From these two cities in fact arose the first two founders of Sunni law, Ibn Malik from Medina and Abu Hanifah from Kufa. These men established schools of law by making a careful study of the Quran and Hadith and the practices of the earlier generations.
Ideals and realities of Islam On page 108 January 5, 2013
beautiful Persian poem from the Gulshan-i raz: A single mim divides Ahad from Ahmad The world is immersed in that one mim. This 'mim' which separates the esoteric name of the Prophet, Ahmad, from God, is the symbol of return to the Origin, of death and reawakening to the eternal realities.
Ideals and realities of Islam On page 94 January 5, 2013 | Modified
within the vast corpus of prophetic sayings there are forty which are called "sacred sayings' (Hadith qudsi) which are not a part of the Quran but in which God speaks in the first person through the Prophet. These sayings although small in number are of extreme importance in that they are, along with certain verses of the Quran, the basis of the spiritual life in Islam. Sufism is based on these sayings and many a Sufi knows them by heart and lives in constant remembrance of their message. These sayings all concern the spiritual life rather than social or political matters.
Ideals and realities of Islam On page 88 January 5, 2013
Muslims who, having come under the sway of its arguments, accept the fatally dangerous conclusion that the body of Hadith is not the sayings of the Prophet and therefore does not carry his authority. In this way one of the foundations of Divine Law and a vital source of guidance for the spiritual life is destroyed. It is as if the whole foundation were pulled from underneath the structure of Islam. What would be left in such a case would be the Quran, which, being the Word of God, is too sublime to interpret and decipher without the aid of the Prophet. Left by themselves men would in most cases read their own limitations into the Holy Book and the whole homogeneity of Muslim society and the harmony existing between the Quran and the religious life of Islam would be disrupted.
Ideals and realities of Islam On page 87 January 5, 2013
applying their so-called historical method is that they are projecting the kind of agnostic mentality prevalent in many academic circles today on to the mentality of a traditional Muslim scholar of Hadith. They think that for him also the questions of religion could be treated in such a 'detached' manner as to enable them even to 'forge' sayings of the Prophet or to accept them into the traditional corpus without the greatest care. They do not realize that for men of the early centuries and especially the religious scholars the fire of hell was not an abstract thought but a concrete reality. They feared God in a way which most modern men can hardly imagine and it ispsychologically absurd that, with a mentality to which the alternative of Heaven or Hell is the most real thing of all, they should commit the unpardonable sin of forging prophetic sayings.
Ideals and realities of Islam On page 86 January 5, 2013
As a result in the Sunni world six major collections of Hadith became assembled such as those of Bukhari and Muslim and soon gained complete authority in the orthodox com-munity. In Shi'ism a similar process took place except that in addition to the sayings of the Prophet those of the Imams, whose teachings expound the meaning of the prophetic message, form a part of the Hadith collection. There too, volumes of these sayings were assembled of which the most important is the Usui al-kafi of Kulaini.
Ideals and realities of Islam On page 84 January 5, 2013
As for the Hadith, these too were memorized by those whoheard them and were in turn transmitted to those who followed during succeeding generations. Here again it was not a question of memorizing just anything but of remembering the sayings of one whom God had chosen as His messenger. And those who memorized the prophetic sayings were not like modern men whose memory has been dulled by formalized classroom learning and over-reliance on written sources, but nomads or men of
Ideals and realities of Islam On page 83 January 5, 2013
The aspect of serenity, which also characterizes all true expressions of Islam, is essentially the love of truth. It is toput the Truth before everything else. It is to be impartial, to be logical on the level of discourse, not to let one's emotions colour and prejudice one's intellectual judgment. It is not to be a rationalist, but to see the truth of things and to love the Truth above all else.
Ideals and realities of Islam On page 80 January 5, 2013
Secondly he had a quality of combativeness, of always being actively engaged in combat against all that negated the Truth and disrupted harmony. Externally it meant fighting wars, either military, political or social ones, the war which the Prophet named the 'little holy war' (al-jihad al-a$ghar).Inwardly this combativeness meant a continuous war against the carnal soul (na/s), against all that in man tends towards the negation of God and His Will, the 'great holy war' (al-jihad al-akbar).
Ideals and realities of Islam On page 78 January 5, 2013
What appears to some as the cruelty of the Prophet towards men isprecisely this aspect of his function as the instrument of God for the establishment of a new world order whose homeland in Arabia was to be pure of any paganism and polytheism which if present would pollute the very source of this new fountain of life.
Ideals and realities of Islam On page 76 January 5, 2013
Likewise, with the marriages of the Prophet, they are not at all signs of his lenience vis-d-vis the flesh. During the period of youth when the passions are most strong the Prophet lived with only one wife who was much older than he and also underwent long periods of abstinence. And as a prophet many of his marriages were political ones which, in the prevalent social structure of Arabia, guaranteed the consolidation of the newly founded Muslim community. Multiple marriage, for him, as is true of Islam in general, was not so much enjoyment as responsi-bility and a means of integration of the newly founded society. B
Ideals and realities of Islam On page 75 January 5, 2013
Arberry, A. J., The Koran Interpreted, 2 vols., London, Allen & Unwin, 1955. The most poetic translation of the Quran in English and onewhich conveys more than any other English translation some of the literary qualities of the original.
Ideals and realities of Islam On page 71 January 5, 2013
among the most common formulae used are the two insha Allah and masha Allah, 'if God Wills' and 'what God haswilled', which are heard so often in daily speech. The first refers to the future and expresses man's confidence in God's Will and the realization that nothing can be achieved without His Will. This formula and the attitude that accompanies it, of course, apply to that aspect of reality which is connected with our free will, not that which follows from necessity.
Ideals and realities of Islam On page 69 January 5, 2013 | Modified
A Muslim repeats the Shahadah,not only because it reaffirms over and over again Divine Unity but also because, through its repetition, this Unity comes to leave its permanent imprint upon the human soul and integrates it into its Centre. It is a sword with which the 'deities' that keep springing up in the soul are destroyed and all multiplicity and otherness is negated.
Ideals and realities of Islam On page 67 January 5, 2013
Ta'wil for Sufism, or Shi'ism, does not possess the same meaning as it does in Mu'tazilite theology and in jurisprudence. It has nothing to do with the debate between the Ash'arites and Mu'tazilites over the literal meaning of the Quran versus rational interpretation of it. Ta'wil in the sense used by the Sufis and Shi'ite sages is the penetration into the symbolic—and not allegorical—meaning of the text which is not a human interpretation but reaching a divinely pre-disposed sense placed within the Sacred Text through which man himself becomes transformed.
Ideals and realities of Islam On page 66 January 5, 2013
From the Islamic point of view all knowledge is contained in essence in the Quran, the knowledge of all orders of reality. But this knowledge lies within the Quran potentially, or as a seed and in principle, not actually. The Quran contains the principles of all science but does not seek to tell us the number of plants found in a particu-lar continent or the number of elements that exist in the chemical table. It is useless and in fact absurd to try to find detailed scientific information in the Quran as has been done by certain modern commentators of it, as meaningless as the attempt made in the West to correlate scientific discoveries with the text of the Bible. By the time one comes to correlate thefindings of a particular science with the text of the Holy Book, that science itself has changed
Ideals and realities of Islam On page 55 January 5, 2013
Of course the Quran doesmention certain facts such as the rebellion of a certain people against God and His punishment of those people as we see also in the Old Testament. But even those 'facts' retain their power because they concern us as symbols of a reality which is always present.
Ideals and realities of Islam On page 54 January 5, 2013
This power lies precisely in its nature as symbol not fact, as thesymbol of a truth which concerns man vitally here and now.
Ideals and realities of Islam On page 54 January 5, 2013
As such the Quran is an assemblage of 'ideas' and 'thoughts' leading towards a concentration upon the truth contained in them. It is also a furqan or discrimination in that it is the instrument by which man can come to discriminate between Truth and falsehood, to discern between the Real and the unreal, the Absolute and the relative, the good and the evil, the beautiful and the ugly.
Ideals and realities of Islam On page 54 January 5, 2013
Persians, despite having been best known in the West for really only two things, prior to their fame for Islamic fundamentalism, that is, cats and carpets, spend an awful lot of time pondering carpets and virtually no time thinking
The Ayatollah Begs to Differ - The Paradox of Modern Iran On page 0 November 5, 2012
what encapsulates the purpose of this book (and happens to also reflect what is, despite Western conceptions, very much part of the Iranian mind-set): Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
The Ayatollah Begs to Differ - The Paradox of Modern Iran On page 0 November 5, 2012
by the curb, onto the sidewalk on Safi Alishah. It took one look at me, and then fled down the road toward the Sufi mosque. “That’s the neighborhood laat!” exclaimed my friend Khosro, a longtime resident of the no-longer-chic downtown Tehran street. “He’s the local tough, and he beats up all the other cats. Every
The Ayatollah Begs to Differ - The Paradox of Modern Iran On page 0 November 5, 2012
remarked how very much it resulted in his trip occurring inside a “bubble.”
The Ayatollah Begs to Differ - The Paradox of Modern Iran On page 0 November 5, 2012
While American (and some European) politicians may often come from ordinary backgrounds, their lifestyles usually change dramatically when they are in office, and by the time they have reached the pinnacle of power, they are long removed from their more humble roots.
The Ayatollah Begs to Differ - The Paradox of Modern Iran On page 0 November 5, 2012
I thought, What am I doing here? As a rule, I avoid crowds. I am not an agoraphobe, but dislike crowds on principle. The inevitable if unwitting poke of strange elbows into breast and
Party of One - The Loners' Manifesto On page 0 November 5, 2012
Many Floridians were angered by the inflated prices. “After Storm Come the Vultures,” read a headline in USA Today. One resident, told it would cost
Justice - What's the Right Thing to Do? On page 0 November 5, 2012
Iran is a nation of some seventy million people, the vast majority (90 percent) Shia Muslim but with Sunni, Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian, and Baha’i minorities (though the Baha’is, officially unrecognized and often persecuted by the state as heretics, tend to keep their identities secret). Ethnically, it is made up of Persians, Turks, Turkmen, Arabs, Kurds, and a slew of other races, often intermingled to the point where it is impossible to say with any certainty what one Iranian’s heritage is, particularly since birth
The Ayatollah Begs to Differ - The Paradox of Modern Iran On page 0 November 5, 2012
On a smaller scale, cameraswith appropriate filters can 'see' in the ultraviolet and take photo-graphs of flowers that show an alien range of stripes and spots thatare visible to, and seemingly 'designed' for, insect eyes but whichour unaided eyes can't see at all. Insect eyes have a spectral windowof similar width to ours, but slightly shifted up the burka: they areblind to red and they see further into the ultraviolet than we do -into the 'ultraviolet garden'.*
The God Delusion On page 353 November 5, 2012
My attitude to assisted suicide, by contrast, takes off from MarkTwain's observation, already quoted. Being dead will be nodifferent from being unborn - I shall be just as I was in the time ofWilliam the Conqueror or the dinosaurs or the trilobites. There isnothing to fear in that.
The God Delusion On page 347 November 5, 2012
I suppose, for completeness, we should consider the reverse pos-sibility. Rather than gods evolving from ancestral binkers, couldbinkers have evolved from ancestral gods? This seems to me lesslikely. I was led to think about it while reading the American psy-chologist Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in theBreakdown of the Bicameral Mind, a book that is as strange as itstitle suggests. It is one of those books that is either complete rub-bish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between!Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets.
The God Delusion On page 340 November 5, 2012
