Examines the socio-cultural history of the regions where Islam took hold between the 7th and 16th century. This two-volume work contains 700 alphabetically arranged entries, and provides a portrait of Islamic civilization. It is of use in understanding the roots of Islamic society as well to explore the culture of medieval civilization.

A common objective of saint veneration in all three Abrahamic religions is the recovery and perpetuation of the collective memory of the saint. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all yield intriguing similarities and differences in their respective conceptions of sanctity. This edited collection explores the various literary and cultural productions associated with the cult of saints and pious figures, as well as the socio-historical contexts in which sainthood operates, in order to better understand the role of saints in monotheistic religions. Using comparative religious and anthropological approaches, an international panel of contributors guides the reader through three main concerns. They describe and illuminate the ways in which sanctity is often configured. In addition, the diverse cultural manifestations of the cult of the saints are examined and analysed. Finally, the various religious, social, and political functions that saints came to play in numerous societies are compared and contrasted. This ambitious study covers sanctity from the Middle Ages until the contemporary period, and has a geographical scope that includes Europe, Central Asia, North Africa, the Americas, and the Asian Pacific. As such, it will be of use to scholars of the history of religions, religious pluralism, and interreligious dialogue, as well as students of sainthood and hagiography.

Ewing examines the competing forces behind the formation of a modern western subjectivity in the context of Sufi religious meanings and practices in Pakistan.

Saints, their places, the rituals of their veneration - the heroes and martyrs they represent or to whom they are often connected with - and the beliefs in their powers have often been described as being counter-thematic to the constructive issues of modern society in our times. However, in the Middle East - and certainly this is true for many other world regions and other world religions - local saints, Jewish, Christian and Islamic, have gained a very ambiguous status in religious movements, political struggles and events of social re-construction. In the case of Islam, perhaps more openly, modernists and fundamentalists alike attempt to abolish or to re-formulate the agenda of venerating the saints. However, at the same time saints and their localities have become a sort of overcharged symbolic incidence in the modern presence of Islam, in politics, in the media and - perhaps on a more hidden ground - in the struggle of ideas. In this volume historians, islamologists, anthropologists and sociologists give a multiple description of the inherent issues of the unhampered continuity of Muslim saints and their significance. With this volume 5, the Yearbook of the Sociology of Islam is linking empirical research on individual saints (including cases from Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, Syria and Morocco) with the debates around Islam and modernity. Georg Stauth teaches Sociology at the University of Bielefeld, Germany, and has widely published on Islam and Theory of Modernity.

In Sainthood and Authority in Early Islam Aiyub Palmer recasts wilāya in terms of Islamic authority and traces its development in both political and religious spheres up through the 3rd and 4th Islamic centuries. This book pivots around the ideas of al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī, the first Muslim theologian and mystic to write on the topic of wilāya. By looking at its structural roots in Arab and Islamic social organization, Aiyub Palmer has reframed the discussion about sainthood in early Islam to show how it relates more broadly to other forms of authority in Islam. This book not only looks anew at the influential ideas of al-Tirmidhī but also challenges current modes of thought around the nature of authority in Islamicate societies.

Annotation. Every major religion exalts certain individuals who occupy a dual role. On the one hand they serve as exemplars of virtue to be imitated, and on the other hand they stand removed from other mortals, privileged and unique. Christianity knows them as saints, and in the study of religion the term has been taken over and applied to similar figures in other traditions. The essays in this volume analyze the role of the saint in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, providing both a comparative and an interpretive view of sainthood. The notion of sainthood is problematic in two ways. First, can the category be usefully applied to individuals in religious traditions other than Christianity? How has it manifested itself, and what differences are there in the various manifestations of sainthood? Second, where individuals are considered to have risen above the norms in these different traditions, how is it possible to resolve the tension between the saint's imitability and his or her otherness, between imitating and venerating the saint? The authors consider these questions in relation to a wide range of individuals in all the major traditions.

Based on careful study of the substantial and largely unpublished manuscript legacy left by the Halveti mystical order, one of the most influential Sufi orders in the Ottoman Empire, this is a history of the rise and spread of its Sa'baniyye branch betwee

This accessible study is the first critical investigation of the cult of saints among Muslims and Jews in medieval Syria and the Near East. Through case studies of saints and their devotees, discussion of the architecture of monuments, examination of devotional objects, and analysis of ideas of 'holiness', Meri depicts the practices of living religion and explores the common heritage of all three monotheistic faiths. Critical readings of a wide range of contemporary sources - travel writing, geographical works, pilgrimage guides, legal writings, historical sources, hagiography, and biography - reveal a vibrant religious culture in which the veneration of saints and pilgrimage to tombs and shrines were fundamental.

"A comprehensive tour of the exuberant landscape of Muslim religious life, past and present. With an impressive array of textual and visual works, Renard's kaleidoscopic survey sounds the death toll to the longstanding misconception that Islam is a dry and mechanistic religion devoid of spirituality. This is the best introductory book on Islam currently available."—Ahmet T. Karamustafa, Washington University "Comprehensive and accessible, this book is a richly textured and wide-ranging introduction to Islamic spirituality and a refreshing change from the obsession with current politics that characterizes most approaches of Islam."—Carl W. Ernst, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill