From Mohammed to the late twentieth century, Rahman traces the development of Islam as a religion and, more importantly, as an intellectual tradition, offering both an easily understood introduction to the faith and an impassioned argument for its future direction.

    You’ve never seen her. You’ve never heard her voice. You’ve never perhaps even thought of her as your mother. But she is your mother nonetheless. And if you get to Jannah, your mother will be there, waiting to meet you. Her name is Khadijah, The Great. She was the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad (S), the first to believe in his message and the first mother of the greatest nation history has ever seen. This book immerses you in Khadijah’s legendary story. Its rich descriptions place you in front-row seats in her arena. Its flowing narrative renders a captivating reading experience. And since only authentic sources have been used, the story loses nothing of its original iman elevating inspiration. Discover your legendary mother. Discover Khadijah.

    In this book, Muhammad Abdel Haleem examines its recurrent themes and for the first time sets them in the context of the Qur'an's linguistic style. Haleem examines the background to the development of the surahs (chapters) and the ayahs (verses) and the construction of the Qur'an itself.

    It offers what is frequently seen as a forbidden theory of the origin of religion that goes deep into evolution, especially but not exclusively cultural evolution.How did our early ancestors transcend the quotidian demands of everyday existence to embrace an alternative reality that called into question the very meaning of their daily struggle? Robert Bellah, one of the leading sociologists of our time, identifies a range of cultural capacities, such as communal dancing, storytelling, and theorizing, whose emergence made this religious development possible. Deploying the latest findings in biology, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology, he traces the expansion of these cultural capacities from the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (roughly, the first millennium BCE), when individuals and groups in the Old World challenged the norms and beliefs of class societies ruled by kings and aristocracies. These religious prophets and renouncers never succeeded in founding their alternative utopias, but they left a heritage of criticism that would not be quenched.Bellah's treatment of the four great civilizations of the Axial Age--in ancient Israel, Greece, China, and India--shows all existing religions, both prophetic and mystic, to be rooted in the evolutionary story he tells. Religion in Human Evolution answers the call for a critical history of religion grounded in the full range of human constraints and possibilities.

    Whether they think of the evolutionary proofs of Darwin or of spectacular investigation into the boundaries of physics conducted by CERN's Large Hadron Collider, most people assume that scientific enquiry goes to the heart of fundamental truths about the universe. Yet elsewhere, science is under siege. In the USA, Christian fundamentalists contest whether evolution should be taught in schools at all. And in Muslim countries like Tunisia, Egypt, Pakistan and Malaysia, a mere 15% of those recently surveyed believed Darwin's theory to be "true" or "probably true." This thoughtful and passionately argued book contends absolutely to the contrary: not only that evolutionary theory does not contradict core Muslim beliefs, but that many scholars, from Islam's golden age to the present, adopted a worldview that accepted evolution as a given. Guessoum suggests that the Islamic world, just like the Christian, needs to take scientific questions -- quantum questions -- with the utmost seriousness if it is to recover its true heritage and integrity. In its application of a specifically Muslim perspective to important topics like cosmology, divine action and evolution, the book makes a vital contribution to debate in the disputed field of "science and religion."

    They have been a vital presence in North America since the 16th century. Muslims in America unearths their history, documenting the lives of African, Middle Eastern, South Asian, European, black, white, Hispanic and other Americans who have been followers of Islam. The book begins with the tale of Job Ben Solomon, a 18th century African American Muslim slave, and goes on to chart the stories of sodbusters in North Dakota, African American converts to Islam in the 1920s, Muslim barkeepers in Toledo, the post-1965 wave of professional immigrants from Asia and Africa, and Muslim Americans after 9/11. The book reveals the richness of Sunni, Shi'a, Sufi and other forms of Islamic theology, ethics, and rituals in the United States by illustrating the way Islamic faith has been imagined and practiced in the everyday lives of individuals. Muslims in America recovers the place of Muslims in the larger American story, too. Showing how Muslim American men and women participated in each era of U.S. history, the book explores how they have both shaped and have been shaped by larger historical trends such as the abolition movement, Gilded Age immigration, the Great Migration of African Americans, urbanization, religious revivalism, the feminist movement, and the current war on terror. It also shows how, from the very beginning of American history, Muslim Americans have been at once a part of their local communities, their nation, and the worldwide community of Muslims. The first single-author history of Muslims in America from colonial times to the present, this book fills a huge gap and provides invaluable background on one of the most poorly understood groups in the United States.

    The author deals with fundamental problems faced by contemporary Muslims and provides real solutions, beginning with a discussion on ‘The Contemporary Western Christian Background’ in Chapter (I), followed by his analysis of the concepts (which he newly defines) of ‘secular’, ‘secularization’, and ‘secularism’ in Chapter (II). All this is then contrasted in Chapter (IV) of the book entitled ‘Islam: The Concept of Religion and the Foundation of Ethics and Morality’. Based on all the preceding explanation, the author proceeds to analyze the Muslim ‘dilemma’ by declaring that it should be resolved primarily through what he calls the “dewesternization of knowledge” or, conversely, the “islamization of contemporary knowledge”, an original concept conceived and elucidated by the author for the past three decades. Numerous original and profound ideas are contained in this book—arrived at chiefly through critical study of the Muslim tradition—such as the concepts of din,‘adl, hikmah, adab, ma‘na, and ta’dib, and their significance in the development of an Islamic system of education. The rationale for the islamization of contemporary knowledge and the establishment of a truly Islamic university was in fact provided for the first time in contemporary Muslim thought by this author long before the appearance of the present book, which explains these interconnected subjects more concisely. Further, the appendix entitled, ‘On Islamization: The Case of the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago’ is an actual explanation and application of the seminal ideas discussed in the book. This is a must read for all Muslims and those concerned with the problems and effects of secularization in our world today. This book has been translated into most of the major Islamic languages of the world— Turkish, Arabic, Urdu, Indonesian, Bosnian, and Persian.

    Join him on an existential, spiritual and rational journey that articulates powerful arguments for the existence of God, the Qur'an, the Prophethood of Muhammad and why we must know, love and worship God. He addresses academic and popular objections while showing how contemporary atheism is based on false assumptions about reality, which leads to incoherent answers to life's important questions.Does hope, happiness and human value make sense without the Divine? Do we have an ultimate purpose? Can we have consciousness and rational minds without God? Did the universe come from nothing? Does evil and suffering negate Divine mercy? Has scientific progress led to the denial of God? Are revelation and prophethood myths? Is God worthy of our worship? If you want to know how the Islamic intellectual and spiritual tradition answers these questions then this is the book for you.Hamza Andreas Tzortzis's new book presents a much needed comprehensive account of Islamic theism that draws upon Western and Islamic thought.

    Today's updated-language version makes the author's lofty concepts accessible and easy to apply to real-life situations.

    There are many books in English which present Sufi doctrine, but few which can be used as practical travel guides along the Path. Originally written in Classical Arabic, the aptly-named Book of Assistance is today in widespread use among Sufi teachers in Arabia, Indonesia and East Africa. The author, Imam al-Haddad (d. 1720), lived at Tarim in the Hadramaut valley between the Yemen and Oman, and is widely held to have been the "spiritual renewer" of the twelfth Islamic century. He spent most of his life in Kenya and Saudi Arabia where he taught Islamic jurisprudence and classical Sufism according to the order (tariqa) of the BaAlawi sayids.

    Convinced that the veil is a symbol of unjust male authority over women, in The Veil and the Male Elite, Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi aims to investigate the origins of the practice in the first Islamic community.

    These essays are crucial to the interpretation of Levinas's work more generally, [and] Aronowicz's excellent introduction and occasional notes are very helpful in making this work accessible to those unacquainted with either Talmud or Levinas." --Religious Studies ReviewNine rich and masterful readings of the Talmud by the French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas translate Jewish thought into the language of modern times. Between 1963 and 1975, Levinas delivered these commentaries at the annual Talmudic colloquia of a group of French Jewish intellectuals in Paris. Here Levinas applies a hermeneutic that simultaneously allows the classic Jewish texts to shed light on contemporary problems and lets modern problems illuminate the texts. Besides being quintessential illustrations of the art of reading, the essays express the deeply ethical vision of the human condition that makes Levinas one of the most important thinkers of our time.

    Illustrated with 4 of his own paintings and drawings, it is the most important edition to the canon of this great writer.

    This clearly written book introduces the essentials of each dimension and then shows how each has been embodied in Islamic institutions throughout history.

    In doing so, the authors provide a balanced approach representing not only theistic and atheistic perspectives, but also a much-needed Islamic point of view that has largely been ignored or misunderstood.