Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

H i s to r i cal Introduction and Overv i e w 1 5learning roiled and surged. Her being a woman stood out in [people’s] mentionof her, but awareness of [that fact] was no detriment to her reputation. (Quotedin Renard 1998, 288)The institutional forms and sets of ritual practices transmitted across some networksof Sufi students and teachers eventually took on the form of organizedorders—also referred to in Arabic as t a r i q as and often named after the purportedfounding s h a y k h . From the twelfth century on, various t a r i q as createdcommunities of Muslims centered on forms of association and ritual practicethat institutionalized the teachings of particular s h a y k hs. The number of organizedSufi orders grew steadily, and many spread far from their local pointsof origin to establish branches throughout the Muslim world from NorthAfrica to Southeast Asia.In addition to the organized orders, there were also less-institutionalizedSufi schools of thought covering ritual practices and devotional exercises, andthere were complex intellectual formulations by figures such as the thirteenthce n t u ry scholar of Muslim Spain, Ibn Arabi. Ibn Arabi is one of the most controversialfigures in Islamic history, and debates over his legacy often extendbeyond the polemics of Sufism to incorporate aspects of theology and philosoph y. Many of Ibn Arabi’s later Muslim detractors attacked him for espousing amodel of the relationship between God and humankind that they saw as dangerous,potentially leading to the improper effacement of the distinction betweencreation and its Creator. Despite such criticisms, the thought of IbnArabi was never universally condemned by all Muslims. Even in the modernperiod, there was a renaissance of interest in his work among scholars such asthose associated with the Akbariyya of late nineteenth-century Damascus. Abdal-Qadir al-Jaza’iri, a major figure in those circles, found in Ibn Arabi’s thoughttools for dealing in dynamic ways with the challenges of rationalism andmodernity posed by the growing cultural and political hegemony of the We s t( Weismann 2001, 141–224).Islamic PhilosophyThe origins of Islamic philosophy can be traced to the vibrant and cosmopolitanintellectual atmosphere of the early Abbassid Caliphate at Baghdad(750–991), when the Arabic translation movement was introducing texts fromclassical Greek, Christian, and other “foreign” literatures into the conversationsof educated Muslims. This material was selectively interpreted and representedin ways that seemed to address the concerns and interests of variousgroups of Muslims at that time. In the ninth century, Muslim “free thinkers,”such as Ibn al-Rawandi and Abu Bakr al-Razi, dove into the pre-Christian phi-