Sufi whirling

Islamic dervish and Sufi culture, norms and mores pervade Letters from a Kurd and this presence importunes for elaboration. Dervishism is a derivative of Sufi Islam mysticism, which Funk & Wagnall’s New World Encyclopedia characterizes as what that “arose out of various influences, among them a mystical overtone in some teachings of Muhammad” (Funk &Wagnalls,”Sufism”). Dervishism is both intricate and nuanced as a subsidiary of a subdivision. As a chiefly monastic order, these luminaries sought to

1. Who was Muhammad? According to a Britannica article by Annemarie Schimmel, Muhammad is the last of a series of prophets, according to the Islam religion. He is considered the messenger of Allah who was given the words to write the Qur'an from Allah through the angel Gabriel (Schimmel, 2016). 2. How is the Qur’an structured? When is Ramadan observed? The Qur’an has 114 chapters describing different aspects of life including God, Satan, Heaven, Hell, social justice, humanity, and so forth etc

controversial nature of the subject of Sufism becomes evident when one realizes that this short introduction already reveals a viewpoint which the Sufi would strongly disagree with. For, if the Sufi spiritual quest is to be viewed

conscious of the intricate details of being alive. I can be sitting among a huge crowd outside the king’s palace in Fez, Morocco, and unexpectedly become aware of the individual currents of blood flowing through my veins as I become entranced by the Whirling Dervishes. I can be standing on a beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama, staring aimlessly into the ocean, and experiencing an intense sense of longing and painful separation caused by leaving a country and people I had come to adore and love. I could

As an observant Jewish individual I wanted to take this course to not only deepen my understanding of other religions and cultures, but also be given the opportunity to step outside what I have always known and accepted as “truth.” In particular, I found myself gravitating toward the religion of Islam, for reasons that were personal and social. First, it is hard to ignore what is shown everyday through media and every day life. If one were to believe only what they read or heard, it would be easy

In “A Silk Road Legacy: The Spread of Buddhism and Islam” by Xinru Liu of the College of New Jersey, Journal of World History 22 (March 2011): 55-73, she examines the religious and social lives of the Central Asian peoples, both before and after the Islamic occupation between 700 and 1100 CE, despite the difficulties of finding reliable data due to an “extremely fluid nature of the region’s ethnic, religious, and political composition”. Xinru, a peasant girl that worked her way through factory life

To counteract this growing influence, the Ottomans appointed a rival Sufi group, the Bektasi, to become the official order of janissary soldiers who captured Byzantine cities throughout Anatolia.1 In 1453, the Ottomans captured Constantinople and renamed it Istanbul.? This victory allowed the Ottomans to consolidate

Music and religion are often intertwined, whether it be religious chanting or hymns used to worship. However, in the case of Islam, the relationship between religion and music is more strained, as Islamic law strictly forbids listening to music. However, there is a very strong religious debate on what constitutes music as diversion and what is acceptable to use in worship and religious purposes. There are two concepts in Islam which are relevant to this conversation: sama and ghina. The ghina

Born in Qazvin, the third religious city in Iran, in 1957, Shirin Neshat was sent to the United States at the age of 17, to study art at the UC Berkley. Her father was a physician, who under the influence of the westernization- the fashionable idea of the era- and rejecting all the traditional values, sent his children abroad to continue their studies. After receiving her MFA in painting, willing to learn more about the western art, Neshat moved to New York, attended many art classes and artists

Many people who live on Earth are close minded to what is really out there in the universe. They cannot even begin to fathom the vastness of it and how Earth is just a tiny little speck compared to everything else out there. From the planets to the stars and out towards the edge of the unknown, we can only see what science provides us with. From this, we know that we are nothing but a tiny planet located in a solar system of millions in a galaxy of many more in the universe. A galaxy, also called