Question: Respected Marjaʼ Ayatullāh al-Udhmā Sayyid Ali al-Sistani Dāma Dhilluh, As-Salāmu ʿalaykum wa Rahmatullāhi wa Barakātuh. From time to time we come across some characters amongst the youth in the institutes of higher religious learning (Hawzāt al-ʿilmiyya) and other places, who claim to be endowed with ʿIrfan and inner purity, and they…
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Before the publication of Newton’s Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis (1689), Aristotle’s Physics was the most widely read and influential book of natural philosophy (طبیعیات). After 1250, it constituted the core text of the discipline of natural philosophy and was, together with Aristotle’s other “natural books,” routinely studied at all European universities. Change…
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Allama Tafazzul Hussain Khan Kashmiri (1727 – 1801), also known as Khan-e-Allama, was a Twelver Shia scholar, scientist, and theologian of North India. He is famous for his Arabic translation of Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia. Early Life and Education Allama Tafazzul Husain Kashmiri was born to an influential Kashmiri family in Sialkot…
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Introducing Sayyid Dildar Ali’s critique of mysticism, al-shihab al-thaqib (الشهاب الثاقب), Dr. Athar Abbas Rizvi writes: “Mawlānā Dildar Ali (1753 – 1820) toed the line of the Safawid Ulama in fiercely opposing sufism. Like them he considered it was a threat to Shi’ism. He wrote a detailed work entitled the Shihab al-Saqib…
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Download Link Introduction – Prof. Katherine Pratt Ewing When we, as a public living at this particular historical moment, ask, “What is Sufism? Is Sufism part of Islam? What is the relationship between Sufism and the modern state?” our concerns have been largely shaped by a pervasive, globalized media- and policy- driven…
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