Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
- Publication
- Publication Type
Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Islamic Studies
On Types Of Certainty: From Buddhism To Islam And Beyond, Michael Chase
On Types Of Certainty: From Buddhism To Islam And Beyond, Michael Chase
Comparative Philosophy
Studies the threefold hierarchy of certainty, from its origins in Mahāyāna Buddhism, through Islam, to 17th century China. This tripartite scheme may be traced back to the ancient Buddhist scheme of the threefold wisdom as systematized by Vasubandhu of Gandhāra in the 4th-5th centuries CE. Following the advent of Islam in the 8th century, it was combined with Qur'anic notions of certainty (al-yaqīn). Initially taken up by early Islamic mystics such as Sahl al-Tustarī and al-Ḥākim al-Tirmiḏī (late 9th-early 10th centuries), the notion of yaqīn was gradually systematized into the three-level hierarchy of “knowledge or science of …
“Whenever We Crossed A Mountain / On This Earth, Yet Another One Appeared”: Circumstantial Poetry In ʿAbd Al-Ghanī Al-Nābulusī’S (D. 1143/1731) Travelogues, Tom J. Abi Samra
“Whenever We Crossed A Mountain / On This Earth, Yet Another One Appeared”: Circumstantial Poetry In ʿAbd Al-Ghanī Al-Nābulusī’S (D. 1143/1731) Travelogues, Tom J. Abi Samra
Comparative Literature M.A. Essays
This essay identifies an early modern aesthetic that mobilizes the mundane to make a point about the world or the grandiose. Through a close reading of the poetry in the travelogues of the 17th-century Ottoman Damascene scholar ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1143/1731), this essay identifies, theorizes, and historicizes early modern Arabic circumstantial verse—what the 19th-century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé calls vers de circonstance. By drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “chronotope,” this essay shows how the poetry in Nābulusī’s travelogues fits within, and sometimes advances, their linear narrative. If poetry is expected to transcend the chronotope in which …
For The Birds: The Mystery Of God’S Grace Through Attar’S The Conference Of The Birds, Matthew David Alvarado
For The Birds: The Mystery Of God’S Grace Through Attar’S The Conference Of The Birds, Matthew David Alvarado
Senior Projects Spring 2022
As a lover of Birds, I have a fascination with Attar of Nishapur's The Conference of the Birds, and what the poet's lyrical work says about Sufi theology. Questions of death, the afterlife, obliteration of the self in the presence of free will and predestination, all through the story of one hundred thousand birds as well as the fall of Iblis. What is God's grace and how does the death of Attar add value to the words he wrote? I explore how the nature of God as the unveiled Beloved plays into these questions and the essential contradictions that underpin …