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This volume and its companion, John Renard's 1996 book, SEVEN DOORS TO ISLAM, together integrate a wide range of Islamic literary and visual forms, offering a superb introduction to the primary religious sources, as well as a general understanding, of Islamic spirituality and culture. 66 illustrations. 1 map.
This book focuses on women’s important contribution to Sufism by analysing the lives and seminal contributions of six mystic Sufi women to Islamic spirituality. To help reverse the sidelining of Sufi women in the recorded academic literature, the author has selected a representative sample of figures from diverse Islamic dynasties with varying backgrounds, social status, and devotional contributions. Taking a historical approach attentive to specific political contexts, readers will be introduced to the contributions of Umm Ali al-Balkhi and Fātima of Nishāpūr in the ninth-century Khurāsān, Aisha al-Mannūbiyya of the Hafsid dynasty in Afriqya, Aisha al-Bā‘únīyya of the Mamlūk d...
In Saints hommes de Chiraz et du Fārs. Pouvoir, société et lieux de sacralité (Xe-XVe s.), Denise Aigle studies the spiritual role, but also the political one, played by the Sufi shaykhs. From the tenth century, Fārs was a a land of holiness with Shaykh Kabīr in Shiraz and Murshid al-Dīn Abū Isḥāq in Kāzarūn. This research is based on hagiographic sources, historical chronicles, literary sources and archival documents. The author shows how the pre-Islamic history of Fārs was integrated into spiritual Islam thanks to the mystical speculations of the Sufi shaykhs. The particular interest of this research is its contribution to the history of Lāristān, a region that has long remained terra incognita. Thanks to handwritten hagiographic documents preserved in several private libraries, we discover the existence and the role of spiritual masters until now totally unknown.
The notion of adab is at the heart of Arab-Islamic culture. Born in the crucible of the Arabic and Persian civilization, nourished by Greek and Indian influences, this polysemic notion could cover a variegated range of meanings: good behavior, knowledge of manners, etiquette, rules and belles-lettres and finally, literature. This collection of articles tries to explore how the formulations and reformulations of adab during the first centuries of Islam engage with the crucial period of the first great spiritual masters, exploring the importance of normativity, but also of transgression, in order to define the rules themselves. Assuming that adab is ethics, the articles analyse the genres of S...
This book explores the way in which the study and practice of love creates a common ground for different faiths and different traditions within the same faith. For the contributors, “common ground” in this context is not a minimal core of belief or a lowest common denominator of faith, but a space or area in which to live together, consider together the meaning of the love to which various faiths witness, and work together to enable human flourishing. Such a space, the contributors believe, is possible because it is the place of encounter with the divine. This book is the fruit of a Project for the Study of Love in Religion which aims to create this space in which different traditions of...
The three-volume series titled The Presence of the Prophet in Early Modern and Contemporary Islam, is the first attempt to explore the dynamics of the representation of the Prophet Muhammad in the course of Muslim history until the present. This first collective volume outlines his figure in the early Islamic tradition, and its later transformations until recent times that were shaped by Prophet-centered piety and politics. A variety of case studies offers a unique overview of the interplay of Sunnī amd Shīʿī doctrines with literature and arts in the formation of his image. They trace the integrative and conflictual qualities of a “Prophetic culture”, in which the Prophet of Islam continues his presence among the Muslim believers. Contributors Hiba Abid, Nelly Amri, Caterina Bori, Francesco Chiabotti, Rachida Chih, Adrien de Jarmy, Daniel De Smet, Mohamed Thami El Harrak, Brigitte Foulon, Denis Gril, Christiane Gruber, Tobias Heinzelmann, David Jordan, Pierre Lory, Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, Samuela Pagani, Alexandre Papas, Michele Petrone, Stefan Reichmuth, Meryem Sebti, Dilek Sarmis, Matthieu Terrier, Jean-Jacques Thibon, Marc Toutant, Ruggiero Vimercati Sanseverino.
This book discusses hagiographical sources from Morocco taking in consideration the often-overlooked oral tradition. Orality, as is shown in this study, completes and enriches the vision of hagiography that written sources traditionally has offered. The most relevant example in this book is the high presence of female saints in oral narratives that were not included in any other written sources. Recovering oral tradition to study hagiography as well as the role of female saints in Morocco has been one of the main areas of focus in this study as well as problematizing the dependence and dialogue between written and oral culture and can help to understand the diffusion and presence of similar phenomena in other areas of Morocco.
This second collective volume of the series The Presence of the Prophet explores the growing importance of the figure of the Prophet Muhammad for questions of authority and power in early modern and modern times. The authors provide a rich collection of case studies on how Muhammad’s material, spiritual, and genealogical heritage has been claimed for the foundation of Muslim empires, revolutionary movements, the formation of modern nation states and ideologies, as well as for communal mobilization and social reform. This novel comparative, and diachronic study, which is unique for its wide coverage of regional cases and perspectives, reveals diverse political representations of the Prophet in an increasingly globalised struggle over the control of his image between secularization and sacralization. Contributors Gianfranco Bria, Rachida Chih, Christoph Günther, Gottfried Hagen, Jan-Peter Hartung, David Jordan, Soraya Khodamoradi, Jamal Malik, Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, Alix Philippon, Martin Riexinger, Stefan Reichmuth, Dilek Sarmis, Renaud Soler, Jaafar Ben El Haj Soulami, Florian Zemmin.
Arguably the single most important element in Abrahamic cross-confessional relations has been an ongoing mutual interest in perennial spiritual and ethical exemplars of one another’s communities. Ranging from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages, Crossing Confessional Boundaries explores the complex roles played by saints, sages, and Friends of God in the communal and intercommunal lives of Christians, Muslims, and Jews across the Mediterranean world, from Spain and North Africa to the Middle East to the Balkans. By examining these stories in their broad institutional, social, and cultural contexts, Crossing Confessional Boundaries reveals unique theological insights into the interlocking histories of the Abrahamic faiths.
Before the Arabs conquered northwest Africa in the seventh century, Ramzi Rouighi asserts, there were no Berbers. There were Moors (Mauri), Mauretanians, Africans, and many tribes and tribal federations such as the Leuathae or Musulami; and before the Arabs, no one thought that these groups shared a common ancestry, culture, or language. Certainly, there were groups considered barbarians by the Romans, but "Barbarian," or its cognate, "Berber" was not an ethnonym, nor was it exclusive to North Africa. Yet today, it is common to see studies of the Christianization or Romanization of the Berbers, or of their resistance to foreign conquerors like the Carthaginians, Vandals, or Arabs. Archaeolog...