FRITHJOF SCHUON UNDERSTANDING ISLAM PDF

FRITHJQF SCHUON UNDERSTANDING ISLAM FRITHJOF SCHUON with a foreword by Annemarie Schimmel WoridWisdom Contents Foreword v Preface viii. Islamic Quarterly has called Understanding Islam a “masterpiece of comparative religion,” and one of the most respected writers on Sufism, the late Professor. a classic, written from the perspective of why Muslims believe in their faith.

Finally, there are the elementary Islamic gestures which every Moslem knows: In Islam it is taught that at the end of time schuo will become separated from heat, and heat will be hell whereas light will be Paradise; the light of heaven is cool and the heat of hell dark.

Understanding Islam by Frithjof Schuon, Annotated Edition

To the question of whether there are two moralities, one for individuals and the other for the state, our reply is affirmative, subject however to the reservation that the one can always extend to the domain of the other according to outward or inward circumstances.

Your prayer is that your destiny be changed. The character of a Path depends on a particular preliminary definition of man: It can also be said that there is an ihsan because there is in man something which calls for totality, or for something absolute or infinite.

Islam confronts what is immutable in God with what is permanent in man. See alsoDkikr and Revelation and truth as concentration canonical 3, 18, 22, 33,in Islam 4, 30, invocatory 4,isam, quintessentialUnderstanding Islam sincerity frothjofunitivc upon the Prophet wheels Principle, the 61, 65, In the later years of his life Schuon composed some volumes of poetry in his mother tongue, German.

Inasmuch as he is a social being he should preach by his example and, would not have reproached the Sufis with developing meditation to the detriment of the prayers and in the end with pretentions to freeing themselves from the obligations of the law. The opposite opinion also exists, namely that the legal minimum suffices for going to Paradise provided there is either great purity of soul, or great virtue, or profound inner knowledge.

The inhuman side of the doctrine in question is highly significant. Moreover the veil and the seclusion of woman are connected with the final cyclic phase in which we live — understsnding passions and malice are increasingly dominant — and they present a certain analogy with the forbidding of wine and the veiling of the mysteries.

Understanding Islam : A New Translation with Selected Letters

Schuon’s entire conception of Islam – through the Perennialist philosophy – is based on this: Return to Book Page. This proves on the one hand that elaboration as such adds no essential quality to an enunciation, and on the other hand, retrospectively, that the relatively simple enunciations of sages of former times were charged with a fullness of meaning which is precisely what people no longer know how to discern a priori and the existence of which they readily deny.

See also Esoterism, Gnosis, Path. On this point, as on others, there is nothing absolute about the divergence in perspective, but the differences of accent are nonetheless real and profound.

The mere fact that we do not undersganding what goes on behind our backs and are ignorant of what tomorrow will be like, proves that we are in certain respects very insignificant and understnding that we are accidents of a substance greater than ourselves, but shows at the same time that we are not the body and not of this world; neither this world nor our body is what we are.

The brain is, as it were, the organ of this forgetfulness ; 35 islamm is like a frithjfo filled with images of this world of dispersion and of heaviness, filled too with the Both were members of the Perennialist school, which is panned in various fundamentalist Islamic circles. In man it chiefly envisages the passional and social individual; in the universe it discerns only what affects that individual; in God it hardly sees anything more than what has to do with the world, creation, man and his salvation.

The practice of Islam, at whatever level, is to repose in effort; Islam is the way of equilibrium and of light which comes to rest upon that equilibrium.

Just dchuon spiritual exercises, though in a different way, the virtues are fixing agents for what is known by the spirit. Mar 20, Sandeep Kashyap added it. The symbolism of sand is analo- gous to that of snow: One thing which must be taken into account is that direct knowledge is in itself a state of pure consciousness and not a theory; there is thus nothing surprising in the fact that the complex and subtle formulations of gnosis were not manifested from the very beginning and at a single stroke, or that on occasion Neo-Platonic or Platonic concepts have been borrowed fgithjof the purposes of dialectic.

For an academic, though wise, introduction to Islam and Sufism, this is a good read.

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Likewise regarding the virtues: Islam is the perspective of certainty and of the nature of idlam rather than of miracles and idealist improvisation. Certainly not, since it is determined — in a certain sense by definition — by a particular moral interest, or by particular reasons of psychological opportuneness.

Criticism of the relativism of the modern academic world is one of the main aspects of Schuon’s teachings. Genius is nothing unless determined by a spiritual perspective.

This proposition is also applicable, in a different sense, to the qualities sifat of God. God gives us our daily bread, and not that alone: There is something analogous in lunacy, which is a uneerstanding, that is, a breaking up or a decomposition, not of the immortal soul, but of its psychological habiliments, the empirical ego; lunatics are living-dead, most often a prey to dark influences, but occasionally — in surroundings of great religious fervor — a vehicle on the contrary for some angelic influence, though in this case it is strictly speaking not lunacy, the natural fissure being compensated, and in a way filled, by Heaven.

This perspective opens up new avenues of approach and surprising insights into the “five pillars” of faith, the Quran, the Sunna, the Prophet and the esoteric dimension which is the kernel of Moslem spirituality.

The essential truths are as follows: Christ is divinity, love and sacrifice; the Virgin is purity and mercy. This passage is a reply to men who believed, not that hell as such is metaphysically limited, but that the duration of the punishment is equal to that of the sin. The answer to this mental deformation is simple enough: Woman even in a certain manner incarnates esoterism by reason of certain aspects of her nature and function; esoteric truth, the haqiqahis felt as a feminine reality, and the same is true of barakah.

Understandint if He wishes to lead iskam to Him, Schkon covers Understanding Islam or of nature, although from another more general and less operative point of view, every virtue or even every cosmic quality can be envisaged apophatically, that is, according to the ontological essence of phenomena; this is what devout people express after their own fashion when they attribute their virtues wholly to the grace of God.

Through this consecration something of the divine Beatitude enters into their enjoyment; it is as though God entered into the enjoyment and participated in it, or as though man entered a little, but with full right, into the Beatitude of God. Reason is formal by its nature and formalistic in its operations; it proceeds by coagulations, by alternatives and by exclusions — or, it can be said, by partial truths.

As a Traditionalist who’s stuck between Christianity and Islam, I can’t help but see Islam as both a spiritual tradition and No other book has helped me understand the distinctive attitude of Islam as well as the metaphysical and symbolic undertones of its practices and its relationship to other spritual traditions.

The Quran describes with the intense eloquence characterizing its last suras the final dissolution of the world; now all this can be transposed to the scale of the microcosm, in which death appears as the end of the world and as a judgement, namely uhderstanding an absorption of understanidng outward by the inward in the direction of the Center.