Mark Sedgwick
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199977642
- eISBN:
- 9780190622701
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199977642.003.0008
- Subject:
- Religion, Islam
This chapter looks at Western understandings of Sufism other than those already considered (as mysticism and as esoteric universalism). It shows how these understandings developed during the ...
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This chapter looks at Western understandings of Sufism other than those already considered (as mysticism and as esoteric universalism). It shows how these understandings developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in verse, fiction, drama, painting, and journalism. They were often trivial, emphasizing dervishes as Oriental stereotypes or vaudeville figures. Even serious, accomplished figures such as Lessing and Goethe ultimately did no more than trivialize Sufism. The best-known, possibly Sufi poem in Western history, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, is considered in detail, and is shown to have been understood as both Epicurean and as mystical. It is argued that the tension between these two understandings is precisely what made it a great poem. The chapter closes with an alternative understanding of Sufism: that is, of dervishes as fanatical warriors, the product of colonial warfare from Algeria to the Caucasus via the Sudan.Less
This chapter looks at Western understandings of Sufism other than those already considered (as mysticism and as esoteric universalism). It shows how these understandings developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in verse, fiction, drama, painting, and journalism. They were often trivial, emphasizing dervishes as Oriental stereotypes or vaudeville figures. Even serious, accomplished figures such as Lessing and Goethe ultimately did no more than trivialize Sufism. The best-known, possibly Sufi poem in Western history, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, is considered in detail, and is shown to have been understood as both Epicurean and as mystical. It is argued that the tension between these two understandings is precisely what made it a great poem. The chapter closes with an alternative understanding of Sufism: that is, of dervishes as fanatical warriors, the product of colonial warfare from Algeria to the Caucasus via the Sudan.
Michael Harris
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780691175836
- eISBN:
- 9781400885527
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691175836.001.0001
- Subject:
- Mathematics, Logic / Computer Science / Mathematical Philosophy
What do pure mathematicians do, and why do they do it? Looking beyond the conventional answers, this book offers an eclectic panorama of the lives and values and hopes and fears of mathematicians in ...
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What do pure mathematicians do, and why do they do it? Looking beyond the conventional answers, this book offers an eclectic panorama of the lives and values and hopes and fears of mathematicians in the twenty-first century, assembling material from a startlingly diverse assortment of scholarly, journalistic, and pop culture sources. Drawing on the author's personal experiences as well as the thoughts and opinions of mathematicians from Archimedes and Omar Khayyám to such contemporary giants as Alexander Grothendieck and Robert Langlands, the book reveals the charisma and romance of mathematics as well as its darker side. In this portrait of mathematics as a community united around a set of common intellectual, ethical, and existential challenges, the book touches on a wide variety of questions, such as: Are mathematicians to blame for the 2008 financial crisis? How can we talk about the ideas we were born too soon to understand? And how should you react if you are asked to explain number theory at a dinner party? The book takes readers on an unapologetic guided tour of the mathematical life, from the philosophy and sociology of mathematics to its reflections in film and popular music, with detours through the mathematical and mystical traditions of Russia, India, medieval Islam, the Bronx, and beyond.Less
What do pure mathematicians do, and why do they do it? Looking beyond the conventional answers, this book offers an eclectic panorama of the lives and values and hopes and fears of mathematicians in the twenty-first century, assembling material from a startlingly diverse assortment of scholarly, journalistic, and pop culture sources. Drawing on the author's personal experiences as well as the thoughts and opinions of mathematicians from Archimedes and Omar Khayyám to such contemporary giants as Alexander Grothendieck and Robert Langlands, the book reveals the charisma and romance of mathematics as well as its darker side. In this portrait of mathematics as a community united around a set of common intellectual, ethical, and existential challenges, the book touches on a wide variety of questions, such as: Are mathematicians to blame for the 2008 financial crisis? How can we talk about the ideas we were born too soon to understand? And how should you react if you are asked to explain number theory at a dinner party? The book takes readers on an unapologetic guided tour of the mathematical life, from the philosophy and sociology of mathematics to its reflections in film and popular music, with detours through the mathematical and mystical traditions of Russia, India, medieval Islam, the Bronx, and beyond.
