Islamic Research Papers

The views in these research papers May not be My views or We only agree with them in part;

Curricula and Educational Process In Mamluk Madrasas

This study examined and discussed about the process of education in Egypt and Syria during the Mamluk Era (1250 – 1517). It presented the array of learning activities that affected the lives of both the students and teachers; the learning methods and materials utilised; the curricula; the schedules of study days and holidays, etc. The student went through different stages, gradually moving up from the basic elementary (kuttab) to the final stage (muntahun), at the end of which the student was entitled to receive a graduation certificate (ijaza). The study examined also the changes in these activities, in light of the developments occurred in the Mamluk state in general.

The Written Word In Medieval Arabic

Societies within the Islamic world, especially those in the belt stretching from al-Andalus in the west to Persia in the east, belonged in the medieval era to the world’s most bookish societies. The sheer number of works that existed – Ibn al-Nadīm in fourth/tenth-century Baghdad was already aware of several thousand titles – and the sophisticated division of labour for producing manuscripts, including author, copyist, ‘copy editor’ (muḥarrir), calligrapher, illustrator, cutter and binder bear witness to the central role of the written word. Reports on the lively manuscript markets, as well as on the countless individual legacies of manuscripts bequeathed to one’s children, colleagues or libraries suggest the extent to which the written word remained in constant circulation in these pre-print societies. At the same time, manuscript-books acquired, at least in some quarters, such outstanding prestige that scholars such as the towering figure of al Jāḥiẓ, writing in the third/ninth century, could expend page upon page praising their excellence. This fascination with manuscripts, as well as their massive production and constant circulation, even led some medieval scholars to fear the ‘over-production’ of manuscript-books.

Arabic Linguistic Tradition II. Pragmatics

This article deals essentially with two topics. The first is rhetoric (balāgha), as one of the two sectors of the basic core of the Arabic linguistic tradition. Since the tradition was not definitively constructed until the postclassical period, Qazwīnī’s Talkhīṣ (d. 739/1338) is used—the most famous “epitome” of the rhetorical part of Sakkākī’s Miftāḥ al-‘ulum, which itself is based on the two works of ‘Abd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī (d. 471/1078), Asrār al-‘arabiyya and Dalā’il al-I‘jāz. The second is the intersections of rhetoric with the other sectors of this tradition: linguistics proper, namely, grammar (naḥw : Astarābādhī’s (d. 688/1289) Sharḥ al-Kāfiya is given as a sample of balāgha integrated into naḥw); and not linguistics proper, namely, the theologico-juridical sciences (fiqh, ’uṣūl al-fiqh, tafsīr, kalām).

Ibn ‘Arabi’s Letter to Fakhr al-Din al-Razi: A Study and Translation

In the Name of God, the All-Merciful, the Compassionate; This is the letter by the master, the leader, the firmly rooted in knowledge, the unique, the verifier (muḥaqqiq), the unveiler of reality (kāshif al-ḥaqīqa), the reviver of the community and the religion, Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad b. ʿAlī b. al-ʿArabī al-Ṭāʾī al-Andalusī al-Maghribī (God sanctify his soul); to the leader, the learned, the adept, the erudite, the pride of the community and the religion, Muḥammad b. ʿUmar al-Khaṭīb al-Rāzī (God grant him peace and make Paradise his abode).

The Origins and Development of the Office of the Chief Sufi in Egypt, 1173-1325

In 969/1173, Saladin endowed a khānqāh in Cairo for the use of foreign Sufis arriving in that city. This khānqāh, known as the Saʿīd al-Suʿadāʾ, also included a stipendiary position for a “Chief Sufi” (shaykh al-shuyūkh), who would direct the day-to-day operations of the khānqāh and guide the Sufis who lived there. However, virtually nothing is known about the origins and development of this elite position. In this article I reconstruct the roster of individuals who held the office of Chief Sufi in Egypt between 969/1173 and 724/1325, when the office of Chief Sufi was moved to a new khānqāh outside Cairo. I trace the origins of the office in Seljuk Baghdad and its subsequent development in Syria and Egypt. These findings show that the Chief Sufi was almost always from the East, typically Iraq or Khurasan. He was nominally a Sufi, but was known primarily for being a jurist, having trained in Shāfiʿi jurisprudence and Ashʿari theology. Perhaps most interestingly, the position was ineluctably tied to the politics of the Ayyubid and Mamluk states. The position was thus often unstable and the object of fierce competition among other elites.

The Crisis of Rule in Late Medieval Islam: A Study of Idrīs Bidlīsī (861-926/1457-1520) and Kingship at the Turn of the Sixteenth Century, Ph.D. dissertation

This dissertation received the Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award in the Humanities from the Middle East Studies Association of North America in 2016. It examines the Ottoman transition to a new mode of kingship in the first decades of the sixteenth century by examining the life and work of Idrīs Bidlīsī (861-926/1457-1520), one of the most dynamic scholars and statesmen of the period. It situates Bidlīsī’s life within the context of the sweeping geo-political changes that precipitated the dissolution of the most powerful polities in Islamic lands and the emergence of the Ottomans as preeminent. In his lifetime, Bidlīsī resided or worked at three of the four major sultanates of the region: the Aqquyunlu of western and central Iran, the Ottomans of the Balkans and Anatolia, and the Mamluks of Egypt and Syria. While his itinerant career was somewhat emblematic of this period, his extensive professional and literary activities within these three courts offer a unique view to a political culture in crisis and the efforts of one of these powers, namely the Ottomans, to transcend the basic volatile power dynamics common to all late medieval Islamic polities. Through the composition of two major chronicles of the Ottoman dynasty in Persian, Hasht bihisht (The Eight Paradises) and the Salīmshāhnāma (The Book of Sultan Selīm), Bidlīsī recorded his observations of the seminal events of his day and argued for a vision of rule undergirded by innovative discourses that emphasized the cosmic and sacral aspects of kingship.

The Ottomans and The Mamluks: Imperial Diplomacy and Warfare in the Islamic World

In 1393 the Ottoman ruler Bayezid I (r.1389–1402) gave audience to the Mamluk emissary Amir Husam al-Din Hasan al-Kujkuni in the Ottoman capital Bursa, an ancient city in northwestern Anatolia that flourished under Ottoman rule yet paled in comparison to the Mamluk imperial capital of Cairo. According to a Mamluk source, while accepting the gifts sent by the Mamluk sultan Barquq (r.1382–9 and 1390–9), Bayezid commented that he was Barquq’s slave, or mamluk. With this exaggerated expression, Bayezid did not display false humility, but instead acknowledged his inferior political status. Despite his rapid expansion into the Balkans and through western and central Anatolia, the Ottoman sovereign was not yet the equivalent of his Mamluk counterpart, who ruled a prestigious regime that had dominated the central Islamic lands since the 1250s. Bayezid’s predecessors had merely established themselves as vassals of first the Anatolian Seljuks and then of the Mongol Ilkhanids in northwest Anatolia, which existed as a frontier territory squeezed between the borders of the Byzantine Empire and multiple local Muslim magnates.

Books on Ethics and Politics: The Art of Governing the Self and Others at the Ottoman Court

“In our time, kings ignored libraries and only built madrasa libraries as usual except for the library of our great sultan— who honored our time with his presence and shadow. It is reported that there is no book, be it religious or non-religious (sharʿī wa ghayr sharʿī), or Arabic or Persian, which cannot be found in this library, all beyond the reach of the madrasa students’ hands. May Allah continue the rule of this sultan and extend his life till the end of times”. The above statement by the Ottoman scholar Taşköprülüzade (d. 1561) concerning Sultan Süleyman’s (r. 1520–66) library does not appear to be an exaggeration, considering the sheer number and diversity of books cited in his encyclopedia of sciences, Miftāḥ al-Saʿāda wa Miṣbāḥ al-Siyāda fī Mawḍūʿāt al-ʿUlūm (The Key of Happiness and Light of Nobility in Objects of Science). In this work, which features about 2,000 titles representing some 350 disciplines, Taşköprülüzade con-siders the imperial library of Süleyman as a successor to the three great caliphal libraries of the Abbasids, the Fatimids, and the Andalusian-Umayyads. Before Süleyman, at least since the time of Mehmed I (r. 1412–20), book collecting had been a family tradition among the Ottoman sultans, and Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512) was no exception. Although we do not have a full catalogue of Süleyman’s books, the inventory of Bayezid II’s imperial library, which lists 7,200 titles, certainly justifies Ṭaşköprülüzade’s praise.

Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?

Rasul Allah (saws) said “the people who close the door to Ijtihad were entirely self-serving” and He (saws) pointed towards the Khalifate’s they were serving. It was closed by evil rulers who wanted to break the authority of the scholars in Islam for their interests in ruling. عَالِمُ الْغَيْبِ وَالشَّهَادَةِ الْكَبِيرُ الْمُتَعَال Extract: As conceived by classical Muslim jurists, ijtihād is the exertion of mental energy in the search for a legal opinion to the extent that the faculties of the jurist become incapable of further effort. In other words, ijtihad is the maximum effort expended by the jurist to master and apply the principles and rules of uṣūl alfiqh (legal theory) for the purpose of discovering God’s law.1 The activity of ijtihad is assumed by many a modern scholar to have ceased about the end of the third/ninth century, with the consent of the Muslim jurists themselves. This process, known as ‘closing the gate of ijtihad’ (in Arabic: ‘insidād bāb al-ijtihād’), was described by Joseph Schacht as follows.

Encounter after the Conquest: Scholarly Gatherings in 16th-Century Ottoman Damascus

This article examines the extensive intellectual and social exchange that resulted from the Ottoman imperial incorporation of Arab lands in the 16th century. In the years immediately after the 1516–17 conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate that brought Egypt, Greater Syria, and the Hijaz under Ottoman rule, Turkish-speaking Ottomans from the central lands (Rumis) found that their political power was not matched by religious and cultural prestige. As the case of Damascus shows, scholarly gatherings called majālis (sing. majlis) were key spaces where this initial asymmetry was both acutely felt and gradually overcome. As arenas for discussion among scholars on the move, literary salons facilitated the circulation of books and ideas and the establishment of a shared intellectual tradition. As occasions where stories were told and history was made, they supported the formation of a common past. In informal gatherings and in the biographical dictionaries that described them, Rumis and Arabs came together to forge an empire-wide learned culture as binding as any political or administrative ingredient of the Ottoman imperial glue.

Islamic Law, Jurisprudential Authority and Empire in the Ottoman Domains (16th-17th centuries)

This dissertation is an attempt to explain how different jurisconsults (muftīs) throughout the Ottoman domains perceived, constituted, and negotiated their jurisprudential authority over the course of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The debates and exchanges between the muftīs (as well as other actors) surrounding the nature of the institution of the muftī and the ways whereby his jurisprudential authority is constituted hold the keys to understanding the function and nature of Islamic law – and particularly of the Sunnī Ḥanafī school, one of the four legal schools in Sunnī Islam, which the Ottoman state adopted as its state-school – in the Ottoman Empire. More specifically, these debates offer an opportunity to investigate some significant legal aspects of the Ottoman doctrine of sovereignty, and the place the sultan (and the dynasty) occupied in the Ottoman political-legal imagination. Moreover, the exchanges between the jurisconsults (and, more generally, among members of the empire’s scholarly circles) throw into sharp relief the implications of the Ottoman development of an imperial state-sponsored religious-judicial establishment (or a learned hierarchy) on the articulation of the content of Ḥanafī jurisprudence and its administration in the Ottoman realms. I situate these exchanges, dialogues and debates against the backdrop of the Ottoman conquest of the Arab lands, and particularly of Greater Syria (Bilād al-Shām, roughly today’s central and southern Syria, Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine), and their subsequent incorporation into the empire. Nevertheless, although this dissertation concentrates on some jurisprudential aspects of the incorporation of the Arab lands into the empire, the developments in the realm of Islamic law are merely examples of a wider set of interlocking processes whereby an identifiable Ottoman imperial Sunnī tradition emerged.

A Lexicon of Mistakes to Avoid While Eating with Ottoman Gentlemen

This article examines the material culture and social etiquette of elite dining in the early modern Ottoman Empire. The challenges of eating with others were numerous, as the sixteenth-century Damascene scholar Badr al-Din al-Ghazzi (d. 1577) showed in painful and hilarious ways in his treatise entitled Table Manners (Adab al-Muʾakala). One set of problems stemmed from the objects structuring the meal, especially the relative dearth of crockery and cutlery. Far from making dining experiences simpler and more straightforward, as scholars have sometimes suggested, this necessitated greater cooperation between diners and made them vulnerable to individual misbehavior. Another set of problems arose from the material qualities of food, where sources of pleasure, handled poorly, could easily trigger disgust. The self-discipline that Ghazzi promoted in his manual offered a partial solution to these difficulties, but not a solution equally available to all.

Sayyids and Sharifs in Muslim Societies: The Living Links to the Prophet

The global Muslim population includes a large number of lineal descendants and relatives of the Prophet Muḥammad. These kinsfolk, most often known as “sayyids” or “sharīfs,” form a distinct social category in many Muslim societies, and their status can afford them special treatment in legal matters and in the political sphere. This book brings together an international group of renowned scholars to provide a comprehensive examination of the place of the kinsfolk of Muḥammad in Muslim societies, throughout history and in a number of different local manifestations. The chapters cover:

• how the status and privileges of sayyids and sharīfs have been discussed by religious scholars;
• how the prophetic descent of sayyids and sharīfs has functioned as a symbolic capital in different settings;
• the lives of actual sayyids and sharīfs in different times and places.

Providing a thorough analysis of sayyids and sharīfs from the ninth century to the present day, and from the Iberian Peninsula to the Indonesian Archipelago, this book will be of great interest to scholars of Islamic, Middle East and Asian studies.

The Self-Fashioning of an Ottoman Urban Notable

While historians have learned much about the political, social, and economic roles of the Ottoman provincial elites (a‘yān) in the 18th century, little is known about their cultural orientations and personal interests. Functioning as political intermediaries between the Ottoman central government and local populations, the majority of the a‘yān were effectively placed in an ambiguous position between the cosmopolitan demands of service as Ottoman officials and the cultural particularism of the local society in which they were or had become rooted. This study takes in hand the foundation document of a college (madrasa) built in mid-18th century Aleppo by a Muslim judge (qadi) and merchant, Tahazâde Ahmad Efendi. Examining together the document’s constituent elements, primarily the library inventory, personnel recruitment strategy, curriculum stipulations, and prayer supplications, this study discerns a calculated and fine-tuned effort on the part of the founder to fashion a distinct and autonomous social status and cultural identity. On the one hand, Ahmad Efendi identifies with the Ottoman legal and social establishment as through the prescribed teaching of Hanafi jurisprudence in the curriculum of the madrasa, the plurality of Hanafi texts in his library, and his cultivation of Turkish and Persian poetry in the Edeb-i Osmani tradition. On the other hand, Ahmad Efendi carves out a space within which he asserts his own cultural and intellectual orientation. This is seen most notably through promotion of his sharīf lineage and pursuit of group leadership as naqīb al-ashrāf, which is reinforced by ownership of prestigious genealogical texts in his library; the cultivation of an pre-Ottoman awareness tied primarily to the Mamluk Sultanate as seen in his concentrated acquisition of chronicles and biographical dictionaries of that era and his affiliation with multiple pre-Ottoman Sufî orders with proud but temporally remote local histories; his extensive financial and technical support for the training of timekeepers (muwaqqits); and, perhaps most strikingly, his explicit and extensive patronage of Kurds, primarily from the area of Mosul, as teachers and students in his madrasa.

Treasures of Knowledge An Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3–1503/4)

The section on Sufism—with lives of saints, ethics, and homiletics also nested in it—constitutes the largest single classification in the palace library inventory, with-out even considering several dozen relevant works listed in other sections of the inventory by Bayezid II’s librarian ʿAtufi. Among the twenty sections (
tafṣīls) or fields of learning that constitute the grid in which ʿAtufi struggles to situate each and every volume in its appropriate discipline, Sufism takes pride of place in terms of numbers. The 1,084 titles in this section account for fifteen percent of the more than 7,200 works listed in the inventory as a whole. By 1502–4, in other words, Sufism had arrived, at least in the lands of Rum and arguably also in many corners of the broader geography of Muslim communities in the Afro-Eurasian oikoumene.

The Occultist Encyclopedism of ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Bistami (d.858/1454)

The following serves as a wake-up call that this exists and has been used for over a thousand years by the Elite to steal power and influence from their rightful inheritors; The Antiochene occultist, littérateur, and professional court intellectual ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī (d. 858/1454) is best known as someone whose writings influenced Ottoman thought and ideologies of rule during and beyond his lifetime. It is argued here that al-Bisṭāmī’s writings shed important light on Mamlūk intellectual history as well, particularly regarding the rising interest in occultism in the Mamlūk cities of the late-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—including at the court of the sultan al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Barqūq. Attention is paid to al-Bisṭāmī’s major work on the occult “science of letters and names” (ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-al-asmāʾ), Shams al-afaq fī ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-al-awfāq, which is approached as an “encyclopedic” work structurally reflective of major trends in Mamlūk thought and literature despite its seemingly obscure topic. The focus is on al-Bisṭāmī’s account of his initiation into the science of letters and names among various teachers in Cairo, Damascus, and Alexandria, and what this account reveals not only of the bustling occult scene in these cities, but also of broader changes that were afoot in Mamlūk learned society, especially with regard to issues of manuscript culture.

Books on Occult Sciences. In Treasures of Knowledge: An Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3-1503/4)

The Prophet of Allah (saws) while pointing at the Ottomans said this is the place of such things, the Prophet of Allah (saws) said “when evil increases in the Ummah rule over it will be handed over to the worst of it”, and the Ottomans where the last to rule, they were occultists and an oligarchy who consequently lost to western occultists they warred with, destroying the Ummah in the process. Hence this serves as a further wake-up call of how widespread the Occult is in the world. Abu Thalaba al Khashny (ra) the companion of Rasul Allah (saws) said: “I heard in the era of Mu’awiyah when he was trying to open Constantine, I hope my community will not fail to maintain their position in the sight of their Lord if He delays them half a day, when you see Sham is a bounty for a man (nothing but a jewel to be captured from others) and his oligarchy family members then at this time Constantine will be opened.  (Majmu’ al Zawa’id, 6/222, Abu Dawud similarly reported a version in his Sunan), thus spoke Rasul Allah (saws) about the Ottomans; The 129 codices recorded in this section of the palace library inventory include more than 200 copies of texts on a diverse range of topics: oneiromancy (ʿilmal-taʿbīr), physiognomy, alchemy (ʿilm al-kīmiyāʾ), the occult properties of stones (ʿilm al-aḥjār ), the divinatory method known as geomancy (ʿilm al-raml), omens or bibliomancy (al-fāl), the interrelated“magical” arts of talismans (al-ṭilsimāt), nīranj, and sīmiyāʾ, the adjuration of spirits (ʿazāʾim), the political-eschatological divinatory discourse known as  jafr; the manufacture of wondrous automata and related devices(ṣināʿat al-ʿajāʾib, al-ḥiyal), and siḥr, another term usu-ally glossed as “magic” or “sorcery.” A final category of works on “wondrous matters” (al-umūr al-ʿajība) is found as well, though the heading is noted only in the margin and not in the table of contents at the head of the inventory. The subjects of this section thus roughly fit within the rubric of what modern scholarship calls“occult sciences,” a term for which various cognates are found in Arabic and Persian: “the strange sciences”(al-ʿulūm al-gharība), “the hidden sciences” (al-ʿulūmal-khfiyya), “the sciences of the concealed” (ʿulūm al- ghayba), etc. ʿAtufi employs none of these phrases, however, giving the section no overarching title.

Abstract Art and Communication in Mamluk Architecture (Bibliography)

Fourteenth-century Cairo saw a movement towards abstract, geometric art. This movement reflected contemporary intellectual interests and represents the culmination of the ascendancy of Islamic philosophy over the humanist vocabulary of art. The thesis seeks explanations for the positive, i.e. for the forms which art actually took, rather than concentrating on prohibitive mechanisms. In architecture, the disappearance of stucco vegetal decoration may have been partly due to the effects of an outbreak of plague, but the main influences on contemporary art and architecture came from the esoteric habits of thought induced by sufism, alchemy and hermeticism, and from the dualist concerns of Islamic philosophy. The thesis discusses the continuity between sufism and Shī’ism, the history of sufism in Cairo as it affected art and architecture, concepts of the microcosm and the macrocosm, and theories of colour, substance and gilding. The thesis examines talismans and other esoteric material. It discusses architectural incorporata, presents a catalogue of Pharaonic material re-used in Islamic architecture, and argues that blocks bearing Pharaonic hieroglyphs represented Hermetic lore and, at entrances to buildings, paralleled the use of Pharaonic references at the beginning of esoteric manuscripts. The detailed discussion of architecture takes the form of an examination of a religious building, scrutinising the underlying principles of decoration and then moving on to specific elements such as the entrance and the mihrab. The thesis discusses, and dissents from, iconographic interpretations of architectural imagery. It attempts to evolve a terminology for discussion and concludes that ‘mamluk’ is inappropriate as a cultural term, since the influence of the individual patron on art and architecture was less innovative than the intellectual background of the period, and the dissociation of the patron from contemporary society has been over-estimated. It comes to the conclusion that ‘an art of the bāṭin’ would more effectively express the major influence on the art and architecture of fourteenth century Cairo. (The people of Allah disagree with the conclusion and would say the mamluks chose what they chose and the resulting amalgamation is called Mamluk) 

Identifying Mysticism in Early Esoteric Scriptural Hermeneutics: Sahl al-Tustarī’s (d. 283/896) Tafsīr Reconsidered

Abstract: Much has been written on the rise of Sufi Qurʾān exegesis (tafsīr ṣūfī) with an emphasis on the continuity of exegetical practices in mysticism across time. In a break with this analysis, some historians have called into question whether Sufi tafsīr constitutes a distinct genre of Qurʾān exegesis, particularly given the extent to which it shares analytical categories and conceptual tools with the tafsīr genre more broadly. This article sheds new light on this debate by asking a simple question: What makes Sufi tafsīr “mystical” at the level of hermeneutics? The current study uses Sahl al-Tustarī’s (d. 283/896) tafsīr as a case study to identify the intersection of three key elements that formed the foundation of an influential hermeneutical method for mystical experience in early Islam: (1) the use of an esoteric scriptural hermeneutic based on an exterior-interior (ẓāhir-bāṭin) interpretive framework; (2) the use of the supererogatory invocation (dhikr) of the Names of God (al-asmāʾ al-ḥusnā); and (3) the achievement of a state of “certainty” (yaqīn) that facilitates the acquisition of mystical perception (baṣar) of God’s Oneness and the reception of knowledge (maʿrifa) and wisdom (ḥikma) from the unseen (al-ghayb). Tustarī’s integration of a unique hermeneutical methodology with a methodology of mystical experience constitutes a major hallmark of the writings of mystics in early Islam, and his synthesis found adherents among later philosophically oriented Sufis in the generations of Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 638/1240) and Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī (d. ca. 587/1191). A key outcome of this study is the claim that there was an early tradition of mystical exegesis that was initiated by Sahl al-Tustarī and that transmitted in the writings of, among others, Abū Ṭālib al-Makkī (d. 386/996), IbnMasarra (d. 319/931), and Ibn Barrajān (d. 536/1141). (Just as reality is divorced from reality in the minds of modern scholars the questions they ask are the same, is there spirituality/mysticism in the Quran, is Allah spiritual, such are the holes and gaps in the reality of modern scholarship, rather the question is how does classical exegesis fall short of the spirituality in the Quran, the answer is every exegesis is an aspect of the subjects Allah is raising, they are thematic, none of them claim to be complete or the totality of anything, Shaykh Al Islam Qutb Allah Rami Al Boustani Al Rifai).

Introduction to the Text “Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice”

The World is ruled by occult societies whose origin is the Islamic world, the Encyclopedia of Ikhwan al Safa for example was the first complete Encyclopedia of any kind to appear in Europe, whose aim was to teach the elite how to rule with the occult. My (q) intention here is to bring this world into peoples sphere of reference so it can be addressed, a task the leaders of Islam such as Imam al Mahdi (q) will have to deal with in the future, Shaykh Al Islam Qutb Allah Rami Al Boustani Al Rifai; Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice brings together the latest research on Islamic occult sciences from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, namely intellectual history, manuscript studies, and material culture. Its aim is not only to showcase the range of pioneering work that is currently being done in these areas but also to provide a model for closer interaction amongst the disciplines constituting this burgeoning field of study. Furthermore, the book provides the rare opportunity to bridge the gap on an institutional level by bringing the academic and curatorial spheres into dialogue.

Ottoman Eschatological Esotericism: Introducing Jafr in Ps. Ibn al-‘Arabi’s The Tree of Nu’man

This article addresses a desideratum in Islamic intellectual history concerning apocalyptic eschato­logy. I propose to focus on the Islamic revelatory genre par excellence known as jafr which as a textual tradition comprises the fusion of eschatology and esotericism. As a case study, I have chosen to examine an Ottoman apocalypse known as The Tree of Nu‘mdn Concerning the Ottoman Empire (al- Shajara al-nu‘mdniyyafi al-dawla al-‘uthmdnippa). This complex revelatory text was composed at some point in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century and was pseudepigraphically attributed to Ibn al-‘Arabi (d. 1240), the “Great Doctor” (al-shaykh al-akbar) of Sufism. Importantly, The Tree of Nu‘man shows us that eschatological predictions were central to bolstering Ottoman imperial claims to universal sovereignty, this being an historical phenomenon that permeated Islamic dy­nasties following the collapse of the central Abbasid Caliphate in 1258. More specifically, end- of-times tractates like The Tree of NuPmdn highlight the reliance of revelatory propaganda on the esoteric sciences of lettrism ((ml al-huruf) and astrology ((pm al-falak). With these two esoteric pillars, I argue that Pseudo-Ibn al-‘Arabi secured the validity and appeal of his pseudepigraphic apocalyp­se. A further important contribution of this essay is a new, critical definition of jafr that expands on previous scholarly attempts at understanding this immanently Islamic eschatological genre. (Some Key points: “With that said, the pseudonymous author (hereafter: Ps.-Ibn al-(Arabi) is uniquely concerned with proving two things. First, Ps.-Ibn alArabi contends that with the close of the first Muslim millennium (1000 AH/1592 CE), the final “hour” (al-saah) of creation was about to chime. Second, and consequently, he identifies the Ottomans as the exclusive gatekeepers of the cosmic eschaton”. The Authors lack of qualifications are highlighted with his prejudice, first, all scholars at the time thought the world would end by the year 1000H because that is what Allah planed, He (swt) then extended this period by a further 500 years, thus the prophet of Allah (saws) said “I hope My community maintain their place with their Lord if He (swt) delays them half a day”, it was asked “how long is half a day”, the prophet answered “500 years”. Secondly, the Ottomans, historically where the “eschaton” of the cosmic “plane”, but not in a good way as they assumed, the Prophet of Allah (saws) called them an Oligarchy, they hoarded the power of the entire Islamic world so that when they fell all of Islam fell with them and we awoke to the horrors of this world now ruled by the Occult with their master the Dajjal soon to appear. Thirdly, why would anyone in the 17th century claim the world was about to end in the 15th century? Shaykh Al Islam Qutb Allah Rami Al Boustani Al Rifai). 

The Occultist Encyclopedism of ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Bistami. Mamluk Studies Review 20 (2017), 3-38.

The Antiochene occultist, littérateur, and professional court intellectual ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī (d. 858/1454) is best known as someone whose writings influenced Ottoman thought and ideologies of rule during and beyond his lifetime. It is argued here that al-Bisṭāmī’s writings shed important light on Mamlūk intellectual history as well, particularly regarding the rising interest in occultism in the Mamlūk cities of the late-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—including at the court of the sultan al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Barqūq. Attention is paid to al-Bisṭāmī’s major work on the occult “science of letters and names” (ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-al-asmāʾ), Shams al-afaq fī ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-al-awfāq, which is approached as an “encyclopedic” work structurally reflective of major trends in Mamlūk thought and literature despite its seemingly obscure topic. The focus is on al-Bisṭāmī’s account of his initiation into the science of letters and names among various teachers in Cairo, Damascus, and Alexandria, and what this account reveals not only of the bustling occult scene in these cities, but also of broader changes that were afoot in Mamlūk learned society, especially with regard to issues of manuscript culture. (Know thy enemy, this is being highlighted because his text are still in use today and are some of the worst, it was the occult that destroyed the Mamluk and Ottoman Khalifa, you gain one thing and pay for it from someplace else until the Mizan destroys you, the Occult is spiritual entanglement and acts like a spiders web constricting you, the more you move/use it the more your entanglment with destructive forces increase, the universe is built this way, Physics is just finding this out Allah called it Karma/The Mizan, see Quantum field theory, Shaykh Al Islam Qutb Allah Rami Al Boustani Al Rifai)

Encountering The Face of Allah in Sufi Mysticism

This thesis describes the mystical experience in Islam where the Muslim mystic (Sufi) encounters the Face of God (Wajh Allah) through spiritual practices and beliefs. In the process of researching and writing this thesis, the author conducted a literature search using various sources on interpreting the subject from the mystical, fundamentalist, and rationalist perspectives. This thesis is slated to be a reference and resource for those seeking to understand the mystical side of Islam, which is often misunderstood to be outside the fold of the faith and an innovation that does not originate within Islam itself. (To say Islam has no Spirituality/Sufism is to accuse the Prophet of Allah (q) of Kufr, thus are these incomplete scholars heaping kufr upon themselves by denying that science itself exists. You see the Fuqaha are only lawyers learned in Law while spirituality is the science of physics, the science of the subatomic in the universe, thus is their denial monumental, their state cut off from Allah and incomplete, and their affair futile, you do not prove the existence of science by using legal arguments that is like trying to bash it into existence, Shaykh Al Islam Qutb Allah Rami Al Boustani Al Rifai)

Ars Orientalis Volume 42

Ars Orientalis is a peer-reviewed annual volume of scholarly articles and occasional reviews of books on the art and archaeology of Asia, the ancient Near East, and the Islamic world. It is published jointly by the Freer and Sackler Galleries and the University of Michigan Department of History of Art. Fostering a broad range of topics and approaches through themed issues, the journal is intended for scholars in diverse fields. Ars Orientalis provides a forum for new scholarship, with a particular interest in work that redefines and crosses boundaries, both spatial and temporal.

Review of Religious Authority in Transnational Sufi Networks Shaykh Nazim Al-Qubrusi Al-Haqqani Al-Naqshbandi

The article is a case study of the methods Skaykh Nazim al-Qubrusi, the spiritual leader ofHaqqaniyya, a transnational Sufi network of the Naqshbandiyya tradition with disciples of multiple ethnicities, and was written before Shaykh Nazim’s death in 2014. The reading demonstrates the relationship between religious authority, corporate identity and network structure, whereas the emphasis of the article is the way Shaykh Nazim managed to structure his network and introduce innovative techniques and methods so that he will keep the number of his disciples great, and as such legitimize his religious authority. Although at the beginning conveys the sense that is a paper that aims to promote or praise Shaykh’s lifelong work, at the final pages it takes an interesting twist of emphasizing on aspects that could be considered as criticism. Other elements related to Sufism that was present in the paper are the difficulty of constructing a historically accurate biography of Shaykhs, and the detail that, like other Sufi orders, Naqshbandiyya is not of Arabic origin (Chib, 2007, p.23).

Binding with a Perfect Sufi Master: Naqshbandi Defenses of Rābiṭa from the Late Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic

This article explores debates surrounding the controversial spiritual exercise of rābiṭa – the binding of the disciple with a Sufi master by envisioning the image of the master in different parts of the body. Despite being criticized as a non-Qurʾanic practice and as a form of idolatry, rābiṭa was made a ritual of prominence among the Khālidī-Naqshbandī suborder which took shape in early nineteenth-century Syria and spread throughout the late Ottoman Empire. Tracing defenses of the practice from Arabic sources in the early nineteenth century to Turkish language treatises in the twentieth century, I argue that the Sufi ādāb manual al-Bahja al-saniyya composed by Muḥammad b. ʿAbdallāh al-Khānī (1798-1862) established a repertoire of arguments that have been adopted and reused in Turkish language treatises until the present with little variation, revealing a remarkable continuity of apologetics over nearly two centuries. Additionally, the article considers the role of this ritual in defining the nature of master-disciple relationships and establishing hierarchies of Sufi devotion and obedience. (By the standards of the occult present in people’s lives today, this is a non-issue in our time, consider how pop or movie stars are idolized today, people shove far worse images into their minds, Qutb Allah, Shaykh Al Islam Rami Al Boustani Al Rifai).

The Origins of the Naqshbandi-Haqqani Sufi Order and Its Current Prominence in the UK

The Sufi order known as Naqshbandi-Haqqaniya has been described “as one of the fastest-growing and most important orders in Western Europe and North America” and is gaining members within the South Asian communities even though its immediate origins eastern Mediterranean rather than the Sub-continent. The purpose of this paper is to explore where this movement comes from and what its appeal is in the UK in the early 21stCentury.

Inquiry of the Lost Branch of Naqshbandi Sufism in Transoxiana in 12th and 13th Hijri Centuries

Founded by Shaykh Bahā’uddīn Naqshband, the “Naqshbandī” Sufi doctrine, came on the scene through the trend of the Sufism of Khājagān in the Transoxiana, became one of the most sustainable and influential Sufi doctrines in Central Asia throughout its course of evolution that transcended the geographic boundaries from which it came about. Although it is regarded as a Persian Sufi doctrine, few academic studies have been conducted on Naqshbandiyya in Iran, so the necessity and importance of paying attention to the cultural background of Transoxiana, as a part of ancient Iran, and the rooting of the course of mysticism and Sufism in the region, and the study of the evolution and development of the Naqshbandiyya have led to inquiring the small and missing branches of Sufism in Transoxiana through using documentary sources in a historiographical and investigative manner and utilizing the unique manuscript of Tuhfa al-Rasūl and Farīd al-Maktūbāt, written by Mir Ahmad Kashi, one of the Sufis of Naqshbandi in Transoxiana. Based on the main hypothesis of the paper, it is possible to draw a sub-branch of the genealogy of the highly popular Naqshbandī doctrine through recognition of some key figures, works, and less known treatise of the doctrine.

Falsafah and Tasawwuf In The Islamicate Civilization: Ghazali and Suhrawardi On The Epistemological Value Of Mystical Experience

This thesis analyzes Abū H̩āmid Muh̩ammad b. Muh̩ammad b. Muh̩ammad al-Ghazālī (1058-1111) and Abū al-Futūh̩ Yah̩yā b. H̩abash b. Amīrāk al-Suhrawardī’s (1154-1191) ideas about the acquisition of knowledge through mystical practice and experience. Their practice of tas̩awwuf and their intellectual approach to it will be compared to their relation to philosophy, in the sense of the falsafah tradition of the Islamicate world, and how their being related to both traditions (falsafah and tas̩awwuf) informed their mysticism. Particular attention will be given to their ontology and epistemology. The main works that will be taken in consideration are Ghazālī’s Mishkāt al-Anwār, Kitāb Sharh̩ ʽAjāʼib al-Qalb and al-Munqidh min al-D̩alāl and Suhrawardī’s Kitāb H̩ikmat al-Ishrāq, Kalimat al-Tas̩awwuf and al-Alwāh̩ al-ʽImādiyyah. Finally, their mystical experiences and epistemology will be compared to three approaches to the study of mysticism (Traditionalism, the Unity Thesis and Constructionism) to see whether these approaches are suitable to the study of these authors. I argue that both Ghazālī and Suhrawardī consider the way of mysticism as superior to the way of reason in seeking the truth, even though they both value reason and do not reject it. Rather, the best way of seeking the truth is by joining mysticism and reason. I also argue that none of the three approaches to the study of mysticism mentioned (Traditionalism, Unity Thesis and Constructionism) suits our authors, so new approaches are needed. (Imam Ghazali (q) in short teaches that learning to understand metaphors is a door for understanding what you will experience spiritually, philosophy as an exercise has merits but not as a way, today philosophy is called pseudoscience by scientists for the reason it does not establish science, while the Spiritualty of Ghazali relied on revelation, the words of the author of science, hence science and spirituality are compatible, both aim to seek the truth and the truth is correct, Qutb Allah, Shaykh Al Islam Rami Al Boustani Al Rifai).

The Mirage Of Islamic Art: Reflections On The Study Of An Unwieldy Field

When we started studying Islamic art some thirty years ago, there were no good introductory textbooks that undergrad¬uates could read, When we started teaching the subject nearly a decade later, there were still none, and we had to make do with stacks of photocopied articles and chapters assigned from one book or another in an attempt to present students with a coherent narrative. So little survey material existed that even graduate students had difficulty getting a grasp on the whole field and had to resort to obscure and uneven publi¬cations. For example, K.A.C. Creswell’s massive tomes im¬plied that Islamic architecture ended in 900 C.E. except in Egypt, where it suddenly stopped four hundred years later in the middle of the Bahri Mamluk period, although the Mamluk sequence of sultans persisted until 1517 and there was ample evidence for a glorious tradition of Islamic architec¬ture in many lands besides Egypt. The venerable Survey of Persian Art, originally published in five massive volumes in the 19805, continued to define that field although many of the chapters were woefully out of date when the series was re-printed, faute de mieux, in the 70s. In short, despite the exponential growth of interest in the Islamic lands generated by the oil boom and crisis of the 1970s, Islamic art remained a rather esoteric specialty field taught in a few elite institu¬tions.

Books

Miscellaneous Papers