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Al-Ghazali (d. 1111) is one of the most important theologians, philosophers, and Sufis of Islam. Born around 1056 in northeastern Iran, he became the holder of the most prestigious academic post in Islamic theology in Baghdad, only to renounce that position and teach at small schools in the provinces for no money. His contributions to Islamic scholarship range from responding to the challenges of Aristotelian philosophy to creating a new type of mysticism in Islam, and integrating both these traditions—falsafa and Sufism—into the Sunni mainstream. Using the most authoritative sources, including reports of his students, his contemporaries, and his own letters, this book reconstructs every stage in al-Ghazali’s turbulent career. The al-Ghazali that emerges still offers many surprises, particularly on his motives for leaving Baghdad and the nature of his “seclusion” afterwards. In its close study of al-Ghazali’s cosmology—meaning, how God creates things and events in the world, how human acts relate to God’s power, and how the universe is structured—the book reveals the significant philosophical influence on al-Ghazali. His cosmology has always been one of the most challenging aspects of his work. This book shows how al-Ghazali created a new discourse on cosmology that moved away from concerns held earlier among Muslim theologians and Arab philosophers. This new cosmology was structured to provide a framework for the pursuit of the natural sciences and a basis for science and philosophy in Islam to continue to flourish beyond the 12th century.

Jihadi-Salafi narratives of martyrdom-seeking operations are filled with praise for what they label the exemplary self-renunciative acts of their martyrs performed as a model of the earliest traditions of Islam. While many studies evaluate the biographies of these would-be martyrs for evidence of social, psychological, political, or economic strain in an effort to rationalize what are often labeled “suicide bombings,” this book argues that through their legal arguments debating martyrdom-seeking operations, Jihadi-Salafis, including those fighting for al-Qaʿida, ISIS, and their affiliates, craft a theodicy meant to address the suffering and oppression faced by the global Muslim community. Taking as its source material legal arguments (fatwas), texts, pamphlets, magazines, forum posts, videos, and audio files from authors sympathetic to both al-Qaʿida and ISIS on the subjects of martyrdom operations, jurisprudence, and political philosophies, this book reveals that the Jihadi-Salafi legal debates on martyrdom-seeking rearrange the basic objectives (maqāṣid) of the Shariʿa around the principles of maximizing the general welfare (maṣlaḥa) and promoting religion (dīn) above all other concerns—including the preservation of life. This utilitarian turn opens the possibility for formulating a meaningful engagement and critique of Jihadi-Salafi legal interpretation and theories of warfare within a broader, just-war framework. However, as the jurists and propagandists of ISIS demonstrate, this turn also opens the possibility for the utilization of self-renunciative violence as engendering modes of state formation.

This groundbreaking book examines the means by which the Muslim Brotherhood was reconstituted during the years of Anwar al-Sadat’s presidency. By including an analysis of structural, ideological, and social developments during this period in the history of the Islamic movement, a more accurate picture of the so-called Islamic resurgence develops, one that represents the rebirth of an old idea in a new setting. The Muslim Brotherhood’s success in rebuilding its organization rested in large part on its ability to attract a new generation of Islamic activists who had transformed Egypt’s colleges and universities into a hub for religious contention against the state. Led by groups such as al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyyah (the Islamic Society), the student movement exhibited a dynamic and vibrant culture of activism that found inspiration in a multitude of intellectual and organizational sources, of which the Muslim Brotherhood was only one. By the close of the 1970s, however, internal divisions over ideology and strategy led to the rise of factionalism within the student movement. A majority of student leaders opted to expand the scope of their activist mission by joining the Muslim Brotherhood, rejuvenating the struggling organization, and launching a new phase in its history.

The aim of the present work is threefold. One, it intends to place the thought of Avicenna within its proper historical context, whether the philosophical-scientific tradition inherited from the Greeks or the indigenous influences coming from the medieval Islamic world. Thus, in addition to a substantive introductory chapter on the Greek and Arabic sources and influences to which Avicenna was heir, the historical and philosophical context central to Avicenna’s own thought is provided in order to assess and appreciate his achievement in the specific fields treated in that chapter. Two, the present volume aims to offer a philosophical survey of Avicenna’s entire system of thought ranging from his understanding of the interrelation of logic, physics, psychology, metaphysics, ethics, politics, and medicine. The emphasis here is on how, using a relatively small handful of novel insights, Avicenna was not only able to address a whole series of issues that had troubled earlier philosophers working in both the ancient Hellenistic and medieval Islamic world, but also how those insights fundamentally changed the direction philosophy took, certainly in the Islamic East, but even in the Jewish and Christian milieus. Three, the present volume will provide philosophers, historians of science, and students of medieval thought with a starting point from which to assess the place, significance, and influence of Avicenna and his philosophy within the history of ideas.

The fascination with the houri, the pure female of Islamic paradise, began long before September 11, 2001. The Beauty of the Houri demonstrates how the ambiguous reward of the houri, mentioned in the Qurʾan and developed in Islamic theological writings, has gained a distinctive place in English and French literature from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century and in digital material in the twenty-first century. The houri had multiple functions in Islamic texts that ranged from caretaker to pure companion to entertainment. French, English, and American writers used the houri to critique Islam and Muslim societies while also adopting the houri as a model of feminine beauty. Unlike earlier texts that presented different forms of the houri or universalized the houri for all women, writings about the houri after September 11th offer contradictory messages about Islam. In the twenty-first century, the image of the houri symbolizes a reward for violence and the possibility of gender parity. As a cosmic figure that inspires enduring questions about the promise of paradise and the idealized feminine form, the houri has a singular past and potential for future interpretation.

There has been a proliferation of interest in youth issues in recent years, and Muslim youth in particular. Young Muslims have been thrust into the global spotlight in relation to questions about security, employment, migration, multiculturalism, conflict, human rights, and citizenship. This book interrogates the cultures and politics of Muslim youth in the global South and North to understand their trajectories, conditions, and choices. It shows that although the majority of young Muslims share many common social, political, and economic misfortunes, they exhibit remarkably diverse responses to their situations. Although groups of them are drawn into radical Islam, others embrace their religion more as an identity marker. Although some take Islam as a normative frame and subvert it to express and reclaim their youthfulness, their counterparts may exert themselves through a music of rage or via collective action using the tools of new media and communications technologies. Far from being “exceptional,” young Muslims in reality have as much in common with their non-Muslim global generational counterparts as they share among themselves. They permeate the spaces of culture and politics to navigate between being Muslim, modern, and young.

In this groundbreaking volume, eminent and up-and-coming scholars, representing a diversity of backgrounds and viewpoints, address the question of non-Muslim salvation: according to the Islamic ethos (however understood), what can be said about the status and fate of non-Muslims? Each of the volume’s contributors responds to this often asked “salvation question”—a question with profound theological and practical implications—from different angles: while some limit themselves to its historical dimensions, others approach it as theologians and philosophers, yet others focus on the relationship between this-worldly relations with Others and next-worldly conceptions of salvation. Individually and collectively, the essays comprising this volume advance the discourse on religious diversity and our understanding of Islamic thought and Muslim societies. Between Heaven and Hell is possibly the first ever multi-authored volume on salvation in Islamic thought, at least in English. It does not conclude with neat resolutions; instead, it offers fascinating expositions, debates, and points of departure for further contemplation. Aside from the editor of the volume, Mohammad Hassan Khalil, and the author of the foreword, Tariq Ramadan, the contributors include William C. Chittick, Farid Esack, Mohammad Fadel, David M. Freidenreich, Marcia Hermansen, Jerusha Lamptey, Bruce B. Lawrence, Muhammad Legenhausen, Yasir Qadhi, A. Kevin Reinhart, Sajjad Rizvi, Reza Shah-Kazemi, and Tim Winter.

Despite Rumi’s (d. 1273) recent emergence as a best-selling poet in the English-speaking world, fundamental questions about his teachings, such as the relationship of his Sufi mysticism to the wider Islamic religion, remain contested. This book reaches to the heart of the matter by examining Rumi’s teachings on walāya (Friendship with God) in light of earlier discourse in the wider Sufi tradition and juridico-theological Islam. Walāya is not only central to Rumi’s teachings, but also forms the basis for the celebration of intimacy, communication with the Divine, and transcendence of conventional religiosity in his poetry. And yet walāya is the aspect of Sufism which has proven the most difficult to reconcile with juridico-theological Islam. The book presents, in addition, an analysis of the historical development of the discourse on walāya in the formative centuries of Sufism. This period coincides with the time when juridico-theological Islam rose to dominance, as reflected in the harmonizing efforts of theoretical Sufi writings, especially the manuals of the tenth and eleventh century. In this way, Mojaddedi’s analysis facilitates a contextualized evaluation of Rumi’s teachings on walāya, which had already attracted a range of views before his time. In the process, the book enables a fresh evaluation of the influential early Sufi manuals in their historical context, while also highlighting the significance for juridico-theological scholars of fundamental dogma, such as “the Seal of Prophethood” (khatm al-nubuwwa) in the process of consolidating their own dominance.

Beyond Jihad describes how trans-Saharan trade and traffic facilitated the spread of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa where merchants, rulers, and clerics ensured its successful establishment. From North Africa Islam followed routes and kingdoms to emerge in sub-Saharan Africa where religious professionals undertook the religion’s peaceful propagation. Under al-Hajj Salim Suware, the charismatic pilgrim-scholar who founded the pacifist movement, clerical teaching drew distinctions with jihad and political power to launch the vocation free of political office. Based in civil society, religious pacifism was disrupted by nineteenth-century jihad outbreaks as well as by encroaching colonial rule, requiring adjustment and adaptation, with retreat, dispersion, and resettlement offering opportunities of recovery, expansion, and renewal. The Western policy of separation of church and state, including the free exercise of religion without political office, benefited clerical pacifism, which survived the challenge of nationalism and secular ideologies. It preserved its reputation of moderation and tolerance as a well-worn, centuries-long witness against extremism and intolerance, representing an important contribution of the religion in an unsettled world.

A recent influx of one hundred thousand West African immigrants is creating an enclave that Harlem residents now cal, Little Africa. Because most Americans view Islam as an Arab religion, many disregard the Muslim identity of these Black immigrants. Black Mecca, however, begins not here but with an African desire to attain the American dream. Arrival is met with a host of challenges, including the meaning of Black identity and notions of belonging. Since most of these immigrants come from Francophone countries, the difficulty they face in an English-speaking world is much more than they anticipated, and American English in particular poses an interesting dilemma. Despite these and other issues, African Muslims primarily from Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, and Guinea have created religious activities and institutions that have transformed Harlem into a new kind of sacred city. Yet, as in most cities, urban residents without proper means undergo their own unique set of problems, which force African Muslims to redefine this jihad or struggle on their own terms. Most work an inordinate amount of time, taking a little money for themselves but sending more to relatives back home. While family is generally a tremendous resource abroad, New York presents special circumstances where some are called to become matchmakers for friends and embrace local residents as kin. In the end, Black Mecca is a book about hope and what we can learn from the West African Muslim search for it in a place like Harlem.

This book offers an ethnographic study of African-American Muslims. Drawing on hundreds of interviews conducted over a period of several years, the author provides a look inside the little-understood world of black Muslims. He discovers that the well-known and cultlike Nation of Islam represents only a small part of the picture. Many more African Americans are drawn to Islamic orthodoxy, with its strict adherence to the Quran. The author takes us to the First Cleveland Mosque, the oldest continuing Muslim institution in America, on to a permanent Muslim village in Buffalo, and then inside New York’s maximum-security prisons to hear testimony of the powerful attraction of Islam for individuals in desperate situations. He looks at the aftermath of the assassination of Malcolm X, and the ongoing warfare between the Nation of Islam and orthodox Muslims.

Religiously motivated terrorism is a religious phenomenon; thus the psychology of religiously motivated terrorism is the psychology of religion. For many decades the author of this book has been working in the discipline of the psychology of religion as both a professor of religious studies and a practicing clinical psychologist. Here he applies that work to the topic of religious terrorism, addressing it from both perspectives. Both the clinician’s concern with the dynamics of individual personalities and the scholar’s knowledge of the diversity and complexity of the religious life enter into this book. This book analyzes the psychological dynamics involved in religiously motivated violence and discusses how understanding those dynamics can contribute to understanding both the psychology of religion and contemporary, religiously motivated terrorism. In the literature on this topic there is a paucity of discussion of both of these factors—the psychodynamics of religious terrorism and the religious aspect itself. This dual perspective on a topic of obvious interest and importance is unique to this book. Besides the psychology of religiously motivated terrorism, chapters include contemporary terrorism as seen from multiple perspectives, Islamic terrorism in the context of world religions, Aum Shrinkyo, American apocalyptic Christianity, what this perspective tells us about religion, and religious responses to terrorism.

This book presents a social and religious history of the Sabbatean movement from its birth in the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century to the Republic of Turkey in the first half of the twentieth century. Initiated by a Jewish “messiah,” Sabbatai Sevi (1626–1676), the movement became an influential historical event, in terms of its rapid dissemination and widespread impact, combining Jewish, Islamic, and Christian religious and social elements in the early modern Eurasian world. When Ottoman authorities forced Sevi to convert to Islam in 1666, his followers formed a messianic crypto Judeo-Islamic sect, Dönme, lived mainly in Salonica, Izmir, and Istanbul, and which has survived to the present. During this long process of self-preservation, the book argues, the Dönmes internalized the Kabbalistic philosophy of a “burden of silence” to conceal their practices from their often hostile surroundings. They came to believe that they must keep their identities secret on pain of “spiritual” and material punishments, which shaped their responses to internal and external challenges over centuries. This “burden of silence” became the core aspect for the Dönme Kabbala. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, well-educated and well-organized community members played important roles in modernizing and secularizing Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic. By using Ottoman, Turkish, Jewish, and European written and oral sources, the book narrates and analyzes the Dönme history against broader topics such as messianism, conversion, crypto- and hybrid identities, modernism, and memory.

Iran is a key player in some of the most crucial issues of our time. But because of its relative diplomatic isolation and the partisan nature of conflicting accounts voiced by different interest groups both inside and outside the country, there is a shortage of hard information about the scale and depth of social change in today's Iran. This book offers chapters on the nature and evolution of Iran's economy, significant aspects of Iran's changing society, and the dynamics of its domestic and international politics since the 1979 revolution, focusing particularly on the post-Khomeini period.

Why did non-Muslims convert to Islam during Muhammad’s life and under his immediate successors? How did Muslim historians portray these conversions? Why did their portrayals differ significantly? To what extent were their portrayals influenced by their time of writing, religious inclinations, and political affiliations? These are the fundamental questions that drive this study. Relying on numerous works, including primary sources from over a hundred classical Muslim historians, this investigation is the first scholarly study to detect, trace, and analyze conversion themes in early Muslim historiography. It emphasizes how classical Muslims remembered conversion, and how they valued and evaluated aspects of it. This study examines the interplay between history and historiography, as it scrutinizes the influence of religio-political and sociocultural contexts on historical narratives. While this study focuses on historical accounts, its conclusions are contrasted with recent findings of non-historiographical research on conversion to Islam. Readers will join an intellectual journey, exploring numerous early Muslim sources and wrestling with critical observations regarding the sources’ reliability. They will question whether Islam actually spread by the sword and deduce unconventional meanings of conversion. They will unearth the hidden link between historical narratives and historians’ religious sympathies and political agendas. This study leads readers through a complex body of literature, provides insights regarding historical context, and creates a vivid picture of conversion to Islam as early Muslim historians sought to depict it.

This volume offers a fresh interpretation of Islamic punishments, namely ḥudūd, qiṣāṣ, and taʿzīr, based on a holistic reading of Qur’anic verses on the subject. To do this, the book provides a detailed review of the existing interpretations that have dominated the field. Also provided is a roundup of opinion of the leading contemporary scholars of Islamic law on many of the outstanding issues. The debate in Malaysia is covered in a separate section in some detail. This is because Malaysia provides a good case study of the problematics of Islamic criminal law in a contemporary Muslim society with effects on a sizeable non-Muslim minority. The discussion also provides a series of shorter reviews on similar issues in fourteen other Muslim countries

This book presents a study of the cult of saints among Muslims and Jews in medieval Syria and the Near East. Through case studies of saints and their devotees, discussion of the architecture of monuments, examination of devotional objects, and analysis of ideas of ‘holiness’, the book depicts the practices of living religion and explores the common heritage of all three monotheistic faiths. Critical readings of a wide range of contemporary sources — travel writing, geographical works, pilgrimage guides, legal writings, historical sources, hagiography, and biography — reveal a vibrant religious culture in which the veneration of saints and pilgrimage to tombs and shrines were fundamental.

This book is a study of Islamic identity in Damascus, Syria, from its fall to Muslim armies in 635–6 ad until the end of its tenure as the capital of the Islamic Empire in 750. It discusses the shift from late antique to Islamic culture in the eastern Mediterranean. Even as continuity with the world of late antiquity persisted into the early Islamic period, the formation of Islamic identity in Syria was effected by the specific agents who constructed, lived in, and narrated the history of their city. This book presents literary, material, and social aspects of early Islamic identity as construed by architects, pilgrims, biographers, geographers, and historians. While most studies of this period admit that an important and nuanced transformation of culture took place from Byzantium to early Islam, this work focuses specifically on narrative and the constitution of identity in the dynamic landscape of the early Islamic Mediterranean. By contributing to our understanding of how the narrative work of medieval historians shaped and constituted social identity, in conjunction with analysis of evidence from the material world in which people lived and to which they related, this book is a fresh approach to the early Islamic period. It moves the study of Islamic origins beyond discussions that focus exclusively on issues of authenticity and source criticism to an interdisciplinary discourse on narrative, compelling story telling, and the interpretation of material culture.

This study revolves around the emergence and spread of the “Community of the Divine Flood,” established in 1929 by Ibrahim Niasse, a leader of the Tijaniyya Sufi order from Senegal. Based on a wide variety of written sources, mostly in Arabic, and encounters with leaders and ordinary members of the movement, the book analyzes the teachings and practices of this community, most notably those concerned with mystical knowledge of God. It presents an intimate portrait of the community's formation in Senegal and its subsequent transformation into a transnational movement in West Africa and beyond. The book exposes the intellectual roots of Niasse's Sufi revival by examining the religious ideas and writings of scholars associated with the Tijaniyya. Tracing Niasse's ascension as the widely acclaimed “Supreme Saint of His Era,” the study shows how the stages of his career intersect with the development of his mystical teachings, as well as with the historical context of late colonial West Africa. Against the widely held view that Sufism is not compatible with modernity, the book demonstrates how Sufis have managed to adapt to changing environments. Through a combination of textual analysis with empirical research, the book bridges the divide between the anthropological study of popular religion at the expense of the intellectual side, on the one hand, and the philological focus on the intellectual and contempt of the popular, on the other, thus making a compelling case for studying Sufis and their literary production in their social and historical contexts.

Interreligious feminist engagement is a legitimate and vital resource for Muslim women scholars seeking to articulate egalitarian interpretations of Islamic traditions and practices. Acknowledging very real challenges within interreligious feminist engagement, Divine Words, Female Voices: Muslima Explorations in Comparative Feminist Theology uses the method of comparative feminist theology to skillfully navigate these challenges, avoid impositions of absolute similarity, and propose new, constructive insights in Muslima theology. Divine Words, Female Voices reorients the comparative theological conversation around the two “Divine Words,” around the Qur’an and Jesus Christ, rather than Prophet Muhammad and Jesus Christ, or the Qur’an and the Bible. Building on this analogical foundation, it engages diverse Muslim and Christian feminist, womanist, and mujerista voices on a variety of central theological themes. Divine Words, Female Voices explores intersections, discontinuities, and resultant insights that arise in relation to divine revelation; textual hermeneutics of the hadith and Bible; Prophet Muhammad and Mary as feminist exemplars; theological anthropology and freedom; and ritual prayer, tradition, and change.