Rebel Between Spirit and Law

Rebel Between Spirit and Law PDF

Author: Scott Alan Kugle

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0253347114

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This book examines the authority of saints in Islam and their ability to build communities among Muslims in North Africa. It analyzes the power generated in religious communities through their allegiance to saints, a power usually identified with the term Sufism. In the late 15th and 16th centuries, a community of Sufis in Fes (Fez), Morocco, and other urban centers in North Africa advocated this paradigm of sainthood during a time of intense political and religious crisis. Juridical sainthood, a concept that fuses Islamic legal rectitude and devotional piety, was the center of their reformist agenda. The juridical saint was to be absorbed in legal training and religious values, in ways that questioned political loyalty and dynastic legitimacy. Scott A. Kugle explores this tradition by focusing on the life and writings of Shaykh Ahmad Zarruq. Following his exile from Fes, Zarruq traveled widely over North Africa, spreading his teachings and writings and attracting followers from Morocco to Mecca. The life and teachings of Zarruq remain useful for Muslims. They are a piece of the past that present-day Muslims are rediscovering and redeploying to reconcile Islam's heritage with its very troubled post-colonial present.

Forgotten Saints

Forgotten Saints PDF

Author: Sahar Bazzaz

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 9780674035393

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In 1894 a Muslim mystic named Muḥammad al-Kattānī abandoned his life of asceticism to preach Islamic revival and jihad against the French. Ten years later, he mobilized a Moroccan resistance against French colonization. This book narrates the story of al-Kattānī and his virtual disappearance from accounts of modern Moroccan history.

Voices of Islam

Voices of Islam PDF

Author: Virginia G. Blakemore-Henry

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2006-12-30

Total Pages: 1397

ISBN-13: 031305116X

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Despite frequent and extensive publications on Islam, very few Americans, indeed very few non-Muslims, truly understand the faith or the more than one billion adherents who live it. This set presents the diversity and richness of Islam, filling in the blanks and expanding our knowledge and understanding. Portraying Muslims in all their humanity and diversity balances the images that have bombarded society and presents the reader with a fuller and more accurate picture of the Islamic faith and what it means to live as a Muslim—in Muslim communities, and as part of a broader tapestry of pluralism in the nations of the world. What does it mean to share Muslim concerns? To experience Muslim spirituality? What is the difference between Sunni and Shiite sects? Why do Muslims pray so frequently? What is the reality of Muslim marriage and gender relations? What is the meaning of jihad and martyrdom to a practicing Muslim? What role do the arts and humanities play in modern Muslim life? How are Islamic children raised? These questions and others are answered in these volumes, which bring together Muslim voices from around the world, including men and women, scholars and laypersons, fundamentalists and progressives, and others from various cultural, political, and Islamic backgrounds. Personal experiences and poetry are included to illustrate the many different expressions of Islam.

Sufism and Society

Sufism and Society PDF

Author: John Curry

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-06-12

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 1136659048

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In recent years, many historians of Islamic mysticism have been grappling in sophisticated ways with the difficulties of essentialism. Reconceptualising the study of Islamic mysticism during an under-researched period of its history, this book examines the relationship between Sufism and society in the Muslim world, from the fall of the Abbasid caliphate to the heyday of the great Ottoman, Mughal and Safavid empires. Treating a heretofore under-researched period in the history of Sufism, this work establishes previously unimagined trajectories for the study of mystical movements as social actors of real historical consequence. Thematically organized, the book includes case studies drawn from the Middle Eastern, Turkic, Persian and South Asian regions by a group of scholars whose collective expertise ranges widely across different historical, geographical, and linguistic landscapes. Chapters theorise why, how, and to what ends we might reconceptualise some of the basic methodologies, assumptions, categories of thought, and interpretative paradigms which have heretofore shaped treatments of Islamic mysticism and its role in the social, cultural and political history of pre-modern Muslim societies. Proposing novel and revisionist treatments of the subject based on the examination of many under-utilized sources, the book draws on a number of disciplinary perspectives and methodological approaches, from art history to religious studies. As such, it will appeal to students and scholars of Middle East studies, religious history, Islamic studies and Sufism.

Infectious Ideas

Infectious Ideas PDF

Author: Justin K. Stearns

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2011-04-01

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 1421401053

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Infectious Ideas is a comparative analysis of how Muslim and Christian scholars explained the transmission of disease in the premodern Mediterranean world. How did religious communities respond to and make sense of epidemic disease? To answer this, historian Justin K. Stearns looks at how Muslim and Christian communities conceived of contagion, focusing especially on the Iberian Peninsula in the aftermath of the Black Death. What Stearns discovers calls into question recent scholarship on Muslim and Christian reactions to the plague and leprosy. Stearns shows that rather than universally reject the concept of contagion, as most scholars have affirmed, Muslim scholars engaged in creative and rational attempts to understand it. He explores how Christian scholars used the metaphor of contagion to define proper and safe interactions with heretics, Jews, and Muslims, and how contagion itself denoted phenomena as distinct as the evil eye and the effects of corrupted air. Stearns argues that at the heart of the work of both Muslims and Christians, although their approaches differed, was a desire to protect the physical and spiritual health of their respective communities. Based on Stearns's analysis of Muslim and Christian legal, theological, historical, and medical texts in Arabic, Medieval Castilian, and Latin, Infectious Ideas is the first book to offer a comparative discussion of concepts of contagion in the premodern Mediterranean world.

Beyond Timbuktu

Beyond Timbuktu PDF

Author: Ousmane Oumar Kane

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2016-06-07

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 0674969359

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Timbuktu is famous as a center of learning from Islam’s Golden Age. Yet it was one among many scholarly centers to exist in precolonial West Africa. Ousmane Kane charts the rise of Muslim learning in West Africa from the beginning of Islam to the present day and corrects lingering misconceptions about Africa’s Muslim heritage and its influence.

Speaking Qur'an

Speaking Qur'an PDF

Author: Timur R. Yuskaev

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2017-10-18

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 1611177952

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An exploration of how Muslims in the United States have interpreted the Qur'an in ways that make it speak to their American realities In Speaking Qur'an: An American Scripture, Timur R. Yuskaev examines how Muslim Americans have been participating in their country's cultural, social, religious, and political life. Essential to this process, he shows, is how the Qur'an has become an evermore deeply American text that speaks to central issues in the lives of American Muslims through the spoken-word interpretations of Muslim preachers, scholars,and activists. Yuskaev illustrates this process with four major case studies that highlight dialogues between American Muslim public intellectuals and their audiences. First, through an examination of the work of Fazlur Rahman, he addresses the question of how the premodern Qur'an is translated across time into modern, American settings. Next the author contemplates the application of contemporary concepts of gender to renditions of the Qur'an alongside Amina Wadud's American Muslim discourses on justice.Then he demonstrates how the Qur'an becomes a text of redemption in W. D. Mohammed's oral interpretation of the Qur'an as speaking directly to the African American experience. Finally he shows how, before and after 9/11, Hamza Yusuf invoked the Qur'an as a guide to the political life of American Muslims. Set within the rapidly transforming contexts of the last half century, and central to the volume, are the issues of cultural translation and embodiment of sacred texts that Yuskaev explores by focusing on the Qur'an as a spoken scripture. The process of the Qur'an becoming an American sacred text, he argues, is ongoing. It comes to life when the Qur'an is spoken and embodied by its American faithful.

Medicine and the Saints

Medicine and the Saints PDF

Author: Ellen J. Amster

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2013-08-15

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 0292745443

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The colonial encounter between France and Morocco in the late nineteenth century took place not only in the political realm but also in the realm of medicine. Because the body politic and the physical body are intimately linked, French efforts to colonize Morocco took place in and through the body. Starting from this original premise, Medicine and the Saints traces a history of colonial embodiment in Morocco through a series of medical encounters between the Islamic sultanate of Morocco and the Republic of France from 1877 to 1956. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources in both French and Arabic, Ellen Amster investigates the positivist ambitions of French colonial doctors, sociologists, philologists, and historians; the social history of the encounters and transformations occasioned by French medical interventions; and the ways in which Moroccan nationalists ultimately appropriated a French model of modernity to invent the independent nation-state. Each chapter of the book addresses a different problem in the history of medicine: international espionage and a doctor's murder; disease and revolt in Moroccan cities; a battle for authority between doctors and Muslim midwives; and the search for national identity in the welfare state. This research reveals how Moroccans ingested and digested French science and used it to create a nationalist movement and Islamist politics, and to understand disease and health. In the colonial encounter, the Muslim body became a seat of subjectivity, the place from which individuals contested and redefined the political.

The Discourses

The Discourses PDF

Author: al-Ḥasan al-Yūsī

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2020-02-20

Total Pages: 531

ISBN-13: 0814764835

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Wide-ranging essays on Moroccan history, Sufism, and religious life Al-Hasan al-Yusi was arguably the most influential and well-known Moroccan intellectual figure of his generation. In 1084/1685, at the age of roughly fifty-four, and after a long and distinguished career, this Amazigh scholar from the Middle Atlas began writing a collection of short essays on a wide variety of subjects. Completed three years later and gathered together under the title Discourses on Language and Literature (al-Muhadarat fi l-adab wa-l-lughah), they offer rich insight into the varied intellectual interests of an ambitious and gifted Moroccan scholar, covering subjects as diverse as genealogy, theology, Sufism, history, and social mores. In addition to representing the author’s intellectual interests, The Discourses also includes numerous autobiographical anecdotes, which offer valuable insight into the history of Morocco, including the transition from the Saadian to the Alaouite dynasty, which occurred during al-Yusi’s lifetime. Translated into English for the first time, The Discourses offers readers access to the intellectual landscape of the early modern Muslim world through an author who speaks openly and frankly about his personal life and his relationships with his country’s rulers, scholars, and commoners. A bilingual Arabic-English edition.