This article discusses the politics of local Sufi group in Indonesia, the Shiddiqiyyah. It addresses the locality of Shiddiqiyah tarekat and its politics during New Order Indonesia and following the fall of the regime. It is argued that the Shiddiqiyah, a local tarekat with its roots in East Java and later successfully welcomes national reputation, is an example of a tarekat that utilizes nationalistic slogan to expand its influence as well as to protect the tarekat from heretic accusation. Through (...) a series of intensive fieldwork, the article argues that the Shiddiqiyyah has successfully maintained ideological patronage to the New Order Indonesia through nationalistic slogan which has been a core value of the group. The doctrine of nationalism has been translated in Sufi and Javanese idioms and become fundamental doctrine of the Shiddiqiyyah. (shrink)

The paper outlines the interpretation of Sufism formulated by Mohamed Abed Al-Jabri, a contemporary Moroccan philosopher and critic of the Arabic tradition. According to him, Sufism, unknown to Arabic culture until the advent of Islam, originated through a historical conspiracy whereby the Persians attempted to weaken their new Arabic colonisers. Sufism is viewed by him as an evasion and a detachment from life and its problems. It leads its adepts, through the mystical journey, to renounce material life. (...) It plunges its adepts into a way of life where the annihilation of the self in God represents the central value. This annihilation of the self in deity is possible only through the blind obedience of the Seeker to his Master. Therefore, Sufism can only thrive by using tyrannical means. It demands that its adepts, through following a predestined path chosen by God, lose their own volition and freedom in favour of their Master. Breaking the law at the end of the Seeker’s mystical journey reflects, paradoxically, a spiritual accomplishment. Additionally, Sufi orders maintain a congenial relationship with political tyranny. Consequently, I argue, Sufism leads to a loss of human responsibility for oneself and other beings. I also claim that in a post-tyrannical Arabic society, where responsibility for oneself and one’s community should be the centralvalue, Sufi ethics are unable to play a role in the promotion of modern values. For this reason, it should be prevented from shaping the political and social choices of a modern society and constrained to the mystical realm. (shrink)

The history of sufism entered a new process called “period of muhaqqiqs /period of metaphysical sufism/ tasawwuf” with Ibn al-Arabī one of the most important intellectuals of sufi/tasawwuf thought. Ibn al-Arabī is the leading muhaqqiqs formulating the understanding of this period which is peculiar to itself with his books. However, the person who regulated the knowledge inherited from him and produced a new doctrine from it is Sadr al-Din al-Qunawī. His book in which he exhibited this contribution (...) is Miftāḥ al-ghayb acceptedas an essential book by muhaqqiqs after Qunawī and assigned to principles and orders of theoretical tasawwuf thought. Because of its complicated and important content, many commentaries were written on Miftāḥ al-ghayb. Thus, theoretical tasawwuf thought by the commentators of Qunawī have taken Akbarian-Qunawian form and gained a place in Turkish-Islamic thought. In this article, characteristics of metaphysical term in history of sufism will be mentioned shortly, the content and influences of Miftāḥ al-ghayb will be stated and the Akbarian-Qunawian movement consisting from commentators of Miftāḥ al-ghayb, which have shaped the theoretical Tasawwuf thought will be introduced in general. (shrink)

The study of Sufism, the mystical aspect of Islam, known as taṣawwuf to those closer to the sources and practices, has come a long way since Richard Eaton compl.

This study aimed to analyse the contribution of the Sufi order in stemming religion-based violence as a form of the Sufis’ response to rampant violence, extremism and religious radicalism. This study used a qualitative method in which the data were obtained through interviews, observation and documentation. Then they were analysed by using an interactive model. This study was carried out in three Sufi communities of the Sufi order Qadariyah wan Naqshabandiyah (TQN) in Indonesia, namely in Suryalaya Islamic (...) Boarding School, Futuhiyyah Islamic Boarding School Mranggen and Darul Ulum Islamic Boarding School Jombang. The results of the study show that the three TQN orders have the concepts of dhikr and love, which are internalised in the act of Sufism. The Sufi order has the doctrines of love of God, mutual love, discourse of moderation and tolerance towards religion and other groups as the main instruments in the fight against religious radicalism. The resistance of the Sufis to religious radicalism shows that the Sufi order is cornered from attacks by formalist groups in religion. This fact reopens the historical archive of contradictions between the two major currents of Islamic thought and movement, Salafi versus Sufi. The counter-radicalism narrated by the Sufis of the three TQN communities represents their defensive attitude towards the aggressiveness of the textual and radical Salafis. Contribution: This article contributes to prevent and reduce the rise of religious radicalism in Indonesia. The doctrines of tanbih, mahabbah, tolerance and moderatism developed by the Sufis in the three TQN communities became a source of reference and inspiration for resistance to violence and religious radicalism. (shrink)

The issue of how to read and interpret the Qur’ān has been the subject of Islamic sciences such as Kalām, Fiqh and Taṣawwuf. Each discipline has put forward an interpretation methodology according to its point of view. While interpreting the verses, the Ṣūfīs who are members of Taṣawwuf also produced some methodological concepts for several reasons. They interpreted the Qur’ān with the sign (ishāra), a method of interpretation suitable for the characteristics of Taṣawwuf. The ishāra is a secondary method of (...) interpretation compared to tafsīr (the Qur’ānic exegesis). In this context, the ishārī tafsīr is the interpretation of the verses by kashf and ilhām. It is also the narration of the signs claimed to exist in the verse. However, while the ṣūfīs wanted to explain their inferences regarding the verses on the one hand, they had to hide them on the other hand. These attitudes led to the paradox of statement-concealment as a problem peculiar to the ishārī tafsīr. The goal of this study is to evaluate the tradition of ṣūfī tafsīr / exegesis in terms of this paradox. One of the aims of this study is also to determine the tools that the ṣūfīs use for some reasons in interpreting the Qur’ān and how they conceptualize them. In this perspective, the function of symbolic means such as letter and sign in Taṣawwuf has been emphasized. The formation of a number of methods and instruments specific to ishārī interpretation and the influence of Ibn al-ʿArabī on this method have been discussed. To achive the objectives of this paper, this research article conducted a detailed literature review. As a method, the phenomenological approach and historical methodology have been used in order to present the ṣūfīs interpretation methodology objectively. The concept analysis method has used in order to exhibit a detailed analysis of some concepts directly related to the subject of the study. There are many studies about ishārī tafsīr, the method of interpretation of the Qur’ān by the ṣūfīs in Turkey and abroad. These works are mostly of classical-style works based on determining the nature and position of the ishārī tafsīr or discussing the ishārī interpretation style of a ṣūfī mufassir. For example, Yaşar Kurt’s work titled Ni’metullah Nahcivânî ve Tasavvufî Tefsiri, Mehmet Okuyan’s work named Necmuddin Daye ve Tasavvufi Tefsiri are doctoral theses on this subject. If we need to mention some studies directly related to the subject and the purpose of our article; they are as follows: Among the works written today are Yunus Emre Gördük’s Tarihsel ve Metodolojik Açıdan İşârî Tefsir, Davut Ağbal’s book titled İbn Arabî’de İşârî Tefsir, some communiqués in the book published by Kuramer under the name of Kur’an’ın Bâtınî ve İşârî Yorumu. Ekrem Demirli’s article “Kuşeyrî’den İbnü’l-Arabî’ye İşârî Yorumculuk Hakkında Bir Değerlendirme” is one of the sources of this research. As for the works written in the past; early ṣūfīsm classics, al-Ghazālī’s and Ibn al-ʿArabī’s writings, some boks on the methodology of Qur’ānic interpretation written by scholars such as al-Dhahabī and al-Zurḳānī can be given. The findings and results obtained inthe light of this study are: The ṣūfis have named their experiences they wanted to express, as ishāra. They have wanted to declare their feelings as a result of the spiritual states they were in while reading or listening to the Qur’ān. At the same time, they tried to hide their feelings with the concern of not being understood, not being accepted, being accused or harming those who did not taste the same pleasure. The desire to explain their enthusiastic feelings and experiential knowledge on the one hand and the need to conceal them on the other, seemingly have caused a paradox. Therefore, they have made use of some conceptual tools while interpreting the Qur’ān and used a covered language. In this framework, Ibn al-ʿArabī and his successors have a different position and style. Ibn al-ʿArabī’s approach to the Qur’ān has been named as theoretical ṣūfī tafsīr instead of ishārī ṣūfī tafsīr from now on. His main instrument is iʻtibār / taʻbīr as a way of ta’wīl. His followers such as Kāşhānī, Nakhčiwānī and Brūsawī have been influential in the spread and acceptance of the ishārī interpretation activities. This article fills the gap in the literature. Because it is a methodological analysis and an evaluation of the terms and methods that ahl al-taṣawwuf have produced in order to explain or conceal some of their thoughts about the verses, it will also make a contribution to the ishārī tafsīr literature. Although the article is presented as a result of a careful and detailed research, there are some missing points in it. Thus, further studies that will contribute positively to the debates on the legitimacy of the ishārī tafsīr and its method can be produced. (shrink)

A modern classic of Universal Sufism that explores the mystical dimensions of music-and the musical dimensions of mysticism. Music, according to Sufi teaching, is really a small expression of the overwhelming and perfect harmony of the whole universe-and that is the secret of its amazing power to move us. The Indian Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882-1927), the first teacher to bring the Sufi mystical tradition to the West, was an accomplished musician himself. His lucid exposition (...) of music's divine nature has become a modern classic, beloved not only by those interested in Sufism but by musicians of all kinds. This newly reissued edition includes a foreword by Pir Zia Inayat Khan, Hazrat Inayat Khan's grandson and the current leader of the Inayati Order, the widespread Western Sufi organization that Hazrat Inayat Khan founded. (shrink)

There are some radical practices of asceticism, such as wearing ṣūf (wool clothes), traveling without provisions, choosing to be single, and avoiding earning a living by working, which were generally seen in the 2nd century A.H. and were subject to criticism with the formation of classical Ṣūfism. Criticisms of these practices have started to appear in the literature since the 3rd century A.H. Early Ṣūfī writers such as Al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī, Muḥāsibī, Abū Saʿīd al-Kharrāz, al-Sarrāj focused on this issue and criticized (...) these practices. How are these practices of ascetics viewed in the sects that were formed and spread in the 6th and 7th centuries? Our research seeks the answer to this question, but limits it to the example of Abū l-Ḥasan al-Shādhilī, the founder of Shādhiliyya. This question is important in two respects: First of all, it is investigated whether the determination of some researchers that al-Shādhilī taught comfort in the face of worldly blessings is also correct. Because, among contemporary researchers, there are those who believe that al-Shādhilī wears ostentatious clothes, rides horses, encourages economic competitiveness, and is therefore open to benefiting from worldly blessings to the fullest. Secondly, it includes an investigation of the validity of the belief that these practices belong to an early period in the history of Sûfism and have been completely abandoned over time. Although al-Shādhilī seems to have completed his spiritual education in Morocco with his sheikh, he later went to Tunisia with the latent command of his master. We see that in his first years in Tunisia, he went into seclusion in a cave and was completely isolated from the society and engaged in worship in a way that reminds us of the practices of the early ascetics. But in the second phase of his life in Tunisia, he went to the city on a spiritual sign, socialized, started to give sermons to people, and started to behave more flexible about eating and drinking. al-Shādhilī specifically states that he did not prefer socialization at this stage, but with a spiritual sign. Later, he went to Egypt again with a spiritual sign and got married there, started to deal with agriculture, and continued to socialize by establishing relations with the rulers. Therefore, it can be said that this new social period is a break both from the radical practices of the early ascetics and from the early period in Tunisia itself. It is also seen that in this new period of al-Shādhilī, he did not wear the clothes of ascetics like sūf (wool clothes) and did not want his followers to wear them. He also encouraged to have a profession and was generally against traveling without provisions. But there are two points to be noted here: First, these milder and more comfortable practices should not lead to a search for comfort and luxury. He continued to keep his distance from worldly blessings and to advise asceticism. Secondly, he had some of his distinguished disciples make some practices of the ascetics. The reason for the existence of these seemingly contradictory practices is that while he recommends moderate and sustainable practices to the general public and his followers, he can make the specialized sūfis more strict and difficult practices. While he was encouraging work and earning in general, not ignoring experience, including avoiding work; not ignoring seclusion while leading to sociality in general; while generally suggesting to resort to occasions, he also follows a path of implementing and enforcing radical practices such as traveling without food. Thus, al-Shādhilī is able to encompass all the seemingly incompatible practices of the previous sūfi accumulation with a point of view of spiritual rank and hierarchy. (shrink)

Debate over the closure of DeVasco High School shows that data-driven accountability was a methodological and administrative processes that produced both transparency and opacity. Data, when applied to a system of accountability, produced new capabilities and powers, and as such were political. It created second-hand representations of important objects of analysis. Using these representations administrators spoke on behalf of the school, the student and the classroom, without having to rely on the first-person accounts of students, teachers or principals. They empowered (...) one group—central city administrators—over another—teachers and principals. After analyzing the form these policies took, this article concludes that it is necessary to rethink the processes that create visibility and invisibility. Public data obscured the voices, experiences and collective traumas of students and faculty within the school. A narrow focus on activities within the schools rendered invisible the structural decisions made by the Department of Education in New York City—to favor small schools over large, comprehensive ones. In order to create understanding, and a sense of common purpose, those who are spoken for in simplified data must also be given the opportunity to debate the representations of their performance and quality. (shrink)

Sheikh Halid Sufi, as a Sufi poet, addresses human being as the main subject of his sufist dicourse. He is an important figure of our recent history as he primarily adopted the goal of human perfection and revealed a doctrine of humanity in the school of knowledge. In advance of our current century, when human is seen just in physical respect, he lived as a man of heart who handled human being with an integrated approach within the aspects (...) of matter and spirituality, the world and the hereafter, individual and community, body and soul. In this communiqué, I will discuss Sheikh Halid Effendi’s ontology and his point of view on the place of human being in the realm of existence. He seeks human perfection and wishes people to free themselves of shabby desires and regain their disposition. He recommends people to achieve purity in order to reach the rank of being a mirror to God’s reflections. As a Sufi poet, he attaches importance to carrying out the education of divine journey, wrapping up in mystical ethics, having the identity of wisdom and gaining the aesthetics of love so as to reach the perfection. SUMMARY Sheikh Mehmed Halid was born in 1273/1856 in Sivas. He graduated from Ottoman Junior High School. He attended the 1893 War. In 1880, he started his professional career at a state office. Until 1899, he served in several positions, as assistant judge in Erbaa Lower Court, as Prosecuting Deputy Attorney in Sivas, as Prosecuting Judge assistant in Lower Court and head clerk in Darende, as head clerk in Lower Court in Tonus/Altınyayla, and as prosecuting judge in Kuruçay. He died in 1931 and was buried in Sivas Yukarı Tekke Graveyard. Sufism (tasawwuf) is an education for integrity towards maturity, in a way to prufiy the self from evils of nafs (self) and to reach the love of Allah. This spiritual educational journey is called ‘Seyr-u Suluk’. Sheikh Mehmed Halid completed his Seyr u Suluk as a dervish (student) of murshid (mentor) Kastamonulu Ganizade Mehmed Sadık Baba. Sheikh Mehmed Halid wrote three books called Hilafetnāme, Mektubāt, and Divan. He deals with issues of Sufism (mysticism) in these works. Primarily, his works dwells into the matters of morals, worship, good manners (adab), customary practices, ingenuity, existence, and love. Sheikh Mehmed Halid’s sole attempt is to explain the relationship among Allah, man and universe in an understandable way. According to Sheikh Mehmed Halid’s conception of Sufism, existence is unique and that existence is only Allah. The existence of Allah is absolute while the existence of assets is relative. Things do not exist on their own. Universe is like a mirror. What is reflected in the mirror of universe are the shadows of Allah the Omnipotent. The graces of The Divine are reflected in this mirror. All the things that exist in the universe proves the Self of Allah and his properties. Each of the things in the universe are the words of Allah. The existence of the universe is a result of Allah’s mercy. Man is the fruit of the tree of the Universe.Man is both the embodiment and the reflection of Allah. We want to discuss the position of man in between Allah and the universe with Sheikh Halid’s verses. Perceiving plurality in unity and unity in plurality, Sheikh Mehmed Halid attributes the variety of things and existence in the universe to the Divine beauties of Allah. For those who can comprehend, the plurality/ abundance in existing objects in the universe indicates singularity and uniqueness of Allah. According to Sheikh Halid, Allah is independent from and beyond all the entities that exist in the universe. However, Allah, manifests Himself in the things that he creates and the actions he takes through His divine names and properties. According to Sheikh Halid, each object is a reflection of Allah’s divine properties. Every entity in the universe glorifies Allah with all their existence. For Sheikh Halid, Seyr u Suluk is the journey from weakness to perfection, from substance to meaning, and from things to reality. Considering Seyr u Suluk education as distancing one’s self from other beings, reaching purity of heart, disposing of all signs explains these concepts with pilgrimage metaphor. As a response to those who asks him what he meant by seyr u suluk, he says seyr u suluk is servitude and submission to Allah. In order for Seyr u Suluk to be meaningful, a person should enter the way of a murshid-i kāmil (perfect religious mentor), and should have sincerity, purity (being deprived of all sins) and dhikr. According to Sheikh Halid, someone who is not in trouble is not given a remedy. So as to bother is necessary for remedy to be arisen. Nuisances of the universe are also ephemeral as the universe itself. Therefore, it is unnecessary to bother things that are ephemeral. Because remedy is not available without being mature. According to Sheikh Halid, the procedure of gaining advantage from being mature; getting rid of the ego, feeling the love, being pioneer of the mission, being modest, to attain soul pleasure, escaping from fame, leaving the claim, the glory of salvation, proceeding dhikr, reaching the conquests and escaping from friendship of worldly things. According to Sheikh Halid, being mature is not setting about affiliation ceremony. Asceticism cannot be a show and claim authority. Sincerity is needed on the basis of seyr u suluk education. Asceticism which is an effort of making the religion a specific of Allah is to make intimacy with Allah. Sheikh Halid wants his murids who take part in ṭarīqa (sufī path) to decide on the sincerity. Sincerity is said to be the unique factor that makes sense the membership. Seyr u suluk which begins with being membership of mature murshid, which makes sense with proceeding worship and respecting the sincerity arises by teaching manners to soul. Seyr u suluk is trying to reform the soul. Teaching manners to soul is a challenging and significant task. The most important factor that ensure teaching manners to the soul to be achieved is dhikr. Dhikr practice which makes successful the teaching manner to the soul of seyr u suluk training increases the prudence and foresight of dervish. The unique task that murshid expects from his murid during the membership process is to adjust his soul and parlance to the dhikr of Allah. Dhikr of Allah is a product of fondness. According to Sheikh Halid, one who wants to be remembered in heaven should himself learn to remember Allah. Sheikh Halid gives too much importance to disciplining the tariqa where sufi training takes place. A murid should qualify his murshid whom he intimated to. Followers should gain sufficient advantage from the spiritual atmosphere in the dergāh of their murshid. The murid must be at the service of the murshid who trains him and should obey tariqa manners. Salik who achieves seyr u suluk, who maturates the sufi ethics and who gains sincerity through dihkr of Allah tries to achieve the Gnosis. The intent of being a human is to know Allah. The biggest disaster for human is to come upon unawareness. Sheikh Halid who assumes the the Arifs as sultans of walayah makes a comparison between the Arifs and the Zahids and prefers the Arifs. He thinks that the Zahids pay attention to the appearance, cannot reach the basis and cannot go beyond Allahliness show. Sheikh Halid, who encourages the Zahids to avoid comparing themselves with the Arifs, warns the ones who combat with the Arifs and reminds that Allah proclaims warfare to those who has hostility towards those surrendering themselves to Allah. Sheikh Halid lines up the ways of being mature and having wisdom as godly grace, asceticism, love, the mind of leaving, battle with the self, humility, dikhr and being woeful. Salvation process which Marifetullah will guide is to achieve the love of Allah. Love is the way of achieving the reunion. The reality can just be gained through love. However, gaining the divine love requires to be loved. Because, the way of gaining the divine love is to remove everything except Allah from one’s heart. (shrink)

First, on the "lawless adjudicator." The question I want to pose is this: Why is it so hard for the legal academy - and the legal profession - to come to grips with the bare logic of the charge, much less the case, that Vere acted lawlessly, and therefore criminally, and indeed murderously, when he willfully distorted the governing law, so as to execute Billy? Why has this quite specific legal claim not received more of a hearing? Is it because (...) Weisberg was not sufficiently considerate in his communication of this idea? On first blush that seems implausible: It is one thing, after all, to argue syllogistically that Claggart is Christ, that Claggart is a villain, and that therefore Christ is a villain-one can see why that claim may require considerate communication - but the indictment of the fictional Vere in a nineteenth century novella? Why has it proven so hard for the academy to hear Weisberg's claim that Vere is a murderer? Here is the syllogism: Vere was charged with the duty to uphold the law, he betrayed the law and his duty to apply it in order to execute an innocent man, and he did it knowingly, intentionally, and with plenty of malice aforethought, and for the most profoundly personal, political reasons. Therefore, Vere is a lawless adjudicator, a dissembler, a criminal, a murderer. Does that straightforward legal argument - that an adjudicator is a man to whom the power to declare what the law is has been delegated; that an adjudicator might be a criminal, and might achieve criminal ends, through dissembling, misrepresenting, or perverting legal texts, and thereby through breaching a trust - itself require considerate communication? Has our faith in adjudication reached such absurd heights that the lawless or criminal adjudicator has become an unthinkable oxymoron? Or, have our expectations dropped so low that the phrase "lawless adjudicator" has become redundant, so self evident, that the presentation, the claim, that an adjudicator is lawless, is just a trite, banal, and unnecessary restatement of a mode of being always and already present in courts of law? (shrink)

After the three families divided up the state of Jin and the Tian family took over Qi, the political situation in the fourth century B.C.E. appeared even more chaotic. Wei conquered Chu's Luyang and Qin's Xihe, Qin defeated Wei at Shimen , and again at Shaoliang , and Wei moved its capital to Daliang. During the mid-Warring States period, Qin became dominant in the west, Qi in the east, Chu in the south, and Wei in the center. Rapid changes occurred (...) one after another; trickery and conflict were rampant. However, the shi , the intelligentsia, actually managed to expand their spheres of existence and activity accordingly in this state of tension between countries, states, and men. A few major states assembled quite a number of literati; and those men of the villages, who had in earlier times merely waited passively for opportunities to fall into their laps, crisscrossed the various feudal states; literati who previously had no cause to use military force became, one by one, the honored guests of the feudal lords. With the breakdown of the previously simple and obvious order, the gradually dismantling of the common body of the ancestral clan of the past, and the increasing complexities of social relationships after the dissolution of blood ties, social order became a matter of concern. Or, to reword this most practical issue: How could this universally chaotic society go from disorder to order? (shrink)

Towards the end of the Tābi‘ūn generation (the generation of Muslims who followed the Sahaba [companions of the prophet Muhammad]), there was a search for a name through history, for people who were members of Ahl as-Sunnah (people of the tradition and the community of Muhammad [peace be upon him]), and were distinguished from other people with their understanding of zuhd (asceticism) and faqr (indigence), and their sensitivity to worship and to abide by righteous deeds. In this process, any name (...) other than Tasawwuf (Islamic mysticism, commonly known as Sufism) was not generally accepted because it was considered incomplete and inadequate in expressing the knowledge, state, behavior, and approaches of Sufi. The debate about the origin of the word Tasawwuf has continued from the first time to the present day. Some authors have argued that the original word was not in Arabic and hence it was not known during the time of Sahaba, while other authors have argued that it was in Arabic and that it was known in the time of Sahaba. Also, there were differences of opinion about the origin of the root word for Tasawwuf among the authors who argued that the origin of the word Tasawwuf was Arabic. When Sufi works are examined, it can be seen that each Sufi made many descriptions of Tasawwuf in accordance with the subjects they cared about and the state in which they lived. However, this study does not aim to examine the terminological descriptions of the notions of Tasawwuf expressed in the historical process, but to bring up some discussions about the origin of the word and to examine some issues related to the subject.Summary: There has been an ongoing search for a name for the group who was a part of Ahl as-sunnah and were distinguished from others with their outside appearances and zuhd (asceticism), and made intensive efforts for the elimination of the heart (sense of selfishness and ego). Some authors declared that this group was essentially famous and known, but that a name was needed to distinguish them from other people and to show their privileges. In the early days, some distinguishing names such as abid, nasik, vari‘, zahid (following are some of the descriptions/meanings of these names; one who prays a lot, servant of God, extremely religious, someone who gave up earthly possessions for God, etc.) were given to the pioneer Sufis. However, these names were not seen as a distinguishing feature because they were also given to other non-Sufi individuals, and the use of these names did not become widespread in later times. In addition, since these names indicated only one characteristic of the Sufi in terms of their meaning, they were considered incomplete and inadequate, and there was a need for a more comprehensive name. In addition to these names, there was also a search for new ones in some regions. Among these names, some names such as fuqaraa (the poor), ghuraba (eccentric and noncomformist), sayyaheen (pilgrims), shiqaftiyyah (cave people), dju’iyyah (who eats just enough to survive), malamatiyya (someone who believes in the value of self-blame), nouriyyah (someone who is trying to reach the God's light [nour in Arabic]) and moqarraboon (blessed). Khorasan, Basra, Damascus, and Baghdad are the locations where new names were searched for extensively. These names used in these regions have not gained prevalence in the historical process either. As a more comprehensive name in the historical process, the word Tasawwuf/Sufiyyah (sufism) was preferred. The word Sufism, which means "one who wears wool", signifies an external meaning. However, the main distinguishing feature of Sufi is not the external aspect, but the internal state and scholarship/wisdom. In this context, the relationship between name and person has always been the subject of discussion. Depending on the spiritual education of Sufi, there will be constant changes in their spiritual state and wisdom. There has been a lack of an encompassing name to express this change. Because of this insufficiency, the word Tasawwuf, which includes external meaning, has been accepted as an umbrella term, which also included the internal meaning. In addition, because wearing wool garments was the custom of elite servants of God such as prophets and saints, Sufis considered it appropriate to be known by this name. Tasawwuf has been accepted as a word that encompasses the meanings of words such as zuhd, faqr, vera’ (being afraid to sin), morality, adherence, nusq (praying for and worshipping God). In this sense, Tasawwuf does not mean only morality, zuhd, or worshipping. It refers to a feature that encompasses all of these and also includes other meanings.There are two different views on whether the word Sufism was known and used during the times of Muhammad (PBUH), Sahaba, and Tābi‘ūn. According to one view, the term Tasawwuf was not known during this period. For this reason, the advocates of this view accept Tasawwuf as a way of thinking and approach which is formed by some non-Islamic influences such as Indian, Iranian, Christian, Jewish, and Greek Philosophy. Contrary to this view, according to some advocates, Tasawwuf was known and used not only during the time of Muhammad (PBUH), Sahaba, and Tābi‘ūn, but also during Jahiliyyah period (ignorance period in Arabia before the advent of Islam. Wool (Suf) symbolized devotion during the Jahiliyyah period. When someone tied wool around his neck and head, this movement meant devotion. There are apparent connections between wool and sacrifice in some customs during the Jahiliyyah period.The fact that the word Sufism does not appear in Qur'an verses and hadith (the record of the words, actions, and approval of Muhammad [PBUH]) and that no one from the two prominent generations of Islam, Sahaba, and Tābi‘ūn, was called Sufi does not make it necessary to search for the origin of Tasawwuf in non-Islamic sources. Because although Tasawwuf is not mentioned in verses and hadith, there are some words such as Moqarraboon and Abrar (good samaritan) which correspond to Sufi. The names Sahaba, and Tābi‘ūn were the most honorable names for these two generations, this should explain why no one in the Sahaba, and Tābi‘ūn generations used the name Sufi or needed any other name. Although the name Sufi was not used as a word in the time of Sahaba, it is known that the life of Sahaba is the main premise of the Sufi lifestyle. For this reason, the Sufis took Sahaba as an example, especially the Ashab al-Suffa (young, unmarried, and poor Sahaba, who dwelled in the Suffas [shades] Muhammad [PBUH] built near the Al-Masjid al-Nabawi [a mosque the prophet built while in Medina]).With the preference of this word, discussions about the origin of the word have come up. Among these discussions, the most effective ones were whether the origin of the word was Arabic and if so, what was the root word. Authors such as Al-Qushayri and Ali Hujwiri did not accept the word Sufism as an Arabic word. According to them, there was no comparison showing that the word originally was Arabic. Whatever meaning is given, it is not correct to derive the name Sufi from a root word in Arabic according to the language rules. In this context, it is more appropriate that it is a moniker, not a word derivative. Contrary to Al-Qushayri and Ali Hujwiri, authors such as Abu Nasr as-Sarraj, Abu Bakr al-Kalabadhi, Sohrevardi, Ibn Taymiyyah, and Ibn Khaldun accept the origin of the word as Arabic, but they disagree about the word origin. Abu Nasr as-Sarraj, who is among the first sources of Tasawwuf, stated that the word origin was Safa (enjoyment), while authors such as Abu Bakr al-Kalabadhi, Sohrevardi, Ibn Taymiyyah, and Ibn Khaldun stated it was the word Suf (wool). According to them, if the origin of the word is accepted as Suf, in terms of vocabulary, the word becomes authentic and the wording correct. According to al-Kalabadhi, the words put forward about the origin were allied in terms of meaning, even if they appeared different on the outside, and the meanings of all these names were collected in the word Suf. (shrink)

The notion of 'the West' is commonly used in politics, the media, and in the academic world. To date, our idea of 'the West' has been largely assumed and effective, but has not been examined in detail from a theoretical perspective. Uses of 'the West' combines a range of original and topical approaches to evaluate what 'the West' really does, and how the idea is being used in everyday political practice. This book examines a range of uses of 'the West', (...) and traces how 'the West' works in a broad array of conceptual and empirical contexts, ranging from the return of geopolitics - via a critical review of the debates surrounding Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilization thesis - to the question of the future of 'the West'. Analysis extends further to the repercussions of the war on terror on Western democracy and the processes of delineating the Western from the non-Western, as well as observations of the institutional transformations of Western order. (shrink)

Revered as the ‘Queen of Qawwali’ and ‘Queen of Sufi music’, sixty-seven-year-old Abida Parveen is a spiritual phenomenon who transcends gender while performing. She is known for her signature fashion style of buttoned-up masculine-cut kurta with matching shalwar and an ajrak shawl. Her aesthetic circulates within transnational and national fashion media and popular cultural spaces through descriptors such as androgynous, masculine, modest, indigenous and sacred. As a highly respected figure with widely circulating performances on both the national and international (...) stages, as well through multiple media circuits, including television, social/digital media and broadcast concerts, Parveen's undeniable fame and her transgressive entry into an otherwise male-dominated music genre raises important questions about gender, embodiment, spirituality and the sacred. In analysing Parveen's body and dress in performance, I centre her sartorial style as sites of spirituality and affect to ask: what does it mean for Parveen to transcend gender through a performance of androgynous Sufism and mobilise it as an entry way into spiritual iconism? What imaginations around spirituality and the sacred become available through Parveen's sartorial practices? How does Parveen's style offer an alternative route to Muslim spirituality? Taking up Parveen's embodied coagulation between fashion and the sacred reveals an absence in feminist fashion studies on which subjects and styles are viewed as important, relevant, resistant or transgressive and thus worthy of theorisation. As a feminist scholar interested in the relationship between gender, power and self/representation, I see Parveen as a key global cultural and spiritual figure who necessitates transnational feminist analysis. This article is situated at the intersections of fashion and cultural studies, feminist, queer and trans spiritualities and South Asia studies. (shrink)

In his study of the conversion of Westerners to Islam, a Turkish sociologist revealed in 1996 that it happened that a significant proportion of the converts had adopted that religion under the influence of Islamic mysticism, or Sufism. Now Sufism, located at the meeting-point of the written and oral traditions of Islam, offers an original commentary on the Quran and a spiritual practice based on psychosomatic exercises close to yoga. Interest in Sufism among Westerners was revealed at (...) the end of the nineteenth century and became considerable from the 1930s onwards, resulting in the foundation in Europe of Sufi groups directed by converts who very quickly became shaykhs (shaikh). These first groups, to which new ones were added, are still active today, although somewhat bruised by numerous divisions. The reasons for conversion to Sufism among Europeans, for the most part from intellectual milieux, rest on concerns of a spiritual dimension linked to the climate of religious crisis which the modern West has experienced since the end of the nineteenth century. To which should be added in recent decades the fashionable exoticism fostered by the development of means of transport and communication which have brought East and West closer. (shrink)

The Sufi tradition remains one of the most mysterious and least understood systems of self-realization. This book demystifies the practice of the sohbet—an ad hoc discourse—as the central instructional tool in the globally influential Naqshbandi-Haqqani Order. -/- It approaches the practice using categories of improvised music to establish a framework for analyzation. Its ritualized formal structure, illustrated via selected talks of Shaykh Nazim Adil al-Haqqani, discloses the underlying—and assumingly primary—function to provoke prolonged states of raised awareness in listeners and (...) condition their sympathetic nervous system. -/- In an extensive discussion based on several years of field research in Cyprus, the book relates this intention to similar practices in other traditional knowledge systems by proposing psychophysical interpretations based on psychology, biochemistry, neuroscience, or quantum physics. It will appeal to scholars and students of Sufism, Islamic studies, and comparative religion, as well as those interested in performance studies and improvised music, interpersonal communication, and education. (shrink)

This chapter considers what type of bioethics is necessary to address contemporary issues in global health. It explores what kind of ethics, or bioethics, is needed to adequately address such concerns, and argues that because the most pressing ethical dilemmas are global, a global framework must be adopted. Moreover, it argues that to adopt a local model of ethics (whether one community, one nation state or one area of jurisdiction) will fail to illuminate key issues of injustice and thus will (...) ultimately fail as an ethical framework. In short, the global nature of current health issues requires that ethics is global. This argument is a practical one, and one which should be uncontroversial given the clear need for this response. Thus this chapter goes on to explore why, if the need for a global ethical approach is so clearly required by the global nature of health concerns, there is still a debate about whether ethics can or should be global. Thus the chapter looks briefly at the arguments against a global approach to ethics and goes on to suggest a global model of ethics which addresses at least some of these concerns. -/- In order to make this argument the chapter begins by outlining why only a global bioethics or ethics is appropriate. It will argue that global bioethics is necessary for both practical and ethical reasons. As a matter of practicality a global approach to bioethics is necessary as health issues are essentially global; and ethically, not to recognize the global implications of health issues is to endorse the significant injustice which occurs in the arena of global health. Given this the chapter will then go on to consider why, given the overwhelming reasons for adopting a global ethical framework, that the debate about whether ethics should be local or global is still ongoing. The chapter will finish with a brief overview of the global ethics model and will suggest that it might address some of the concerns of those who are wary of global approaches. -/- This chapter is available Open Access (http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781472544582.ch-003). (shrink)

Although Ibn Barrajān (d. 536/1141) was one of the foremost Sufi masters in al-Andalus, he remains a controversial figure. He is mainly known for an accurate prediction of the Muslim capture of Jerusalem on 583/1187, for his close relationship with the other leading Andalusian Sufi master of his time, Ibn al-ʿArīf (d. 536/1141), and for his obscure death. Ibn Barrajān is not mentioned in Ibn Bashkuwāl’s Ṣila—the main source for study of the Andalusian ulema of this time—and as (...) a result has been taken to be an outsider among the Andalusian ulema, one who threatened the theological and political establishment. However, this image is distorted by the socio-political context of the time and by the paucity of our references. The aim of this article is to shed light on the figure of Ibn Barrajān from a historical point of view so as to improve our understanding of the role played by Sufism in Mahdist movements and in the political changes in the Islamic West during the sixth/twelfth century. (shrink)

This study proposes a reassessment of the social and political thought of Ziya Gökalp, the most influential ideologue of Turkish nationalism. Challenging the still ubiquitous trend which emphasizes the influence of Western ideas to explain the dominant intellectual currents of the late Ottoman Empire, this article locates Gökalp’s thought in the continuity of Ottoman-Islamic intellectual tradition. Indeed, Gökalp’s thought incorporates and appropriates many concepts, arguments and definitions present in that tradition as well as the tensions existing in the historical narratives (...) of Ottoman and Islamic history. As evidence of this continuity, the first part focuses on the dual concepts of medeniyet and hars in Gökalp’s thought and demonstrates his use of traditional vocabulary and the historical tension between Sufi Islam and orthodox-legal Islam in defining these two categories. Gökalp’s idealism and his celebration of Durkheimian sociology also rest on a particular interpretation of Sufi tradition. Accordingly, the second part deals with the political concepts Gökalp uses, particularly tecdîd, and demonstrates how Gökalp’s usage is comparable to other Ottoman authors from the eighteenth century onwards, and reflects the quest for the qualities that once made the Empire great. In the light of these findings, the article proposes a dynamic and inclusive concept of tradition and concludes with some methodological reflections on the practice of intellectual history in the late Ottoman context. Keywords: Ziya Gökalp, Sufism, Islamic revivalism, tradition, impact of the West, Ibn Khaldun, culture and civilization. (shrink)

Today, Islamic scholars are faced with a very interesting situation: while in traditional Islamic societies, Sufism has lost some of its significance compared to the nineteenth and the first third of the twentieth century. and in republican turkey, we are also witnessing a kind of expansion of the sufism of the pas west, especially to the countries of europe, usa, canada and australia. Interestingly, in European countries, traditionally professed by Islam, Sufi tirades are quite widespread. This applies (...) in particular to Albania as well as to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and the like. (shrink)

This article seeks to examine the rise of _tarekat_ (Sufi order) in the context of the digital public sphere with a special attention to the Eshaykh website. As this article argues, the Eshaykh website represents an adaptation of conventional groups of _tarekat_ combined with information technology. However, this digital adoption raises a new problem, especially related to the differences in terms of access between digital _tarekat_ and conventional _tarekat_. This article—using a virtual ethnographic approach—focuses on the Eshaykh website by (...) the _Tarekat_ Naqsyabandiyah Haqqaniyah (TNH) as the primary source. The website provides all information about the _tarekat_, both the doctrine and the _wirid_, which are presented online. There is also an element of the simplification of orthodoxy which has so far been strictly guarded by conventional _tarekat_, but the rise of the Eshaykh website in the digital public sphere is offering _tarekat_ practices that are easily accessible and reach all levels of society. (shrink)

The first poems about the Prophet Muḥammad appeared while he was alive. These first examples, which are panegyrics (madīḥ, i‛tiẕār, fakhr and ris̱ā), largely reflect the characteristics of the pre-Islamic qaṣīda poetry. Due to the developments in the following centuries, the number of poems about the Prophet increased. And thus, a separate literary genre was formed under the name al-madīḥ al-nabawī. Especially the fact that sufi leaning poets contributed to the literary richness in this field. Another factor is the (...) beginning of the tradition of writing mawlid poems in memory of the birth of the Prophet Muḥammad. The thirteenth century was an important period for poems praising the Prophet Muḥammad. Two important poets emerged in this century. One of them is Egyptian poet al-Būṣīrī and the other is Baghdad's famous poet, Yaḥyā al-Ṣarṣarī. Even after his death, Ṣarṣarî’s works with high literary value were read and memorized in the circles of science, literature and Sufism. Due to his competence in the field, al-Ṣarṣarī was known as the poet of the Prophet and Ḥassān b. Thābit of his time. However, it is understood that his poems, which lost their importance in literary circles over time, were not studied as much as they deserved in the modern period. In this article, his life and works are introduced and basic language and stylistic features of his poems are examined. Also, the image of the Prophet in his poems was determined within the framework of the political conditions of the period.Summary: In the field of madīh nabawī, which first appeared in the ‘Asr al-Sa’āda and has continued to the present day, especially two names stand out in the 7th/13th century, when famous poets such as Macduddīn al-Vitrī (d. 662/1264), Ibn al-Muraḥḥal (d. 699/1300) and Ṣafiyyuddīn al-Ḥillī (d. 749/1348) were also raised. One of them is the Egyptian poet al-Būṣīrī (d. 695/1296), who left his mark on the field of madīh nabawī with his many poems, especially Qaṣīda Burda, and the other is the Iraqi poet Yahya al-Ṣarṣarī (d. 656/1258), who was named Shā‘iru Rasūlillāh (The poet of the Prophet) and Ḥassānu Vaḳtihī (Ḥassān of that period) because of the quality of his poems in this field.al-Ṣarṣarī, was born in the village of al-Ṣarṣar, near Baghdad, spent most of his life in the shadow of Baghdad’s political instability and the social collapse that developed in parallel. He was killed in 656/1258 by the Mongolian forces that invaded Baghdad. al-Ṣarṣarī was extremely knowledgeable in fiqh, hadith, language, and ‘ilm al-qirāa. Our poet adopted the views of the Hanbalī law school. In addition, he turned to Sufism and became a murīd (disciple) of Ali ibn Idrīs al-Ya‘kūbī, a student of Abdalqadīr al-Gīlanī who was accepted as the founder of Qādiriyya. He was closely attached to the Sunnah of the Prophet and was fond of reading the Quran. He was chaste and patient and was content with what he had himself. All his works are poetic and they all concern the madīh nabawī or fiqh.Since his poems, almost all of which are about the praise of the Prophet, have a high literary value, they were read, memorized and narrated for a long time in the circles of science, literature and Sufism. In terms of its structure, his poems are based on the traditional forms of Arab qasīda. In the introductory sections of his poems, he often expresses his longing for Madina. The main subject in poems is usually the Prophet and his superior features. In the last part, he usually says salāt for the Prophet and seeks help from him. It can be said that he used simple language in his poems. The vocabulary reflects the characteristics of the urban life in which he lived. The source of inspiration for his poems are the Qur’an and especially the hadith of the Prophet. He uses the potential of literary arts as much as possible while conveying his feelings. But he does not allow the correct information to be lost due to these arts on a serious subject such as depicting the Prophet. We can see a lot of badī‘ (creative) art in some of his poems. But we can immediately understand that these arts do not spoil the beauty of his expression. The poet provides rhythm and harmony in his poetry with the meter and rhyme in accordance with the classical Arabic qasida rules. In addition, he strengthens the musicality in poetry with puns (jinās) and repetition.The influence of the instability of the region where al-Ṣarṣarī lived on his poems is obvious. According to him, the main reason for the terrible situation that Muslims were in was that they were away from the way of the Prophet. He thought that it would be possible to go back to the old peaceful days by following the way of the Prophet. Perhaps as a result of this opinion, he allocated his qasīda to the narration of the Prophet and his Companions. In his poems, he describes the Prophet with his names, superior qualities, physical and moral characteristics. He says that the sentences describing the Prophet are the ornament of poems and believes that praising him is a mean of salvation in the next world. He also hoped that the poems he said in order to achieve spiritual ascension would protect himself against the troubled events of the period.In his poems, especially on the occasion of mawlīd, al-Ṣarṣarī mentions the Prophet’s physical characteristics and likens his smiling face to a bright full moon, his brows to the letter nûn, his teeth to pearls. He describes the Prophet as a man with black eyes, broad shoulders, born with kohl-lined eyes, and who emanates a beautiful scent as a requirement of his creation. The poet, who also touches on the Prophet’s powerful address, states that his speech is more effective than Luqman’s wise words by virtue of his jawami‘ al-kalim (comprehensive speech) and faṣl al-khiṭab (clear speech), and that his soft address, which states nothing other than the truth, is a blessing from Allah. He additionally describes the Prophet’s plain words, easy to understand by all, as more valuable than jewels. al-Ṣarṣarī, who praises the Prophet in terms of morality with basic human virtues such as bashfulness, justice, modesty, and courage, emphasizes that he is, a paragon of patience, perseverance, kindness, and compassion through analogies such as, “his clothes are peace and perseverance”, his “cover is kindness and forgiveness”. In his world of imagery, the Prophet’s benevolence is so abundant like the rain that the clouds cannot compete with him. Also, he does not shame anybody for what he gives. He bestows the most valuable possessions like gold and camels. Even the respectable personalities of the tribe benefit from his grace. He is so generous that he is giving even when the clouds are stingy about giving rain during times of drought. He welcomes with a smile those who approach him with requests. The donations he makes privately are entirely satisfying.The image of prophethood in al-Ṣarṣarī’s poems, is centralized around the thought of nūr Muhammadī (prophetic light) and the miracles of the Prophet. He reminds that the Prophet never gave up despite the calamities he encountered and that he was supported with extraordinary events in various stages of his life since he was born, and reflects the understanding that the prophet is spiritually supporting the community with his nūr, and in the case the community follow his sunnah, overcoming the Mongolian attacks, which seems like a miracle, is possible. The mention of Qattāl (warrior), Māḥī (eliminator of disbelief), Ẓāhir, Ẓāfir, Manṣūr and Muẓaffar (victorious) among the Prophet’s names, especially those that evoke the superiority he gained in his fight against the disbelievers, giving greater prominence to his courage and valor among his virtues are also related to the political and social conditions of the period. The couplets about the Companions of the Prophet following the couplets that describe the Prophet’s valor, the emphasis of their aid to the Prophet, and the particular mention of their fighter spirit may be considered in the same context. Perhaps, in this way, the poet aims to boost the courage of the Muslims who are exposed to Mongolian attacks with respect to protecting their spiritual and holy values against the enemy. (shrink)

Are critiques of the "West" peculiar to the Muslim world? Are they a reflection of a simple discontent with the international order or a conservative rejection of Western-originated, universal modernity? How should Western intellectuals and leaders respond to the Muslim critiques?

Exploring the pre-political en pre-legal spiritual infrastructure from which modern, liberal democracies in the West live, but cannot guarantee, this book ...

In the 21st century, amid converging global political, social, and economic forces we are questioning the fundamental values we hold true, driven by an antagonism between different schools of philosophy--between left- and right-wing politics. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of western political philosophy and underlines the core principles of each argument. It then argues that neither have we solved nor do we have any pathway to eventually solve, the question of right and wrong--we are essentially moral relativists in disguise. (...) In order to break out of this cycle of uncertainty, the book proposes a solution of knowledge-based cognition: policy based on a concrete and proven understanding of an absolute and certain body of truths. This requires an analysis and blending of non-western political philosophical traditions, such as those espoused by Islam and Confucianism. This book gives an original critique of western political philosophy and is the first book to engage in a reconstruction of Islamic political philosophy." -- Back cover. (shrink)

The Naqshbandiyya is one of the most widespread and influential Sufi orders in the Muslim world. Having its origins in the Great Masters tradition of Central Asia almost a millennium ago, it played a significant role in the pre-modern history of the Indian subcontinent and the Ottoman Empire, and is still spreading today. This volume seeks to present a broad picture of the evolution of the ideas and organizational forms of the Naqshbandi order throughout its history. It combines a (...) synthesis of the vast literature on the order with original research, and shall be an important contribution for those interested in Sufism, Islamic history and Muslim-Christian relations. (shrink)

The Confucian doctrine of _tianxia_ outlines a unitary worldview that cherishes global justice and transcends social, geographic, and political divides. For contemporary scholars, it has held myriad meanings, from the articulation of a cultural imaginary and political strategy to a moralistic commitment and a cosmological vision. The contributors to _Chinese Visions of World Order_ examine the evolution of tianxia's meaning and practice in the Han dynasty and its mutations in modern times. They attend to its varied interpretations, its relation to (...) realpolitik, and its revival in twenty-first-century China. They also investigate tianxia's birth in antiquity and its role in empire building, invoke its cultural universalism as a new global imagination for the contemporary world, analyze its resonance and affinity with cosmopolitanism in East-West cultural relations, discover its persistence in China's socialist internationalism and third world agenda, and critique its deployment as an official state ideology. In so doing, they demonstrate how China draws on its past to further its own alternative vision of the current international system. Contributors. Daniel A. Bell, Chishen Chang, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Prasenjit Duara, Hsieh Mei-yu, Haiyan Lee, Mark Edward Lewis, Lin Chun, Viren Murthy, Lisa Rofel, Ban Wang, Wang Hui, Yiqun Zhou. (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)

For a long time, international relations scholars have adopted a narrow view of what is global order, who are its makers and managers, and what means they employ to realize their goals. Amitav Acharya argues that the nature and scope of agency in the global order - who creates it and how - needs to be redefined and broadened. Order is built not by material power alone, but also by ideas and norms. While the West designed the post-war order, the (...) non-Western countries were not passive. They contested and redefined Western ideas and norms, and contributed new ones of their own making. This book examines such acts of agency, especially the redefinitions of sovereignty and security, shaping contemporary world politics. With the decline of Western dominance, ideas and agency from the Rest may make it possible to imagine and build a truly global order. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the environmental conservation efforts that respond to the human race’s ecological crisis. It does this by looking at Sufistic-based environmental conservation at the pesantren of ath-Taariq in West Java, Indonesia. Data were obtained through interviews, observation and documentation using qualitative methods. Two findings were yielded; firstly, environmental conservation practices taught to students include ecology teaching, producing plant seeds and recycling waste into organic fertiliser. Secondly, significant steps have been taken by the establishment for reforestation and (...) nature conservation motivated by Sufi values and doctrines, including the concept of zuhud [asceticism] and gratitude, kinship and mutual assistance, love and blessing, as well as tafakkur [contemplation]. Contribution: This article helps develop studies of Sufism and environmental conservation. It offers a new direction for the teaching and learning of contemporary Sufism that all Islamic educational institutions could adopt. (shrink)

Partly diagnostic, this essay explores the religious background to the shift in the dominant political anxieties of our time: from injustice to anarchy. The primordial elements of water, fire, earth, and air supply us with powerful images for the dissolution of institutional forms and structures into chaos. In its response to the threat of chaos, the United States runs the danger currently of shifting in its sense of itself: from leading citizen among the nations to imperial power ruling over all (...) nations. On the domestic scene, the country also shows signs of reconfiguring its life after the pattern of imperial Rome. While both order and justice are fundamental social goods—neither of which can be ignored—the essay argues, in closing, for the priority of justice in God's charitable ordering of all things. This article was the Presidential Address at the 2003 SCE annual meeting in Pittsburgh. (shrink)

Sufism - spiritual practice, intellectual discipline, literary tradition, and social institutionhas played an integral role in the moral formation of Muslim society. Its aspiration toward a universal kindness to all creatures beyond the requirements of Islamic law has added a distinctly hypernomian dimension to the moral vision of Islam, as evidenced in a wide range of Sufi literature. The universal perspective of Sufism, fully rooted in Islamic revelation, yields a lived (and not just studied) ethics with the (...) potential to view and embrace all creatures through a single ethical vision, regardless of religious or other affiliation. This side of Islam, both acknowledging and surpassing the outlook of the legal heritage, offers important insight into understanding the nature of Muslim society as both Islamic and metaIslamic in religious orientation. Sufism, still significant in today's Islamic world, thus offers important material for locating Islam as part of an international order with principles and standards that resonate deeply with the moral vision of Islam itself. (shrink)

This article aims to study Sufism (taṣawwuf) and inspiration (ilhâm), which is the main means of the mystical knowledge, in the thought of Ibn Taymiyya who is known generally as an exponent of a tradition grounded on the understanding of Salaf. He is considered by majority to be a rigid opponent of Sufism because of his unconventional interpretations of Sufi terminology. Also, since Ibn Taymiyya constantly offers the Qur’ān, ḥadīth, and the opinions of Salaf as the base (...) of religious knowledge, the idea that he does not lean toward inspirational and rational knowledge and he does not give a place for them in his epistemology came out and has grown in the course of time. As a result of our research, however, we realize Ibn Taymiyya admits the epistemological value of inspiration along with Sufism conditionally. While he divides Sufism into Early and Later periods, he examines inspiration in the context of knowledge (bâb al-ʿilm) which is considered to be a subcategory of supernatural events. Ibn Taymiyya, who believes that inspirational knowledge must be tested by means of the Qur’ān, Sunna, and the opinions of Salaf, without rejecting its reality, assesses the subject matter in detail through his own criteria. Therefore, this article, in which the subject is elaborated critically and descriptively, focuses on the approach of Ibn Taymiyya to Sufism and inspiration that is the basic element of Sufi knowledge. (shrink)

In this volume Henry Corbin emphasizes the differences between the exoteric and esoteric forms of Islam. He also reveals that whereas in the West philosophy and religion were at odds, they were inseparably linked, at least during this period, in the Islamic world. A valuable section of notes and appendices includes original translation of numerous Sufi treatises.

In this book, Nicolas Laos studies the meaning of the terms "world" and "order," the moral dimensions of each world order model, and wider issues of meaning and interpretation generated by humanity's attempt to live in a meaningful world and to find the logos of the beings and things in the world. The aim of this book is to propose a unified theory of world order (i.e., a theory that combines philosophy, theology, and political theory). In this context, the author (...) provides a thought-provoking (re)interpretation of classical philosophy (placing particular emphasis on Platonism), an in-depth inquiry into medieval philosophy and spirituality (placing particular emphasis on the cultural differences between the Greek East and the Latino-Frankish West), and an intellectually challenging review and evaluation of modern Western philosophy (including Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Husserl, and Heidegger) and of Nietzsche's and the postmodernists' revolt against modernity. He then elucidates the philosophical foundations and "pedigree" of each of the three basic political theories of modernity (i.e., Liberalism, Communism, and Fascism), and he studies the basic theoretical debates in International Relations, Geopolitics, and Noopolitics. Finally, Laos proposes a new, "fourth," political theory which he calls "metaphysical republicanism.". (shrink)

Sufi group mainly dictates its followers to distance themselves from worldy affairs and to live in religious seclusion. This article offers a distinct perspective on the study of sufism through examining the political activities of the sufi group the Tarekat Qa>diriyah wa Naqsyabandiyah of Cukir in Indonesia and the group’s political patron, the Partai Persatuan Pembangunan. The article benefits form a French philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of geneology and the notion of knowledge to better comprehend the nature (...) of political activism of a sufi group. It further argues that basic concept of student and master relationship in Sufism is explaining the politics of sufism in contemporary Indonesia. The mutual relation between leaders of the sufi group and the PPP has facilitated the crossing boundaries of Sufi basic principle of non-participatory politics. (shrink)

This article discusses the role of myth in Persian literature and poetry, and how it has affected Sufism and the evolution of its mysticism. Sufism developed in the seventh (3 AH) century solely within the confines of Islamic orthodoxy. The Sufi path began as a protest movement against Islam and the Caliphs, and progressively enriched its many dimensions until the tenth century, when the majority of artists, calligraphers and poets were Sufi. The article will investigate (...) class='Hi'>Sufism as an activism movement related to politics, religion and social circumstances, and its collaboration with new media in finding a new, contemporary method of protest in today’s Iran. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"A Unity of Order":Aquinas on the End of PoliticsWilliam McCormick S.J.Nonspecialists are often surprised to learn that Aquinas's thought on Church and state is a matter of obscurity. After all, Aquinas is the most famous medieval thinker in the West, and the question of Church and state is one of the best-known medieval political questions. And yet his thought on that polemical topic remains obscure. As John Watt puts (...) it: "There are too many ambiguities in his doctrine and too many unanswerable questions about what he did or did not hold."1Why is his view not better understood? Part of its obscurity is the relative infrequency with which he writes on politics.2 Another is the relative lack of interest in medieval political thought among political scientists and historians of political thought, an obscurity dating back to the Renaissance.3 Those who do study Aquinas's thought, moreover, have been mired in a controversy over two key texts: one from book II of his Scriptum or commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences (d. 44, q. 2, a. 3, exp. text.), and the other in book II of De regno (On kingship), chapter 3 (no. 110). For brevity, I will use S for the Scriptum passage and R for the De regno passage.4 These two [End Page 1019] appear to contradict each other, and with respect to fundamental political questions. The debate over these two texts points to what most contributes to the obscurity of Aquinas's teaching on Church and state: confusion about his vision of politics in human life. As I will show in this paper, Aquinas transcends modern categories of the "secular" and "belief" in his treatment of politics. Aquinas valorizes the integrity of political activity: that autonomy is not just a concession to the modern condition. It is in fact when Aquinas is most theological that he is most open to that integrity. The integrity of the political speaks to the intrinsic goodness of that order: it mirrors God's unity in its complex and ordered diversity.In this paper I examine R and S to show their concordance. I argue that they are complementary in what they prescribe for relations between Church and state, and indeed grounded in the same account of the origins of political authority. Through this investigation we will uncover key principles of Aquinas's political thinking that show him to have a capacious vision of politics where humans achieve the actualization of their full beings as human.A key notion will be unitas ordinis, or unity of order: the form of human cooperation in political life. As we will see, that form strikes a middle path between the simple unity of the individual person and the orderless collectivity of a crowd. For Aquinas, that order is itself a common good of politics, and an intrinsic one at that, before any "extrinsic" common good achieved by the people through that order. Part of why this seemingly secular consideration is good is its theological importance: it mirrors God.Further, if Aquinas does not elaborate on political arrangements as much as one would like, nevertheless he offers sure guidance for the principles which ought to guide the prudent development of those arrangements in a particular time and place. Ultimately Aquinas shows that medieval political thought is in key respects not as alien and hostile to us as we might imagine, but in its own way equally concerned about the integrity of the political life.5The Teaching of SAquinas's teaching on Church and state in S is widely accepted as his mature "two powers" teaching. Aquinas's most famous work, the Summa theologiae [ST], would eventually replace Lombard's Sentences, but in Thomas's own thirteenth century it was that compendium of quotations and arguments [End Page 1020] from Christian sources compiled by the twelfth-century theologian-bishop Lombard that was the standard theology textbook in the Latin West—the Ur-text for theological teaching and scholarship.6The Sentences is perhaps the most important Western book no one has heard of. It was so influential not only because it collected a rich trove of... (shrink)

In late eighteenth-century West Africa, cycles of increasing violence and slave raiding sparked a desire for new modes of political organization. In the Sahel a.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Chinese Gleams of Sufī Light: Wang Tai-yü's Great Learning of the Pure and Real and Liu Chih's Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm, with a New Translation of Jāmī's Lawā'iḥ from the Persian by William C. ChittickE. N. AndersonChinese Gleams of Sufī Light: Wang Tai-yü's Great Learning of the Pure and Real and Liu Chih's Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm, with a New Translation of (...) Jāmī's Lawā'iḥ from the Persian by William C. Chittick. By Sachiko Murata, with a foreword by Tu Weiming. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Pp. xiv + 264.Contacts between China and the Near East are at least as old as civilization but have been relatively little studied. This has led to a lack of attention to Chinese Islam. Yet, Islam has been a profoundly influential force in China for centuries. In Chinese Gleams of Sufī Light, Sachiko Murata has stepped forward to bring a wider awareness to the interactions between Chinese Islam and native Chinese philosophic traditions. (Murata is also the author of The Tao of Islam [1992] and, with Islamicist William Chittick, The Vision of Islam [1994]). [End Page 257]The present book adds greatly to our understanding. It includes a translation of The Great Learning of the Pure and Real, by Wang Tai-yü (ca. 1590-ca. 1658) and facing-page versions of William Chittick's English translation of the fifteenth-century Gleams (Lawā'iḥ) by 'Abd al-Rahman Jāmī and Murata's English translation of Liu Chih's (ca. 1662-ca. 1730) Chinese version of the same work. (Here, incidentally, I follow the book in using the Wade-Giles system.) One can see, comparing the translations, howLiu recast Jāmī's work in Chinese philosophic language, paraphrased some difficult passages, summarized others, and added his own commentaries.Interestingly, Liu eliminated Jāmī's Persian poetry. Murata thinks this is because Liu wanted to focus on the hard ideas; I suspect that it was because Liu realized that Persian prosody and imagery were too far from Chinese poetry to please his audience.Both Wang and Liu belonged to what must have been a rather loose but some-how connected circle of Chinese Islamic scholars. Both, also, almost necessarily used language fairly widespread in Chinese philosophy. Terms such as "emptiness" and "transformation" had many Chinese resonances, some most un-Islamic (Neo Confucian and Buddhist, for instance).Neither Chittick nor Murata give any glosses for key philosophical terms in either source language. Their philosophical and religious provenance, Chinese or Muslim, is correspondingly unclear.What is clear is that Neo-Confucianism had a strong influence on these scholars. Haqiqa "reality" is often translated as li "principle." Pen-jan "root nature" is used for the Arabic compound "essence and attributes." These examples are discussed in the introduction (p. 19). "Annihilation" becomes "conquering" (pp. 148-149). This is strange, because "Annihilation" (fana') is a technical term in Sufism for the disappearance of the self in God; it is an Arabic term, and literally means something like. "passing away." It signifies the forgetting or loss of self, such that only contemplation of the Divine remains. It is as close to the Divine as humans can get since, in Islam, humans cannot be absorbed into Allah (as, in Buddhism, they can be absorbed into Nirvāṇa or the Buddha-nature). "Conquering" seems a rather strange way to express this in Chinese. Perhaps Chinese Muslim readers of the time had developed this specialized sense for it.There are, of course, debatable translations here to contend with (both from Persian and Arabic to Chinese and from Persian and Chinese into English), but it appears that real incommensurability is involved. It was very difficult to use the language of Chinese philosophy in the seventeenth century, influenced as it was by centuries of Neo-Confucian thought, to talk about a radically different religion characterized by an infinitely powerful and wise God, aware of all futures, close to the believer and yet cut off.The inevitable result is to wedge the Arabic and Persian philosophy, so heavily informed by Neoplatonic essentialism and other... (shrink)

Although some critics of Eric Voegelin’s later work have faulted his failure to deal with the historical Jesus and to address the implications of Christianity for social and political life, the recent publication of Voegelin’s _History of Political Ideas_ has allowed a more complete assessment of his position regarding the Christian political order. This book addresses that criticism through an analysis of Voegelin’s early work. In _Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Christian Political Order_, Jeffrey C. Herndon analyzes the development (...) of Voegelin’s thought regarding the origins of Christianity in the person of Jesus, the development of the church in the works of Paul, and the relationship between an immanent institutional order symbolizing the divine presence and the struggle for social and political order. Focusing on the tension between a spiritual phenomenon based on Pauline faith and the institutionalization of that experience in the church, Herndon offers one of the first examinations of the relationship of the _History of Political Ideas_ to Voegelin’s larger body of work. In his wide-ranging study, Herndon explores Voegelin’s examination of the problem of Christian political order from the inception of Christianity through the Great Reformation. He also presents a clarification of Voegelin’s theory of civilizational foundation and of Voegelin’s philosophy of history with regard to Christianity and Western political order. Herndon addresses not only the nagging problem in Voegelin scholarship regarding his relationship with the historical Jesus but also the “Pauline compromises with the world” that enabled Christianity to become the instrument by which the West was civilized. He also shows that Voegelin’s interpretation of the historical pressures released by the Great Reformation is important to an understanding of his later work regarding the negative effect of Christian symbols in the creation of ideological disorder. _Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Christian Political Order_ clarifies issues in Voegelin studies regarding the intersection between political theory and Christian concerns, addressing the relation of religious experience to the public sphere of political life in the West and helping to explain Voegelin’s contention that the death of the spirit is the price of progress. It offers scholars a perspective heretofore lacking in Voegelin scholarship and a clearer view of Voegelin’s understanding of the Christian dispensation and its influence on the course of Western development, history, and philosophy. (shrink)

The integration of modern Western philosophy with the study of Sufism tradition wasn’t quite familiar. So far, philosophical Sufism is often studied from the perspective of neo-platonic philosophy which is famous for its emanation doctrine. Through this research, the author proposes a new integration by using the philosophical concept of Heidegger’s hermeneutics and Roland Barthes’s semiotics as perspectives in studying the phenomena of the philosophical Sufism tradition. The hermeneutic theory of Martin Heidegger used in this research is (...) existential primordial verstehen and the theory of facticity. Whereas Semiotic theory used in this research is Roland Barthes’s theory of order of signification which is used to analyze Sufi’s connotative interpretation of the Qur’an verse. The method used in this research is analysis descriptive by a combined table of hermeneutic and semiotic theories through library research on several primary sources concerning Sufi’s interpretation such as Miftahus Sufi, al-Luma‘, Shaṭaḥāt al-Sūfiyyah, etc. As a result, in the perspective of Sufism Primordial Verstehen, the doctrines of Sufism such as ittiḥād, ḥulūl, and waḥdah al-wujūd could be understood as existential primordial understanding in contemplating Sufi’s existence in the world and his arrival at the understanding of Allah as the only existing Being. (shrink)

How important is Jiang Qing, whose extraordinary proposals for political change make up the core of the new book A Confucian Constitutional Order: How China’s Ancient Past Can Shape Its Political Future? In his Introduction to the volume, co-editor Daniel Bell maintains that Jiang’s views are “intensely controversial” and that conversations about political reform in China rarely fail to turn to Jiang’s proposals. At least in my experience, this is something of an exaggeration. Chinese political thinking today is highly pluralistic, (...) and for many participants Jiang is simply a curiosity—if indeed they are aware of him. Still, for three reasons Jiang is very much worth our attention. First, there is a vibrant and .. (shrink)

Both Michael Oakeshott and Carl Schmitt were deeply preoccupied with what Oakeshott called ‘the experience of living in a modern European state’; both felt that the state's proper origins and trajectory had not been grasped, that proper statehood had profoundly been put into doubt in the twentieth century, and that state authority and legitimacy needed to be shored up in an age of ‘mass politics’. Not surprisingly, then, both developed their conception of political association with and sometimes against Hobbes. Both (...) profoundly disagreed with conventional readings of Hobbes as propounding a materialist or ‘scientistic’ philosophy. Most importantly, both consistently de‐emphasized, or entirely discounted, Hobbes's contractualism – they cut off any possible route from Hobbes's thought to liberal theories of explicit or tacit consent. Instead, both stressed a concern with the cultural preconditions of political order. Oakeshott's civil association turned out to be an idealized picture of modern European individualism as a unique civilizational achievement that sustained a very limited state whose authority could only be acknowledged, rather than contested. Schmitt, on the other hand, advocated a deeply authoritarian fusion of political and religious elements, a sort of neo‐Erastian dictatorship as the solution to the problem of political order. Idiosyncratic as these visions might appear, they in fact sum up two ways of thinking about political order still prevalent today: the notion that liberal democracy is only for the West; and the idea that, ultimately, political cohesion depends on a shared religious mentality. (shrink)

Through the influence of the religious mystical thought, which interprets the human as a traveler and the world as a destination to settle in and migrate from, numerous connotations as to the road, the passenger as well as the journey have been created in Turkish Ṣūfī poetry. The caravan, which takes place in poetry as an element of simile (tashbīḥ) and generally within the framework of metaphor (majāz) is one of these associations. In Ṣūfī texts, the caravan symbolizes the spiritual (...) journey of the sālik, who wants to reach the rank (maqām) of the Perfect Human Being in the footsteps of the leading figures of the religion and Ṣūfīsm (Taṣawwuf). The caravan has passed, which is understood as a symbol peculiar to the lore language, looks like a formula of a series of advice that reminds and warns people of the responsibilities they are obliged to fulfill even though life is short and the world is temporary. Being delayed of the unwary traveler when the caravan has passed was used in the sense that the sālik could not make use of his life, time, and opportunities; and the situation of the person who was left behind and separated from the caravan was generally met with the analogy of a lame donkey. In this study, which is about the caravan as a mystical metaphor (majāz), the survey model, one of the qualitative research methods, was used. The research aims to determine the use of the caravan metaphor (majāz) in the examples of Ṣūfī poetry and meanings it has gained in Ṣūfī terminology. For this purpose, the major works written between the 12th and 19th centuries in Turkish Ṣūfī poetry have been investigated, and the data obtained have been evaluated in the light of the works and views of the leading figures who have been influential on Turkish Ṣūfī culture and literature. The study, which is thought to contribute to the understanding of the metaphors (majāzs) that Turkish Ṣūfī poetry is based on is important since it reveals that the usages the caravan has passed is one of the common symbols of Ṣūfīsm (Taṣawwuf). As a result of the research, it was found out that the metaphor (majāz) of the caravan has existed in poetry uninterruptedly since the 12th century when Turkish Ṣūfī literature began to take shape. Although time, place, and persons change, the meanings attributed to the metaphor (majāz) of the caravan are almost the same. Especially in the poems containing advice, the metaphor (majāz) of the caravan was frequently used to guide people and human life was associated with the caravan. In this respect, it can be said that the metaphor (majāz) of the caravan has a traditional usage in Turkish Ṣūfī poetry. On the other hand, the usage of the caravan metaphor (majāz) in Turkish Ṣūfī poetry and the usage in Iranian literature show similarity. As a matter of fact, starting with Aḥmed Yesevī (d. 562/1166), many Ṣūfī poets depicted the same journey in a similar way, and Saʿdī-i Shīrāzī (d. 691/1292) dealt with the same theme in a way that coincided with the narrative and vocabulary of Turkish poets. The fact that the caravan is determined with similar uses in the poems of different societies as a Ṣūfī symbol shows that the metaphor (majāz) of the caravan has a common usage regarding Ṣūfīsm (Taṣawwuf) in the wide cultural geography of Islam. The metaphor (majāz) of the caravan has a special usage in Turkish Ṣūfī poetry in the form of the caravan has passed. Expressions in the style of the caravan has passed which succinctly fit a long adventure into two words, are symbols peculiar to the lore language, and serve as psychological advice in Turkish Ṣūfī poetry. On the one hand, this symbol deals with the caravan journey in the dimension of truth, on the other hand, it gives metaphorical meanings to the word, referring to the spiritual journey of sālik. In this sense, the caravan has passed is a powerful metaphor (majāz) that warns people to make the best use of the rest of their life, or rather the moment they are in, and it looks like a formula of a series of advice that warns them. The advice in question is closely related to the words die before you die and time is a sharp sword, often used by the leading figures of religion and mysticism. Therefore, the caravan has passed is a kind of contemplation and presents a vivid picture of the journey that takes its source from the social life so that the traveler does not forget that he is on the way by reminding him of death. The advice style is generally dominant in the poems in which the metaphor (majāz) of the caravan is used, especially in the poems describing the caravan’s passing and the heedless traveler staying on the road. However, it is obvious that the subject is presented in a lyrical and impressive style, especially in poets such as Aḥmed Yesevī, Yūnus Emre (d. 720/1320 [?]) and Niyāzī-i Mıṣrī (d. 1105/1694). (shrink)