Mystical Dimensions of Islam- Annemarie Schimmel
Some call Annemarie Schimmel’s book, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, obsolete, but I disagree. To date, I have not come across another book on Sufism that is more complete and moving than this. Spanning a hefty 500-odd pages, Schimmel’s work is conspicuously free from the the kinds of defects that afflict other Orientalist writings.
She begins by [...]
Have you heard the latest joke about doctors?
Again and again, some silly nut drives an explosives-laden car into a building and reminds us that the scourge of terrorism is far from over. Has the war on terrorism accomplished anything at all? The answer would be a resounding yes. To which I would add: more terrorism!
Isabel Hilton also snidely remarked:
The war against terrorism [...]
Ibn Humayd on Ibn Abdul Wahhab
Ibn Humayd on Ibn Abdul Wahhab Some of the people whom I met have related from some of the people of knowledge narrations from the contemporaries of Shaykh ‘Abdul Wahhab that describe his anger with his son Muhammad. This is because he had not agreed to study the religious knowledge of his ancestors and the people [...]
Wahdat-al-Wujud and the politics of polytheism
Wahdat-al-wujud was an idea developed by the inestimable twelfth-century scholar, Ibn Arabi. Translated literally, wahdat-al-wujud means unity of being, but it can also mean unity of finding. The object of this ‘finding’ is God, and the finder seeks to remove the veils that stand between himself and God so that the perfect level of certainty [...]
The Amman Message in light of Imam al-Ghazali’s Clear Criterion
By all accounts, the Jordan Initiative was a remarkable achievement- a shining moment in this otherwise troubled age. In 2005, King Abdullah, the latest monarch of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, invited leaders of all Muslim communities to Amman and placed before them a short document. By the end of that conference, those leaders had [...]
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