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The subject of "human free-will" versus "divine predestination" is one of the most contentious topics in classical Islamic thought. By focusing on a theme of central importance to any philosophy of religion, and to Islam in particular, this book offers a critical study of the intellectual contributions offered to this discourse by three key medieval Islamic thinkers: Avicenna, al-Ghāzālī and Ibn ʿArabī. Through investigation of primary sources, Free Will and Predestination in Islamic Thought establishes the historical, political and intellectual circumstances which prompted Avicenna, al-Ghāzālī and Ibn ʿArabī’s attempts at harmonization. By analysing the theoretical and linguisti...
The Written World of God is the first systematic overview of the science of letters ('ilm al-huruf) according to the great Andalusian spiritual master, scholar, poet and philosopher Ibn 'Arabi (d. 1240). Ibn 'Arabi defined the science of letters as familiarity with the building blocks of the Quranic revelation and everything in the world of nature. Letters are understood as visual and aural signs pointing to the mysteries of existence. The present study examines how the universe came to be, for what purpose it was created and the hierarchical structure it is endowed with. It is an old story told anew - through the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet, their orthographic forms and the meanings attributed to them, using Ibn 'Arabi's own diagrams. Although the story could be told through geometric figures or numbers, letters were chosen on the basis of Ibn 'Arabi's doctrine that the meanings carried by the letters fully encompasses the whole of existence: God and the universe.
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.
"Sculpting the Self addresses "what it means to be human" in a secular, post-Enlightenment world by exploring notions of self and subjectivity in Islamic and non-Islamic philosophical and mystical thought. Weaving together insights from several disciplines such as religious studies, philosophy, anthropology, critical theory, and neuroscience, and arguing against views that narrowly restrict the self to a set of cognitive functions and abilities, this study proposes a multidimensional account of the self that offers new options for addressing central issues in the contemporary world, including spirituality, human flourishing, and meaning to life." --
In Freedom through Submission Johannes Renders explores Danish-Muslim statements on human freedom. Within a context where public talk of Islam is largely mediated by an incessant succession of controversies, the notion of freedom is weaponized both by and against a growing Muslim community. Danish Muslims take issue with liberal associations of the notion with autonomy and choice, and seek to reconfigure the public debate that pits freedom against Islam. This book brings out a sophisticated and reflective Muslim discourse, in which freedom is something individuals must simultaneously exercise, surrender, and achieve through a cultivated relinquishing of the will to Allah.
The book is a representation of the Pescopaganese community in the United States of North America. It represents the research commitment of decades by Prof. Giovanni Pinto who has been a driving force and a leader in this community for half a century. Besides an Introduction, Pinto’s book includes four sections: Part One – Our Italian roots and heritage: The territory, the history, the urban setting; Part Two: The causes of emigration, the passage, the communities, the progress; Part Three: A to Z: Genealogies, Profiles and Remembrances of deserving Families, Individuals and Businesses; and Part Four: Corollary documents. Prof. Pinto’s book is of great relevance to the history of America, of Italian Americans, and in particular of Pescopaganesi. This book would be a valuable gem in libraries of any Institution or Individual.
A groundbreaking scholarly study of crime and punishment in Qajar Iran Drawing on a rich array of primary sources in multiple languages, Farzin Vejdani argues that the ambiguity in defining the boundaries between private and public in Qajar Iran often corresponded with the jurisdictional friction between government authorities and religious scholars regarding who had the authority to police and punish public crimes. This ambiguity had implications for the spaces in which illicit acts were carried out: “private” parties in domestic residences where music, alcohol, and prostitution were present were often tolerated by local police officials but raised the ire of religious authorities and t...
This volume—the proceedings of a 2018 conference at LMU Munich funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation—brings together, for the first time, experts on Greek, Syriac, and Arabic traditions of doxography. Fourteen contributions provide new insight into state-of-the-art contemporary research on the widespread phenomenon of doxography. Together, they demonstrate how Greek, Syriac, and Arabic forms of doxography share common features and raise related questions that benefit interdisciplinary exchange among colleagues from various disciplines, such as classics, Arabic studies, and the history of philosophy.
The period from the Late Roman Republic to the end of antiquity was marked by a wide interest in divination, and more broadly by an intense belief in the possibility of establishing close and personal connections with the gods. Divinatory practices underwent profound changes, accompanied by new trends in religious belief and philosophical reflection. Different religious, ethnic and cultural groups resorted to prophecy to define their respective identities and traditions, to articulate their peaceful or polemical interactions, and more broadly to construct their own worldview, the effects of which are still visible today. This wide-ranging volume creates a holistic picture of divination in antiquity, with perspectives from scholars of different disciplinary backgrounds. They argue that a greater focus on transcendent knowledge of the divine and cosmos influenced theories of divination among pagans, Jews, and Christians during the later part of the period.
This book examines material and multi-sensorial expressions of Shiʿi Islam in diverse, and understudied demographic and geographic contexts.It engages with conceptual debates and makes several propositions that push the frontiers of scholarship on Islamic and Religious Studies, Material Religion, Heritage Studies, and Anthropology and Sociology of Religion.The contributions presented in this volume demonstrate how material things and less thing-like materialities make the praesentia and potentia of the Sacred tangible, how they cultivate intimate relations between human and more-than-human beings, and how they act as links and gateways to the Elsewhere and Otherworldly. The volume posits that materialities of religion are integral to processes of heritagization shaped by competing social and political actors involved in the construction and canonization of religious—in this case, Shiʿi—heritage.