The portrait that emerges is of a highly pragmatic man dedicated to finding non-violent solutions to human problems in all arenas--personal, political, and environmental.

    He recounts the perilous journey of the world’s birds to the faraway peaks of Mount Qaf in search of the mysterious Simorgh, their king. Attar’s beguiling anecdotes and humor intermingle the sublime with the mundane, the spiritual with the worldly, while his poem models the soul’s escape from the mind’s rational embrace.Sholeh Wolpé re-creates for modern readers the beauty and timeless wisdom of the original Persian, in contemporary English verse and poetic prose.

    Bahlool who lived in Baghdad, circa the 8th century AD, feigned madness to escape the oppression of the ruling class. Now free of the burden of normalcy he dispensed wisdom in strange and amusing ways.The Wise Fool of Baghdad is a collection of these true stories, richly illustrated in the Turkish-Iranian miniature style. Every story is followed by sacred verses of the Qur'an and traditional sayings, inscribed in Arabic By Muqtar Ahmed, one of India's finest Islamic calligraphers.Get the book. In the crazy times we live in, you'll probably need a fool to make sense of it all.http://www.suficomics.com

    Is Islam a religion of peace or war? Is it amenable to reform? Why do so many Muslims seem to be drawn to extremism? And what do words like jihadism and fundamentalism really mean? In a world riven by misunderstanding and violence, Sam Harris--a famous atheist--and Maajid Nawaz--a former radical--demonstrate how two people with very different religious views can find common ground and invite you to join in an urgently needed conversation.

    This is incorrect, for at the very outset the movement was stigmatized as aberrant by the leading Sunni scholars of the day, because it rejected many of the traditional beliefs and practices of Sunni Islam and declared permissible warfare against all Muslims that disputed Wahhabi teachings. Nor can Wahhabism be regarded as a movement of “purification” or “renewal,” as the source of the genuinely revivalist movements that were underway at the time. Not until Saudi oil money was placed at the disposal of its propagandists did Wahhabism find an echo outside the Arabian Peninsula. The author discusses the rise of Wahhabism at the hands of Muhammad b. `Abd al-Wahhab, a native of Najd in the eastern part of the Arabian peninsula, the doctrines he elaborated to serve as the basis of the Wahhabi sect, and the alliance he concluded with the Saudi family, then rulers of the principality of al-Dir'iya. An early result of this union was a creeping conquest of the Arabian Peninsula, misnamed as jihad; it culminated in the sacking of Taif and the occupation of Mecca in 1803. This first Wahhabi occupation was short-lived but Wahhabism triumphed anew with the foundation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1925. Among the extensions of Wahhabism beyond Arabia must be accounted the perverse and brutal regime of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

    Based on the sira, the eighth- and ninth-century Arabic biographies that recount numerous events in the prophet’s life, it contains original English translations of many important passages that reveal the words of men and women who heard Muhammad speak and witnessed the events of his life.Scrupulous and exhaustive in its fidelity to its sources, Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources is presented in a narrative style that is easily comprehensible, yet authentic and inspiring in its use of language, reflecting both the simplicity and grandeur of the story it tells. This revised edition includes new sections detailing the prophet’s expanding influence and his spreading of the message of Islam into Syria and its neighboring states. It represents the final updates made to the text before the author’s death in 2005. The book has been published in 12 languages and has received numerous awards, including acknowledgment as best biography of the prophet in English at the National Seerate Conference in Islamabad.

    He discusses the fate of virtue, the legacy of racism, the moral issues implicated in the war on terrorism, and the objectivity of ethical norms. Against those who see no place for religious reasoning in the democratic arena, Stout champions a space for religious voices. But against increasingly vocal antiliberal thinkers, he argues that modern democracy can provide a moral vision and has made possible such moral achievements as civil rights precisely because it allows a multitude of claims to be heard.Stout's distinctive pragmatism reconfigures the disputed area where religious thought, political theory, and philosophy meet. Charting a path beyond the current impasse between secular liberalism and the new traditionalism, Democracy and Tradition asks whether we have the moral strength to continue as a democratic people as it invigorates us to retrieve our democratic virtues from very real threats to their practice.

    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.

    This book provides a new understanding of a man who played a significant part in the Iranian revolution and an analysis of a current of political Islam that has influenced movements throughout the Middle East.This full-length political biography looks at Ali Shari`ati's life and thought in the context of the complex and contradictory cultural, social, and political conditions of the Iranian society that shaped him.

    Willow Wilson—already an accomplished writer on modern religion and the Middle East at just twenty-seven—leaves her atheist parents in Denver to study at Boston University, she enrolls in an Islamic Studies course that leads to her shocking conversion to Islam and sends her on a fated journey across continents and into an uncertain future.She settles in Cairo where she teaches English and submerges herself in a culture based on her adopted religion. And then she meets Omar, a passionate young man with a mild resentment of the Western influences in his homeland. They fall in love, entering into a daring relationship that calls into question the very nature of family, belief, and tradition. Torn between the secular West and Muslim East, Willow records her intensely personal struggle to forge a “third culture” that might accommodate her own values without compromising the friends and family on both sides of the divide.

    A pro-faith attempt by a Muslim woman to present a comprehensive, female-inclusive reading of the Qur'an, the sacred Islamic text.

    It's about the man who composed the Koran.Author F. W. Burleigh draws on an academic, investigative, and literary background to bring forth this penetrating look at the man behind it all. Burleigh’s interest in Islam was sparked by the events of 9/11. The questions guiding his studies were, “Why do Muslims do what they do? Why is there so much violence connected with this religion?” After a line-by-line scrutiny of 20,000 pages of the original literature of Islam, the author gives his blunt assessment in the title: It’s All About Muhammad.The book is in three parts. The first 12 chapters explore the epileptic fits that convinced Muhammad that he was in communion with God, explain the Koran and why he composed it the way he did, and show the humble origin of the Kabah, which only attained its cubic shape in the year A.D. 605 with Muhammad as a member of the construction crew. The book shows the magma chamber of hatred that formed in him due to traumatic early-life experience and tracks the emergence of his psychopathic nature. It exposes how he modified ideas he took from Judaism and Christianity to suit his grandiose idea of himself as the "last and final prophet," his intolerance of Meccan polytheistic beliefs, and finally his declaration of war against "all and sundry" who refused to accept him and his religion.In the second part, Muhammad's magma chamber of hatred erupts on the world. The book shows the creation of his al-qaeda--his base of operations in Yathrib (Medina) where he fled after the Meccans decided they had to kill him, his conflict with the Jewish tribes of Yathrib after they refused to accept him as their prophet; his genocide of the Jews including the beheading of the men of an entire tribe; the assassination of his critics; the battles and raids and orgies of rape, plunder, and slaughter; and finally his conquest of Mecca. Like a dramatic arc, these 18 chapters form Act II of a script that is still being played out today.In the final part, Muhammad's ruthless conquest of all of Arabia is presented. This section also gives an account of his numerous wives and the expansion of his wars beyond the confines of the Arabian peninsula. One of the final chapters explores his claim that he will be the first to be resurrected on the day of resurrection and that he will assist Allah in determining who goes to heaven and who stays in hell--part of the "breathtaking nonsense" of what Muhammad claimed about himself, as the author phrases it.What Muhammad created continues to wreak havoc on the world. It follows the script he wrote fourteen centuries ago. It is not sufficient any longer merely to raise the alarm about Islam--an ideology of submission to the will of a psychologically deformed and spiritually grotesque man. What needs to accompany the alarm is a solution, and this book offers a solution: It is a matter of an aggressive, relentless, and unapologetic exposure of the truth about Muhammad in every graphic form possible, from illustrated books to docudramas to full-length feature films. With its 25 illustrations, It's All About Muhammad offers itself as an example of the approach.The truth about Muhammad is a powerful weapon of self-defense that people must take up to oppose and ultimately push back what he created. It is a weapon within the reach of everyone.

    An Introduction to Islam, Third Edition, provides students with a thorough and unified topical introduction to the global religious community of Islam. It places Islam within a cultural, political, social, and religious context and examines its connections with Judeo-Christian morals. The text's integration of the doctrinal and devotional elements of Islam enables students to see how Muslims think and live--engendering understanding and breaking down stereotypes. An Introduction to Islam, Third Edition also reviews pre-Islamic history so students can see how Islam developed historically.

    The years following Muhammad's passing in 632 AD saw an intellectual "war of ideas" rage between rationalist, flexible schools of Islam and the more dogmatic, rigid ones. The traditionalist school won out, fostering perceptions of Islam as antithetical to modernity. However, through his careful reexamination of the currents of Muslim thought, Akyol discovers a flourishing of liberalism in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and the unique "Islamo-liberal synthesis" of present-day Turkey. Only by accepting a secular state, he powerfully asserts, can Islamic societies thrive. Persuasive and inspiring, Islam without Extremes offers a desperately needed intellectual basis for the reconcilability of Islam and religious, political, economic, and social freedoms.

    مترجم اثر آقاي هاشم ايزد پناه هستند. در سايت آمازون درباره ي اين کتاب اين توضيحات درج شده است.The years 260-329/874-941, known among the Shî‘ites as the period of Minor Occultation, comprised undoubtedly the most difficult and critical period in the history of Imâmite Shî'ism. The death of the eleventh Imam, with no apparent successor, resulted in internal conflicts, many desertions and conversions, and the emergence of numerous splinter groups and subsects within the Imâmite community. Contemporary Imâmite theologians had the difficult task of defending the doctrine against attack while trying to offer new interpretations of fundamental principles to accommodate contemporary developments. Abu Jafar b. Qiba al-Razi, one of the most prominent and active Imâmite theologians, had a major role in all of these reconstructions and developments. The present work attempts to shed light on some aspects of the Imâmite doctrine during the Minor Occultation and on the contributions of Abu Jafar b. Qiba to the formation of the developed Imâmite doctrine. The second part of this volume contains the texts of three short works of this scholar, together with their English translation.