In Unknowing and the Everyday Seema Golestaneh examines how Sufi mystical experience in Iran shapes contemporary life. Central to this process is ma'rifat, or "unknowing"-the idea that, as it is ultimately impossible to fully understand the divine, humanity must operate from an engaged awareness that it knows nothing. Golestaneh shows that rather ......
In Unknowing and the Everyday Seema Golestaneh examines how Sufi mystical experience in Iran shapes contemporary life. Central to this process is ma'rifat, or "unknowing"-the idea that, as it is ultimately impossible to fully understand the divine, humanity must operate from an engaged awareness that it knows nothing. Golestaneh shows that rather ......
Contesting Knowledge and Practice in West African Sufi Texts
Examines the works of two Sufi Muslim scholars, Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti (d. 1811) and his son Sidi Muhammad (d. 1826), focusing on their cosmology and metaphysics of the realm of the unseen, in relation to the history of magical discourses within the Hellenistic and Arabo-Islamic worlds.
Contesting Knowledge and Practice in West African Sufi Texts
Sorcery or Science? examines how two Sufi Muslim theologians who rose to prominence in the western Sahara Desert in the late eighteenth century, Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti (d. 1811) and his son and successor, Sidi Muhammad al-Kunti (d. 1826), decisively influenced the development of Sufi Muslim thought in West Africa. Known as the Kunta scholars, ......
A groundbreaking exposition of Islamic mysticism The Essence of Reality was written over the course of just three days in 514/1120, by a scholar who was just twenty-four. The text, like its author 'Ayn al-Qudat, is remarkable for many reasons, not least of which that it is in all likelihood the earliest philosophical exposition of mysticism in ......
Nationalism and the Commemoration of Saints in Turkey
When the Ottoman Empire met its demise in the early twentieth century, the new Republic of Turkey closed down the Sufi orders, rationalizing that they were antimodern. Yet the nascent nation, faced with defining its cultural heritage, soon began to promote the legacies of three Sufi saints: Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi, Haci Bektas Veli, and Yunus ......
Understanding Fethullah Gulen's Life and His Call to Service
Fethullah Guelen is a leading figure in the current Turkish socio-political context. Regardless of the impression different circles have about him, he is universally acknowledged as an accomplished scholar and independent thinker who has had a life in tears dreaming of a golden generation, but also a life spent in persecution and ongoing trials. ......
The heart in the Islamic understanding is the expression of a human being's spiritual existence. It is a Divine gift and Divine subtle faculty bestowed upon humanity. It is a polished mirror reflecting God. Like a general, the heart commands all other bodily organs and faculties, which are its troops, Everything that comes from a human being, ......
