Rethinking Ibn Arabi

Download or read book Rethinking Ibn ʻArabi written by Gregory A. Lipton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring how the medieval mystic Ibn 'Arabi has been read as an inclusive universalist through the interpretative field of Perennial Philosophy, this book shows how his metaphysics is inseparably intertwined with Islamic supersessionism. Ibn 'Arabi's universalist reception is thus traced to lineages of Eurocentrism, revealing how Perennialism is itself exclusionary.

Download or read book Rethinking Ibn 'Arabi written by Gregory A. Lipton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-02 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thirteenth century mystic Ibn `Arabi was the foremost Sufi theorist of the premodern era. For more than a century, Western scholars and esotericists have heralded his universalism, arguing that he saw all contemporaneous religions as equally valid. In Rethinking Ibn `Arabi, Gregory Lipton calls this image into question and throws into relief how Ibn `Arabi's discourse is inseparably intertwined with the absolutist vision of his own religious milieu--that is, the triumphant claim that Islam fulfilled, superseded, and therefore abrogated all previous revealed religions. Lipton juxtaposes Ibn `Arabi's absolutist conception with the later reception of his ideas, exploring how they have been read, appropriated, and universalized within the reigning interpretive field of Perennial Philosophy in the study of Sufism. The contours that surface through this comparative analysis trace the discursive practices that inform Ibn `Arabi's Western reception back to the eighteenth and nineteenth century study of "authentic" religion, where European ethno-racial superiority was wielded against the Semitic Other-both Jewish and Muslim. Lipton argues that supersessionist models of exclusivism are buried under contemporary Western constructions of religious authenticity in ways that ironically mirror Ibn `Arabi's medieval absolutism.

Download or read book Rethinking Ibn 'Arabi written by Gregory A. Lipton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-02 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thirteenth century mystic Ibn `Arabi was the foremost Sufi theorist of the premodern era. For more than a century, Western scholars and esotericists have heralded his universalism, arguing that he saw all contemporaneous religions as equally valid. In Rethinking Ibn `Arabi, Gregory Lipton calls this image into question and throws into relief how Ibn `Arabi's discourse is inseparably intertwined with the absolutist vision of his own religious milieu--that is, the triumphant claim that Islam fulfilled, superseded, and therefore abrogated all previous revealed religions. Lipton juxtaposes Ibn `Arabi's absolutist conception with the later reception of his ideas, exploring how they have been read, appropriated, and universalized within the reigning interpretive field of Perennial Philosophy in the study of Sufism. The contours that surface through this comparative analysis trace the discursive practices that inform Ibn `Arabi's Western reception back to the eighteenth and nineteenth century study of "authentic" religion, where European ethno-racial superiority was wielded against the Semitic Other-both Jewish and Muslim. Lipton argues that supersessionist models of exclusivism are buried under contemporary Western constructions of religious authenticity in ways that ironically mirror Ibn `Arabi's medieval absolutism.

Download or read book Sufi Narratives of Intimacy written by Sa'diyya Shaikh and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012-03-05 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirteenth-century Sufi poet, mystic, and legal scholar Muhyi al-Din ibn al-'Arabi gave deep and sustained attention to gender as integral to questions of human existence and moral personhood. Reading his works through a critical feminist lens, Sa'diyya Shaikh opens fertile spaces in which new and creative encounters with gender justice in Islam can take place. Grounding her work in Islamic epistemology, Shaikh attends to the ways in which Sufi metaphysics and theology might allow for fundamental shifts in Islamic gender ethics and legal formulations, addressing wide-ranging contemporary challenges including questions of women's rights in marriage and divorce, the politics of veiling, and women's leadership of ritual prayer. Shaikh deftly deconstructs traditional binaries between the spiritual and the political, private conceptions of spiritual development and public notions of social justice, and the realms of inner refinement and those of communal virtue. Drawing on the treasured works of Sufism, Shaikh raises a number of critical questions about the nature of selfhood, subjectivity, spirituality, and society to contribute richly to the prospects of Islamic feminism as well as feminist ethics more broadly.

Download or read book Following Muhammad written by Carl W. Ernst and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2004-08-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major contribution that explains the faith practiced by the more than one billion Muslims throughout the world. Departing from the usual Arab-centric bias, Ernst addresses Euro-Americans and illuminates the diversity of Muslim societies and thought. He describes how Protestant definitions of religion and anti-Muslim prejudice have affected how Islam has come to be viewed in Europe and America. He also covers the contemporary importance of Islam in both its traditional locations and its new homes.

Download or read book Ibn 'Arabi in the Later Islamic Tradition written by Alexander D. Knysh and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the fierce controversy over the legacy of Ibn 'Arabi, the great Islamic mystic.

Download or read book Sufis and Anti-Sufis written by Elizabeth Sirriyeh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-09 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite its continuing appeal in the Muslim world, Sufism has faced fierce challenges in the last 250 years. This volume assesses the evolution of anti-Sufism since the middle of the eighteenth century and Sufi strategies for survival. It also considers the efforts of a few significant Muslim intellectuals to contemplate a future for a mystical approach to Islam without traditional Sufism. Many studies of Islam in the modern period have focused on the attempts of Muslim 'modernists' or 'fundamentalists' to come to terms with western modernity, and Sufis have often been marginalised in the process. Elizabeth Sirriyeh redresses this neglect by assigning to Sufism a central place in the broader history of Islam in the modern world and by examining how changing understandings of Sufism's role in modern conditions have affected Muslims of all shades of opinion.