RUMI -- Shams show your face and take me home ...

All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern. When I get back around to that place, I'll be completely sober. Meanwhile, I'm like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary. The day is coming when I fly off, but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice? Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul? I cannot stop asking. If I could taste one sip of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks. I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way. Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

This poetry, I never know what I'm going to say. I don't plan it. When I'm outside the saying of it, I get very quiet and rarely speak at all. Shams if you show your face to me one more time, I can flee the imposition of this life ...

On the question of which one of Abraham's son was put to be sacrificed ?

Religion - The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-goodman/totally-open-to-suggestio_b_4080484.html

Eid Al-adha: What if God Were a Writer Who Couldn’t Stop Revising? | James Goodman


Starting on Monday evening, at the very height of the Haj, Muslims around the world will observe Eid Al-adha, the Festival of the Sacrifice, a four-holiday that celebrates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son to God.

Millions will converge on holy sites in Medina and Mecca, and if the past is prologue, here in the West, we will see images and read accounts of the festival that suggest (at their most generous) its strangeness — especially the sacrifice of a hundred million animals (each family consumes a third, shares a third with friends, and gives a third to the poor); the stoning of three great pillars (representing the devil); and a version of the sacrifice story in which Ishmael is the nearly sacrificed son.

What I see in Eid Al-adha is something else: a celebration with deep connections to both Christianity and Judaism. The deepest of those connections is the spectacle, past and present, of countless deeply devout people taking a sacred story into their own hands as if it were a clump of soft clay and remaking it in their own image.

At the root of the holiday is the story told in Genesis 22. There, God tests Abraham, commanding him to offer Isaac, the longed-for son of his and Sarah’s old age, on a mountain in the land of Moriah. Abraham sets out, without saying a word, but at the very last moment God stops him. Abraham sacrifices a lamb instead.

By the time Muhammad received his revelation from God, Jews and Christians had been revising those nineteen lines for centuries, adding characters (starting with Satan), dialog (conversations between Satan and God, God and Abraham, Abraham and Isaac, even Isaac and Ishmael), thoughts (How in the world am I am going to get away with Isaac without telling Sarah where we are going?), motivations, and meanings (obedience, fear, love, and faith).

Mohammed and other Muslims followed suit. The Koran’s Abraham, unlike the Bible’s, dreams that God wants his son in sacrifice. When he wakes, he asks his son what he thinks. His son says: “If that’s what God wants, lets do it.”

But the Koran, like the Hebrew Scriptures and Gospels before it, was just the beginning. The Jews had midrash, the Christians commentaries. Muslims had Hadith, the authoritative record of the words of the Prophet. There you will find scores of different Islamic versions of the story, some of them clearly derived from Jewish tradition (Satan trying to stop Abraham from obeying God, thus the need to stone him), some from pre-Islamic Arabian traditions, and some from emerging Islamic traditions.

In one version, the idea of the sacrifice is Abraham’s. He is so overjoyed by the news of the imminent arrival of a son that he promises to sacrifice him when he comes of age. In another, Isaac takes center stage, showing Abraham the God’s way. In a third, Sarah’s response to Abraham’s report sounds like the punch line to a Jewish comedian’s joke: “You would sacrifice my son and not tell me?”

The great Islamic innovation was to substitute Ishmael for Isaac as the nearly sacrificed son. In the Koran, the boy is not identified. Many early Islamic exegetes considered Isaac the victim, and they weren’t embarrassed as some later exegetes may have been, to cite Israelite tales (Torah) and the Gospels as authorities. But in no time there was a debate: “Some people say that it was Ishmael,” wrote al-Ya’qūbī (a Shiite historian and geographer in the third century of Islam), “because he was the one who settled in Mecca, while Isaac remained in Syria. Other people say that it was Isaac because Abraham sent him (Ishmael) and his mother out when Isaac was a young boy, and Ishmael was a grown man with children. There are many traditions about each view and people disagree about them.”

That debate raged for centuries, but as time went on the Ishmael versions gained favor. It is no mystery why. In the Bible, God made his covenant with Abraham and confirmed it (“because you have done this”) at Moriah. Ishmael, though banished, would be taken care of. He would be the father of many great nations, but the covenant was with Isaac and his children through the ages.

The early Christians started there, but they altered the definition of Abraham and Isaac’s descendants, casting the Jews off as Abraham and Sarah had earlier cast off Hagar. They made Jesus and through him all Christians the beneficiaries of God’s promise.

Ishmael was the genealogical link between Abraham and the Prophet, the progenitor of the Arab people. Is it any wonder that, as Islam took root in the Arabian peninsula and spread from there, many Muslims preferred the version of the near sacrifice that made Abraham’s older son the son whose submission to God defined their faith and secured God’s blessing? In favoring Ishmael, Muslims simply did what, for so many, comes naturally. They redirected the course of sacred history so that God’s blessing ran their way.

Today there are still Muslims who insist it was Isaac, just as there are those who (like many Christians and Jews) insist that Scripture got history wrong: God would never have asked Abraham to kill his son. Our religious traditions are not singular or fixed. They are plural and fluid, the product of conversation, argument, difference, dissent, and change, however halting. What has been (animal sacrifice, holy war, the subordination of women) does not have to be today, or tomorrow). I think of God as a writer who can’t stop revising.

     

Coleman Barks: Rumi's Poetry: 'All Religions, All This Singing, One Song'

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/coleman-barks/rumi-and-some-new-ways-to_b_777382.html

Rumi's Poetry: 'All Religions, All This Singing, One Song'

Rumi: The Big Red Book collects all the work that I have done on The Shams (Rumi's Divani Shamsi Tabriz, The Works of Shams Tabriz) over the last 34 years. As I put this book together, I felt drawn to revise slightly almost every poem, to relineate and reword. So I hope this is a refreshed collection.

I sent a copy to my friend, Robert Bly. He describes in a letter what I have done with these poems: "You have given them pats on the shirt, set them on some local horse, and given the horse a clap on the rear, and the poems are gone, well almost gone." He should know. He got me started on this path, when in June of 1976, he handed me a copy of Arberry's translation of Rumi and said, "These poems need to be released from their cages," by which he meant they needed to be translated out of their scholarly idiom into the lively American free verse tradition of Whitman. Hence this book. It is not all that I have done the last three decades, but I did spend some time, almost every day, with Rumi's poetry. I do not regret it. Something about the practice keeps unfolding.

The organization of this book is unique. The odes (ghazals) are divided into 27 sections, each a Name for the Mystery. I avoid, wherever I can, using the word God. It feels so freighted, to me, with doctrine and division and violence. I don't necessarily recommend this avoidance to anyone else. Eighteen of the Names are taken from my teacher, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen's The 99 Beautiful Names of Allah (The Opener, The Gatherer, The Patient, The Kind, The Intricate, Majesty, Light, Peace, The Grateful, The Living, etc). Two of the Names for Mystery are people I have been fortunate enough to meet, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen and Osho. Two other Names are also human beings, the Indian saint, Ramana Maharshi, and Shams Tabriz. Three other Names are borrowed. Dissolving the Concept of "God" (I have heard this somewhere, but I don't remember where), Playing (Plotinus), Tenderness Toward Existence (Galway Kinnell's phrase) and then there's the next to last, Everything and Everyone Else. The last Name is one that is implied in every Sufi list of the 99 Names, The Name That Cannot Be Spoken or Written.

The quatrains are more playfully, less thematically, divided. As I say in the Organizational Note (p. 364), the expanse of Emily Dickinson's 1789 short, title-less poems in the Harvard edition is dismaying to the eye. So in order to give some pattern to this array of Rumi's short poems, and some spaciousness too, I set them in 27 sections, 25 under the aegis of a constellation (Taurus, Leo, Pegasus, Orion, Pisces, etc.), and two under the name of another celestial body: the Milky Way (our home galaxy seen from the side) and the Black Hole at the center of it, which I have presumptuously named. Somebody had to. Bijou. It is that maelstrom that gives our galaxy its spiraling, dervishly outflung arms. The strange devices above the headnotes for each section are 10th Century drawings of the constellations from al-Sufi's (903-986) The Book of Fixed Stars. That is the fairly esoteric layout of the book. The wildly ecstatic, and wise, poems themselves are of more interest.

In other volumes I have buried some surprises in the Notes. The four recipes at the end of The Essential Rumi, for example, the last two meant to serve 60 and 100 people! There are buried items here, too. On p. 487 I explain how I came to sign a book for President Obama, and on p. 484 I lay out the circumstances, as well as I can determine them, of Osho's death, which was very possibly a CIA assassination, a slow one by thallium poisoning.

****

In October, I gave a reading in Toronto with a Sufi group. Several were of Pakistani descent. They asked me about the intense Islamophobia loose in this country, that is particularly pointed against Pakistan. I acknowledged the truth of their question, but I begged for more time before answering. I'll attempt a piece of an answer here.

During the 1979 hostage-taking in the US Embassy in Tehran, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (my teacher) called a news conference in Philadelphia with the world media, something he had never done. He denounced the hostage-taking, saying, this is not Islam. Did this happen after the destruction of the World Trade Center towers? If it did, I am not aware of it. Did the great Sufi Masters of Pakistan, and there are many, come forward in Karachi to say al Qaeda is not Islam? Have they in the 10 years since? I need to be educated in these matters. Have the Ayatollahs in Iran spoken out in this way? Has my friend Ayatollah Zanjani? I hope so. I hear there is a strong movement in Iran now among the young people toward Sufism.

(We could at this point, in all fairness, call upon our own leaders to acknowledge our very American violence. Two and a half million is one estimate of those killed in Vietnam. We exploded more ordnance in that war than was exploded by all sides in World War II. How many were killed in the First Gulf War? 205,000. In the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, which continues, and in Afghanistan? 919,967. Do we keep such records? Where? I googled these numbers. Nobody knows the true body count. If we could weep for much of what we have done, I feel the old Sufis would weep with us.)

Islamophobia is real and deep and widespread in this country. This much we can know for sure. I sat recently watching a baseball playoff game with a very well-educated man, who seriously recommended that we "Nuke Tehran. Hit them hard. That's all they understand. Like Dresden." Sheer Idiocy. I visited Tehran in May of 2006. I tried to describe that beautiful, gentle, European culture to him. Not much help. There is a lot we do not see. The lines of Islamic men bowing down, touching their foreheads to the ground, sitting back, standing up, bowing again. They are doing a form of prayer that acknowledges unity, not political or religious solidarity with each other, but in praise of the mystery of oneness within all living beings, all things, all molecules even. That is the essence of Islam that I meet in Sufis today, that I saw in Bawa's eyes. There is a sweetness and a coolness, a profound courtesy, and a peace in Islam that we are mostly blind to in the West, and in the media particularly. The Islam that Rumi speaks from within is not one that separates us into different religions. Amazingly, it is one that celebrates how we can meet in Friendship and sing One Song. Here is one of his most famous poems.

One Song

Every war and every conflict between human beings
has happened because of some disagreement about names.

It is such an unnecessary foolishness,
because just beyond the arguing
there is a long table of companionship
set and waiting for us to sit down.

What is praised is one, so the praise is one too,
many jugs being poured into a huge basin.
All religions, all this singing, one song.
The differences are just illusion and vanity.
Sunlight looks a little different on this wall
than it does on that wall
and a lot different on this other one,
but it is still one light.

We have borrowed these clothes,
these time-and-space personalities,
from a light, and when we praise,
we are pouring them back in.

He said that in the 13th Century. Rumi very consciously made himself and his poetry a bridge between cultures and between religions. There is nothing exclusivist about him. He includes everyone in his embrace. He was, and is, a healer of whatever might separate us. Shams Tabriz adds another, more incandescent, element to his gift. Pure freedom, pure internal wildness, beyond any category we know. The West has no one comparable. Thoreau to the 100th power. Dostoyevsky to the 10th. Cervantes times 40. Mark Twain spun into seven new dimensions. It is the whirlwind of his presence that we feel as the power within Rumi's poetry. Shams is what draws us.

I am often asked why Rumi is currently so popular. I give my lame reasons. The real cause is Shams Tabriz, the one so startlingly alive and awake, his face is "what all religions long for." That is the feel of the depth of their friendship. Such friendship is another quality we are missing about Islam. Rumi called his red book The Works of Shams Tabriz. He did that because these poems flow from their seamless friendship. And I would make the mystical claim that that is a way of being, of loving, that we can experience eight centuries later, a little taste of, by reading.

Making art out of words | Yemen Times

Making art out of words | Yemen Times
http://www.yementimes.com/en/1710/news/2854

MAKING ART OUT OF WORDS

It’s all in the wrist: Calligraphy is a hobby for many Yemeni artists. While there are several independent schools and institutions that teach calligraphy classes all over Sana’a, enthusiasts would like to see the art form become a part of Yemen’s school

It’s all in the wrist: Calligraphy is a hobby for many Yemeni artists. While there are several independent schools and institutions that teach calligraphy classes all over Sana’a, enthusiasts would like to see the art form become a part of Yemen’s school

Calligraphers ask government to add craft to school curricula

Amani Mohammed Al-Kabodi, 18, stands beside a table placed inside a room at the Arab Painting Forum in Sana’a, carefully drawing the Arabic alphabet in black ink with studied brush strokes.

Special pens, ink, paper, brushes and other tools are scattered on the table next to her. Every time Al-Kabodi starts drawing a new letter, she cleans the pen off with a tissue and dips it into a special ink.

Calligraphy, both for secular artwork and for religious depictions is practiced in Yemen by a number of talented Yemenis and immigrants.

Calligraphers say the art is an important part of Islamic and Arab identity and many complain about the absence of calligraphy in school curricula. Students are often taught calligraphy as part of the Arabic language, instead of as a separate subject. Many are encouraging the education sector to take it a step farther and offer calligraphy courses.  

Al-Kabodi, a recent high-school graduate who will begin medical school next year, has been practicing calligraphy since age 10.

“I decided to enroll in Arabic calligraphy courses after my relatives encouraged me to improve my handwriting,” said Al-Kabodi.

“Because of the lack of Arabic calligraphy departments at Yemeni universities, I will go to medical school and look for institutes that teach the art so I can improve my skills,” she said.

Al-Kabodi studied Riqaa', Al-Dewani and Al-Thlth Arabic calligraphy font courses at the forum. Many want to expand access and availability.

“Calligraphers don’t have an identity here in Yemen due to the lack of Arabic calligraphy curricula, departments and local competitions,” said Khalid Al-Ward, an Arabic calligraphy trainer involved with school curriculum at the Education Ministry.

Al-Ward has been working in the Education Ministry for 18 years. He started teaching Arabic calligraphy courses at private institutes five years ago and has improved his skills by learning from talented Syrian, Egyptian and Iraqi teachers in the ’80s.

“Other countries have a special Arab calligraphy curriculum for students. So, we were very happy when teachers from these countries come to Yemen because they teach us many things about Arabic calligraphy. I also read old books about calligraphy. Yemen is at the end of the list when it comes to the art,” Al-Ward said.  

To improve that ranking, calligraphy will need public support.

“We want to enrich generations and history with multi-faceted calligraphy, but we cannot as long as we receive no government attention,” he added.

Al-Ward says that those interested in Arabic calligraphy are a small, cultured group. This, he said, is the reason why the number of talented calligraphers is so few. 

“Yemenis are busy earning a living and chewing qat. For them, the art is unnecessary entertainment,” said Al-Ward.

At another table at the forum sat Hisham Al-Ulafi, practicing his craft. Like Al-Kabodi, Al-Ulafi was also interested in improving his handwriting, but mostly, he wanted to improve his paintings with calligraphy.

A young painter, Al-Ulafi has been taking classes for a month.

“Once training finishes, I’ll be able to use Arabic calligraphy in my paintings,” he said.

Though Yemeni calligraphers are few, they are a presence at Arab exhibits.

Yemeni calligrapher Hamoud Al-Bana is an award-winning artist who has participated in several Arab calligraphy competitions. The last competition he participated in was in 2011 in Jordan. Al-Bana blames the government for the lack of talented calligraphers.

“I am awarded by foreign countries, but I cannot find funds for an Arabic calligraphy exhibition in my [own] country,” Al-Bana said.

Al-Bana put together a beginner’s guide to teaching Arabic calligraphy. The guide has not been approved by the Education Ministry to be used as part of public curricula, but some private schools are making use of it for extra school activities.  

Over the past five years, Al-Bana, in cooperation with calligrapher Nasser Al-Nasari, has been preparing a methodology for teaching Arabic calligraphy.  The methodology will be used in training courses over the next two years.  

He indicated that this methodology, if used, will help establish the first Arabic Calligraphy Institute, which will enable talented and aspiring calligraphers to hone their skills.

“We will be strong competitors in international calligraphy exhibitions,” Al-Bana predicted.

The work of Al-Kabodi and many other trainees were thoughtfully displayed on the forum’s walls. Al-Ward called Al-Kabodi’s work creative and encouraged her to stick with the art.

She is looking forward to taking part in calligraphy-related exhibits organized by independent Yemeni calligraphers.  

“Our [appreciation for the craft] needs to evolve. Arabic calligraphy is representative of our Islamic identity,” said Al-Kabodi.

The Marginalia Review of Books – Rachel Friedman on The Poetics of Iblis, by Whitney Bodman

The Marginalia Review of Books – Rachel Friedman on The Poetics of Iblis, by Whitney Bodman


http://themarginaliareview.com/archives/2856

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Rachel Friedman on The Poetics of Iblis, by Whitney Bodman

Can a reader use Western literary theory to approach the Qur’an?

Since the time of its appearance in seventh-century Arabia, the Qur’an has been the subject of rich and diverse commentaries, a testament to its power as experienced by Muslim and non-Muslim audiences. What can Western literary thought contribute to this longstanding tradition of interpreting the Qur’an? How can a contemporary audience not versed in Islamic sources understand this religious text?

These questions lie at the heart of many recent efforts to bring European-born modes of interpretation to the study of Islamic Scripture. Traditional tafsir interprets the text largely in an atomistic, verse-by-verse manner. Modern readings, by contrast, approach the text from angles ranging from structural to thematic to narrative. These experimental projects draw attention to connections between different parts of the text as well as common themes and structures that undergird the suras (roughly, “chapters” of the Qur’an). Though they are not the first to do so, they show how the rhetorical and linguistic features of the Qur’an contribute to its power.

Whitney Bodman’s book The Poetics of Iblis, which applies reader-response criticism to the Qur’an, is part of this growing field of research. While Bodman is not entirely successful in using his interpretive mode of choice, he reveals meaningful variations among the Qur’an’s seven iterations of the story of Iblis by expanding the story’s scope to allow for a wider range of interpretation.

According to traditional Islamic exegesis, Iblis is considered to be a specific shaytan, or devil. Bodman instead reads Iblis as a tragic literary figure, contrasting him with Shaytan, who represents pure evil. The character of Iblis develops throughout the Qur’an, possibly even meriting the audience’s sympathy, while Shaytan remains a static symbol of evil in the world. Qur’an 17:61 states: “Behold! We said to the angels: ‘Bow down unto Adam’: They bowed down except Iblis: He said, ‘Shall I bow down to one whom Thou didst create from clay?’” Iblis’s response to God here is Bodman’s key to understanding him as an interesting literary figure and specifically as a tragic hero. God punishes Iblis for refusing to prostrate to “a human whom you [God] created from ringing clay, from stinking black clay,” a sentiment reiterated in several places in the Qur’an. Iblis’s refusal is a decision made using his God-given reasoning to determine that bowing to Adam, a smelly creation made from earth, is “neither logical, nor just, nor warranted.”  Bodman shows that portrayals of Iblis as a literary character in modern Arabic literature also pick up on this logic.

Bodman has chosen to use the variety of reader-response criticism associated with the German literary scholar Wolfgang Iser. For Iser, meaning is formed in the interaction between the author’s so-called “implied reader”—whom the author imagines as her ideal future audience of the text—and the particular thinking of actual readers. The author draws on this implied reader’s background knowledge with the aim of helping the reader create meaning. To apply Iser’s theory, Bodman tries to reconstruct what background knowledge the Qur’an assumes its implied reader to have. He surveys ancient Semitic texts as well as Jewish and Christian sources, focusing on the interpretation of biblical material. Bodman identifies several themes in these pre-Islamic texts that the Qur’an also incorporates, such as sibling rivalry and the myth of a fallen angel. He also investigates the origins of some Qur’anic ideas. For example, was the notion of angels present in pre-Islamic Arabia or did it come from Judeo-Christian lore? This allows him to ask ”what the original hearers of passages concerning angels might have made of the concept.”

The choice to focus on the Qur’an’s first audience is common to Western academic approaches to the Qur’an. This decision assumes that the Qur’an is a response to circumstances in seventh-century Arabia and privileges the origins of ideas over their function in the text. Yet to what extent can this endeavor understand the Qur’an on its own terms without undervaluing what these ideas mean within it? For many it will seem strange to interpret this sacred text using a German mode of criticism that reached the height of its popularity in the 1970s. A theory that was formulated with modern European texts and readers in mind may not be suitable for a more ancient Arabian source. What are the implications of applying Western literary theory to the Qur’an?

In the case of reader-response criticism, this question takes on an interesting valence. As previously mentioned, the notion of an implied reader fails to do justice to the experience of actual readers and the background knowledge they bring to their readings of the text. The author of a text cannot account for all actual readers, an idea that was important to Iser’s theory about the production of meaning. While human authors cannot account for all actual readers, a divine omniscient author is an exception: this author would not have to project a prototypical reader and guess at this reader’s background knowledge. A divine, omniscient author is very different from Iser’s imagined author. The former would already know the entirety of future readership and, moreover, would be eminently aware of all meanings of the text. In this case, meaning could not be produced in the gap between what the implied reader knows and what actual readers bring to the text, because this gap would not exist. Reader-response criticism could not work in the way Iser theorized.

Iser’s reader-response criticism is generally not applied to texts claiming to be the direct word of God. Islamic doctrine asserts the divine origin of the Qur’an, although many scholars have attributed its composition to Muhammad, a group of seventh-century authors, or later writers. Moreover, the Qur’an speaks of itself as having a divine source and addresses all of humanity, which indicates that its author does not have one ideal reader in mind. Following much recent Western scholarship on Islam, Bodman avoids addressing the issue of the Qur’an’s authorship directly.

Not all scholarship on the Qur’an must deal with the question of authorship. But for a writer who applies a mode of interpretation in which the author’s own assumptions play a unique role, the issue cannot be ignored. A text that claims a divine source may imagine a reader response different from the type that a mortal author would imagine.

Bodman would have done well to devote more attention to the Qur’an’s self-understanding, but I am not suggesting that he take a theological stand on the Qur’an’s origins. In light of the Qur’an’s specific features, its encounter with reader-response theory should be allowed to push the boundaries of the theory itself.

As an interaction between the Qur’an and literary theory, The Poetics of Iblis is best taken as an experimental project, part of a contemporary effort to determine whether and how one might productively and thoughtfully apply Western understandings of literature to the Qur’an. These efforts tend to focus on larger patterns of meaning, narrative, and aesthetics, which can make the text at hand more approachable and meaningful to audiences that may otherwise find it alien and hard to comprehend. As a text held to be divinely authored, the Qur’an poses an interesting challenge to Western theory, exposing its limitations when applied to texts beyond the realm of modern European writings.

Book: The poetics of Iblis, Narrative Theology in the Qur'an

Iblis, the character in the Qur'an who refuses God's command to bow to Adam and is punished by eviction from heaven, is commonly depicted as a fiendish character no different from Satan. However, some Sufi stories describe Iblis as the ultimate monotheist, a lover of God, but tragically rejected. This volume seeks the origins of this alternative Iblis within the Qur'an itself, by looking at each of the seven Qur'anic versions of the Iblis story as a unique rendering of the basic narrative. Whitney Bodman finds that the likely earliest version of the Iblis story presents him as a tragic figure, an elder sibling of Adam unjustly displaced from God's favor. Subsequent renderings present an Iblis more hostile to humanity, and in the last two abbreviated versions Iblis becomes an incidental figure in the extended story of Adam. In modern Arab literature the character of Iblis is deployed to reveal tragic dimensions of modern life. Alhough it is often said that there is no place for tragedy in Islam, Bodman's careful examination of the Iblis story shows that the tragic exists even in the Qur'an and forms part of the vision of medieval Sufi mystics and modern social critics alike.

The Poetics of Iblis: Narrative Theology in the Qur'an (Harvard Theological Studies)

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