The philosophy of religion and theology are related to the culture in which they have developed. These disciplines provide a source of values and vision to the cultures of which they are part, while at the same time they are delimited and defined by their cultures. This book compares the ideas of two contemporary philosophers, John Hick and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, on the issues of religion, religions, the concept of the ultimate reality, and the notion of sacred knowledge. On a (...) broader level, it compares two world-views: the one formed by Western Christian culture, which is religious in intention but secular in essence; the other Islamic, formed through the assimilation of traditional wisdom, which is turned against the norms of secular culture and is thus religious both in intention and essence. (shrink)

In the age of technology, when our daily lives are occupied by the unwanted attacks of useless information, when we are helpless in achieving an authentic communication with our close environment, there appears a more pressing need for genuine spirituality as a means of communication. Zeki Sarıtoprak has explored the potentiality of Islamic spirituality in this book. In the first part, he attempts to discover the roots of Islamic spirituality in the Quran as well as in the life of the (...) prophet and he successfully covers it. He names the first part as "theological foundation." In the second part, he exemplifies Islamic spirituality in the life of some great personalities, two of them contemporary, namely, Said Nursi... (shrink)

In the West, one might say that understanding Sufism is a difficult task. Without authentic information and deep empathy, one has to contend with only the language about Sufism. The words cut off from the Sufi practices represent a simulacrum of Sufism, not its reality.In this thoroughly researched book, Sedgwick is confident enough as a historian to start from Plotinus and end with Ian Dallas and John G. Bennett, touching almost all issues that he finds related to Sufism and visiting (...) almost all the intellectuals whom he associates with Sufi practices in the West. The book is divided into four parts, fourteen chapters, and fifty-one sub-chapters and has a seventeen-page index of names and concepts. All illustrate... (shrink)