MEDIEVAL ISLAM

2021 ◽  
pp. 102-124
Keyword(s):  
Medieval Islam

The relevance of religion and the response to it: a study of religious perceptions in early Islam

1988 ◽  
Vol 120 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-287
Author(s):  
Muhammad Qasim Zaman
Keyword(s):  
Religious Commitment ◽  
Social Protest ◽  
Perceived Threat ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
Early Islam ◽  
Medieval Islam

What did the Muslim citizen of the classical Islamic world mean by Islam? In what sense was it operative in his life? To what extent did an Islamic slogan signify religious commitment? The difficulty in treating these questions consists in the fact of the variety, not the dearth of answers to them. Rather than develop alternative perspectives, however, we would, in what follows, focus our study on one aspect of the life of the Muslim Umma. This is the problem of the dynamics underlying revolt, rebellion, social protest and revolution in early Islam; with reference to this aspect we would ask our basic questions. In a sense, the three questions could be resolved into one: to what extent, in what sense, and why, was Islam a factor in Muslim revolts during the first centuries? Two propositions would help treat this question, and in the course of the study, we would see if a third may also be legitimately articulated. They are as follows: first, it is possible that the disaffected Muslims in classical and medieval Islam may have tended to translate their mundane grievances into religous terms so that, for instance, the perceived threat to a particular dispensation, or the actual destruction of such a dispensation may have been interpreted as a threat to religion itself; and second, Islam may have been interpreted as the best form of propriety and justice so that those whofeltthemselves deprived considered it incumbent to fight for such justice, not necessarily because it would benefit them but because this was what Islam was, it being considered obligatory to strengthen, save, or reestablish Islam.

AL-SUHRAWARDĪ ON MIRROR VISION AND SUSPENDED IMAGES (MUTHUL MU ʿALLAQA)

2015 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolai Sinai
Keyword(s):  
Ontological Status ◽  
Material World ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Medieval Islam ◽  
Reconstructive Analysis

AbstractThe notion of a “World of Images” located somewhere between the immaterial and the material world was a mainstay of eschatological speculation in late medieval Islam. As has been recognised before, the concept was launched by al-Suhrawardī (d. 1191). However, its more properly philosophical underpinnings, in particular the notion of “suspended” images – images which somehow have an objective, rather than just a mental or subjective, status – merit further clarification, which this article attempts to provide. Since the concept of “suspended forms”, while applied to eschatological matters in the last treatise of the Philosophy of Illumination, makes its first appearance in a discussion of mirror vision, I examine in some detail Avicenna's understanding of mirror vision as presented in the Shifāʾ, to which al-Suhrawardī reacts. I then undertake a detailed reconstructive analysis of two paragraphs of the Philosophy of Illumination, paying particular attention to the question of the ontological status of “suspended” or “self-subsistent” images as well as to the idea that mirrors serve, not as loci in which images inhere, but as loci at which they become manifest (singular maẓhar).

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document