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.
Joseph P. Ansell
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- February 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781874774945
- eISBN:
- 9781789623314
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781874774945.003.0007
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
This chapter primarily discusses the background and context of Arthur Szyk's most enduring work, The Haggadah. It also provides an analysis of the work and its publication. For much of the 1930s, ...
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This chapter primarily discusses the background and context of Arthur Szyk's most enduring work, The Haggadah. It also provides an analysis of the work and its publication. For much of the 1930s, Szyk had been working on this illustrated and illuminated book — his version of the Haggadah, the prayer book used by the Jews for the celebration of Passover. The holiday of Passover commemorates the liberation and Exodus of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. It is thus a celebration of freedom. The decision to work with this text had both art-historical precedent and contemporary political significance. So that work on The Haggadah could be completed and the many details of its production could proceed smoothly, the Szyks settled in London in 1937. Although the several years he spent with his family in London were occupied primarily with work on The Haggadah, Szyk also worked on two additional and very different major projects: a series of paintings on the history of Poles in America and a set of eight illustrations for The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.Less
This chapter primarily discusses the background and context of Arthur Szyk's most enduring work, The Haggadah. It also provides an analysis of the work and its publication. For much of the 1930s, Szyk had been working on this illustrated and illuminated book — his version of the Haggadah, the prayer book used by the Jews for the celebration of Passover. The holiday of Passover commemorates the liberation and Exodus of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. It is thus a celebration of freedom. The decision to work with this text had both art-historical precedent and contemporary political significance. So that work on The Haggadah could be completed and the many details of its production could proceed smoothly, the Szyks settled in London in 1937. Although the several years he spent with his family in London were occupied primarily with work on The Haggadah, Szyk also worked on two additional and very different major projects: a series of paintings on the history of Poles in America and a set of eight illustrations for The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
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.
