Against the sweeping backdrop of South Asian history, this is a story of journeys taken by sixteenth-century reformist Muslim scholars and Sufi mystics from India to Arabia. At the center is the ...influential Sufi scholar Shaykh Ali Muttaqi and his little-known network of disciples. Scott Kugle relates how Ali Muttaqi, an expert in Arabic, scriptural hermeneutics, and hadith, left his native South Asia and traversed treacherous seas to make the Hajj to Mecca. Settling in Mecca, he continued to influence his homeland from overseas. Kugle draws on his original translations of Arabic and Persian manuscripts, never before available in English, to trace Ali Muttaqi's devotional writings, revealing how the Hajj transformed his spiritual life and political loyalties. The story expands across three generations of peripatetic Sufi masters in the Mutaqqi lineage as they travel for purposes of pilgrimage, scholarship, and sometimes simply for survival along Indian Ocean maritime routes linking global Muslim communities. Exploring the political intrigue, scholarly debates, and diverse social milieus that shaped the colorful personalities of his Sufi subjects, Kugle argues for the importance of Indian Sufi thought in the study of hadith and of ethics in Islam. We are proud to announce that this book is freely available in an open-access enhanced edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of Emory University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Learn more at the TOME website: openmonographs.org. The open-access enhanced edition of Hajj to the Heart can be found here: https://manifold.ecds.emory.edu/projects/hajj-to-the-heart
Against the sweeping backdrop of South Asian history, this is a story of journeys taken by sixteenth-century reformist Muslim scholars and Sufi mystics from India to Arabia. At the center is the ...influential Sufi scholar Shaykh Ali Muttaqi and his little-known network of disciples. Scott Kugle relates how Ali Muttaqi, an expert in Arabic, scriptural hermeneutics, and hadith, left his native South Asia and traversed treacherous seas to make the Hajj to Mecca. Settling in Mecca, he continued to influence his homeland from overseas. Kugle draws on his original translations of Arabic and Persian manuscripts, never before available in English, to trace Ali Muttaqi's devotional writings, revealing how the Hajj transformed his spiritual life and political loyalties.The story expands across three generations of peripatetic Sufi masters in the Mutaqqi lineage as they travel for purposes of pilgrimage, scholarship, and sometimes simply for survival along Indian Ocean maritime routes linking global Muslim communities. Exploring the political intrigue, scholarly debates, and diverse social milieus that shaped the colorful personalities of his Sufi subjects, Kugle argues for the importance of Indian Sufi thought in the study of hadith and of ethics in Islam.We are proud to announce that this book is freely available in an open-access enhanced edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of Emory University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Learn more at the TOME website: openmonographs.org.The open-access enhanced edition of Hajj to the Heart can be found here: https://manifold.ecds.emory.edu/projects/hajj-to-the-heart
The two Muslim poets featured in Scott Kugle's comparative study lived separate lives during the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries in the Deccan region of southern India. Here, they meet in ...the realm of literary imagination, illuminating the complexity of gender, sexuality, and religious practice in South Asian Islamic culture. Shah Siraj Awrangabadi (1715-1763), known as "Sun," was a Sunni who, after a youthful homosexual love affair, gave up sexual relationships to follow a path of personal holiness. Mah Laqa Bai Chanda (1768-1820), known as "Moon," was a Shi'i and courtesan dancer who transferred her seduction of men to the pursuit of mystical love. Both were poets in the Urdu language of the ghazal, or love lyric, often fusing a spiritual quest with erotic imagery.Kugle argues that Sun and Moon expressed through their poetry exceptions to the general rules of heteronormativity and gender inequality common in their patriarchal societies. Their art provides a lens for a more subtle understanding of both the reach and the limitations of gender roles in Islamic and South Asian culture and underscores how the arts of poetry, music, and dance are integral to Islamic religious life. Integrated throughout are Kugle's translations of Urdu and Persian poetry previously unavailable in English.
Islam is often described as abstract, ascetic, and uniquely disengaged from the human body. Scott Kugle refutes this assertion in the first full study of Islamic mysticism as it relates to the human ...body. Examining Sufi conceptions of the body in religious writings from the late fifteenth through the nineteenth century, Kugle demonstrates that literature from this era often treated saints' physical bodies as sites of sacred power. Sufis and Saints' Bodies focuses on six important saints from Sufi communities in North Africa and South Asia. Kugle singles out a specific part of the body to which each saint is frequently associated in religious literature. The saints' bodies, Kugle argues, are treated as symbolic resources for generating religious meaning, communal solidarity, and the experience of sacred power. In each chapter, Kugle also features a particular theoretical problem, drawing methodologically from religious studies, anthropology, studies of gender and sexuality, theology, feminism, and philosophy. Bringing a new perspective to Islamic studies, Kugle shows how an important Islamic tradition integrated myriad understandings of the body in its nurturing role in the material, social, and spiritual realms.
Some twentieth-century interpreters assert that the Qurʾan forbids same-sex female intercourse. Neo-traditional Shiʿi and Sunni interpreters converge on this point, even as they diverge from their ...respective traditions in tafsir, innovate in interpretive strategies, and ignore Arabic grammar. Their assertions raise questions about the nature of the Qurʾan, methods of interpreting it, and its status as scripture in contradistinction to hadith and opinion of early authorities. This article compares neo-traditional interpretation of Qurʾan 4:15-16 by Ayatollah Khui and Rashid Rida with a range of tafsir texts to reveal the contradictions between answers offered by a variety of scholars, modern and medieval, female and male, Shiʿi and Sunni.
This book builds a case for Muslim same-sex unions for the fulfillment of gay and lesbian Muslims' human need for intimacy, affection, and companionship. In constructing this case, the book ...extensively engages with the Muslim tradition, drawing on the Qur'an, Hadith, and jurisprudence as well as contemporary scholarship.
The story of an Indian king's conversion to Islam by the prophet Muhammad and of the subsequent foundation by Arab Muslims of communities and mosques across the sovereign's former dominion in Kerala ...appears in various Arabic and Malayalam literary iterations. The most remarkable among them is the Qiṣṣat Shakarwatī Farmāḍ. This legend of community origins is here translated from the Arabic in full for the first time. Historians have dealt with such origin stories by transmitting them at face value, rejecting their historicity, or sifting them for kernels of historical truth. The comparative approach adopted here instead juxtaposes the Qiṣṣa with a Malayalam folksong and other Indian Ocean narratives of conversion as related in medieval Arabic travel literature to reveal underlying archetypes of just or enlightened kings as sponsors of community. The legend emerges as a crucial primary source for the constitution and self-definition of Islam in Kerala and for the discursive claims of this community vis-à-vis others.
In each final couplet of her ghazals, Mah Laqa Bai declares her loving submission to ʿAli and the Shiʿi imams in innovative, charming, and audacious ways. These couplets are a characteristic feature ...of her poetry that indicate that she was not merely a courtesan but also a devoted Shiʿi woman. Her ghazals have an element of spirituality and mysticism, despite her secular profession that might seem lascivious. The previous chapter argued that the male gaze helped create Mah Laqa Bai’s personality; she both was formed by it and manipulated it to her own advantage. This is true in her poetry,
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