Book picks similar to
And God Knows the Soldiers: The Authoritative and Authoritarian in Islamic Discourses by Khaled Abou El Fadl
islam
religion
non-fiction
usuli-institute-recommended
Inside the Soul of Islam: A Unique View into the Love, Beauty and Wisdom of Islam for Spiritual Seekers of All Faiths
Mamoon Yusaf - 2017
Despite frequent news coverage, we remain poorly informed about the true beliefs at the heart of Islam. How many of us would be able to explain who the Prophet Muhammad was or what the Quran actually teaches?In this profound yet highly accessible book, practising Muslim Mamoon Yusaf provides a vital introduction to the essential teachings of Islam. In each short chapter he focuses on a core teaching from the Quran, such as loving kindness, resilience, gratitude or forgiveness, and shares his unique insight into how these teachings can lead to spiritual evolution in anyone, regardless of their beliefs, religion or background.Mamoon also considers the role of women in Islam, as well as the true nature and meaning of the words jihad and Shariah. Finally, touching upon current events, he demonstrates how acts of violence committed in the name of Islam are inherently un‑Islamic, and boldly concludes not only that Islam is not the cause of terrorism – Islam contains the cure for it.
The Prophetic Invocations
الحبيب عبد الله بن علوي الحداد الحضرمي الشافعي - 2000
The original Arabic text of the litanies and English translation are presented in accessible format. In addition, a transliteration of the supplications is provided for easy use. A commentary rounds off the volume. "The Prophetic Invocations" is a solid glimpse at the practice of meditative Remembrance of God that has been the staple of spiritual growth throughout the history of Islam.Author Biography: Imam Abdullah ibn Alawi al-Haddad was a late 17th- and early-18th-century Islamic scholar and spiritual master who lived in Yemen. To this day, he has a large following of admirers and is widely known for the breadth of his knowledge and the profundity of insight. Imam al-Haddad died in 1720.
Hindu Rites and Rituals: Origins and Meanings
K.V. Singh - 2015
Often the age-old customs, whose relevance is lost to modern times, are dismissed as meaningless superstitions. The truth, however, is that these practices reveal the philosophical and scientific approach to life that has characterized Hindu thought since ancient times; it is important to revive their original meanings today. This handy book tells the fascinating stories and explains the science behind the Hindu rites and rituals that we sometimes follow blindly. It is essential reading for anyone interested in India's cultural tradition.
The Beatitudes
Arthur W. Pink - 2010
It is not appropriate in a brief study such as this to discuss that most interesting topic, the Kingdom of heaven—what it is and what the various periods of its development are—but these Beatitudes teach us much about those who belong to that Kingdom, and upon whom Christ pronounced its highest forms of benediction.
The G.O.D. Experiments: How Science Is Discovering God in Everything, Including Us
Gary E. Schwartz - 2006
Schwartz, Ph.D., there is compelling scientific evidence that we no longer have to accept God on faith alone. Through a multidisciplinary approach, Harvard University-educated Dr. Schwartz blends psychology, quantum physics, and mathematics to examine the science of spirit. Faith and science are not mutually exclusive, and a better understanding of their relationship can lead us to recognize how God operates in everything.Trained in the scientific method as an "open-minded skeptic," Dr. Schwartz was taught how to raise questions, turn them into hypotheses, and design experiments to test them. He was not trained to consider the nature of God. And yet, his scientific research led him directly to the discovery of God's existence in intelligent evolution and everyday life.Scientifically rigorous and spiritually reassuring, this eye-opening book is a wake-up call for anyone who wonders about life's true meaning and who longs to believe in the existence of a universal intelligence.
The Bible, the Qur'an, and Science: The Holy Scriptures Examined in the Light of Modern Knowledge
Maurice Bucaille - 1976
This book seeks to spiritually unite by highlighting similarities in the texts. It sheds new light and dispels many preconceived ideas in separating what belongs to Revelation from what is the product of error or human interpretation
The Divine Reality: God, Islam and the Mirage of Atheism
Hamza Andreas Tzortzis - 2016
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.
Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection
Sherman A. Jackson - 2005
Jackson notes that no one has offered a convincing explanation of why Islam spread among Blackamericans (a coinage he explains and defends) but not among white Americans or Hispanics. The assumption has been that there is an African connection. In fact, Jackson shows, none of the distinctive features of African Islam appear in the proto-Islamic, black nationalist movements of the early 20th century. Instead, he argues, Islam owes its momentum to the distinctively American phenomenon of Black Religion, a God-centered holy protest against anti-black racism.Islam in Black America begins as part of a communal search for tools with which to combat racism and redefine American blackness. The 1965 repeal of the National Origins Quota System led to a massive influx of foreign Muslims, who soon greatly outnumbered the blacks whom they found here practicing an indigenous form of Islam. Immigrant Muslims would come to exercise a virtual monopoly over the definition of a properly constituted Islamic life in America. For these Muslims, the nemesis was not white supremacy, but the West. In their eyes, the West was not a racial, but a religious and civilizational threat. American blacks soon learned that opposition to the West and opposition to white supremacy were not synonymous. Indeed, says Jackson, one cannot be anti-Western without also being on some level anti-Blackamerican. Like the Black Christians of an earlier era struggling to find their voice in the context of Western Christianity, Black Muslims now began to strive to find their black, American voice in the context of the super-tradition of historical Islam. Jackson argues that Muslim tradition itself contains the resources to reconcile blackness, American-ness, and adherence to Islam. It is essential, he contends, to preserve within Islam the legitimate aspects of Black Religion, in order to avoid what Stephen Carter calls the domestication of religion, whereby religion is rendered incapable of resisting the state and the dominant culture. At the same time, Jackson says, it is essential for Blackamerican Muslims to reject an exclusive focus on the public square and the secular goal of subverting white supremacy (and Arab/immigrant supremacy) and to develop a tradition of personal piety and spirituality attuned to distinctive Blackamerican needs and idiosyncrasies.
Islam Beliefs and Practices
Yasmin Malik
It contains : - Biography of the Holy Prophet (S.A.W.), his companions, his wives and children. - Belief. - Pillars of Islam. - Political, economic, ethical and legal system of Islam in brief. - Sources of law. - Fiqh. - Translation of selected Suras, Verses and Ahadith.
We Don’t Know What’s Going to Happen and That’s Okay: Living in Holy Uncertainty
John Mark Comer - 2020
The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist
Robert R. Reilly - 2010
While there are many answers to the question of “what went wrong” in the Muslim world, no one has decisively answered why it went wrong. Until now.In this eye-opening new book, foreign policy expert Robert R. Reilly uncovers the root of our contemporary crisis: a pivotal struggle waged within the Muslim world nearly a millennium ago. In a heated battle over the role of reason, the side of irrationality won. The deformed theology that resulted, Reilly reveals, produced the spiritual pathology of Islamism, and a deeply dysfunctional culture.Terrorism—from 9/11, to London, Madrid, and Mumbai, to the Christmas 2009 attempted airline bombing—is the most obvious manifestation of this crisis. But Reilly shows that the pathology extends much further.
The Closing of the Muslim Mind
solves such puzzles as: · why peace is so elusive in the Middle East· why the Arab world stands near the bottom of every measure of human development· why scientific inquiry is nearly dead in the Islamic world· why Spain translates more books in a single year than the entire Arab world has in the past thousand years· why some people in Saudi Arabia still refuse to believe man has been to the moon· why Muslim media frequently present natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina as God’s direct retribution Delving deeper than previous polemics and simplistic analyses,
The Closing of the Muslim Mind
provides the answers the West has so desperately needed in confronting the Islamist crisis.WHAT THEY ARE SAYING"The lack of liberty within Islam is a huge problem. Robert Reilly’s The Closing of the Muslim Mind shows that a millennium ago Muslims debated whether minds should be free to explore the world—and freedom lost. The intellectual history he offers helps to explain why Muslim countries fell behind Christian-based ones in scientific inquiry, economic development, and technology. Reilly provides astonishing statistics . . . [and] also points out how theology prefigures politics."
—World Magazine
"As Robert R. Reilly points out in The Closing of the Muslim Mind . . . the Islamic conception of God as pure will, unbound by reason and unknowable through the visible world, rendered any search for cause and effect in nature irrelevant to Muslim societies over centuries, resulting in slipshod, dependent cultures. Reilly notes, for example, that Pakistan, a nation which views science as automatically impious given its view that an arbitrary God did not imprint upon nature a rational order worth investigating, produces almost no patents."
—American Spectator
"What happened to moderate Islam and what sort of hope we may have for it in the future is the subject of Robert Reilly’s brilliant and groundbreaking new book. The Closing of the Muslim Mind is a page-turner that reads almost like an intellectual detective novel...One thing Reilly’s account makes clear: Only when we move beyond the common platitudes of our contemporary political discussion and begin to deal with Islam as it really is — rather than the fiction that it is the equivalent of our Western culture dressed up in a burqa — will we be able to help make progress in that direction."
—
National Review Online
Meant for Good: The Adventure of Trusting God and His Plans for You
Megan Fate Marshman - 2020
Dynamic Bible teacher Megan Fate Marshman will help you discover how to stop discounting yourself from a hopeful future, start living in active dependence on God, and find your way to the good plan He has for you. With authenticity and revelatory insights into the character of God, Megan shares an engaging and fresh look at the core themes within the well-loved scripture of Jeremiah 29:11-14. Through winsome and inspiring stories, Meant for Good will show you how to trust God in your daily life and, more importantly, how to trust God's definition of good above your own. You will discover:That your not-enoughness is exactly enough for God, and that in fact, you have everything you need to take that first step into the life God has for you.How to stop counting yourself out, because Jesus never has. God is up to something really good, and He's inviting you to join Him.How to hear and respond to God's voice, and intentionally grow a personal, intimate relationship with Him.How to defeat anxiety, trust God with all you're carrying and worrying about, and experience a life of freedom in relying on God daily.God has a good plan for you--a plan to give you a hope and a future. Are you ready to believe it?
The History of the Qurʾanic Text from Revelation to Compilation: A Comparative Study with the Old and New Testaments
Muhammad Mustafa al-ʿAzami - 2003
It also looks at the origins of Arabic, its palaeography and orthography, the so-called Mushaf of Ibn Mas‘ud, and the strict methodology employed in assembling textual fragments. This scholarly work provides an essential basis for sincere study of the Qur’an at a time when mis-representation of Islam’s Holy Book has become all too common.The author also investigates the histories of the Old and New Testaments, relying entirely on Judeo-Christian sources, and by so doing the book attains an absolutely epic scope. Through this the author makes a sophisticated and passionate case for questioning the aims of Western scholarship towards Islam’s Holy Book and illustrates convincingly that such research, motivated by more than mere curiosity, has no scientific bearing on the Qur’an’s integrity. A truly monumental effort, an indispensable tool for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, this work presents a cogent and powerful argument for the Qur’an’s unique inviolability and will serve as a cornerstone addition to any personal library and Islamic curriculum.
The Lives of Man: A Guide to the Human States: Before Life, In the World, and After Death
ʻAbd Allāh ibn ʻAlawī al-Ḥaddād - 1991
Extensive Qur'anic and Hadith references explain the condition of the soul at each stage.
Muslims in America: A Short History
Edward E. Curtis IV - 2009
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.