Arthur John Arberry

Islamic mysticism , Or Tasawwuf , also known as Sufism , is a belief and practice in which Muslims seek to find the truth of divine love and knowledge through direct personal experience of God. It consists of various mystical paths that are designed to ascertain the nature of humanity and God and to facilitate the experience of divine love and wisdom in the world. Sufism grew out of the early Islamic asceticism , the scholastic and metaphysical researched of early thinkers , theorists and philosophers of Islam. It developed as a counterweight to the increasing worldliness of expanding Muslim community. Sufism emphasizes raising awareness of the REAL through genuine knowledge of the self and the VEILS which divide it from any experience of the Truth. It emphasizes compassion from one human being to another , regardless of all other distinctions and considerations. Like any movement of this kind , Sufism has had its origin , growth and development which resulted in the spread of this movement along with Islam far off lands and thereafter set in decay and eclipse. However , the most significant and remarkable part of this movement is its resurgence all over in the present global context. All these matters have been comprehensively discussed in this book.

408 p. ; 23 cm

History of the ancient Persian city, its saints and poets.

The present volume is not intended as a competitor with Brockelmann and Hitti, Gibb and von Grunebaum, Rosenthal and Lewis, Levi-Provençal and Spuler and Gabrieli-to name but a few of the brilliant historians whose writings have done so much to recover and reinterpret the record. Its scope is at once more modest and, in a certain way, more fundamental. This book is a series of documents illustrating the development of Islamic civilization, texts translated from the languages in which they were originally composed by famous protagonists of that culture. The intention is to present a panorama of Muslim life and thought and achievement as depicted from within. The translations, a considerable part of which has not been published hitherto, are all the work of a single scholar and represent the gleanings of more than thirty years of assiduous reading. They are meant to throw light on the literary, intellectual and religious movements within Islam, as well as illuminating something of the politics and the sociology, ranging from the origins in the sixth century down to the present day. It should of course be confessed that they constitute the merest fragments of literatures preserved in overwhelming abundance, exceeding many times what has survived from ancient Greece and Rome, a repertory of many tens of thousands of volumes, the majority still in manuscript, not a few of immense length. The passages chosen, however, have been taken from the most highly esteemed and authoritative works; and the attempt has been made to construct a balanced and rounded picture. -- from Introduction (p. -10).

Referenced in the introduction to Robert Irwin's For the Lust of Knowing: > When A. J. Arberry published his little book British Orientalists in 1943, he wrote about scholars who travelled in or wrote about Arabia, Persia, India, Indonesia and the Far East.