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300 pages

English

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In Search of the Lost Heart brings together twenty-six essays by William C. Chittick, renowned scholar of Sufism and Islamic philosophy. Written between 1975 and 2011, most of these essays are not readily available in Chittick's own books. Although this is a collection, its editors have crafted it to be a book "sufficient unto itself, which, when taken as a whole, can be said to explore the underlying worldview of Islam."

Chittick draws upon the writings of towering figures such as Ibn al-'Arabī, Rūmī, and Mullā Ṣadrā, as well as other important, but lesser-known thinkers, as he engages with a wide variety of topics, such as the nature of being and knowledge, the relationship between love and scriptural hermeneutics, the practical and theoretical dimensions of Islamic mysticism, the phenomenon of religious diversity, and the ecological crisis.
A Note on Transliteration and Style

Editors’ Introduction

Part I. Sufism and the Islamic Tradition

1. Islam in Three Dimensions

2. The Bodily Gestures of the Şalāt

3. Weeping in Islam and the Sufi Tradition

4. A Shādhilī Presence in Shi‘ite Islam

5. The Pluralistic Vision of Persian Sufi Poetry

6. The Real Shams-i Tabrīzī

7. The Koran as the Lover’s Mirror

Part II. Ibn al-‘Arabī and His Influence

8. A History of the Term Wahdat al-Wujūd

9. The Question of Ibn al-‘Arabī’s “Influence” on Rūmī

10. Ibn al-‘Arabī on the Benefit of Knowledge

11. Qūnawī, Neoplatonism, and the Circle of Ascent

12. Farghānī on Oneness and Manyness

13. Jāmī on the Perfect Man

14. Two Treatises by Khwāja Khurd

15. A Debate Between the Soul and the Spirit

16. A Sufi Handbook from Bijapur

Part III. Islamic Philosophy

17. Rūmī and the Wooden Leg of Reason

18. Bābā Afdal’s Psychology

19. Mullā Şadrā on Perception

20. Eschatology in Islamic Thought

21. The Circle of Life

22. The Goal of Philosophy

Part IV. Reflections on Contemporary Issues

23. The Metaphysical Roots of War and Peace

24. Harmony with the Cosmos

25. Stray Camels in China

26. In Search of the Lost Heart

Appendix I: Chronological List of Historical Figures Cited

Appendix II: Chapter Sources

Appendix III: Books by William C. Chittick

Notes
Bibliography
Index of Koranic Passages
Index of Hadiths and Sayings
General Index

Sujets

Theology

Islam

Informations

Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	15 février 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438439372
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1748€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

In Search of the
Lost Heart
In Search of the
Lost Heart
Explorations in Islamic Thought
WILLIAM C. CHITTICK
Edited by
Mohammed Rustom, Atif Khalil, and Kazuyo Murata
Cover art by Haji Noor Deen.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2012 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Kelli W. LeRoux Marketing by Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chittick, William C.
In search of the lost heart : explorations in Islamic thought / William C. Chittick ; edited by Mohammed Rustom, Atif Khalil, and Kazuyo Murata.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3935-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Sufism.   2. Mysticism—Islam.   3. Islam—Doctrines.   I. Rustom, Mohammed.   II. Khalil, Atif.   III. Murata, Kazuyo.   IV. Title.
BP189.C53 2011 297.4'1—dc22

2011006365

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedicated to the memory of Omer Fereig (1979–2008)
Contents
A Note on Transliteration and Style
Editors’ Introduction
I  Sufism and the Islamic Tradition
1.    Islam in Three Dimensions
2.    The Bodily Gestures of the Ṣalāt
3.    Weeping in Islam and the Sufi Tradition
4.    A Sh ādhilī Presence in Shiʿite Islam
5.    The Pluralistic Vision of Persian Sufi Poetry
6.    The Real Shams-i Tabrīzī
7.    The Koran as the Lover’s Mirror
II  Ibn al-ʿArabī and His Influence
8.    A History of the Term Waḥdat al-Wujūd
9.    The Question of Ibn al-ʿArabī ’s “Influence” on Rūmī
10.  Ibn al- ʿArabī on the Benefit of Knowledge
11.   Qūnawī , Neoplatonism, and the Circle of Ascent
12.   Farghānī on Oneness and Manyness
13.   Jāmī on the Perfect Man
14.  Two Treatises by Khwāja Khurd
15.  A Debate Between the Soul and the Spirit
16.  A Chishtī Handbook from Bijapur
III  Islamic Philosophy
17.   Rūmī and the Wooden Leg of Reason
18.   Bābā Afḍal’s Psychology
19.   Mullā Ṣadrā on Perception
20.  Eschatology in Islamic Thought
21.  The Circle of Life
22.  The Goal of Philosophy
IV  Reflections on Contemporary Issues
23.  The Metaphysical Roots of War and Peace
24.  Harmony with the Cosmos
25.  Stray Camels in China
26.  In Search of the Lost Heart
Appendix I: A Chronological List of Historical Figures Cited
Appendix II: Chapter Sources
Appendix III: Books by William C. Chittick
Notes
Bibliography
Index of Koranic Passages
Index of Hadiths and Sayings
Index of Names and Technical Terms
A Note on Transliteration and Style
Arabic and Persian terms have been transliterated in accordance with the system employed by the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies ( IJMES ), with the following major exceptions: (1) no distinction is made in transliterating consonants shared between Arabic and Persian; (2) complete transliterations of book and article titles have been retained throughout; (3) in contexts where transliteration is not an absolute necessity (i.e., book/article titles and technical expressions), certain terms that appear on the IJMES word list, namely hajj, imam, kalām, qibla , Qurʾan , shahāda , shariʿa, Shiʿi , sunna, ṭarīqah , and ʿulamaʾ , appear here as Hajj, Imam, Kalam, kiblah, Koran, Shahadah, Shariah, Shiʿite , Sunnah, Tariqah, and ulama respectively; (4) in several special cases (e.g., when paired with the word Koran), the term hadith appears as Hadith.
Grammar and punctuation has been standardized in accordance with Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.). The bibliographical format for references in this book closely follows the Chicago Manual of Style (15th ed.), with some minor adaptations. With the exception of the “Editors’ Introduction,” a shorthand citation method has been adopted in the volume’s notes.
Editors’ Introduction
William C. Chittick was born in Milford, Connecticut in 1943. As an undergraduate student majoring in history at the College of Wooster (Ohio), Chittick spent the 1964–1965 academic year abroad, studying Islamic history at the American University of Beirut. It was here that he first came into contact with Sufism, as he decided to write his junior year independent study on the topic. Having become familiar with the standard accounts of Sufism, Chittick attended a public lecture on the topic by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who was the University’s Agha Khan Visiting Professor that year. Nasr’s lecture deepened Chittick’s interest in Sufism to the point that he eventually resolved to pursue graduate studies in Tehran.
Chittick began his graduate work in the foreign students program at the University of Tehran’s Faculty of Letters in 1966. In 1974, he obtained a doctoral degree in Persian language and literature under Nasr’s supervision. Chittick then began teaching comparative religion at Aryamehr Technical University (now Sharif University of Technology) and, in 1978, joined the faculty of the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy (now the Iranian Institute of Philosophy). Shortly before the revolution in 1979, he returned with his wife, Sachiko Murata, to the United States. In the early 1980s, Chittick served as an associate editor for Encyclopaedia Iranica . In 1983, he and Murata took up posts at the State University of New York (Stony Brook), where they are currently full professors in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies.
During his long stay in Tehran, Chittick studied under and/or collaborated with some of the most distinguished scholars of Islamic thought: Jalāl al-Dīn Āshtiyānī , Henry Corbin, Toshihiko Izutsu, Badīʿ al-Zamān Furūzānfar, Jalāl al-Dīn Humāʾī , Mehdi Mohaghegh, and ʿAllāma Sayyid Muḥammad Ḥusayn Ṭabāṭabāʾī . Suffice it to say that Chittick’s prolonged contact with these and other scholars has provided him with a unique appreciation and grasp of classical Arabic and Persian on the one hand, and a variety of medieval Islamic philosophical, theological, and mystical texts on the other.
In addition to his academic training, Chittick is a highly skilled translator who possesses a rigorous analytical mind and a rare ability to explain some of the most difficult ideas in a remarkably lucid manner. This helps explain why his works have had such wide appeal among students of Islamic civilization, comparative philosophy, and religious studies, and have been translated into Albanian, Arabic, Bosnian, Chinese, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Urdu.
Beyond North American and European academia, Chittick’s books have also been well-received by Muslim communities in the West. 1 In the East, his works are taught and discussed in Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, India, and, of course, Iran, where his Me & Rumi (2004) was awarded the World Prize for the Book of the Year in 2005, and was named the best work in the field of Iranian Studies. More recently, a Tehran-based cultural society paid tribute to Chittick’s scholarly achievements by holding a ceremony and publishing a festschrift in his honor. 2
It would be an understatement to say that Chittick’s scholarship has brought the ideas of a number of Islam’s most significant intellectual and spiritual figures out of relative obscurity. In The Heart of Islamic Philosophy (2001), he highlights the central concerns of the Islamic philosophical tradition through his study of the writings of Afḍal al-Dīn Kāshānī (commonly known as Bābā Afḍal ). The book also goes a long way toward demonstrating how Bābā Afḍal molded the Persian language in order to convey the practical concerns of philosophy to those who did not have specialized training in the discipline. Chittick’s The Sufi Path of Love (1983) and award-winning The Sufi Doctrine of Rumi (1974; 2005) are arguably the best expositions of Rūmī ’s worldview to date. They also stand as correctives to the widespread misinformation about the teachings and even “religion” of this spiritual giant of Islam.
It may come as a surprise to many that, along with Sachiko Murata and Tu Weiming, Chittick has recently published a book on Chinese Sufism entitled The Sage Learning of Liu Zhi (2009). This important work investigates the cross-pollination that took place between Neo-Confucian thought and Sufism in the figure of Liu Zhi (or Liu Chih), one of the two important Chinese Muslim thinkers introduced by Murata in an earlier study. 3
Chittick’s works on Ibn al-ʿArabī , such as The Sufi Path of Knowledge (1989) and The Self-Disclosure of God (1998), have shed a great deal of light on some of the fundamental metaphysical and practical teachings that have influenced over seven hundred years of Islamic thought from North Africa to Malaysia. Indeed, Ibn al-ʿArabī ’s writings are just as if not more relevant today, which is why a number of prominent thinkers have drawn on his ideas in developing responses to a variety of pressing contemporary issues, such as the question of the religious “other.” 4

Students of Islamic thought are, in one way or another, indebted to Chittick’s writings. Needless to say, the editors of this volume are no exception. His works have greatly assisted us in navigating our way about the often bumpy terrain of Islamic thought. Over the years we have found that, apart from Chittick’s books, many of his most helpful studies can only be found in journals, festschrifts, collective volumes, encyclopedias, and the like. Unlike his books, many of these works are not easily accessible to scholars and students, let alone the wider public.
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