connection between cosmic and atmospheric phenomena?

In many past societies, including pre-Islamic Arabia, astronomy and weather forecasting were closely connected, and this knowledge played a crucial role in the region’s economic considerations. After the advent of Islam, this understanding was further enriched by the rapid exchange of ideas with neighboring cultures, blending climatic and environmental concepts with astronomical principles, a synthesis that is evident in the literature from that era. While there is some continuity in Arabian knowledge of astronomy and weather between the pre-Islamic and Islamic periods, notable differences also stand out.

Pre-Islamic records are primarily archaeological, such as stone inscriptions, 2 and fragmented poetry, much of which was preserved through Islamic manuscripts. 3 In contrast, sources from the Islamic period, particularly from the late eighth
century onward, are far more diverse and extensive. 4 Another significant difference lies in how this knowledge was created and used. In the Islamic period, knowledge production was primarily state-supported, leading to a more formal and elite-driven approach tied to political and administrative needs. On the other hand, pre-Islamic knowledge of the environment was less structured, based largely on individual observations and regional traditions. Modern scholarship
commonly refers to this body of astro-meteorological knowledge in Arabia, as “folk astronomy” to emphasise its informal, observational character compared to the more advanced and systematic studies that emerged in Islamic societies. However, this lable should not obscure the dynamic encounters between different approaches and practices across changing religious and intellectual contexts

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