Mohammed Rustom

This article offers a study and translation of an important but understudied letter written by the famous Sufi Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240) to the foremost theologian of his day, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210). After situating the letter against the backdrop of the general Rāzī ‘polemic’ which had emerged in Central Asia and Anatolia during the sixth/twelfth and seventh/thirteenth centuries (particularly in Persian Sufi writings), the article explores the manner in which Ibn ʿArabī attempts to convince Rāzī to channel his aspirations in the right direction—namely to empty himself of his reliance upon his discursive powers and turn to the Sufi path. In order to drive his point home, Ibn ʿArabī offers a fundamental distinction between knowledge gained by way of intellectual reflection and knowledge afforded by ‘unveiling’, taking as his point of departure Rāzī’s own well-known crisis of certitude. The foregoing discussion then paves the way for a complete, annotated translation of this important letter.

ABSTRACT This article delves into the Arabic noun maʿrifa as employed in a range of Arabic and Persian Sufi texts. After unpacking the semantics of the ʿ–r–f root in the Qurʾān and ḥadīth literature and juxtaposing maʿrifa with ʿilm, the piece seeks to demonstrate how Sufi authors specifically conceived of maʿrifa as a type of recognition of oneself and of God. This recognition is activated by the practice of dhikr or the remembrance of God, which in the end leads the recognizer to self-forgetting, perplexity, and bewilderment.

Featuring the work of leading contemporary Muslim philosophers and theologians, this book grapples with various forms of evil and suffering in the world today, from COVID-19 and issues in climate change to problems in palliative care and human vulnerability. Rather than walking down well-trodden paths in philosophy of religion which often address questions of evil and suffering by focusing on divine attributes and the God-world relationship, this volume offers another path of inquiry by focusing on human vulnerability, potential, and resilience. Addressing both the theoretical and practical dimensions of the question of evil, topics range from the transformative power of love, virtue ethics in Sufism and the necessity of suffering, to the spiritual significance of the body and Islamic perspectives on embodiment. In doing so, the contributors propose new perspectives based on various pre-modern and contemporary materials that can enrich the emerging field of the global philosophy of religion, thereby radically transforming contemporary debates on the nature of evil and suffering. The book will appeal to researchers in a variety of disciplines, including Islamic philosophy, religious studies, Sufism and theology.

Islamic Thought and the Art of Translation honors two of the most beloved and productive scholars in the field of Islamic Studies, Professors William Chittick and Sachiko Murata. For the past five decades, and in over 40 books (monographs, editions, translations, edited volumes) and more than 300 articles, Professors Chittick and Murata have presented us with philologically astute and analytically sound expositions of the pre-modern Islamic intellectual tradition, particularly in the areas of Sufism and philosophy. They have done so primarily by zeroing in on the technical vocabularies of these disciplines (in Arabic, Persian, and Chinese), demonstrating just how important the functions of philology and cross-cultural translation are when studying pre-modern cultures and civilizations.