Tag Archive for: Sufi
Creating Harmony Through Tradition in Japan – Matthew Teller
Abstract:
The tea ceremony is a marker of Japanese traditional culture, refined over centuries so that every aspect has significance, from the room setting and the arrangement of flowers to the calibrated movements of the tea master in preparing and serving the brew. Yet despite his skill, Yamamoto is not a tea master. A professor of Islamic studies at Marmara University in Istanbul, Turkey, he is an influential figure shaping Japanese Muslim society. His tea ceremony is taking place not in a traditional tea house but before a seated audience ranging from students to elders in Tokyo’s main congregational mosque. At the age of only 33, Yamamoto has developed what he calls an “Islamic tea ceremony” as an experiment, an innovative public workshop in which new links of understanding can be forged between Japan’s roughly 0.1-percent Muslim population and the rest of the country’s people, almost all of whom follow Buddhism and Japan’s homegrown religion, Shinto.“The point is to help people acquire the power of interpretation, the intellectual muscles of critical thinking and critical understanding of this world,” Yamamoto says. “We, as Muslims, can contribute to the prosperity and diversity of Japanese society.”
Realizing Islam: The Tijaniyya in North Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Muslim World – Zachary Valentine
Abstract:
Studies on eighteenth-century Islamic intellectual history tend to highlight the Wahhabi movement or “fundamentalist” movements. Few studies oer insights into less understood—though by no means less influential scholarly currents. One such book is Zachary Valentine Wright’s Realizing Islam The Tijaniyya in North Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Muslim World Focusing on the knowledge production of the modern Tijani Sufi order—one of the largest Sufi orders
Decolonizing Quranic Studies – Joseph E. B. Lumbard
Abstract:
The legacy of colonialism continues to influence the analysis of the Quran in the Euro-American academy. While Muslim lands are no longer directly colonized, intellectual colonialism continues to prevail in the privileging of Eurocentric systems of knowledge production to the detriment and even exclusion of modes of analysis that developed in the Islamic world for over a thousand years. This form of intellectual hegemony often results in a multifaceted epistemological reductionism that denies efficacy to the analytical tools developed by the classical Islamic tradition. The presumed intellectual superiority of Euro-American analytical modes has become a constitutive and persistent feature of Quranic Studies, influencing all aspects of the field. Its persistence prevents some scholars from encountering, let alone employing, the analytical tools of the classical Islamic tradition and presents obstacles to a broader discourse in the international community of Quranic Studies scholars. Acknowledging the obstacles to which the coloniality of knowledge has given rise
Farghānī on the Muhammadan Reality – William C. Chittick
Abstract:
Perhaps the closest parallel to the Johannine Logos in Islam is found in the notion of the “Muhammadan Reality” (al-ḥaqīqat al-muḥammadiyya). The term was probably first used by Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240), but the earliest detailed explanation of what it implies was provided by Saʿīd ibn Aḥmad Farghānī (d. 1300), an outstanding student of Ibn ʿArabī’s foremost propagator, Ṣadr alDīn Qûnawī. Farghānī wrote a dense, two-volume commentary on Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s famous 760- verse qasida, Naẓm al-sulûk. Deeply rooted in Islamic metaphysics, theology, and spiritual psychology, the commentary explains how the poet is describing Muhammad’s eternal archetype in God as both the means whereby God creates the universe and the ultimate returning place of all things.
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The Student and the Sage – Mohammed Rustom
Abstract: Plagued by the problem of evil, a student of philosophy and religion finds himself in great despair, with many more annoying questions than satisfying answers. The student passes by a certain ḥakīm, or sage, as he takes his usual route to his early morning philosophy of religion seminar. Drawn towards the sage’s luminous presence, the student attempts to approach the old man.
SEYYED HOSSEIN NASR – Muhammad U. Faruque
Abstract:
This article provides an overview of the substantive contribution from Dr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a contemporary Islamic philosopher with global influence. Dr. Nasr’s oeuvre covers an extended field from the perennial philosophy, which dominates his philosophical worldview, to religion, science, environmental studies, education, and the arts with particular attention to Islamic and comparative studies, as well as criticism of modernism. Grounded in Islamic tradition, Nasr’s far-reaching ideas have been acknowledged by the global scholarly community. Nasr is perhaps most famous for being one of the first people to predict, diagnose, and provide a response to the ecological crisis, having spoken out on the topic as early as 1966. He is considered the father of “Islamic environmentalism,” which is now gaining momentum in the Muslim world.
Keywords: order of the sacred; eco-philosophy; Islamic science; Islamic art; spirituality, religion and modernity
Life after life: Mulla Sadra on death and immortality – Muhammad U. Faruque
Abstract:
The purpose of this article is twofold: first, I will reconstruct Mullā Ṣadrā’s complex arguments for the soul’s immortality based on its immaterial nature. Second and finally, I will briefly probe and assess various epistemological and metaphysical objections against Ṣadrā’s immaterialist conception of the soul. Ṣadrā contends that our bodily death marks an awakening to the reality of our con- sciousness on the plane of the imaginal realm (the imaginal world is an isthmus between the sens- ible world and the world of intelligible forms). For Ṣadrā, ‘death’ does not mark an end or discontinuity in human consciousness, rather it signifies an awakening to a new mode of existence in which the soul, having once been the active principle controlling the actions of the physical body, now manifests itself as the passive recipient of the form given to it by its imaginal reality – a reality shaped by the actions it had performed in its earthly, embodied state. Thus, death is seen as the passage of the soul from the sensible to the imaginal world, until the soul unites with the intelligible world (ʿālam al-ʿaql).
Keywords: soul; death; immateriality; Mullā Ṣadrā; imaginal world; materialism