Here is a small selection of books read and recommended by members of the Sacred Footsteps team this year. The books included in the list are a mix of history, philosophy, religion, sociology, anthropology, politics and poetry.
Share your favourite books reads in the comments!
1. Man and the Universe: An Islamic Perspective by Mostafa al-Badawi
Many thinking people now have an inward sense that twenty-first century humanity faces stark and urgent challenges that demand wise and decisive responses. Profound illnesses call for profound remedies, and when nothing less than radical change will do, courage is essential to survival. Authentic traditional Islam provides a holistic and historically proven alternative. In this timely book, Dr. Mostafa al-Badawi shows that the revealed knowledge is the source of traditional wisdom, and that the Islamic faith and civilization has a verifiable track record of healing individual and social disintegration. The author presents a penetrating diagnosis of the illnesses of humanity today, together with a fascinating overview of the Islamic metaphysic, unearthing its spiritual and moral values and its timeless relevance and applicability. Man And The Universe is a compelling and urgently needed piece of writing about what we human beings are, where we stand, and what we can do about it. Dr. Mostafa al-Badawi is a consultant Psychiatrist and member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He studied under many shaykhs, foremost among whom is the late Habib Ahmad Mashur al-Haddad. He is also one of the leading contemporary translators of Islamic books. His work includes Book of Assistance, The Lives of Man, Key to the Garden and Degrees of the Soul.
2. A Culture of Ambiguity: An Alternative History of Islam by Thomas Bauer
In the Western imagination, Islamic cultures are dominated by dogmatic religious norms that permit no nuance. Those fighting such stereotypes have countered with a portrait of Islam’s medieval “Golden Age,” marked by rationality, tolerance, and even proto-secularism. How can we understand Islamic history, culture, and thought beyond this dichotomy?
In this magisterial cultural and intellectual history, Thomas Bauer reconsiders classical and modern Islam by tracing differing attitudes toward ambiguity. Over a span of many centuries, he explores the tension between one strand that aspires to annihilate all uncertainties and establish absolute, uncontestable truths and another, competing tendency that looks for ways to live with ambiguity and accept complexity. Bauer ranges across cultural and linguistic ambiguities, considering premodern Islamic textual and cultural forms from law to Quranic exegesis to literary genres alongside attitudes toward religious minorities and foreigners. He emphasizes the relative absence of conflict between religious and secular discourses in classical Islamic culture, which stands in striking contrast to both present-day fundamentalism and much of European history. Bauer shows how Islam’s encounter with the modern West and its demand for certainty helped bring about both Islamicist and secular liberal ideologies that in their own ways rejected ambiguity―and therefore also their own cultural traditions.
3. Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen
Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century―fascism, communism, and liberalism―only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism’s proponents tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure.
4. Letters of a Sufi Master: The Shayikh Ad-Darqawi | Ed. by Titus Burckhardt
This book contains spiritual techniques taken from letters of Shaykh ad-Darqawi. Almost all these letters are concerned with the method and the operative aspects of the Way and are considered among the most direct instructions given on Sufic method to be found in all Sufi literature.
5. The Walking Qur’an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa by Rudolph T Ware
Spanning a thousand years of history–and bringing the story to the present through ethnographic fieldwork in Senegal, Gambia, and Mauritania–Rudolph Ware documents the profound significance of Qur’an schools for West African Muslim communities. Such schools peacefully brought Islam to much of the region, becoming striking symbols of Muslim identity. Ware shows how in Senegambia the schools became powerful channels for African resistance during the eras of the slave trade and colonization. While illuminating the past, Ware also makes signal contributions to understanding contemporary Islam by demonstrating how the schools’ epistemology of embodiment gives expression to classical Islamic frameworks of learning and knowledge.
Today, many Muslims and non-Muslims find West African methods of Qur’an schooling puzzling and controversial. In fascinating detail, Ware introduces these practices from the viewpoint of the practitioners, explicating their emphasis on educating the whole human being as if to remake it as a living replica of the Qur’an. From this perspective, the transference of knowledge in core texts and rituals is literally embodied in people, helping shape them–like the Prophet of Islam–into vital bearers of the word of God.
6. Islam and Secularism by Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas
Written twenty years ago, this is a book by one of the most creative and original Muslim thinkers in the contemporary Muslim world. The author deals with fundamental problems faced by contemporary Muslims and their real solutions, beginning with a discussion on ‘The Contemporary Western Christian Background’, followed by his analysis of the concepts (which he newly defines) of ‘secular’, `secularization’ and ‘secularism.’ Based on all the preceding explanation, he proceeds to analyze the Muslim `dilemma’ by declaring that it should be resolved primarily through what he calls the “de-westernization of knowledge” or, conversely, the “islamization of contemporary knowledge”, an original concept conceived of and argued for by the author for the past three decades. Numerous original and profound ideas are contained in this book— arrived at chiefly through critical study of Muslim tradition— such as the concepts of Din, `adl, hikmah, adab, ma`na (meaning), and ta’dib, and their significance in the development of an Islamic system of education.
7. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 by Rashid Khalidi
A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history
In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.
Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members–mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists–The Hundred Years’ War on Palestineupends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process.
8. Memorial of God’s Friends: Lives and Sayings of Sufis by Farid ad-Din ‘Attar
In Farid ad-Din ‘Attār’s Memorial of God’s Friends, readers will explore the sole extant prose work of the great Persian Sufi poet Farid al-Din ‘Attār (d. ca. 1230). Integrating the writings of generations of Sufi scholars and historians, it relates the saga of Islamic spirituality through the lives and sayings of some its most prominent exemplars. ‘Attār combines popular legend, historical anecdote, ethical maxim, and speculative meditation in lively and thought-provoking biographies. ‘Attār’s lucid and economical style encourages readers to participate fully in the efforts of these pioneers of the sacred to live out and express their unfolding encounters with the divine. Scholars, shopkeepers, princes, and outcasts–God’s friends come from all classes of medieval society and embody the full range of religious attitudes, from piety and awe to love and ecstatic union. This work merges the miraculous and the everyday in one of the most engaging and comprehensive portrayals of spiritual experience in the Islamic tradition. Highlights: This translation makes the major biographies of Memorial of God’s Friends available in their entirety for the first time to a general audience in a contemporary American idiom.
9. With Stones in Our Hands: Writings on Muslims, Racism, and Empire | Ed by Sohail Daulatzai and Junaid Rana
Bringing together scholars and activists, With Stones in Our Hands confronts the rampant anti-Muslim racism and imperialism across the globe today
After September 11, 2001, the global War on Terror has made clear that Islam and Muslims are central to an imperial system of racism. Prior to 9/11, white supremacy had a violent relationship of dominance with Islam and Muslims. Racism against Muslims today borrows from centuries of white supremacy and is a powerful and effective tool to maintain the status quo.
With Stones in Our Hands compiles writings by scholars and activists who are leading the struggle to understand and combat anti-Muslim racism. Through a bold call for a politics of the Muslim Left and the poetics of the Muslim International, this book offers a glimpse into the possibilities of social justice, decolonial struggle, and political solidarity. The essays in this anthology reflect a range of concerns such as the settler colonial occupation of Palestine, surveillance and policing, blackness and radical protest traditions, militarism and empire building, social movements, and political repression. With Stones in Our Hands offers new ideas to achieve decolonization and global solidarity.
Contributors: Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, Abdullah Al-Arian, Arshad Imtiaz Ali, Evelyn Alsultany, Vivek Bald, Abbas Barzegar, Hatem Bazian, Sylvia Chan-Malik, Arash Davari, Fatima El-Tayeb, Hafsa Kanjwal, Ronak K. Kapadia, Maryam Kashani, Robin D. G. Kelley, Su‘ad Abdul Khabeer, Nadine Naber, Selim Nadi, Sherene H. Razack, Atef Said, Steven Salaita, Stephen Sheehi.
10. The Problem of Pain by C. S. Lewis
For centuries people have been tormented by one question above all – ‘If God is good and all-powerful, why does he allow his creatures to suffer pain?’ And what of the suffering of animals, who neither deserve pain nor can be improved by it?
The greatest Christian thinker of our time sets out to disentangle this knotty issue. With his signature wealth of compassion and insight, C.S. Lewis offers answers to these crucial questions and shares his hope and wisdom to help heal a world hungry for a true understanding of human nature.
11. The Ornament Of The World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain by Maria Rosa Menocal
This enthralling history, widely hailed as a revelation of a “lost” golden age, brings to vivid life the rich and thriving culture of medieval Spain, where for more than seven centuries Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together in an atmosphere of tolerance, and where literature, science, and the arts flourished.
12. Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community by Kathryn Linn Geurts
Adding her stimulating and finely framed ethnography to recent work in the anthropology of the senses, Kathryn Geurts investigates the cultural meaning system and resulting sensorium of Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in southeastern Ghana. Geurts discovered that the five-senses model has little relevance in Anlo culture, where balance is a sense, and balancing (in a physical and psychological sense as well as in literal and metaphorical ways) is an essential component of what it means to be human.
Much of perception falls into an Anlo category of seselelame (literally feel-feel-at-flesh-inside), in which what might be considered sensory input, including the Western sixth-sense notion of “intuition,” comes from bodily feeling and the interior milieu. The kind of mind-body dichotomy that pervades Western European-Anglo American cultural traditions and philosophical thought is absent. Geurts relates how Anlo society privileges and elaborates what we would call kinesthesia, which most Americans would not even identify as a sense. After this nuanced exploration of an Anlo-Ewe theory of inner states and their way of delineating external experience, readers will never again take for granted the “naturalness” of sight, touch, taste, hearing, and smell.
The books and the authors mentioned do not necessarily represent the views of Sacred Footsteps.
