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Sufis

Author: Idries Shah

Publisher: eBook Partnership

Published: 2020-06-20

Total Pages: 540

ISBN-13: 1784790052

The Sufis is the best introduction ever written to the philosophical and mystical school traditionally associated with the Islamic world.Powerful, concise, and intensely thought-provoking, it sums up over a thousand years of Eastern thought - the product of some of the greatest minds humanity has ever produced - into a single work, presenting timeless ideas in a fresh and contemporary style.When the book was originally published in 1964, it launched its author, Idries Shah, on to the international stage, attracting the attention of thinkers and writers such as J. D. Salinger, Doris Lessing, Ted Hughes and Robert Graves.It introduced to the Western world concepts which have subsequently become commonly accepted, varying from the psychological importance of attention and humour, to the use of traditional tales as teaching instruments (what Shah termed 'teaching-stories'), and the historical debt owed by the West to the Middle East in matters scientific, literary and philosophical.As a primer for the many dozens of Sufi books that Shah later produced, it is unsurpassed, offering a clear window onto a community whose system of thought and action has long concerned itself with the advancement of the whole of humankind, and whose ideas about individuals and society, their purpose and direction, need to be understood now more than ever before.

Sufis and Saints' Bodies

Author: Scott Kugle

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2011-09-01

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0807872776

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Islam is often described as abstract, ascetic, and uniquely disengaged from the human body. Scott Kugle refutes this assertion in the first full study of Islamic mysticism as it relates to the human body. Examining Sufi conceptions of the body in religious writings from the late fifteenth through the nineteenth century, Kugle demonstrates that literature from this era often treated saints' physical bodies as sites of sacred power. Sufis and Saints' Bodies focuses on six important saints from Sufi communities in North Africa and South Asia. Kugle singles out a specific part of the body to which each saint is frequently associated in religious literature. The saints' bodies, Kugle argues, are treated as symbolic resources for generating religious meaning, communal solidarity, and the experience of sacred power. In each chapter, Kugle also features a particular theoretical problem, drawing methodologically from religious studies, anthropology, studies of gender and sexuality, theology, feminism, and philosophy. Bringing a new perspective to Islamic studies, Kugle shows how an important Islamic tradition integrated myriad understandings of the body in its nurturing role in the material, social, and spiritual realms.

Biographical Encyclopaedia of Sufis

Author: N. Hanif

Publisher: Sarup & Sons

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 9788176250870

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Before Sufism

Author: Christopher Melchert

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-06-08

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 3110617714

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Christopher Melchert proposes to historicize Islamic renunciant piety (zuhd). As the conquest period wound down in the early eighth century c.e., renunciants set out to maintain the contempt of worldly comfort and loyalty to a greater cause that had characterized the community of Muslims in the seventh century. Instead of reckless endangerment on the battlefield, they cultivated intense fear of the Last Judgement to come. They spent nights weeping, reciting the Qur’an, and performing supererogatory ritual prayers. They stressed other-worldliness to the extent of minimizing good works in this world. Then the decline of tribute from the conquered peoples and conversion to Islam made it increasingly unfeasible for most Muslims to keep up any such régime. Professional differentiation also provoked increasing criticism of austerity. Finally, in the later ninth century, a form of Sufism emerged that would accommodate those willing and able to spend most of their time on religious devotions, those willing and able to spend their time on other religious pursuits such as law and hadith, and those unwilling or unable to do either.

The Essence of Sufism

Author: John Baldock

Publisher: Arcturus Publishing

Published: 2005-03-01

Total Pages: 146

ISBN-13: 1848584075

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Insight into Life is the real religion, which alone can help man to understand Life.' Hazrat Inayat Khan The Sufis have been using carefully constructed stories for teaching purposes for thousands of years. Though on the surface these often appear to be little more than fairy or folk tales, the Sufis hold that they enshrine - in their characters, plots and imagery - patterns and relationships that nurture a part of the mind not reachable in more conventional ways, thus increasing our understanding, flexibility and breadth of vision. Familiarization with this body of material can eventually provide answers to questions about our origins and our destiny. In this book John Baldock explores the rich body of literature the Sufis have produced to guide spiritual travellers. While explaining the significant teachings and emphasizing their significance for us, he sheds a timely light on the Sufis' fascinating perception of life, revealing it to be a process of the heart and not of the head, and offers intriguing pathways to further study and reflection.

Tales from the Land of the Sufis

Author: Mojdeh Bayat

Publisher: Shambhala Publications

Published: 2001-10-16

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0834829401

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Take a magic carpet ride into the delightful world of Sufi storytelling with these best-loved tales from Persian literature and lore, in which images of madness, passionate love, and self-sacrifice convey the inner experiences of the soul that has surrendered to the Divine Beloved. The tales are retold from the celebrated works of Sufi poets and spiritual masters such as Rumi, Attar, Nizami, and Jami, as well as anecdotes about these famous masters.

Sufis of Andalusia

Author: M. Ibn 'Arabi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-05

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 0415442591

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First published in 2008. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Philosophers, Sufis, and Caliphs

Author: Ali Humayun Akhtar

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-06-09

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1316858111

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What was the relationship between government and religion in Middle Eastern history? In a world of caliphs, sultans, and judges, who exercised political and religious authority? In this book, Ali Humayun Akhtar investigates debates about leadership that involved ruling circles and scholars of jurisprudence and theology. At the heart of this story is a medieval rivalry between three caliphates: the Umayyads of Cordoba, the Fatimids of Cairo, and the Abbasids of Baghdad. In a fascinating revival of Late Antique Hellenism, Aristotelian and Platonic notions of wisdom became a key component of how these caliphs debated their authority as political leaders. By tracing how these political debates impacted the theological and jurisprudential scholars and their own conception of communal guidance, Akhtar offers a new picture of premodern political authority and the connections between Western and Islamic civilizations. It will be of use to students and specialists of the premodern and modern Middle East.

Sufis in Medieval Baghdad

Author: Atta Muhammad

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-10-19

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0755647599

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This book examines the political and social activities of Sufis in Baghdad in the period 1000-1258. It argues that Sufis played an important role in creating a public sphere that existed between ordinary subjects and the government. Drawing on Arabic sources and secondary literature, it explores the role of Sufis and their institutions including their ribats or lodge houses, from the use of Sufis as political ambassadors to their role in redistributing charity to the poor. The book reveals the role of Sufism in structuring a wide range of social and political arrangements in this period. It also reveals the role of ordinary, non-elite actors who, by taking part in Sufi-affiliated religious or professional associations, were able take part in public life in late-Abbasid Baghdad.

Sufis and Their Lodges in the Ottoman Ḥijāz

Author: Naser Dumairieh

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2023-06-19

Total Pages: 535

ISBN-13: 9004525262

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The distinguished position of the seventeenth-century Ḥijāz attracted Sufis from across the Islamic world, making it the largest Sufi center of that era, with more than forty Sufi orders active during the Ottoman period. Most of the region’s many scholars were associated with Sufism and affiliated to these orders; their lives and Sufi activities more broadly were documented by one of their number, al-ʿUjaymī, in two texts. These texts, critically edited here for the first time, constitute some of the best evidence for the character of spiritual life in the Ḥijāz during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century.