Ali Altaf Mian demonstrates how attention to genre and embodiment illuminates the concepts and practices of the Islamic tradition-and how theologians, Sufi mystics, and ordinary Muslims respond to the incapacitating tribulations of creaturely existence in modernity.
Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty is grounded in the rich textual archive of one of modern South Asia's foremost Muslim theologians and Sufis: Maulana Ashraf ?Ali Thanavi (1863-1943). Through a close examination of Maulana Thanavi's vast corpus of writings, Ali Altaf Mian elaborates a profound theorization of tradition as a discursive and affective crucible of ethical formation and spiritual sovereignty.
With philological and philosophical rigor, Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty elucidates connections between tradition's forms of life and language. Mian demonstrates how intended and unconscious movements between genres in the life of tradition attend to the felt and perceived needs of the ensouled body at the dual scales of singularity and collectivity. Through a novel attention to genre and affect, Mian models a way to study religious traditions and their tensions as productive sites for understanding ritual law and moral agency in the modern world. Insofar as modernity has been about individualism, the rise of literalism, and the disciplining of desire, religious traditions' capacity to respond to these hardships depend on coming up with new configurations of community, activating textuality and the creativity of genres, and keeping alive the unknowability of desire.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty is an insightful and textured case study of embodied, affective, and transformative elements of the religious tradition. The book opens up new avenues, not only in the study of Islam and modernity, but in broader dimensions of comparative religions and cultures." - Marcia Hermansen, co-editor of Varieties of American Sufism
"This book is unmatched in the breadth of its engagement with Ashraf ?Ali Thanavi's vast oeuvre and in its sophistication. Mian has provided us with an extraordinarily vivid sense of how the constraints of particular genres shape articulations of the Islamic tradition and what it has meant to inhabit and experience that tradition in conditions of modernity." - Muhammad Qasim Zaman, author of Islam in Pakistan
Reihe
Sprache
Verlagsort
Zielgruppe
Maße
Höhe: 229 mm
Breite: 152 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-268-21090-8 (9780268210908)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Ali Altaf Mian is the Izzat Hasan Sheikh Fellow in Islamic Studies and assistant professor of religion at the University of Florida. He is the author of many peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on Islam in South Asia, Sufi thought and practice, Hadith studies, Islamic philosophy, critical theory, and psychoanalysis.
Introduction. The Trans-Genre Traversal of Tradition
1. Tradition and Transference
2. Genres and Genealogies
3. Prophetic Humor
4. The Struggle for Equilibrium
5. Living with the Stranger Inside
6. The Gaze and the Traversal of Fantasy
7. ?ikma and ?ukm, or Spiritual Sovereignty
Appendix I. The Islamic Tradition in North India circa 1863
Appendix II. Maulana Thanavi's Sufi Successors (khulafa')
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Notes
Index
