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"Islamic legends"
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Friends of God
Prophets, saints, martyrs, sages, and seers—one of the richest repositories of lore about such exemplary religious figures belongs to the world's approximately 1.3 billion Muslims. Illuminating some of the most delightful tales in world religious literature, this engaging book is the first truly global overview of Islamic hagiography. John Renard tells of the characters beyond the Qur'an and Hadith, whose stories of piety and service to God and humanity have captured hearts and minds for nearly fourteen hundred years. Renard's thematic approach to the major characters, narratives, social and cultural contexts, and theoretical concepts of this remarkable treasury of tales, based on material ranging from the eighth to the twentieth centuries and from countries ranging from Morocco to Malaysia, provides insight into the ways in which these stories have functioned in the lives of Muslims from diverse cultural, social, economic, and political backgrounds. The book also serves as a useful and evocative tool for approaching the vast geographical and chronological sweep of Islamic civilization.
eBook
African American Religious Life and the Story of Nimrod
The biblical text and its key figures have played a prominent role in the development of religious discourse on pressing socio-political issues. Slavery and continued discrimination were given theological sanction through the Old Testament story of Ham, but what of his descendent Nimrod the hunter?.
eBook
The making of a forefather : Abraham in Islamic and Jewish exegetical narratives
This comparative analysis of the Muslim and Jewish exegetical texts on the early life of Abraham provides a new perspective on the extent of the relationship between Islam and Judaism while explaining the particular significance of Abraham in both traditions.
eBook
Religious poetry from the Quranic milieu: Umayya b. Abī l-Ṣalt on the fate of the Thamūd
Unlike most ancient Arabic poetry, the poems attributed to Umayya b. Abī l-Ṣalt treat subjects that are also prominent in the Quran, such as creation, eschatology, and episodes from Biblical history. The authenticity of this corpus has, however, been the subject of some controversy. After a critical survey of previous scholarship, this article examines one particular passage from the Umayya corpus dealing with the destruction of the ancient tribe of Thamūd, which, it is argued, is likely to be pre-Quranic. The article then proceeds to highlight the crucial differences, both in content and in literary format, that exist between Umayya's retelling of the Thamūd narrative and its earliest Quranic version, and concludes with a number of general remarks on the Quran's religious milieu as reflected in Umayya's literary output.
Journal Article
Translation as Self-Consciousness: Ancient Sciences, Antediluvian Wisdom, and the 'Abbāsid Translation Movement
This article discusses the translation of ancient Greek, Indian, and Persian texts of philosophy and sciences into Arabic from the eighth through the tenth centuries CE. In particular, it addresses the issue of how ancient sciences were justified and legitimized in the early 'Abbāsid period (ca. 750-850). Modern scholars have so far devoted a great deal of attention to the role of the caliphate and its administrative elite in the translation movement, but they have by and large neglected the role of prevailing ideological and intellectual discourses as a major component of the legitimating process in 'Abbasid society. Less concerned with documenting practical needs or emphasizing the role of the caliphate to explain the history of the translation movement, this article explores how the narratives of prophetic and antediluvian wisdom as a discursive intervention shaped, within the broader context of scholarly consciousness, the reception history of ancient sciences. It argues that the reference to occult and prophetic knowledge, often attributed to Hermes, as the source of all knowledge, articulated, with the idioms of the developing discourse of Him, the desire to cast ancient sciences as part of an Islamic monotheistic narrative and the emerging historical consciousness that embraced the past as a theater of prophetic action.
Journal Article
Pious Muslims in the Making: A Closer Look at Narratives of Ascetic Conversion
This article examines conversion narratives of some Sufi ascetics by looking closely at their life-stories as expounded in Sufi biographical traditions. How is the ascetic conversion told in the Sufi biographical sources? What kind of purpose do the ascetic conversion narratives serve? In what sense can we see the ascetic practices as an intentional language of protest and opposition? and against whom/what? These questions form the major concern of this article. Different narratives of ascetic conversion will be discussed with the intention of demonstrating the larger context of setting the boundaries of an Islamic piety within which the portrait of idealized pious Muslims is framed in the main traditions of Sufi hagiography. It is, therefore, hoped that this article will shed light on the transformation of individuals from ordinary people to idealized pious Muslims.
Journal Article