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Divine oneness as the principle of beauty is perhaps quintessentially Islamic artistic expression and experience and what it celebrates. Why has Islamic art evolved as it has, what forms does it take, what is the logic underlying it? What message is the Muslim artist attempting to convey, what emotion is he seeking to evoke? This work views Islamic art as a subject of archaeological study and treats its evolution as part of the historical study of art in the broader sense. At the same time, it paves the way for an epistemological shift from viewing Islamic art as a material concept having to do with beautiful rarities and relics that have grown out of Islamic cultural and artistic creativity, to a theoretical concept associated with a vision, a principle, a theory and a method.
This theoretical concept provides the intellectual and cultural foundation for a critical philosophical science of Islamic artistic beauty to which we might refer as ‘the science of Islamic art,’ or ‘the Islamic aesthetic’ that evaluates visual artistic creations in terms of both beauty and practical usefulness. In the process the study also explores orientalist misconceptions, challenging some of the premises with which it has approached Islamic art, with judgement rooted in a cultural framework alien to the spiritual perspective of Islam.
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Jamie Gilham
Loyal Enemies uncovers the history of the earliest British converts to Islam who lived their lives freely as Muslims on British soil, from the 1850s to the 1950s. Drawing on original archival research, it reveals that people from across the range of social classes defied convention by choosing Islam in this period.
Loyal Enemies is a book about the past, but its core themes – about faith and belief, identity, Empire, loyalties and discrimination – are still salient today.
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THE MUSLIMS OF BOSNIA: GENOCIDE OF A PEOPLE describes how over the last two years (1992-1994) a monumental tragedy was unfolding in the Balkans, under the very eyes of ‘civilized Europe’, with Bosnia-Herzegovina, recognised by the international community as a newly-independent state, having become the victim of Serbia’s pan-Slavic aggrandizement.
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Ramadan’s goal is to create an independent Western Islam, anchored not in the traditions of Islamic countries but in the cultural reality of the West. He begins by offering a fresh reading of Islamic sources, interpreting them for a Western context and demonstrating how a new understanding of universal Islamic principles can open the door to integration into Western societies. He then shows how these principles can be put to practical use. Ramadan contends that Muslims can-indeed must-be faithful to their principles while participating fully in the civic life of Western secular societies. Grounded in scholarship and bold in its aims, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam offers a striking vision of a new Muslim Identity, one which rejects once and for all the idea that Islam must be defined in opposition to the West
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Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) was an influential Egyptian ideologue credited with establishing the theoretical basis for radical Islamism in the post colonial Sunni Muslim world. Lacking a pure understanding of the leader’s life and work, the popular media has conflated Qutb’s moral purpose with the aims of bin Laden and al-Qaeda. He is often portrayed as a terrorist, Islamo-Fascist, and advocate of murder. This book rescues Qutb from misrepresentation, tracing the evolution of his thought within the context of his time. An expert on social protest and political resistance in the modern Middle East, as well as Egyptian nationalism, John Calvert recounts Qutb’s life from the small village in which he was raised to his execution at the behest of Abd al-Nasser’s regime.
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Tariq Ramadan has emerged as one of the foremost voices of reformist Islam in the West. In one of his previous books, ‘Western Muslims and the Future of Islam’he urged his fellow Muslims to participate fully in the civil life of the Western societies in which they live, and addressed many of the issues that stand in the way of such participation. In this new book he tackles head-on the thorniest of these issues
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Essential reading for students of the war on Islamist terrorism, and how really to win it: the possibility of intelligent political dialogue with and within the modern Islamic world/Middle East. The US govt. 9/11 Commission Report names theologian-activist Ibn Taymiyya (died 699 years ago) as wellspring of modern Islamist militancy, esp. its al-Qaeda brand. This book presents translation of Ibn Taymiyya’s fatwas on how Muslims must act under the rule of unbelievers or misbelievers. It shows the misreading of Ibn Taymiyya by neo-Orientalist scholars AND by certain violent Islamists (among them, the assassins of Anwar Sadat, and a teacher and companion of Osama bin Ladin). In theory and practice Ibn Taymiyya advocated force only against foreign invaders; he forbade use of force against established authorities; himself died in prison for outspoken criticism of the State, without resort to force or sedition of any kind
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Since the Second World War, there has been a significant migration of Muslims to countries in the Western world. Muslims in Non-Muslim Land traces the process by which these migrants arrived in Western Europe – in particular Britain – and explains how the community developed its faith identity through three particular stances: assimilation, isolation and integration. The findings argue that the assumption that Islam causes Muslims to isolate from the indigenous population and form a ‘state within a state’ is false and that Islamic Law actually gives Muslims confidence and the ability to integrate within the wider society.
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Although this is a very important issue for us Muslims to address, paradoxically, it is an issue we seldom address. Why is it so important, and why do we seldom address it? It is important because it affects our relationship one another as well as with non-Muslims, and thus the spread of Islam-all crucial concerns from the future of the Ummah. Why then we seldom speak about it? Because to do so is to run the risk being abused, misunderstood and quoted out of context by people who cannot tolerate any opinion other than their own, even if that other opinion has a sound basis in Islamic teaching.
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The Organisation of the Islamic Conference, (OIC) was founded forty years ago to respond to the Palestinian crisis and counts fifty-seven Muslim countries among its members. It has since branched out into the areas of economic development, education, culture, science, technology, conflict resolution, and tackling Islamophobia. This book details the achievements, successes, and failures of this singular political body and demonstrates why modernization is so central to the continued development of Islamic society.
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This study contributes significantly to the dialogue between Islam and the West, a field which has tended to be dominated by mainly non-Muslim writers. Primarily concerned with an intellectual history of Western, mainly English and French, writers responses to Islam from about 1787 to the 1890s, the author uses both European and Islamic source materials in his study. His thorough evaluation of writers including Toderini, Boulainvillier, Sylvestre de Sacy, Byron, Edward Lane, Gobineau and Renan, does justice to the European tradition of writing on Islam. At the same time, the scholarly Muslim point of view is sustained by the use of Islamic source materials which have won the esteem of the Muslim community throughout the centuries.
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