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Beneath the battle cries of the jihad and an Islamic politics that draws attention to a religion of rigid rules and obsessive devotion, lies the mystical Islam, known as Sufism. What attracts so many Westerners to the faith, says former convert Ibn al-Rawandi, is its "heart made of poetry and art, vision and devotion, that can only be known fully from within." Enchanted by the metaphysics of Sufism, Rawandi studied and worshiped in Cyprus, convinced he had found the answers to life's questions. When doubts emerged for which the traditionalist authors had no answers and the Salman Rushdie affair divided Islam, Rawandi sought to critically evaluate Sufism by reviewing its origins and the best arguments for its views.
In Islamic Mysticism, Rawandi contends that unreliable sources seriously undermine the classical account of Islam and Sufism. His detailed study of the philosophy of religion -especially the work of traditionalists such as RenT Guenon and Frithjof Schuon - helps to develop a critical analysis of Islam from the inside out. Particular attention is given to great Islamic mystic Ibn Arabi, who is taken as representative of Sufism in its highest development. Rawandi offers a critical, secular perspective on Sufism and concludes that mystical experience is not a trustworthy validation of religion.
- Sales Rank: #2556773 in eBooks
- Published on: 2000-05-01
- Released on: 2000-04-30
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
"...a brief but analytically brilliant look at Islam and Islamic mysticism." -- New Humanist, September, 2000
"...a look at Islam that is quite different from the headlines about jihad and Islamic politics..." -- Bookviews, September 22, 2000
From the Inside Flap
Beneath the battle cries of the jihad and an Islamic political system that draws attention to a religion of rigid rules and obsessive devotion lies the mystical form of Islam known as Sufism. What attracts so many Westerners to this particular Islamic sect is its "heart made of poetry and art, vision and devotion, that can only be known fully from within." Enchanted by the metaphysics of Sufism, author Ibn al-Rawandi,a former convent, studied and warshiped in Cyprus, convinced he had found the answers to life's questions. But when doubts emerged about the faith for which the traditionalist authors had no answers, and the Slman Rushdie affair focused world attention on the need to critically evaluate Islam, Rawandi began his own assessment of Sufism. In Islamic Mysticism, Rawandi examines the traditional Muslim story of the origin of Islam in detail, taking full account of the work of contemporary Western scholars, revealing the unreliable nature of Muslim sources, and undermining the conventional picture of the life of Muhammad and the origin of the Koran. The collapse of these classical accounts takes with it the conventional story of the origin of Sufism.
Rawandi's detailed study of the philosophy of religion-especially the work of traditionalists such as Ren Gunon and Frithjof Schon-helps him to develop a critical analysis of Islam from the inside out. Particular attention is given to the great Islamic mystic Ibn Arabi, a representative of Sufism in its highest development. Also included is an examination of a little-known controversy in the Islamic world surrounding the occurance of the number nineteen in Koran, shedding new light on that document.
In tandem chapters in each of the book's four parts, Rawandi presents first the traditional Islamic interpretaion, drawn from original sources and sympathetic contemporary interpreters; next he presents a critical view of the same material from a secular perspective. In the end, Rawandi's critical examination of Sufism leads to the conclusion that mystical experience is not a trustworthy validation of religion.
About the Author
Ibm al-Rawandi has written for Philosophy Now and New Humanist. He lives in London.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
could have been titled Why I Am Not a Muslim II
By Christopher K. Philippo
The author provides very little information about himself; he joined a sufi order in Cyprus in 1985 and left them three years later, he has written for Philosophy Now and New Humanist and now lives in London. His pseudonym is taken from a famous historical skeptic of Islam; it makes it hard to Google him without getting results for the well-known one. Chapter two of this book appears in another form as chapter two of the pseudonymous Ibn Warraq's The Quest for the Historical Muhammad. A reviewer of that book, Fred McGraw Donner, speculates they're the same person. Well, in a sense they might as well be: two unknown writers critical of Islam who don't appear to have any original ideas of their own.
I liked the first two parts of the book. He does a decent job of summarizing the origins of Islam from the Islamic standpoint, and then the criticism of the sources hits the mark, I think. However, he lacks the same skepticism regarding some of the works providing a different account of the origins of Islam. He completely accepts Hagarism:The Making of the Islamic World, for example (maybe Prometheus Press should simply reprint that book?).
I found the chapter on Islamic mysticism to be almost totally incomprehensible, even though the book is supposed to be aimed at "the general reader" as he says. Most of it focuses on ibn Arabi. Maybe the ideas are just so irrational and esoteric they make no sense (quite possible), or perhaps he's just really bad at explaining mystical Islam. I found the following chapter on the secular perspective of sufism to be just barely more comprehensible. The short chapter "Islam's View of Itself in the Modern World" was odd, didn't seem to be about that at all. The following secular perspective was much more readable, but instead of being about "Islam in the Modern World" in general as titled, it's primarily about perennialism and Sheikh Nazim's Naqshbandi Sufi order. Since Nazim lived in Cyprus and did outreach to non-Muslims in London, it's easy to infer that the author had been a student of his, but oddly he doesn't say.
In the end, he writes "the aim of the book" was to "offer arguments for [leaving Islam] and provide the intellectual basis on which it can be done." It's disingenuous, I think, not to have said that in the introduction (or title). I would have liked the book to have been entirely about what the title promised.
There's also an appendix on the number 19 theory of Rashad Khalifa, late founder of the Quran-only/anti-Hadith sect now called "The Submitters." This is somewhat interesting, but seems to have been included not so much because of any thematic relation than because he feels it's an argument in favor of the human creation of the Quran. More information about Khalifa can be found in Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?: Debunking Pseudoscience.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting and quite useful
By Alyssa A. Lappen
Let me disabuse Fred Donner of the notion that author Ibn al-Rawandi is the same person as Ibn Warraq (author of Why I Am Not a Muslim and Quest for the Historical Muhammad, among innumerable other scholarly titles on Islam). The assertion is false, even preposterous --- and a good indication that Fred Donner has read neither of these authors.
Ibn Warraq (whom I'm honored to call friend) has never claimed any association with Sufism, and in each of his many volumes takes a much tougher and more agnostic view of central Islamic theological points than Ibn Al-Rawandi. Ibn Warraq frequently focuses on the violent and warlike features of Islam, and passages in sacred texts that incite such jihad and violence. Al-Rawandi, while skeptical, is also nostalgic.
There are some similarities between the two: both were horrified by Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 Islamic fatwa seeking Salman Rushdie's death for having written his novel Satanic Verses. Both are self-described ex-Muslims. And obviously, since Ibn al-Rawandi thanks Ibn Warraq for his encouragement, they do know one another and converse.
One enlightening difference, however, is Al-Rawandi's effort to explain, albeit sometimes in the quotations of others, how it is that Muslims perceive their belief and that of others. According to a citation of Frithjof Schuon (the subject of subsequent criminal prosecution and much controversy) --- which comes closest to anything I've seen to describing the "reality" --- is the "curious tendency [of the average Muslim] to believe that non-Muslims either know that Islam is the truth and reject it out of pure obstinacy, or else are simply ignorant of it and can be converted by elementary explanations..." The idea that anyone can in good conscience oppose Islam "quite exceeds the Muslim's imagination precisely because," to him, Islam is entirely coincident with "the irresistible logic of things."
To average Muslims, then, "no explanations are necessary," and indeed, no probing or doubtful questions are allowed or to be tolerated. To Islamic believers, not believing is "not like failing to turn up in church on Sunday," but rather akin to "a traitorous act in time of war." It's making an alliance with an enemy "for whom no good word can be said, an act for which the only appropriate penalty is death."
Furthermore, by way of explaining the appeal of Islam to some conservative intellectual Westerners (who take a romantic view of "The East" and Arabs) "Islam is in fact the last refuge," as they wish "that the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, in short the 'modern world,' had never come about."
Al-Rawandi is also refreshingly skeptical about Sufism, which far too many Westerners believe to be a "kinder, gentler" form of Islam. This supposedly mystical counter-movement, however, is in the author's words "as much a late construct resulting from the Arabs' acquiring an empire as Islam itself." And like Islam itself, Sufism is also "heavily dependent on hadith qudsi, supposedly direct sayings of God not included in the Koran," That is to say, it is antithetical to logical reasoning and fully dependent on total acceptance of Islamic doctrine and an entire tradition without definitive evidence of any kind.
This book is not at all like the works of Ibn Warraq, except that it offers the willing reader much additional material as to encourage healthy skepticism of Islam, and particularly its mystical incarnations.
--- Alyssa A. Lappen
6 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
A Note to the Reader
By Abdou A. Shokr
Ibn Al-Rawandi ...died more than a thousand years ago. Ibn Al-Rawandi the author of this book lives today, As a matter of fact he dedicated the book to his mother 1903-, and inside the book he discussed the views of modern - twentieth century - thinkers as P. Crone and M. Cook who published a book together 1980's, and probably the author assumed the alias Ibn Al-rawandi for himself. To clear the Matter to the reader I add the following two notes:
Ibn Al-Rawandi( 9th century):
The moslem notion that the Koran, no one can produce like it and also - this came later by moslem theoligians - the Koran is as eternal as Allah itself and therefore was not created. was rejected by Nazzam a famous reasonable moslem theologian who was by no means secular. Nazzam saw that notion is damaging to islam especially among the intellectuals, so he said that the Arabs contemporary of Mohammad were able to write like Koran. But he then maintained that Allah stopped the Arabs from doing so as a proof to his prophet. This last statement by Nazzam is not strictly true, for some Arab contemporary to the prophet Mohammad did compose like Koran and their works was destroyed when Islam became dominant. These Statement by Nazzam that the Arab were able to produce like Koran - as the head of Arabic literatures Taha Hussein said in his Phd thesis - caused a great impact on Moslem free thinkers as Ibn Al-Rawandi and Abul-Ala Al Muary who wrote books challenging the Koran. Muary wrote a 4 volumes books in the same pattern as Koran, 3 were lost or destroyed and only the first volume survived. Although Muary and Rawandi shared the same views about religion, Rawandi was hedonist a wine drinker, Muary wasn't, he was strictly vegetarian never married wished if the human race perished from the earth even in one poem he gave the wolf a nobel position than man. Muary came after Rawandi and attacked him for his hedonismm but there is an important point about Muary which even today great sholars have not noticed, Muary was believing in many of the things h's criticizing Rawandi of
Ibn Al-Rawandi (Today), the Book
The book is very great, terse and compact. The author tried to be exact and offered the views of many modern researchers. It will appeal to the neutral objective reader who seekd the Truth about Isalm
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