Richard McGregor

Relics can be found in every era of Islamic history, throughout the Islamic world. In line with other religious traditions of the Near East, the Qur'an mentions several objects endowed with special power (e.g., Joseph's coat, the Ark of the Covenant). The earliest Islamic literature, preserving the life and mission of Muḥammad, presents details of several revered objects. These include objects handed down from pre-Islamic prophets as well as the discards of Muḥammad's person, including clothing, weapons, and hair. Saintly figures, descendants of the Prophet, and his companions have also been sources for relics. Relics are displayed and venerated in devotional contexts such as shrines, tombs, mosques, madrasas, and museums. Relics have been paraded on special occasions such as the festival days of the Muslim calendar, in medieval protest marches, as part of the rituals for relief from drought, and as talismans in battle. Despite the occasional objection from austere doctors of law, devotion to relics has remained commonplace. While a full inventory is impossible, five categories may be proposed for the Islamic relic: (a) Bodily relics include the blood of martyrs, hair, and fingernail parings. Shrines have been built over severed heads-the most famous being that of Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī (d. 680). (b) Contact relics, having collected the baraka (blessing) of their one-time owners, pass those blessings on to any pilgrim who touches them. Several staffs, lances, bows, shields, turbans, cloaks, and sandals attributed to the Prophet have been preserved, some of which were presented as symbols of authority in the early caliphate. (c) Impressions in stone made by feet, hands, fingers, posteriors, and even hooves are preserved. Muḥammad's footprints saw a brisk trade in the medieval period, and his sandal inspired a minor tradition of devotional iconography first in manuscript copies and later in modern mass production. (d) Inanimate objects, miraculously endowed with speech or locomotion, constitute a fourth category. These animated relics could be speaking stones or moving trees, particularly in the sacred topographies of Medina and Mecca. (e) Many revered places which were the site of important events have been marked off and preserved. More than commemorations, these "stage relics" anchored sacred history and holy bodies in the landscape. The location of Muḥammad's birthplace in Mecca was until recently a revered stage relic.

Illuminates the central role of virtue in the evolution of a Sufi visionary practice. Beyond the classical and medieval Sufi masters, these explorations draw upon insights from modern philosophy, particularly theories of the sublime and virtue ethics as developed in the latter half of the twentieth century. This shows how vision and ethics have been woven together through the Sufi understanding of the structure of the self and the nature of the divine Other, a connection the equivalent of which has yet to be found in modern philosophy.

Takes animals as a site for religion and identifies what McGregor calls the “religion of animals.” The construction of the human-animal divide is explored through the Qur’an, Islamic theology and philosophy, with particular attention paid to the encyclopedic epistle "The Case of the Animals versus Man" from tenth-century Iraq. It argues that both our modern and the medieval formulations are organized around a series of assumptions about language, the self, and the religious other. Our study of comparative religion can be usefully decentered by the question of the animal, and "The Case of the Animals versus Man" represents a solution to the challenges of comparison. The religion of others, then, along with the “religion of animals” create a discursive gesture of openness: an opening that points beyond the exclusivity of communitarianism and the ego-centered limitations of religion.

This study will focus on one work by Sha'rani, his "al-Kibrit al-Ahmar," which presents the teachings of Ibn 'Arabi almost entirely through edited excerpts presented thematically. Sha'rani presents an Akbarian worldview, and provides some insight into that school's movement into mainstream Egyptian Sufism.

In 2006 Adam Sabra and I published Jean-Claude Garcin's chapter entitled "Les soufis dans la ville mamelouke d'Égypte. Histoire du soufisme et historie globale." Garcin passed away in Oct 2021.
(https://www.shmesp.fr/deces-de-jean-claude-garcin-1934-2021/)

A fourteenth century 'saint' and poet, Muhammad Wafa', founder of an Egyptian branch of the Shadhiliyya, not only produced inspired mystical and visionary literature, but he also theorized on Sufi notions of sanctity, miracles, and inspiration. Through innovative appropriations of the Akbarian tradition he places himself at the center of theurgical and apoclayptic models of Islamic mystical thought.

The complicated public careers of objects such as the head of Husayn, and the hairs, fingernails, and footprints of the Prophet, tell a story of evolving religious identity and ritual practice. Housing, displaying, and processing these objects was key to their cultural lives and their reception, as was the viewing cultures that grew up around them. In the context of this history an argument is made connecting the aesthetic power of this type of religious object to ritual and devotional practices. Drawing on chronicles, theological and legal treatises, poetry, and architectural studies, the claim is that relics (and bodily imprints in stone) are unique sites of religious practice that display in their very materiality the simultaneous presencing and distancing that is inherent in devotional experience.

On Pharaonic spolia, which were reused in Islamic religious architecture. Islamic interaction with the objects of previous religious cultures began in Arabia, where the earliest narratives dealt extensively with idols and iconoclasm. The association of spectral figures with Arabian idols and shrines is continued in Egypt around Pharaonic ruins. Medieval perspectives on the material ruins of ancient Egypt were varied. Pharaonic monuments were not seen simply with maniacal iconoclastic prejudice, but more typically through a wide range of aesthetic considerations: some believed hieroglyphs were an archive of valuable ancient sciences, others pointed to the artistic excellence displayed in Pharaonic design and painting – offering analysis largely reflecting Greek theories of beauty. Thus, medieval defenders often decried the acts of vandalism and destruction directed toward ancient monuments. The reuse of spolia was most common in mosques, funerary buildings, and Sufi convents and shrines. In a dramatic reworking of the landscape however, many of these reused objects were removed in the 19th and early 20th centuries by colonial powers, seeking to recover what they saw as the pristine Islamic aesthetic. Ironically, by pulling many of these spolia out of mosques and shrines, in order to preserve them in the Egyptian Museum, the colonial administrations destroyed much of the record of an Islamic aesthetic, unique to medieval Egypt.

This is a welcome study addressing an important but under-studied period of Egyptian Sufism. The author has been contributing, largely in French, to this research area for two decades, but now English readers will have easy access to Rachida Chih's erudite scholarship on modern Sufism. Her approach is that of a historian of ideas and institutions and the evolving social structures and organized Sufism.

Review of Un “manuel” ifrîqiyen d’adab soufi; Paroles de sagesse de ‘Abd al-Wahhâb al-Mzughî (m. 675/1276) compagnon de Shâdhilî. Étude, notes et traduction partielle suivis du texte arabe. Sousse: Contraste Éditions, 2013. 28 (Arabic) + 243 (French) pages.
Abd al-Wahhab seems to have been the only teacher after al-Shadhili to have left a substantial legacy of Sufi instruction in Tunisia. Amri situates this short hagiographical book within the wider context of Sufi doctrine and practice, noting particularly that from the thirteenth century onward, the need was felt among Sufis for regulation of dhikr and sama’ practices.

Islamic poetics has long recognized that the eyes do more than passively relay to the mind the images that fall upon them. This paper argues that pre-modern Sufism employed a widened sense of aesthetics and ‘beauty’, which entail dimensions of embodiment and the discipline of that body, all aiming at transforming the self. Sufism emphasized the cultivation of personal virtue, rather than transactional reward and punishment, all of which is reflected in Sufism’s deep and systematic reflection upon visual practice.