The four important schools of Sunni law, the Malikite, Hanafite, Shafi'ite and Hanbalite, that constitute the accepted schools of Shari'ah to the present day, thus came into being in the third Islamic century. Of these, the one with the least number of followers is the Hanbalite school which for long had its centre in Egypt and Syria and from whose background the Wahhabi movement began. The Shafi'ite school has always been strong in Egypt and to a certain extent in Syria. The Malikite school is completely dominant in North Africa and its followersconstitute the most homogeneous body in the realm of Sunni Law. As for the Hanafi school, it was the official school of the Ottomans and is widespread in Turkey, the eastern part of the Arab world and the Indo-Pakistani sub-continen
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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This power lies precisely in its nature as symbol not fact, as thesymbol of a truth which concerns man vitally here and now.
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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.
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weakness inherent in it becoming suddenly the recipient of the Divine Word and displaying its frailty before a power which is infinitely greater than man can imagine.
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Many people, especially non-Muslims, who read the Quran for the first time are struck by what appears as a kind of incoherence from the human point of view. It is neither like a highly mystical text nor a manual of Aristotelian logic, though it contains both mysticism and logic.
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One feels through the shattering effect left upon the language of the Quran, the power of the Divine whence it originated. The Quran displays human language with all the
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Many Western authors writing about this cardinal question, begin with the assumption—often hidden in veils of so-called 'objectivity' and 'scholarship'—that the Quran is not really the Word of God, a revelation from heaven. Therefore, it must be explained away. Not being the Word of God, in their eyes it must naturally be the work of the Prophet who therefore must have been a very good poet and could not in fact have been unlettered. He must have learned bits here and there from the Jewish community in Medina or the Christian monks in Syria and put them together in a book that appears to these critics as a poor replica of other sacred books such as the Torah and the Gospels.
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The covenant made between man and God by virtue of which man accepted the trust (amanah) of being an intelligent and free being with all the opportunities and danger® that such a responsibility implies, is symbolized physically by the stone of the Ka'ba.
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between God and man, God in His Absoluteness and man in his profound theomorphic nature. Islam bases the realization of this central relationship on intelligence, will and speech and consequently on equilibrium and certitude. It has sought to establish equilibrium in life by channelling all of man's natural needs and inclinations, all those natural desires and needs such as that for food, shelter, procreation, etc. given by God and necessary in human life, through the Divine Law or Shari'ah.
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To summarize then, Islam is based on the universal relation
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sense a return to the original Unity, to the 'religion of Abraham'. As Judaism represents the law or the exoteric aspect of this tradi- tion and Christianity the way or the esoteric aspect of it, so does Islam integrate the tradition in its original unity by containing both a law and a way, a shari'ah and a tariqah.
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It sought to accom- plish this by its uncompromising emphasis upon Divine Unity and by seeking to return man to his original nature (fitrah) which is veiled from him because of his dream of negligence.
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History consists of a series of cycles of decay and rejuvenation. Decay comes from the corrupting influences of the terrestrial environment, from the earth which pulls all things downwards and makes every spiritual force decay as it moves away gradually from its original source. Rejuvenation comes from heaven through the prophets who through successive revelations renew the religious and spiritual life of man.
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