Understanding Ismailism PDF Download

Author: Akbarally Meherally
Publisher: Burnaby, B.C. : A.M. Trust
ISBN: 9780969357100
Category : Ismailites
Languages : en
Pages : 171

View

Book Description

Author: Farhad Daftary
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748679227
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 256

View

Book Description
Despite being one of the key Shi'i Muslim communities, the Ismailis were until recently studied primarily on the basis of the accounts of their enemies. This new introduction is the first to be based on modern scholarship, taking account of recently recovered Ismaili texts. It covers all the main developments in the major phases of Ismaili history, from the early formative period, through the Fatamid golden age and the Alamut and post-Alamut periods, to more recent history. Dealing only with the most important historical developments, this is a comprehensive and accessible survey for all newcomers to the subject.

Author: Teena Purohit
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674071581
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

View

Book Description
An overwhelmingly Arab-centric perspective dominates the West’s understanding of Islam and leads to a view of this religion as exclusively Middle Eastern and monolithic. Teena Purohit presses for a reorientation that would conceptualize Islam instead as a heterogeneous religion that has found a variety of expressions in local contexts throughout history. The story she tells of an Ismaili community in colonial India illustrates how much more complex Muslim identity is, and always has been, than the media would have us believe. The Aga Khan Case focuses on a nineteenth-century court case in Bombay that influenced how religious identity was defined in India and subsequently the British Empire. The case arose when a group of Indians known as the Khojas refused to pay tithes to the Aga Khan, a Persian nobleman and hereditary spiritual leader of the Ismailis. The Khojas abided by both Hindu and Muslim customs and did not identify with a single religion prior to the court’s ruling in 1866, when the judge declared them to be converts to Ismaili Islam beholden to the Aga Khan. In her analysis of the ginans, the religious texts of the Khojas that formed the basis of the judge’s decision, Purohit reveals that the religious practices they describe are not derivations of a Middle Eastern Islam but manifestations of a local vernacular one. Purohit suggests that only when we understand Islam as inseparable from the specific cultural milieus in which it flourishes do we fully grasp the meaning of this global religion.

Author: Raficq S. Abdulla
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786724057
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 243

View

Book Description
Sharia has been a source of misunderstanding and misconception in both the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. Understanding Sharia: Islamic Law in a Globalised World sets out to explore the reality of sharia, contextualising its development in the early centuries of Islam and showing how it evolved in line with historical and social circumstances. The authors, Raficq S. Abdulla and Mohamed M. Keshavjee, both British-trained lawyers, argue that sharia and the positive law flowing from it, known as fiqh, have never been an exclusive legal system or a fixed set of beliefs.

Author: Soumen Mukherjee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107154081
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218

View

Book Description
This book explores the evolution of a Shia Ismaili identity in late colonial South Asia.

Author: David Hollenberg
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611176794
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 286

View

Book Description
The first book-length study of ta'wil, a form of allegorical scriptural interpretation propagated by Ismaili-Shiite missionaries Ismailism, one of the three major branches of Shiism, is best known for ta'wil, an esoteric, allegorizing scriptural exegesis. Beyond the Qur'?n: Early Ismaili ta'wil and the Secrets of the Prophets is the first book-length study of this interpretive genre. Analyzing sources composed by tenth-century Ismaili missionaries in light of social-science theories of cognition and sectarianism, David Hollenberg argues that the missionaries used ta'wil to instill in acolytes a set of symbolic patterns, forms, and "logics." This shared symbolic world bound the community together as it created a gulf between community members and those outside the movement. Hollenberg thus situates ta'wil socially, as an interpretive practice that sustained a community of believers. An important aspect of ta'wil is its unconventional objects of interpretation. Ismaili missionaries mixed Qur'?nic exegesis with interpretation of Torah, Gospels, Greek philosophy, and symbols such as the Christian Cross and Eucharist, as well as Jewish festivals. Previously scholars have speculated that this extra- Qur'?nic ta'wil was intended to convert Jews and Christians to Ismailism. Hollenberg, departing from this view, argues that such interpretations were, like Ismaili interpretations of the Qur'?n, intended for an Ismaili audience, many of whom converted to the movement from other branches of Shiism. Hollenberg argues that through exegesis of these unconventional sources, the missionaries demonstrated that their imam alone could strip the external husk from all manner of sources and show the initiates reality in its pure, unmediated form, an imaginal world to which they alone had access. They also fulfilled the promise that their imam would teach them the secrets behind all religions, a sign that the initial stage of the end of days had commenced. Beyond the Qur'?n contributes to our understanding of early Ismaili doctrine, Fatimid rhetoric, and, more broadly, the use of esoteric literatures in the history of religion.

Author: Soumen Mukherjee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316870898
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 220

View

Book Description
This book explores the evolution of a Shia Ismaili identity and crucial aspects of the historical forces that conditioned the development of the Muslim modern in late colonial South Asia. It traces the legal process that, since the 1860s, recast a Shia Imami identity for the Ismailis, and explicates the public career of Imam Aga Khan III amid heightened religious internationalism since the late-nineteenth century, the age of 'religious internationals'. It sheds light and elaborates on the enduring legacies of questions such as the Aga's understanding of colonial modernity, his ideas of India, restructured modalities of community governance and the evolution of Imamate-sponsored institutions, key strands in scholarship that characterized the development of the Muslim and Shia Ismaili modern, and Muslim universality vis-à-vis denominational particularities that often transcended the remits of the modular nation and state structure.

Author: Dominique-Sila Kahn
Publisher: I.B. Tauris
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 206

View

Book Description
Who is Hindu, who is Muslim? The answer, according to Dominique-Sila Khan, is not as simple as generally assumed. By analyzing documentary sources as well as original field data, she examines the shaping of religious identities in South Asia, particularly in North India. The author argues that the perception of Islam and Hinduism as two monolithic and perpetually antagonistic faiths coexisting uneasily in South Asia has become so deeply ingrained that the complexity of the historical fabric is often overlooked or ignored. She demonstrates how the emergence of clear-cut categories is a comparatively recent phenomenon, and shows how the past is characterized by a remarkable fluidity and diversity in the social and religious milieus of the two faiths. In exploring the historical mechanisms that have led to the emergence and crystallization of religious identities the author sheds light on the increasing number of conflicts which threaten the harmonious co-existence of South Asian communities today.

Author: Farhad Daftary
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521003100
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

View

Book Description
This volume presents scholarship on Isma`ili history and thought from leading authorities in the field.

Author: Henry Corbin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136137548
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 221

View

Book Description
First published in 1983. The volume Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis brings together in English translation three of Henry Corbin's richest and most complex studies, originally presented at the Eranos conferences of 1951 and 1954 and another conference in 1956. Each of these three relatively early studies is built around a complex, highly creative 'comparison' of the phenomenological correspondences between texts (often highly fragmentary) from a vast range of spiritual traditions from late Antiquity (including Manichaenism and the sects of Sassanid Iran) - all 'gnostic' in the root Greek sense of that term favoured by Corbin, though not in the narrower historical sense used by most contemporary scholars - and comparable spiritual themes in an equally wide range of Islamic texts eventually preserved in the later Ismaili Shi'i tradition.