Stanford's Özgen Felek investigates the power of dreams in Sufism || Stanford University

Every night when the 16th-century Ottoman ruler Sultan Murad III went to bed, he looked forward not just to rest, but also to the guidance he would find in his dreams. In the morning, Murad, the grandson of Suleiman the Magnificent, reported his dreams to his Sufi – a mystical Islamic master who interpreted and transcribed the signs and symbols to help the sultan make decisions about his empire and his personal progress.

One night while dreaming of a boy with “a bejeweled crown on his head,” the sultan reported hearing a voice in his dream that said, “It is not a boy, it is the religion of Muhammad and the religion of Islam; it is the religion of Muhammad.”

Hundreds of dream narrations like this were eventually compiled into a bound manuscript that established the ruler not only as a religious leader but also as an important authority figure.

To this day, Islamic mysticism places a great emphasis on the significance of dreams as windows into the dreamer’s soul. The mystics also believed that dreams, and even visions that happen when one is awake, correspond to real-world scenarios. While many modern historians write off dreams as fiction, Muslim populations understood the interpretation of these dreams as ways in which to achieve “orientation in a world that would otherwise be experienced in chaos,” according to Stanford scholar Özgen Felek.

The research of Felek, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Religious Studies at Stanford, has shed new light on Ottoman dream culture and Sufism. Her international investigation of archival documents has yielded new perspectives on the spiritual progress of important figures in Ottoman history.

“For Ottoman chroniclers and their audiences, dreams were as real as historical events. But, for some Sufis, dreams were particularly significant for each disciple’s individual progress,” said Felek.

For example, in the Khalwatiyya order of the Sufi tradition, if one’s dreams featured elephants and camels or the color blue, the individual’s soul was in the first stage or “Nafs-i Ammara” (the Soul/Self that Dictates Evil), which indicated that the soul was still dominated by earthy desires and passions.

Felek, co-editor (with Alexander D. Knysh) of the recently published book, *Dreams and Visions in Islamic Societies* (SUNY Press), is studying how Sultan Murad III’s portrayal of himself in dreams established him as a universal Islamic ruler and an accomplished Sufi.

Felek, inspired by the rich descriptions of the dreams, is also painting a series of miniatures that illustrate some of their themes.

Read More

Tumblr: Truth About Muslims

Weirdest tumblr of the week.

Posting again, since I think everyone needs to see this.

Imam Khalid Latif: How does religion change? || BBC [AUDIO]

Heart and Soul: Absolving the Past

Religion is in a special bind. It must represent the eternal.

But how does a world religion grapple with the fact that, throughout its history, important beliefs or practices have become obsolete?

In this two-part series, Imam for the Islamic Centre at New York University Khalid Latif, addresses religion as a difficult learning process with believers and leading theological thinkers.

Using historic and contemporary examples, the Imam examines how religions revise, update or even apologise.

In part one Khalid examines Islam, comparing its early history with its place in the modern world, while considering the tension between fundamentalists and reformists.

At the conclusion, the Imam searches for commonalities among each case of religious renovation while considering examples within Hinduism and Buddhism.

Paradoxes of "Religious Freedom" in Egypt || Jadaliyya

the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) has backed away from earlier calls for an “Islamic state.” Its 2011 election platform opts instead to promote the sharia as a “frame of reference. ” Working hard to assuage anxieties both at home and abroad, the Party explicitly calls for a “civil state” and repeatedly stresses the importance of equality of citizenship among Muslims and Christians:

Egyptians, Muslims and Christians, are integral parts of the fabric of the one homeland, with equal rights and duties, and without distinction or discrimination, and all together they must remove the injustice inflicted upon them.

Yet the FJP operationalizes this commitment to equal citizenship and religious freedom by declaring further that, “the basis of citizenship is full equality before the Constitution and the law and fully sharing all rights and duties, with the exemption of personal status matters where ‘each has his own rules’” (emphasis added). Elsewhere in the FJP platform, the party reiterates its position that “non-Muslims have the right to refer to their own rules and laws in the fields of family and religious affairs.”

As benign as this aspect of the FJP platform may sound, provisions guaranteeing “special rights” for different religious communities often carry illiberal implications when codified as state law. But the presumed alternative—banishing religious law through strict secularism—is also not an unqualified good. It imposes restrictions on “religious freedom” in another way, by disempowering citizens from entering into legal arrangements inspired by their own religious commitments. This paradox of religious freedom—the difficulty of reconciling the individual’s right from religion, while providing for the right to religious law is a paradox rooted in the modern state’s capacity and proclivity to codify and monopolize law. And, ironically, it is not modern state law but the Islamic legal tradition itself that may point the way out of this impasse.

Read More

Marital Delights: Beyond the Discourse of Rights || goatmilk

Ours is a religion of practicality that contains the concept that “no soul is given a burden greater than it can bear.” People in situations of hardships are regularly given a concession…but rarely do we free people of the obligation on the account of a minority that cannot, for whatever reason, fulfill it.

Why is it then that paying a wife’s medical bills instead elicits lengthy (and defensive) arguments from medieval fiqh texts, some of which conclude that, literally, food and shelter is what is mentioned in Quran and therefore it is not his obligation? This explains why the devaluation of contemporary tafasir or contemporary vocabulary in traditionalist circles is problematic. We find that relying solely upon medieval texts results in a definition of marriage as the “purchasing of a woman’s private parts.” This application of opinions from a different social context has resulted in well-meaning scholars resurrecting another opinion as a sort of feminist counterargument: that a man should provide a housekeeper or pay her wages to do housework! We are even seeing the notion that a woman should receive wages for breastfeeding her own child crop up, even though I know of no woman who would accept such a wage. Ironically, when women jump on board with these opinions they are contributing to a paring down of the definition of female marital duties to that of a sex provider, thus reinforcing the conception of another era.

The more hard-hearted among the laymen have taken with gusto to the idea that a man is not responsible for his wife’s medical bills. Is this the end of muruwwa (chivalry)? Should fiqh be divorced from ethics? It dawned on me as my husband and I discussed divorce in his native country. He stated that it was normal for a man to allow his irrevocably divorced wife to keep all the furniture in the house, indeed to keep the house itself. ‘But isn’t she not entitled to anything according to Islamic law,?’ I asked. He stated (quite uncontroversially) that yes, according to the law, but not according to muruwwa.

The law is concerned with explicating the bare minimum of what is due between husband and wife in terms of rights. It is not a field of counseling and not a field of spiritual tazkiya. While it may be better for a man to forfeit some of his property, it is not legally required. But in the fatwa-based discourse of modern Islam, we seem to be highly preoccupied with what the court of law can extract from us, not what a sense of higher ethics would demand.

In truth, most men will pay their wife’s medical bills without blinking an eye. In truth, most women could not conceive of being paid for what seems to be their natural duty to feed their child and cook some meals here and there. So why are we making a controversy out of nothing?

Read More

The Tragic Transformation of Mecca || ILLUME Magazine

I will always post articles on this. ALWAYS.

I wish there was more outrage on this in my community rather than can-we-still-consider-a-girl-a-good-Muslimah-if-she-takes-off-her-hijab-debates

AP wins Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting on NYPD surveillance

Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Chris Hawley and Eileen Sullivan of The Associated Press today were named winners of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for their months-long series outlining the New York Police Department’s surveillance of minority and particularly Muslim neighborhoods since the 9/11 terror attacks.
 
In addition, the AP had finalists in two other Pulitzer categories, Feature Photography and National Reporting.
 
The Pulitzer Prizes are the most prestigious honors in journalism.
 
The NYPD stories revealed that the department had become one of the nation’s most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies, sending undercover officers into minority neighborhoods, student groups and houses of worship, though there was no indication they harbored criminals or terrorists.
 
In documenting the extent of the NYPD’s undercover operations, conducted with the advice and guidance of the CIA, the AP team’s stories ignited ongoing debate in the halls of government, in the ethnic communities, on editorial pages and across the Web.
 
“We’re especially gratified by this award, which recognizes the deep digging of our reporters on a story of vital interest,” said AP President and CEO Tom Curley. “The AP series has set off a healthy, important and timely debate on what tactics government can or should use to prevent another terrorist attack on the United States.”

Curley added: “No matter where you come down on the merits of this issue, one thing is clear: the public is better off knowing what methods its government is up to in the name of keeping people safe. A vigorous and strong free press is essential to helping inform the debate, especially when civil liberties are at stake.”
 
The Pulitzer Prize board honored the AP for NYPD stories written in 2011. The investigative series, begun last August, has continued in 2012. The stories can be read at www.AP.org/nypd.