The Texture Of The Divine

The Texture of the Divine explores the central role of the imagination in the shared symbolic worlds of medieval Islam and Judaism. Aaron W. Hughes looks closely at three interrelated texts known as the Hayy ibn Yaqzan cycle (dating roughly from 1000--1200 CE) to reveal the interconnections not only between Muslims and Jews, but also between philosophy, mysticism, and literature. Each of the texts is an initiatory tale, recounting a journey through the ascending layers of the universe. These narratives culminate in the imaginative apprehension of God, in which the traveler gazes into the divine presence. The tales are beautiful and poetic literary works as well as probing philosophical treatises on how the individual can know the unknowable. In this groundbreaking work, Hughes reveals the literary, initiatory, ritualistic, and mystical dimensions of medieval Neoplatonism. The Texture of the Divine also includes the first complete English translation of Abraham Ibn Ezra's Hay ben Meqitz.

In this book Vernon K. Robbins provides an accessible introduction to socio-rhetorical criticism, illustrating the method by guiding the reader through the study of specific New Testament texts and stories. An opening chapter outlines this new approach and its focus on values, convictions, and beliefs both in the text we read and in the world in which we live. Then follow studies and exercises dealing with specific textural features: inner texture, intertexture, social and cultural texture, ideological texture, and sacred texture.

This book reveals how Moses ibn Ezra, Judah Halevi, Moses Maimonides, and Shem Tov ibn Falaquera understood metaphor and imagination, and their role in the way human beings describe God. It demonstrates how these medieval Jewish thinkers engaged with Arabic-Aristotelian psychology, specifically with regard to imagination and its role in cognition. Dianna Lynn Roberts-Zauderer reconstructs the process by which metaphoric language is taken up by the imagination and the role of imagination in rational thought. If imagination is a necessary component of thinking, how is Maimonides’ idea of pure intellectual thought possible? An examination of select passages in the Guide, in both Judeo-Arabic and translation, shows how Maimonides’ attitude towards imagination develops, and how translations contribute to a bifurcation of reason and imagination that does not acknowledge the nuances of the original text. Finally, the author shows how Falaquera’s poetics forges a new direction for thinking about imagination.

1. Symbiosis: rethinking a paradigm -- 2. Origins -- 3. Messianism in the shadows -- 4. The manufacture of Orthodoxy -- 5. Et in Arcadia ego -- 6. Re-frame -- Conclusion: Two solitudes

Enrich your spiritual experience of Shabbat by exploring the writings of mystical masters of Hasidism. Drawing from some of the earliest teachings in the family of the Ba'al Shem Tov through late 19th-century Poland and the homilies of the Sefat 'Emet, Eitan Fishbane evokes the Sabbath experience, from candle lighting and donning white clothing to the Friday night Kiddush and the act of sacred eating.

Most scholars link the origin of politics to the formation of human societies, but in this innovative work, Tilo Schabert takes it even further back: to our very births. Drawing on mythical, philosophical, religious, and political thought from around the globe—including America, Europe, the Middle East, and China—The Second Birth proposes a transhistorical and transcultural theory of politics rooted in political cosmology. With impressive erudition, Schabert explores the physical fundamentals of political life, unveiling a profound new insight: our bodies actually teach us politics. Schabert traces different figurations of power inherent to our singular existence, things such as numbers, time, thought, and desire, showing how they render our lives political ones—and, thus, how politics exists in us individually, long before it plays a role in the establishment of societies and institutions. Through these figurations of power, Schabert argues, we learn how to institute our own government within the political forces that already surround us—to create our own world within the one into which we have been born. In a stunning vision of human agency, this book ultimately sketches a political cosmos in which we are all builders, in which we can be at once political and free.

Analyzes the place of beauty in the Sufi understanding of God, the world, and the human being through the writings of Sufi scholar and saint Rūzbihān Baqlī. According to Muhammad, “God is beautiful and He loves beauty.” Yet, Islam is rarely associated with beauty, and today, a politicized Islam dominates many perceptions. This work tells a forgotten story of beauty in Islam through the writings of celebrated but little-studied Sufi scholar and saint Rūzbihān Baqlī (1128–1209). Rūzbihān argued that the pursuit of beauty in the world and in oneself was the goal of Muslim life. One should become beautiful in imitation of God and reclaim the innate human nature created in God’s beautiful image. Rūzbihān’s theory of beauty is little known, largely because of his convoluted style and eccentric terminology in both Persian and Arabic. In this book, Kazuyo Murata revives Rūzbihān’s ideas for modern readers. She provides an overview of Muslim discourse on beauty before Rūzbihān’s time; an analysis of key terms related to beauty in the Qur’ān, Ḥadīth, and in Rūzbihān’s writings; a reconstruction of Rūzbihān’s understanding of divine, cosmic, and human beauty; and a discussion of what he regards as the pinnacle of beauty in creation, the prophets, especially Adam, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, and Muhammad. Kazuyo Murata is Lecturer in Islamic Studies at King’s College London and coeditor (with Mohammed Rustom and Atif Khalil) of In Search of the Lost Heart: Explorations in Islamic Thought by William C. Chittick, also published by SUNY Press.