Tag Archive for: Sufism
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
Evil, Suffering, and the Art of Listening in Islamic Philosophy
This was a lecture recently given for Global Philosophy Research Interest Group. Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto. Toronto, December 1st, 2023
An Elegy for Gaza
This poem was written to mourn the thousands of people killed in Gaza and millions more whose lives still hang in the balance. The poem references locations in Gaza as well as the Qur’an, the mu’allaqa of Imru’l-Qays, Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “Silence for the Sake of Gaza,” and Dan Heymann’s anti-apartheid song, “Weeping.”
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.
h
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.