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The eleventh-century philosopher and physician Abu Ali ibn Sina (d. A.D. 1037) was known in the West by his Latinized name Avicenna. An analysis of the sources and evolution of Avicenna's metaphysics, this book focuses on the answers he and his predecessors gave to two fundamental pairs of questions: what is the soul and how does it cause the body; and what is God and how does He cause the world? To respond to these challenges, Avicenna invented new concepts and distinctions and reinterpreted old ones. The author concludes that Avicenna's innovations are a turning point in the history of metaphysics. Avicenna's metaphysics is the culmination of a period of synthesis during which philosophers...
In Sainthood and Authority in Early Islam Aiyub Palmer recasts wilāya in terms of Islamic authority and traces its development in both political and religious spheres up through the 3rd and 4th Islamic centuries. This book pivots around the ideas of al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī, the first Muslim theologian and mystic to write on the topic of wilāya. By looking at its structural roots in Arab and Islamic social organization, Aiyub Palmer has reframed the discussion about sainthood in early Islam to show how it relates more broadly to other forms of authority in Islam. This book not only looks anew at the influential ideas of al-Tirmidhī but also challenges current modes of thought around the nature of authority in Islamicate societies.
This work is a critical Arabic text edition of K. al-Bayad wa-l-sawad min khasa'is hikam al-ibad fi na't al-murid wa-l-murad, a substantial Sufi handbook of early Sufism.
Considers the work of nineteenth-century theologian Ibrahim al- B?j?r? and contests the notion of intellectual decline in Islamic thought from the thirteenth through nineteenth centuries. This is a rare study of a late premodern Islamic thinker, Ibrahim al- B?j?r?, a nineteenth-century scholar and rector of Cairos al-Azhar University. Aaron Spevack explores al- B?j?r?s legal, theological, and mystical thought, highlighting its originality and vibrancy in relation to the millennium of scholarship that preceded and informed it, and also detailing its continuing legacy. The book makes a case for the normativity of the Gabrielian Paradigm, the study of law, rational theology, and Sufism, in ...
The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami caused immense destruction and over 170,000 deaths in the Indonesian province of Aceh. The disaster spurred large-scale social and political changes in Aceh, including the intensified implementation of shari‘a law and an end to the long separatist conflict. After the Tsunami explores Acehnese survivors’ experiences of the deadly waves and the subsequent reconstruction process through the stories they tell about the disaster. Narratives, author Annemarie Samuels argues, are both a window onto the process of remaking everyday life and an essential component of it. Building on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Samuels shows how the everyday work of recovery is ...
The main reference source for questions of Islamic philosophy, science, and technology amongst Western engaged readers and academics in general and legal researchers in particular.
Chronicles secularism in Lebanon up to the present day, presenting possible causes for its decline in the face of sectarianism.
In Ibn Taymiyya and the Attributes of God (orig. published in German, 2019), Farid Suleiman pieces together, on the basis of statements scattered unsystematically over numerous individual treatises, an overall picture of the methodological foundations of Ibn Taymiyya’s doctrine of the divine attributes. He then examines how Ibn Taymiyya applies these foundational principles as exemplified in his treatment of selected divine attributes. Throughout the book, Suleiman relates Ibn Taymiyya’s positions to the larger context of Islamic intellectual history. The book was awarded the Dissertation Prize 2019 by the Academy for Islam in Research and Society (AIWG) and the Classical Islamic Book Prize by Gorgias Press (2020).
In this rich intellectual history, Cemil Aydin challenges the notion that anti-Westernism in modern Asia is a political and religious reaction to the liberal and democratic values of the West. Nor is anti-Westernism a natural response to Western imperialism. Instead, by focusing on the agency and achievements of non-Western intellectuals, Aydin demonstrates that modern anti-Western discourse grew out of the legitimacy crisis of a single, Eurocentric global polity in the age of high imperialism. Aydin compares Ottoman pan-Islamic and Japanese pan-Asian visions of world order from the middle of the nineteenth century to the end of World War II. He looks at when the idea of a universal "West" f...
An online, Open Access version of this work is also available from Brill. A Literary History of Medicine by the Syrian physician Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah (d. 1270) is the earliest comprehensive history of medicine. It contains biographies of over 432 physicians, ranging from the ancient Greeks to the author’s contemporaries, describing their training and practice, often as court physicians, and listing their medical works; all this interlaced with poems and anecdotes. These volumes present the first complete and annotated translation along with a new edition of the Arabic text showing the stages in which the author composed the work. Introductory essays provide important background. The reader will find on these pages an Islamic society that worked closely with Christians and Jews, deeply committed to advancing knowledge and applying it to health and wellbeing.