Translated for the first time from the original Persian into English, these selected treatises from the thirteenth-century work The Perfect Being provide a fascinating glimpse into Sufism. With a helpful introduction and explanatory notes, The Perfect Being is a valuable introduction to classic Islamic texts for spiritual seekers and students.
The Moroccan city of Fez, founded in the ninth century CE, is one of the most precious urban jewels of Islamic civilization. For more than 40 years Titus Burckhardt worked to document and preserve the artistic and architectural heritage of Fez in particular and Morocco in general. These newly translated lectures, delivered while Burckhardt was ......
Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-73), founder of the Mevlevi Sufi order of Whirling Dervishes, is the best-selling poet in America today. Rumi was one of the preeminent thinkers of Sufism, the esoteric form of Islam. In this groundbreaking collection of 13 essays on Rumi, many of the world s leading authorities in the field of Islamic Studies and ......
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 ......
Reflections on History, Sufism, Theology, and Literature-Volume One
Wide-ranging essays on Moroccan history, Sufism, and religious life Al-Hasan al-Yusi was arguably the most influential and well-known Moroccan intellectual figure of his generation. In 1084/1685, at the age of roughly fifty-four, and after a long and distinguished career, this Amazigh scholar from the Middle Atlas began writing a collection of ......
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.
Sufism through the eyes of a legal scholar In The Requirements of the Sufi Path, the renowned North African historian and jurist Ibn Khaldun applies his analytical powers to Sufism, which he deems a bona fide form of Islamic piety. Ibn Khaldun is widely known for his groundbreaking work as a sociologist and historian, in particular for the ......
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, ......
