| Can I Come Look At These Items? | | This online store is in association with Amazon.com, so these great, high-qualiy products will come from their warehouse or from other partners. Thanks for shopping! |
|
|
|
The Other Islam: Sufism and the Road to Global Harmony | 
 enlarge | Author: Stephen Schwartz
Publisher: Doubleday
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $6.50
You Save: $18.45 (74%)
New (40) Used (12) from $6.18
Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 453288
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.3 x 0.9
ISBN: 0385518196
Dewey Decimal Number: 297.409
EAN: 9780385518192
ASIN: 0385518196
Publication Date: September 16, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
This eye-opening, insightful exploration of Sufism, the spiritual tradition that has supported Islam for more than a thousand years, shows why it offers a promising foundation for reconciliation between the Western and Muslim worlds.
Many Americans today identify Islam with maniacal hatred of the West. The Other Islam transforms this image and opens the way to finding common ground in our troubled times. Sufism, a blend of the mystical and rational tendencies within Islam, emerged soon after the revelation of Muhammad. A reforming movementagainst the increasing worldliness of Muslim society, it focuses on Islam’s spiritual dimension. Described as “Islam of the Heart,” Sufism has attracted adherents among both Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, as well as Jews, Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists.
In The Other Islam, Stephen Schwartz traces the origins and history of Sufism, elucidates its teachings, and illustrates its links to the other religions. He comments on such celebrated Sufi poets and philosophers as Rumi and Al-Ghazali, and narrates their influence on the Kabbalah, on the descendants of the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, and on Christian mystics like Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Avila as well as the American transcendentalists.
Furthermore, Schwartz presents a fresh survey of Sufism in today’s Islamic world, anticipating an intellectual renaissance of the faith and alternatives to fundamentalism and tyranny in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran.
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Sufism, and its histories November 24, 2008
Does sufism exist? I was assured, years ago, by a known sufi that it doesn't, and that there are no sufis.
This work is of use in trying to reconstruct the history of so-called 'sufism', which has more historical than cultic/organizational meaning. Many westerners proceed blind down the garden path, as it were, without knowing what they are dealing with, to discover the many frauds, occultists, fanatics, and others in sufistic colors claiming a legacy that is apparently mostly smoke and mirrors. One is thus driven to study sufism in its Islamic context to see if this is an aberration, or if Islamic sufism conceals the same, or if Islamic sufis actually grasp what they are dealing with.
The record is hard to set straight and a new generation should be warned of the corruption of the phenomenon of sufism, at least in the West, and grasp the issue that 'sufism' is a history of certain people, not a movement, or method, and that its great decline has spawned a kind of mafia of shadow devils, witness Gurdjieff who openly admitted to it. The crucial issue is to maintain one's autonomy and proceed beyond the spurious authority of shaykhs to a self-created way without the huckstered barakas of black magicians preying on the 'sufi' Faust.
This book, although it looks suspiciously like a crypto-political piece of some kind (maybe a State Department stealth op), is useful enough as a perspective on 'sufistic' history, but beyond that correct information about sufism does not exist. Therefore be wary until that information does exist.
 Too Much Omitted or Ignored, or is There Another Agenda? October 8, 2008
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
This book will have some value to people who know nothing about Sufism, and also for those who want to get some sense of what is happening in modern Sufism. But there are are better books out there for the former purpose, and for the latter, five minutes of googling will put you in touch with many book's worth of Sufi groups than you would have any idea existed if you relied on this book alone. This book seems especially weak in providing at least a minimally complete account of historical and modern Sufism, yet the publisher hypes this book as "an incomparable history of Sufism, covering in one short book all the major Sufi saints, schools." I don't think so. How could a book for which such grandiose claims be made completely omit any mention, for example, of the contemporary sheik, Ahmad al-Alawi, from Algeria, who died in 1934, and whose life is chronicled in Martin Lings' lovely book, A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century: Shaikh Ahmad al-Alawi (Golden Palm Series)? This particular Sufi master had hundreds of thousands of followers, and he spawned various Alawiyya tariqas whose followers trace their lineage back to him to this day? Anyone can find many other significant omissions by checking out this site: http://www.haqq.com.au/~salam/sufilinks/ or Professor Alan Godlas' very nice site: http://www.uga.edu/islam/Sufism.html.
Another irritant in this book is the unending, vehement denunciation of Wahabi Islam. This highly literalist-fundamentalist form of Islam indeed has persecuted Sufis, and the Wahabis are indeed awful for various reasons, but does the reader have to be constantly reminded of this? Real Sufism is mostly about love and spiritual gnosis, yet the author's anti-Wahabi agenda seems to at times position Sufism as a Western-approved Islamic proxy movement to be launched against the hated Darth Vader-like Wahabis, as if implying that the need for fighting against the latter is the real point of this book. It is not that of Sufism, from what I have read and seen. Compulsively focusing with fear and loathing on something as negative as some form of extreme religious fundamentalism is an obsession no form of even a halfway-sincere mysticism and spirituality would encourage or approve of that I have ever witnessed, and I have seen quite a few.
The sense that Schwartz is on a jihad against Wahabis much more than he is in favor of mystical transcendence via the Sufi path is reinforced from some research on his background. According to conservative-libertarian author Justin Raimondo, for example, Schwartz is a rank neoconservative, "who still defends the "glorious" heritage of Leon Trotsky, and in the pages of National Review, yet!" He has been known also by the names "Suleyman Ahmad, aka "Comrade Sandalio," according to Raimondo. http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=5226 Schwartz's writing has appeared on the web site of David Horowitz, another rank or ranking neocon. Noticing this makes one wonder if Schwartz still is a follower of the loathsome communist founder of the Red Army, Trotsky, in spirit, if not obvious expression, and ultimately, with this book, if he is covertly offering another agenda with goals at the opposite end of that of Sufism.
|
|
|
| |
News 
