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Featured Post
 by Seyyed Hossein Nasr
”O thou soul which are at peace, return unto thy Lord, with gladness that is thine in Him and His in thee. Enter thou among My slaves. Enter thou My Paradise.” (Quran – LXXXIX; 27-30 (trans. by M. Lings.)
The function of religion is to bestow order upon human life and to establish an “outward” harmony upon whose basis man can return inwardly to his Origin by means of the journey toward the “interior” direction. This universal function is especially true of Islam, this last religion of humanity, which is at once a Divine injunction to establish order in human society and within the human soul and at the same time to make possible the interior life, to prepare the soul to return unto its Lord and enter the Paradise which is none other than the Divine Beatitude. God is at once the First (al-awwal) and the Last (al-akhir), the Outward (al-zahir) and the Inward (al-batin). [1] By function of His outwardness He creates a world of separation and otherness and through His inwardness He brings men back to their Origin. Religion is the means whereby this journey is made possible, and it recapitulates in its structure the creation itself which issues from God and returns unto Him. Religion consists of a dimension which is outward and another which, upon the basis of this outwardness, leads to the inward. These dimensions of the islamic revelation are called the Shariah (the Sacred Law), the Tariqah (the Path) and the Haqiqah (the Truth), [2] or from another point of view they correspond to islam, iman, and ihsan, or “surrender”, “faith” and “virtue”.[3] Read more... (4185 words, 1 image, estimated 16:44 mins reading time) a
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Oct 10
THE PURPOSE OF LIFE
The Sufi Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan
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Aug 23
Ibn al-’Arabi begins his long chapter on love (mahabba) in the Futûhât al-Makkiyya – as he begins most of the book’s 560 chapters – by citing relevant Qur’anic verses and prophetic sayings (II 322.16).[1] He points out first that love is a divine attribute, and he lists several of the Qur’anic verses in which God is the subject of the verb ‘to love’. Fourteen of these verses mention those whom God loves and another twenty-three mention those whom God does not love. In every case, the objects of God’s love or lack of love are human beings. Indeed, the Qur’an associates love only with human beings among all creatures. Hence love is a key term if we are to understand what differentiates human beings from other created things. Most other divine attributes – such as life, knowledge, desire, power, speech, generosity, justice, mercy, and wrath – have no necessary connection with the human race. Read more... (8916 words, 1 image, estimated 35:40 mins reading time)
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Aug 01
Original Source: http://bit.ly/zTeuT
In this paper, I attempt to investigate the irrefutable similarities found between the underlying foundations of many of the world religions, specifically their ontology. In fact, it seems implausible to neglect to also reveal the resemblance these religions have with a significant number of psychologists’ theories. Due to the vastness of this subject, I have paid particular attention to two specific world religions, Hinduism and Islam and again due to the complexity and diversity of each of these religions, I have chosen to examine only one school of thought from each religion, Advaita Vedanta in Hinduism and Sufism in Islam. There are such significant similarities in their ontology that I feel further investigation is fundamental.
The idea that all religions are essentially the same and the debates that surround that idea are briefly discussed, followed by the significant role India and Hinduism have played in the development and spreading of this ideology as well as its role in the nourishment of so many revolutionary philosophies.
In order to get an understanding into the specificity of the subject matter, an outline of both Advaita Vedanta and Sufism are given along with Jung’s concept of the ‘collective unconscious’ that seem to dovetail with Advaita’s and Sufism’s ontology. Read more... (5874 words, 1 image, estimated 23:30 mins reading time)
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Jul 12
http://www.sufischool.org/
Sufism
The urge toward mysticism – the urge to experience a dimension beyond the material world, to know and return to a spiritual Essence or Truth – is inherent within every person, irrespective of his or her religion. Individuals are imbued with this tendency to differing degrees. Some are endowed with it in quantity; others, only in a small amount. Some people have a chance to develop and translate it into their daily lives, while others do not. Nonetheless, this tendency is present in every human being.
If Sufism is defined as mysticism or the way of the mystic, then its message addresses all people, not just the followers of one religion. Every faith has its own Sufism. In every nation and community there have been Sufis, although they have taken different names and adopted varying practices.
The human being comprises not only a body of flesh, but another aspect, commonly referred to as “I” or “the self (described in Sufi terms as nafs). Mystical experience activates the “I.” Like an electrical current, it runs through an individual, bringing forth untapped potentials. With the activation of self comes a certain degree of consciousness and insight. A person starts to sense that his or her “I” reflects another “I” – the “I” of a Supreme Being. He or she becomes conscious of God acting in and through creation. Read more... (1172 words, estimated 4:41 mins reading time)
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Featured Post
 
The meaning of infinity in Sufi and deconstructive hermeneutics
We may conclude this history of hermeneutics with the following remark. The initial purpose of hermeneutics was to explain the word of God. This purpose was eventually expanded into an attempt to regulate the process of explaining the word of man. In the nineteenth century we learned, first from Hegel and then more effectively from Nietzsche, that God is dead. In the twentieth century, Kojeve and his students, like Foucault, have informed us that man is dead, thereby as it were opening the gates into an abyss of postanthropological deconstruction. As the scope of hermeneutics has expanded. then, the two original sources of meaning, God and man, have vanished, taking with them the cosmos or world and leaving us with nothing but our own garrulity, which we choose to call the philosophy of language. linguistic philosophy, or one of their synonyms. If nothing is real, the real is nothing; there is no difference between the written lines of a text and the blank spaces between them. — Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics Read more... (10879 words, 2 images, estimated 43:31 mins reading time) a
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