Offers a new interpretation of medieval Islamic philosophy, one informed by Platonic mysticism. In this innovative work, Salman H. Bashier challenges traditional views of Islamic philosophy. While Islamic thought from the crucial medieval period is often depicted as a rationalistic elaboration on Aristotelian philosophy and an attempt to reconcile it with the Muslim religion, Bashier puts equal emphasis on the influence of Plato’s philosophical mysticism. This shift encourages a new reading of Islamic intellectual tradition, one in which boundaries between philosophy, religion, mysticism, and myth are relaxed. Bashier shows the manner in which medieval Islamic philosophers reflected on the relation between philosophy and religion as a problem that is intrinsic to philosophy and shows how their deliberations had the effect of redefining the very limits of their philosophical thought. The problems of the origin of human beings, human language, and the world in Islamic philosophy are discussed. Bashier highlights the importance of Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, a landmark work often overlooked by scholars, and the thought of the great Sufi mystic Ibn al-Arabiµ to the mainstream of Islamic philosophy.

Baba Rexheb, a Muslim mystic from the Balkans, founded the first Bektashi community in America. This is his life story and the story of his communities: the traditional Bektashi tekke in Albania where he first served, the displaced persons camps to which he escaped after the war, the centuries-old tekke in Cairo where he waited, and the Bektashi community that he founded in Michigan in 1954 and led until his passing in 1995. Baba Rexheb lived through the twentieth century, its wars, disruptions, and dislocations, but still at a profound level was never displaced.

Through Bektashi stories, oral histories, and ethnographic experience, Frances Trix recounts the life and times of this modern Sufi leader. She studied with Baba Rexheb in his community for more than twenty years. As a linguistic anthropologist, she taped twelve years of their weekly meetings in Turkish, Albanian, and Arabic. She draws extensively on Baba's own words, as well as interactions at the Michigan Bektashi center, for a remarkable perspective on our times.

You come to know Baba Rexheb and his gentle way of teaching through example and parable, poetry and humor. The book also documents the history of the 700-year-old Bektashi order in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Balkans and Egypt and its transposition to America. It attests to the role of Sufi centers in Islamic community life and their interaction with people of other faiths.

Current gender debates in Muslim societies, including questions of women’s rights in marriage and divorce, the politics of hijab, and women’s leadership of ritual prayer, are underpinned by specific, paradigmatic assumptions regarding human nature, gender, and the mandates of Islam. In this feminist analysis, Sa’diyya Shaikh undercuts these paradigms by arguing that Sufi discourses offer contemporary Muslims rich, multi-textured, and largely untapped resources with which to engage ongoing challenges of gender equality. As Shaikh demonstrates, in particular through the illustrative example of the writings of thirteenth-century Muslim poet, mystic, and legal scholar, Muhy? al-D?n Ibn al-‘Arab?, Sufi thought ultimately asserts that men and women are equally capable of attaining divinely ordained spiritual completeness. Indeed, in Ibn al-‘Arab?’s writings, though in many ways reflective of the normative gender assumptions of his era, this basic assumption appears as a foundational tenet of the Islamic understanding of human nature. By focusing on gender in Ibn’ al-‘Arab?’s works, Shaikh interrogates the ways in which love, sexuality, marriage, and related gender dynamics are conceived, imagined, and created in the Islamic tradition. In doing so, she constructs from within the Islamic religious tradition an alternate frame through which to view and understand Islam’s core ethical values.

Abdelwahab Meddeb crosses boundaries in unusual and important ways. Born in Tunis, he is now a French national. In his academic and literary work, he is concerned with the roots and history of Islam and with crossings, like his own, between Islam and Europe. He is an author of extraordinarily beautiful French; this is the first book to represent this lyrical aspect of his work in English translation. White Traverses is a poetic memoir about growing up in Tunisia and the contrasts between Islamic and European influences. In it, the intense colors and blinding whites of the Maghreb interweave with the rich traditions of French poetic discourse. In Africa as in Europe, white designates purity. Yet the complex Mediterranean streams of culture that flow together in Tunis problematize this myth. Meddeb captures their white refractions in vignettes that teach us the truth of the coincidence of contraries, of how the impure lodges in the pure.Tombeau of Ibn Arabi is a series of prose poems that draw their inspiration from the great Sufi poet of mediaeval Andalusia, Ibn Arabi, whose fervent love poetry both scandalized and transformed Islamic culture, and from Dante, who learned from Ibn Arabi a poetry of sensual love as initiation into spiritual experience. It seeks to show how a text written in the present day can maintain a link with the great dead . Ibn Arabi and Dante are two symbolic figures confirming the author's twofold spiritual genealogy--Arabic and European.

The evolution of the information and communications technology (ICT) paradigm is shifting the basis for economic activity from material and labour inputs to knowledge and information inputs, spawning the knowledge-based economy. In East Asia, it is evident that the emergence of the knowledge-based economy is disrupting the flying geese pattern of development and creating a new industrial geography. This book gives a picture of the shifting industrial geography in the region based on accounts of the status of the knowledge-based economy in ten individual East Asian economies. For some economies the increased production of ICT equipment and services is the pathway to the knowledge-based economy and even to leapfrogging ahead of more advanced economies. Other economies are focused on putting in place the physical and institutional infrastructure to connect to electronic networks and avoid the digital divide. For yet others, the emergence of the knowledge-based economy is expanding their role in the region, adding the role of ICT hub.

Discusses philosopher Mulla Sadra’s commentary on the opening chapter of the Qur’an.

The twentieth century was a fascinating period of profound political, social and economic changes in Indonesia. These changes contributed to the diversification of the religious landscape and as a result, religious authority was redistributed over an increasing number of actors. Although many Muslims in Indonesia continued to regard the ulama, the traditional religious scholars, as the principle source of religious guidance, religious authority has become more diffused and differentiated over time. The present book consists of contributions which all deal with the multi-facetted and multidimensional topic of religious authority and aim to complement each other. Most papers deal with Indonesia, but two dealing with other countries have been included in order to add a comparative dimension. Amongst the topics dealt with are the different and changing roles of the ulama, the rise and role of Muslim organizations, developments within Islamic education, like the madrasa, and the spread of Salafi ideas in contemporary Indonesia.

The popularity of neoliberal economic policies is based, in part, on the argument that the liberalization of markets promotes growth and increases employment opportunities for women. Although the latest research bears this out, it also presents a grim portrait of the state of women’s employment. Approximately seventy percent of those living on less than a dollar a day are women or girls. In Veiled Employment, the editors seek to examine these stark disparities, focusing on the evolving role of women’s employment in Iran. Based on empirical field research in Iran, the contributors’ essays document the accelerating trend in the size and diversity of women’s employment since the 1990s and explore the impact of various governmental policies on women. The volume analyzes such issues as the effect of global trade on female employment, women’s contribution to the informal work sector, and Iranian female migrant workers in the United States. Rejecting the commonly held view that centers on Islam as the primary cause of women’s status in the Muslim world, the authors emphasize the role of the national and international political economies. Drawing on postcolonial feminist theory, these scholars reveal the ways in which women in Iran have resisted and challenged Islamism, revealing them as agents of social transformation rather than as victims of religious fundamentalism.

War on Error brings together the stories of twelve young people, all vastly different but all American, and all Muslim. Their approaches to religion couldn’t be more diverse: from a rapper of Korean and Egyptian descent to a bisexual Sudanese American to a converted white woman from Colorado living in Cairo and wearing the hijab.