Ali Altaf Mian demonstrates how attention to genre and embodiment illuminates the concepts and practices of the Islamic tradition--and how theologians, Sufi mystics, and ordinary Muslims respond to the incapacitating tribulations of creaturely existence in modernity. Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty is grounded in the vast textual archive ......
Ali Altaf Mian demonstrates how attention to genre and embodiment illuminates the concepts and practices of the Islamic tradition-and how theologians, Sufi mystics, and ordinary Muslims respond to the incapacitating tribulations of creaturely existence in modernity. Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty is grounded in the rich textual archive ......
Encounters with the Angel of Death in Islamicate Thought and Culture
The archangel Azrael enforces the divine command that all living things must return to God in death. The very word islam implies submission to God's will, and yet Muslim saints, prophets, and sorcerers used charisma, magic squares, and their bare hands to defy Azrael and extend their lives on earth. Their efforts reveal tension between the ......
Ne'matullahi Shrines and Material Culture Between Iran and India
From the fifteenth-century onwards, followers of the Sufi poet Shah Ne'matullah Vali navigated land and sea routes through Central Asia, Iran, and India, acting as agents of power, mobility, and cross-cultural exchange. Along the way, they built shrines whose poetry, spatial configuration, and materiality created intimate religious spaces that ......
Ne'matullahi Shrines and Material Culture Between Iran and India
From the fifteenth-century onwards, followers of the Sufi poet Shah Ne'matullah Vali navigated land and sea routes through Central Asia, Iran, and India, acting as agents of power, mobility, and cross-cultural exchange. Along the way, they built shrines whose poetry, spatial configuration, and materiality created intimate religious spaces that ......
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 ......
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.
