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This book sheds light on the relationship between spiritual and political authority in early modern Egypt. This guide to political behavior and expediency offers advice to Sufi shaykhs, or spiritual guides, on how to interact and negotiate with powerful secular officials, judges, and treasurers, or emirs. Translated into English, it is a unique account of the relationship between spiritual and political authority in late medieval/early modern Islamic society.

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.

This book documents and explores a ninth century Muslim thinker’s response to an emergent information technology—widely available books written on rag-paper. By 850, in Baghdad rag-paper books were all the rage. A book market, with its professionals: stationers, copyists, booksellers and authors, emerged. A cosmopolitan society responded enthusiastically. Al-Jā?i? had, for most of his life, earned his living as an influential counselor, a special adviser to the elite. By the time of his death in 868/9, he had become a professional author. Al-Jā?i? was a bibliomaniac and prided himself on his expertise in Kalām, a dialectical method for ascertaining the truth, the predominant intellectual discipline of his day, a rigorous study of the nature of God and the universe derived from close observation of creation and informed by inferential and analogical reasoning about the suprasensible world. Al-Jāḥiẓ: In Praise of Books concentrates on The Book of Living, the most important work by al-Jā?i?, a documentation of almost all creation, from insect life, such as beetles and flies, to reptiles, such as lizards and snakes, to birds and mammals. The primary focus of the study is the extensive praise of books that The Book of Living contains. This is also the story of how al-Jā?i? thought that his book would save his society from the disorder it had fallen into through its addiction to argument and dissent, an addiction that created social tumult.

This book explores the emotional space occupied by children in modern Islamic societies. Focusing on visual representations of children, primarily from modern Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan, it examines important concepts ranging from cuteness, innocence, devotion, violence, and sacrifice to emotion, aspiration, virtue, performance, nationhood, community, and gender. It grounds the study of the visual representation of children in a concise treatment of the history of childhood, education, and religion, as well as the national histories of the societies in question. In addition to exploring a topic that has never been studied comparatively before, it extends the boundaries of scholarship on emotion, religion, and visual culture, arguing for the centrality of conceptions of childhood to adult intentionalities at a societal level. It demonstrates the ways in which emotion is enacted in a sociocultural space that one might call an emotional habitus, ecosystem, or an emotional regime. It also uses the concept of an aesthetic social imagination to explain how public emotional acts shape the lives of more than the individual who enacts them. Emotions are kinetic and directional, directed inward at the individual's sense of self at the same time as they are directed at other members of society. This quality allows them to function morally as well as aspirationally.

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.

More than any other issue in early and medieval Islamic theology, anthropomorphism (tashbīh) stood at the heart of many theological debates. These debates were not purely intellectual; they were intrinsically linked to political struggles over hegemony. The way a scholar interpreted the anthropomorphic descriptions of God in the Qur’an and the Hadith (for instance, God’s hand, God’s laughter or God’s sitting on the heavenly throne) often reflected his political and social stature, and his theological affinity. This book focuses on aḥādīth al-ṣifāt – the traditions that depict God and His attributes in an anthropomorphic language. The book reveals the way these traditions were studied and interpreted in the circles of Islamic traditionalism which included ultra-traditionalists (the Hanbalites and their forerunners) and middle-of-the-road traditionalists (Ash’arites and their forerunners). The book presents an in-depth literary analysis of aḥādīth al-ṣifāt while considering the role of the early scholars of Hadith in shaping the narrative of these anthropomorphic texts. The book also offers the first scholarly and systematic presentation of hand, face, and bodily gestures that the scholars performed while transmitting the anthropomorphic traditions. The book goes on to discuss the inner controversies in the prominent traditionalistic learning centres of the Islamic world regarding the way to understand and interpret these anthropomorphic traditions. Through a close, contextualized, and interdisciplinary reading in Hadith compilations, theological treatises, and historical sources, this book offers an evaluation and understanding of the traditionalistic endeavours to define anthropomorphism in the most crucial and indeed most formative period of Islamic thought.

Taking as its point of departure the symbolic and cognitive roles of language, this book investigates how Arabic is involved in ideological and cultural debates in which conflict is a defining feature. The book shows how discussions about the inimitability of the Qur’an in the pre-modern period were, at some deep level, concerned with issues of ethnic election against the background of inter-ethnic strife among Arabs and non-Arabs, mainly Persians. Discussions of the (un)translatability of the Qur’an in this period are further shown to be related to this notion of ethnic election. In this respect, theology and ethnicity emerge as partners in theorizing language. Staying within the symbolic role of language, the book further investigates the role of paratexts and literary production in disseminating language ideologies and in cultural contestation. Language symbolism is also shown to be relevant in ideological debates about hybrid or cross-national literary production in the Arab milieu. Language ideology appears to be everywhere, including in discussions of the cognitive role of language in linking thought to reality to which a whole chapter is devoted

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.

The area of Los Angeles known as South Central is often overshadowed by dismal stereotypes, problematic racial stigmas, and its status as the home to some of the city’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods. Amid South Central’s shifting demographics and its struggles with poverty, sociologist Pamela J. Prickett takes a closer look, focusing on the members of an African American Muslim community who call South Central home. Believing in South Central examines how believers help each other combat poverty, job scarcity, violence, and racial injustice, providing new insights into the day-to-day lived religion of African American Muslims. The book shows why the mosque has become believers’ key system of social support in a changing neighborhood and how members deepen their spiritual practice not in spite of, but through, conditions of poverty.

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.

This book captures the autobiographical reflections of twenty-eight Christians who were amongst those who, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and initiatives of the World Council of Churches, committed their lives to the study of Islam and to practical Christian-Muslim relations in new and irenic ways. They record what drew them into the study of Islam, how their careers developed, what sustained them in this work and salient milestones along the way. These men and women come from a dozen nationalities and across the spectrum of the Western Church. Their accounts take us to twenty-five countries and into all the branches of Islamic studies: Qur'an, Hadith, Shari'a, Sufism, philology, theology and philosophy. They range in age from late-forties to late-nineties and so have a wealth of experience to share. They give fascinating insights into personal encounters with Islam and Muslims, speak of the ways in which their Christian traditions of spiritual training formed and nourished them, and deal with some of the misunderstandings and opposition that they have faced along the way. In an analytical conclusion, the editors draw out themes and pointers towards future developments. Such a constellation has not existed before and will not be seen again for at least half a century. Theirs is a unique generation and this is their considered contribution to the state of Christian-Muslim engagement today.