Lost Islamic History: Reclaiming Muslim Civilisation from the Past


Firas Alkhateeb - 2014
    Over the last 1400 years, from origins in Arabia, a succession of Muslim polities and later empires expanded to control territories and peoples that ultimately stretched from southern France to East Africa and South East Asia.Yet many of the contributions of Muslim thinkers, scientists and theologians, not to mention rulers, statesmen and soldiers, have been occluded. This book rescues from oblivion and neglect some of these personalities and institutions while offering the reader a new narrative of this lost Islamic history. The Umayyads, Abbasids, and Ottomans feature in the story, as do Muslim Spain, the savannah kingdoms of West Africa and the Mughal Empire, along with the later European colonization of Muslim lands and the development of modern nation-states in the Muslim world. Throughout, the impact of Islamic belief on scientific advancement, social structures, and cultural development is given due prominence, and the text is complemented by portraits of key personalities, inventions and little known historical nuggets. The history of Islam and of the world's Muslims brings together diverse peoples, geographies and states, all interwoven into one narrative that begins with Muhammad and continues to this day.

The Scientists: A History of Science Told Through the Lives of Its Greatest Inventors


John Gribbin - 2002
    He begins with Copernicus, during the Renaissance, when science replaced mysticism as a means of explaining the workings of the world, and he continues through the centuries, creating an unbroken genealogy of not only the greatest but also the more obscure names of Western science, a dot-to-dot line linking amateur to genius, and accidental discovery to brilliant deduction.By focusing on the scientists themselves, Gribbin has written an anecdotal narrative enlivened with stories of personal drama, success and failure. A bestselling science writer with an international reputation, Gribbin is among the few authors who could even attempt a work of this magnitude. Praised as “a sequence of witty, information-packed tales” and “a terrifi c read” by The Times upon its recent British publication, The Scientists breathes new life into such venerable icons as Galileo, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and Linus Pauling, as well as lesser lights whose stories have been undeservedly neglected. Filled with pioneers, visionaries, eccentrics and madmen, this is the history of science as it has never been told before.From the Hardcover edition.

Doubt: A History


Jennifer Michael Hecht - 2003
    This is an account of the world's greatest ‘intellectual virtuosos,' who are also humanity's greatest doubters and disbelievers, from the ancient Greek philosophers, Jesus, and the Eastern religions, to modern secular equivalents Marx, Freud and Darwin—and their attempts to reconcile the seeming meaninglessness of the universe with the human need for meaning,This remarkable book ranges from the early Greeks, Hebrew figures such as Job and Ecclesiastes, Eastern critical wisdom, Roman stoicism, Jesus as a man of doubt, Gnosticism and Christian mystics, medieval Islamic, Jewish and Christian skeptics, secularism, the rise of science, modern and contemporary critical thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, the existentialists.

The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict


William T. Cavanaugh - 2009
    William T.Cavanaugh challenges this conventional wisdom by examining how the twin categories of religion and the secular are constructed. A growing body of scholarly work explores how the category 'religion' has been constructed in the modern West and in colonial contexts according to specific configurationsof political power. Cavanaugh draws on this scholarship to examine how timeless and transcultural categories of 'religion and 'the secular' are used in arguments that religion causes violence. He argues three points: 1) There is no transhistorical and transcultural essence of religion. What countsas religious or secular in any given context is a function of political configurations of power; 2) Such a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion as non-rational and prone to violence is one of the foundational legitimating myths of Western society; 3) This myth can be and is used tolegitimate neo-colonial violence against non-Western others, particularly the Muslim world.

Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science


David Lindley - 2007
    Heisenberg’s principle implied that scientific quantities/concepts do not have absolute, independent meaning, but acquire meaning only in terms of the experiments used to measure them. This proposition, undermining the cherished belief that science could reveal the physical world with limitless detail and precision, placed Heisenberg in direct opposition to the revered Albert Einstein. The eminent scientist Niels Bohr, Heisenberg’s mentor and Einstein’s long-time friend, found himself caught between the two.Uncertainty chronicles the birth and evolution of one of the most significant findings in the history of science, and portrays the clash of ideas and personalities it provoked. Einstein was emotionally as well as intellectually determined to prove the uncertainty principle false. Heisenberg represented a new generation of physicists who believed that quantum theory overthrew the old certainties; confident of his reasoning, Heisenberg dismissed Einstein’s objections. Bohr understood that Heisenberg was correct, but he also recognized the vital necessity of gaining Einstein’s support as the world faced the shocking implications of Heisenberg’s principle.

Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate


Leila Ahmed - 1992
    She then focuses on those Arab societies that played a key role in elaborating the dominant Islamic discourses about women and gender: Arabia during the period in which Islam was founded; Iraq during the classical age, when the prescriptive core of legal and religious discourse on women was formulated; and Egypt during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when exposure to Western societies led to dramatic social change and to the emergence of new discourses on women. Throughout, Ahmed not only considers the Islamic texts in which central ideologies about women and gender developed or were debated but also places this discourse in its social and historical context. Her book is thus a fascinating survey of Islamic debates and ideologies about women and the historical circumstances of their position in society, the first such discussion using the analytic tools of contemporary gender studies.

الإنسان والإسلام


Ali Shariati - 2006
    The first lecture, "Man and Islam", analyzes the creation of man according to Islamic doctrine and present man as God's vicegerent on earth as is described in the Holy Qur'an. In the second lecture, Shari'ati discusses the differences world-views of numerous regions and philosophies. The third lecture concerns the "Extraction and Refinement of Cultural Resources." In the fourth work, "Modern man and His Prisons," Shari'ati states that there are four constraints under which man is bound. Man can become a rue human being only after he has released himself from the yoke of these constraints. The fifth lecture in this series deals with Shari'ati addressing the question of the intellectual and categorizing him into three types. In the next lecture entitled "Ideology," Shari'ati explains the meaning of ideology as well as philosophy, and expounds on the question that those who relate to them. In the last lecture, Shari'ati addresses the question, "If we believe we a true free-thinking intellectuals, what must be our relationship with the society and what path should we follow?" In these seven brief lectures, Shari'ati brings an enlightening perspective to the study of Islamic ideology, its world-view, man's constraints, and the responsibility of the free-thinker towards the construction of a new society.

The Day the Universe Changed: How Galileo's Telescope Changed the Truth


James Burke - 1986
    Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

رياض الصالحين


يحيى بن شرف النووي
    Covering every aspect of Islamic belief and moral conduct, it selects approximately 2000 hadith from the six major collections: Bukhari, Muslim, Abu Dawood, Tirmidhi, An-Nasai and Ibn Majah. It serves as an excellent hadith primer and daily reader. Wide range of topics: sincerity of purpose, spending in the way of Allah, rules of fasting, seeking knowledge, attending funerals and safeguarding the Qur'aan. Arabic text as well as English translation are presented here in this handsome hardcover two volume set.Riyad-us-Saliheen comprises of about 2000 ahadiths in 372 Chapters and 19 Sections: The Book of Good Manners - The Book about the Etiquette of Eating - The Book of Dress -The Book of the Etiquette of Sleeping, Lying and Sitting, etc.- The book of Greetings - The Book of Visiting the Sick - The Book of Etiquette of Traveling - The Book of Virtues - The Book of I'tikaf - The Book of Hajj - The Book of Jihad - The Book of Knowledge - The Book of Praise and Gratitude to Allah - The Book of Supplicating Allah to Exalt the Mention of Allah's Messenger (PBUH) - The Book of the Remembrance of Allah - The Book of Du'a (Supplications) - The Book of the Prohibited Actions - The Book of Miscellaneous Ahadith of Significant values - and The Book of Forgiveness.رابط التحميل:http://www.waqfeya.com/book.php?bid=5160

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions


Thomas S. Kuhn - 1962
    The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that kind of book. When it was first published in 1962, it was a landmark event in the history and philosophy of science. Fifty years later, it still has many lessons to teach. With The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn challenged long-standing linear notions of scientific progress, arguing that transformative ideas don’t arise from the day-to-day, gradual process of experimentation and data accumulation but that the revolutions in science, those breakthrough moments that disrupt accepted thinking and offer unanticipated ideas, occur outside of “normal science,” as he called it. Though Kuhn was writing when physics ruled the sciences, his ideas on how scientific revolutions bring order to the anomalies that amass over time in research experiments are still instructive in our biotech age. This new edition of Kuhn’s essential work in the history of science includes an insightful introduction by Ian Hacking, which clarifies terms popularized by Kuhn, including paradigm and incommensurability, and applies Kuhn’s ideas to the science of today. Usefully keyed to the separate sections of the book, Hacking’s introduction provides important background information as well as a contemporary context.  Newly designed, with an expanded index, this edition will be eagerly welcomed by the next generation of readers seeking to understand the history of our perspectives on science.

The Conclusive Argument from God


Shāh Walī Allāh ad-Dihlawi أحمد بن عبد الرحيم المعروف بولي الله الدهلوي - 1995
    This work, originally written in Arabic, represents a synthesis of the Islamic intellectual disciplines authoritative in the 18th century. In order to argue for the rational, ethical, and spiritual basis for the implementation of the hadith injunctions of the Prophet Muhammad, Sh?h Wal? All?h develops a cohesive schema of the metaphysical, psychological, and social knowledge of his time. This work provides an extensive and detailed picture of Muslim theology and interpretive strategies on the eve of the modern period and is still evoked by numerous contemporary Islamic movements.

Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam


Michel Onfray - 2005
    If Nietzsche proclaimed the "Death of God," Onfray starts from the premise that not only is God still very much alive, but increasingly controlled by fundamentalists who pose a danger to the human race. Documenting the ravages from religious intolerance over the centuries, the author makes a strong case against the three religions for demanding faith, belief, obedience and submission, and for extolling the "next life" at the expense of the here and now. Not since Nietzsche has a work so groundbreaking and explosive appeared to question the role of the world's dominant religions.

The Elementary Forms of Religious Life


Émile Durkheim - 1912
    He investigates what he considered to be the simplest form of documented religion - totemism among the Aborigines of Australia. For Durkheim, studying Aboriginal religion was a way 'to yield an understanding of the religious nature of man, by showing us an essential and permanent aspect of humanity'. The need and capacity of men and women to relate to one another socially lies at the heart of Durkheim's exploration, in which religion embodies the beliefs that shape our moral universe. The Elementary Forms has been applauded and debated by sociologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, philosophers, and theologians, and continues to speak to new generations about the intriguing origin and nature of religion and society. This new, lightly abridged edition provides an excellent introduction to Durkheim's ideas.

The Heirs of Muhammad


Barnaby Rogerson - 2006
    The Heirs of Muhammad is a swaggering saga of ambition, achievement, self-sacrificing nobility, and blood rivalry. Acclaimed historian Barnaby Rogerson recounts the lives of the handful of individuals who led and influenced Islam after the death of Muhammad. The Heirs of Muhammad is the best kind of history-the kind that brings a forgotten era back to life while simultaneously illuminating a neglected history that is vital to an enlightened understanding of our present world.About the Author:Barnaby Rogerson is the author of The Prophet Muhammad: A Biography and a number of celebrated travel books

Escape from Freedom


Erich Fromm - 1941
    This is the central idea of Escape from Freedom, a landmark work by one of the most distinguished thinkers of our time, and a book that is as timely now as when first published in 1941. Few books have thrown such light upon the forces that shape modern society or penetrated so deeply into the causes of authoritarian systems. If the rise of democracy set some people free, at the same time it gave birth to a society in which the individual feels alienated and dehumanized. Using the insights of psychoanalysis as probing agents, Fromm's work analyzes the illness of contemporary civilization as witnessed by its willingness to submit to totalitarian rule.