78 research outputs found

    The Moral Obligation to Worship God: Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s Legal Analysis in the Tafsīr

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    Sacred Orientation: The Qibla As Ritual, Metaphor, And Identity Marker In Early Islam

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    Scholars of early Islam often take for granted the title of this study—that facing the qibla (i.e. the geographic direction of worship) is an important Islamic ritual and that Muḥammad’s turn toward the Kaʿba after facing Jerusalem for prayer marked the identity of his nascent community. This postulate is rarely questioned, but the mechanisms by which the qibla expressed and inscribed a collective Islamic identity remain largely unexplored. Rather, study of Islam’s sacred direction tends to focus on either historical reconstruction of Islamic origins or on the science of qibla-calculation. The former seeks to question or establish the location of the original qibla, while the latter examines the mathematics, astronomy, and cartography used to ascertain the direction of prayer with growing precision from around the Muslim oikumene. This dissertation probes, instead, the discursive and ritual processes through which qibla-rhetoric and qibla-practice fostered a sense of group belonging and marked boundaries between Islam and other religious communities (mainly Christians and Jews). Through four interlocking projects—spanning Islam’s emergence in Late Antiquity through the Early Middle Ages—this study explicates the subtle ways in which the qibla served as a potent and durable symbol in the construction of Islamic collective identity. Chapter 1 considers the Qurʿān’s presentation of the qibla (Q Baqara 2:142-150) as part of the late antique discourse around liturgical orientation and group identity in the Near East. Chapter 2 explores the semantic usage of the term “People of the Qibla” (ahl al-qibla) to express a kind of “big-tent” view of Islamic community, and traces its earliest recorded usage to Iraq in the late Umayyad period. Chapter 3 studies scholarly (and often polemical discussions of abrogation (naskh) among Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the tenth century, where a change in the qibla became a metaphor for divine election of one people over others. The final chapter takes up the interpretive challenge of supposedly misaligned mosques and what they may tell us about the formative period of Islam. This study concludes by reflecting on the challenges of examining collective identity in premodern societies, and we propose three lenses for doing so that can benefit scholars of early Islam: namely, that we study identity as imagined, identity as a process, and identity as inexhaustible

    India in the Persian World of Letters

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    This study traces the development of philology (the analysis of literary language) in the Persian tradition in India, concentrating on its socio-political ramifications. The most influential Indo-Persian philologist of the eighteenth century was Sirāj al-Dīn ʿAlī Ḳhān (d. 1756), whose pen-name was Ārzū. Besides being a respected poet, Ārzū was a rigorous theoretician of language whose intellectual legacy was side-lined by colonialism. His conception of language accounted for literary innovation and historical change in part to theorize the tāzah-goʾī [literally, “fresh-speaking”] movement in Persian literary culture. Although later scholarship has tended to frame this debate in anachronistically nationalist terms (Iranian native speakers versus Indian imitators), the primary sources show that contemporary concerns had less to do with geography than with the question of how to assess innovative “fresh-speaking” poetry, a situation analogous to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in early modern Europe. Ārzū used historical reasoning to argue that as a cosmopolitan language Persian could not be the property of one nation or be subject to one narrow kind of interpretation. Ārzū also shaped attitudes about reḳhtah, the Persianized form of vernacular poetry that would later be renamed and reconceptualized as Urdu, helping the vernacular to gain acceptance in elite literary circles in northern India. This study puts to rest the persistent misconception that Indians started writing the vernacular because they were ashamed of their poor grasp of Persian at the twilight of the Mughal Empire

    From madness to eternity: Psychiatry and Sufi healing in the postmodern world

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    Problem: Academic study of religious healing has recognised its symbolic aspects, but has tended to frame practice as ritual, knowledge as belief. In contrast, studies of scientific psychiatry recognise that discipline as grounded in intellectual tradition and naturalistic empiricism. This asymmetry can be addressed if: (a) psychiatry is recognised as a form of “religious healing”; (b) religious healing can be shown to have an intellectual tradition which, although not naturalistic, is grounded in experience. Such an analysis may help to reveal why globalisation has meant the worldwide spread not only of modern scientific medicine, but of religious healing. An especially useful form of religious healing to contrast with scientific medicine is Sufi healing, as practised by the Naqshbandi-Haqqani order, which has become remarkable for its spread in the “West” and its adaptation to vernacular cultures. / Research questions: (1) How is knowledge generated and transmitted in the NaqshbandiHaqqani order? (2) How is healing understood and done in the Order? (3) How does the Order find a role in the modern world, and in the West in particular? / Methods: Anthropological analysis of psychiatry as religious healing; review of previous studies of Sufi healing and the Naqshbandi-Haqqani order; ethnographic participant observation in the Naqshbandi-Haqqani order, with a special focus on healing. Ethnography was done at many sites, over a period of 11 years. / Findings: (1) Knowledge is generated by means of the individual’s contact with Shaykh Nazim, who, in turn, is said to be in contact with the Prophet. Knowledge is therefore personalised, situational, and ever-changing. Purification of the nafs (psyche, soul) is held to increase the capacity for knowledge. (2) Discourse in the Naqshbandi-Haqqani order centres around healing of the soul, which is held to be a salvific and intellectual exercise. Activities and intellectual disciplines are subsumed into soul-healing. Healing techniques are eclectic and universally applied, ultimately under the perceived direction of Shaykh Nazim. (3) The Order attracts followers through charisma and personal contacts; adapts to local vernaculars; creates alternative social networks; makes everyday activities part of soul-healing; provides low-cost personalised healing; and reflects postmodern concerns and ecumenism. / Implications: Healing that reflects pre-modern, religious models of the intellect, and a medical science that is not merely naturalistic, has encompassed scientific narratives and gained adherents in the postmodern world

    Islamic Ethics and the Genome Question

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    Islamic Ethics and the Genome Question is one of the first academic works, which examine the field of genomics from an Islamic perspective. The contributions in the volume also accommodate and interact with critical insights from outside the Islamic tradition. Readership: Researchers and students specialized in ethics, bioethics and Islamic studies. Additionally, this volume will be a source of important information for geneticists, genomicists and social scientists who are interested in the ethical discourse about genomics in the Muslim world
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