The Western narrative of world history largely omits a whole civilization. Destiny Disrupted tells the history of the world from the Islamic point of view, and restores the centrality of the Muslim perspective, ignored for a thousand years. In Destiny Disrupted, Tamim Ansary tells the rich story of world history as it looks from a new perspective: with the evolution of the Muslim community at the center. His story moves from the lifetime of Mohammed through a succession of far-flung empires, to the tangle of modern conflicts that culminated in the events of 9/11. He introduces the key people, events, ideas, legends, religious disputes, and turning points of world history, imparting not only what happened but how it is understood from the Muslim perspective. He clarifies why two great civilizations-Western and Muslim-grew up oblivious to each other, what happened when they intersected, and how the Islamic world was affected by its slow recognition that Europe-a place it long perceived as primitive-had somehow hijacked destiny. With storytelling brio, humor, and evenhanded sympathy to all sides of the story, Ansary illuminates a fascinating parallel to the world narrative usually heard in the West. Destiny Disrupted offers a vital perspective on world conflicts many now find so puzzling. Read more

A gripping exploration of the fall of Constantinople and its connection to the world we live in today. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 signaled a shift in history and the end of the Byzantium Empire. Roger Crowley's readable and comprehensive account of the battle between Mehmet II, sultan of the Ottoman Empire, and Constantine XI, the 57th emperor of Byzantium, illuminates the period in history that was a precursor to the current conflict between the West and the Middle East. For a thousand years Constantinople was quite simply "the city": fabulously wealthy, imperial, intimidating - and Christian. Singlehandedly it blunted early Arab enthusiasm for Holy War; when a second wave of Islamic warriors swept out of the Asian steppes in the Middle Ages, Constantinople was the ultimate prize: "The Red Apple." It was a city that had always lived under threat. On average it had survived a siege every forty years for a millennium – until the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmet II, twenty-one years old and hungry for glory, rode up to the walls in April 1453 with a huge army, "numberless as the stars." 1453 is the taut, vivid story of this final struggle for the city, told largely through the accounts of eyewitnesses. For fifty-five days a tiny group of defenders defied the huge Ottoman army in a seesawing contest fought on land, at sea, and underground. During the course of events, the largest cannon ever built was directed against the world’s most formidable defensive system, Ottoman ships were hauled overland into the Golden Horn, and the morale of defenders was crucially undermined by unnerving portents. At the center is the contest between two inspirational leaders, Mehmed II and Constantine XI, fighting for empire and religious faith, and an astonishing finale in a few short hours on May 29, 1453 – a defining moment for medieval history. 1453 is both a gripping work of narrative history and an account of the war between Christendom and Islam that still has echoes in the modern world. Read more

AMERICAN EDITIONBecause what narrow thinkers imagine to be ‘wisdom’ is often seen by the Sufis to be folly compared with deeper knowledge, the Sufis sometimes refer to themselves as ‘the Idiots.’ Wisdom of the Idiots is a collection of lively and intriguing stories, narratives, and anecdotes, which illustrate the experiential philosophy used in Sufi teaching. These ancient fables from the Middle East and Central Asia, many going back several hundred years, exemplify the non-linear and intuitive thinking styles of the masters of Sufism. This type of wisdom, which transcends the limits of conventional logic,is also equated with ‘idiots’ because it penetrates to a depth that is inaccessible to the merely intelligent or academically-knowledgeable.Shah’s stories contain several levels of meaning and work like psychological mirrors in which readers may see themselves and Reality reflected, and come to understand these better.Wisdom of the Idiots was awarded many prizes, including two gold medals, one for ‘Best Book’ in conjunction with UNESCO’s World Book Year. Read more

Jonathan Berkey surveys the religious history of the peoples of the Near East from approximately 600 to 1800 c.e. After examining the religious scene in the Near East in late antiquity, he investigates Islam's first century, the "classical" period from the accession of the Abbasids to the rise of the Buyid amirs. He then traces the emergence of new forms of Islam in the middle period, deftly showing how Islam emerged slowly as part of a prolonged process. Read more

In this classic work, the author of Culture and Imperialism reveals the hidden agendas and distortions of fact that underlie even the most "objective" coverage of the Islamic world."No one stuyding the relations between the West and the decolonizing world can ignore Mr. Said's work." --The New York Times Book ReviewFrom the Iranian hostage crisis through the Gulf War and the bombing of the World Trade Center, the American news media have portrayed "Islam" as a monolithic entity, synonymous with terrorism and religious hysteria. At the same time, Islamic countries use "Islam" to justify unrepresentative and often repressive regimes. Combining political commentary with literary criticism, Covering Islam continues Edward Said's lifelong investigation of the ways in which language not only describes but also defines political reality. Read more

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Long considered a classic, A History of Islamic Societies is now that much more useful a reference for general readers and scholars alike. Widely praised for its balanced and comprehensive account, Ira Lapidus' work has been fully revised in its coverage of each country and region of the Muslim world through 2001. It incorporates the origins and evolution of Islamic societies and brings into focus the historical processes that gave shape to the manifold varieties of contemporary Islam. The concluding chapters survey the growing influence of the Islamist movements within national states and in their transnational or global dimensions, including the Islamic revival, Islamist politics and terrorism. An updated discussion of the roles of women in Islamic societies is added, with new sections about Afghanistan and Muslims in Europe, America, and the Philippines. Ira M. Lapidus is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California at Berkeley. His many books and articles include Islam, Politics and Social Movements (University of California Press, 1988) and Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1984). Read more

A gripping exploration of the fall of Constantinople and its connection to the world we live in today. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 signaled a shift in history and the end of the Byzantium Empire. Roger Crowley's readable and comprehensive account of the battle between Mehmet II, sultan of the Ottoman Empire, and Constantine XI, the 57th emperor of Byzantium, illuminates the period in history that was a precursor to the current conflict between the West and the Middle East. For a thousand years Constantinople was quite simply "the city": fabulously wealthy, imperial, intimidating - and Christian. Singlehandedly it blunted early Arab enthusiasm for Holy War; when a second wave of Islamic warriors swept out of the Asian steppes in the Middle Ages, Constantinople was the ultimate prize: "The Red Apple." It was a city that had always lived under threat. On average it had survived a siege every forty years for a millennium – until the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmet II, twenty-one years old and hungry for glory, rode up to the walls in April 1453 with a huge army, "numberless as the stars." 1453 is the taut, vivid story of this final struggle for the city, told largely through the accounts of eyewitnesses. For fifty-five days a tiny group of defenders defied the huge Ottoman army in a seesawing contest fought on land, at sea, and underground. During the course of events, the largest cannon ever built was directed against the world’s most formidable defensive system, Ottoman ships were hauled overland into the Golden Horn, and the morale of defenders was crucially undermined by unnerving portents. At the center is the contest between two inspirational leaders, Mehmed II and Constantine XI, fighting for empire and religious faith, and an astonishing finale in a few short hours on May 29, 1453 – a defining moment for medieval history. 1453 is both a gripping work of narrative history and an account of the war between Christendom and Islam that still has echoes in the modern world. Read more

The Way of the Sufi is the best-selling follow-up and complimentary work to Idries Shah’s first landmark book on the subject, The Sufis.Idries Shah’s, The Way of the Sufi is a compendium of traditional tales, poetry, epigrams, anecdotes and sayings from individual Sufis and Sufi schools over the last millennia. Shah’s work presents an unparalleled cross-section of Sufi teachings—from Morocco to Indonesia—as an introductory and basic course of Sufi study.Included are biographical sketches of some of the best-known Sufi masters from the classical Islamic period, and descriptions of four of the major Sufi orders: the Chisti, Qadiri, Suhrawardi and Naqshbandi schools. Shah considers attitudes to Sufi ideas, and evidence of their existence in other traditions. Medieval Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jewish mysticism and various modern philosophical teachings, the author shows us, all bear some imprint of Sufi influence.Shah’s comprehensive and well-sourced introduction conveys the essentially undefinable nature of Sufism, both through what outside observers have in part believed it to be, and also what it is not.Forming a matrix of disparate yet synergistic materials, The Way of the Sufi illuminates aspects of the Sufi tradition relevant to the contemporary world. Read more

AMERICAN ENGLISH EDITION.Although enormously attractive as sheer entertainment, Dervish tales were never presented merely on the level of a fable, legend or folklore.They stand comparison in wit, construction and piquancy with the finest stories of any culture, yet their true function as Sufi teaching stories is so little-known in the modern world, that no technical or popular terms exist to describe them.The material in Tales of the Dervishes is the result of a thousand years of development, during which Dervish masters used these and other teaching stories to instruct their disciples.The tales are held to convey powers of increasing perception unknown to the ordinary man. Read more

Beginning with Latin America in the fifteenth century, this book comprises a social history of the experiences of African Muslims and their descendants throughout the Americas, including the Caribbean. The years under slavery are examined, as well as the post-slavery period. The study also analyzes Muslim revolts in Brazil--especially in 1835. The second part of the book traces the emergence of Islam among U.S. African descendants in the twentieth century, featuring chapters on Noble Drew Ali, Elijah Muhammad, and Malcolm X to explain how orthodoxy arose from varied unorthodox roots. Currently Professor of History and Middle Eastern Studies at NYU, Michael Gomez has research interests that include Islam in West Africa, the African diaspora and African culture in North America. He has been involved with the launching of a new academic organization, the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), and has published widely in the field. Read more

A collection of anecdotes and jokes drawn from Middle Eastern folklore and the Sufi mystical tradition, which feature the wise fool, Mulla Nasrudin.The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin is a compendium of tales in which Nasrudin, the village bumpkin and wiseacre, reveals the antics characteristic of the human mind. In each story, the Mulla can manifest great wisdom, or supreme folly. Often enough he reveals layers of both. Nasrudin and his stories appear in literature and oral traditions from the Arab world to China. Many nations claim Nasrudin as a native son, but nobody knows his real origins or who he was. The Sufis, who believe that deep intuition is the only real guide to knowledge, use the humorous stories of Nasrudin’s adventures to trigger breakthroughs into higher wisdom.Since Idries Shah made Nasrudin’s genius available to mainstream Western readers, people from every walk of life have laughed at and learned from this wise fool’s memorable escapades. Read more

This comprehensive, meticulously documented collection of scholarly articles presents indisputable evidence that a readily discernible, uniquely Islamic antisemitism-a specific Muslim hatred of Jews-has been expressed continuously since the advent of Islam. Debunking the conventional wisdom, which continues to assert that Muslim animosity toward Jews is entirely a 20th-century phenomenon fueled mainly by the protracted Arab-Israeli conflict, leading scholars provide example after example of antisemitic motifs in Muslim documents reaching back to the beginnings of Islam. The contributors show that the Koran itself is a significant source of hostility toward Jews, as well as other foundational Muslim texts including the hadith (the words and deeds of Muhammad as recorded by pious Muslim transmitters) and the sira (the earliest Muslim biographies of Muhammad). Many other examples are adduced in the writings of influential Muslim jurists, theologians, and scholars, from the Middle Ages through the contemporary era. These primary sources, and seminal secondary analyses translated here for the first time into English - such as Hartwig Hirschfeld's mid-1880s essays on Muhammad's subjugation of the Jews of Medina and George Vajda's elegant, comprehensive 1937 study of the hadith - detail the sacralized rationale for Islam's anti-Jewish bigotry. Numerous complementary historical accounts illustrate the resulting plight of Jewish communities in the Muslim world across space and time, culminating in the genocidal threat posed to the Jews of Israel today. Read more

No religion in the modern world is as feared and misunderstood as Islam. It haunts the popular imagination as an extreme faith that promotes terrorism, authoritarian government, female oppression, and civil war. In a vital revision of this narrow view of Islam and a distillation of years of thinking and writing about the subject, Karen Armstrong’s short history demonstrates that the world’s fastest-growing faith is a much more complex phenomenon than its modern fundamentalist strain might suggest. Read more

The Sufis, a modern classic that has been translated into over two dozen languages, has attracted the praise of such famous authors as Robert Graves, Ted Hughes, J.D. Salinger, and Doris Lessing.Idries Shah’s The Sufis is the most authoritative book about Sufism ever produced for a modern audience. This definitive work explores an immemorial wisdom tradition best-known for its connections with Islam, but which both predates and goes beyond it.Sufis espouse a mystical teaching and way of life that have had an immeasurable, though little-known, impact on East and West for thousands of years. Core to this “practical philosophy” is the cultivation of intuition and experience as a guide to life—rather than overreliance upon logic and the intellect. Its members believe that theirs is the secret tradition behind all religious and philosophical systems.Shah’s remarkable book includes accounts of the lives and work of the best-known Sufi masters, encompassing many of the world's greatest thinkers, including the Eastern luminaries: Jalaluddin Rumi, Omar Khayyam, Ibn Arabi, Al-Ghazzali, Saadi Shirazi, and Farid Al-Din Attar.Many of the greatest traditions, ideas and discoveries of the West are connected to the teachings and writings of Sufi savants working centuries ago. The astonishing impact of Sufism on the development of Western civilization, especially from the seventh century onwards, is traced through the work of Roger Bacon, St. John of the Cross, Raymond Lully, The Templars, Rosicrucians, Chaucer, Sir Richard Francis Burton, and others.But more than a history, The Sufis is a dynamic book of instruction for modern times, reflecting the idea that living Sufism is never a static artefact of the past, but adapts to the current time, place and people. Read more

Inside Islam: A Guide for Catholics utilizes a popular question-and-answer format so that all Catholics both the theological novice and the well-catechized can learn the basics of Islam. Co-authors Robert Spencer and Daniel Ali, a convert from Islam, give you a solid understanding of Islam's unique teachings including:The Islamic view of GodThe role of Jesus in Islamic theologyIslam's controversial theology of jihad, or holy warWhy Islam's strong beliefs are so attractive to secularized Western societiesThe role of women in Islam Inside Islam is an essential resource for anyone who wants to know more about this historic religion from the Middle East. After reading this book, you will have a better understanding of the issues discussed every day in the news. Read more

‘The Commanding Self’ is the Sufi technical term for the false personality, that mixture of survival reflexes and conditioned responses, common to all of us, which inhibit and distort human progress and understanding.Idries Shah’s The Commanding Self is a collection of tales, anecdotes, letters, lectures, and question-and-answer sessions that highlight one of the fundamental barriers in the Sufi developmental process: the false self. Upon the book’s publication, Nobel Prize winning author Doris Lessing described this false personality as also “made up of what a culture puts into a person--parents, schools, the zeitgeist.”Shah states that in genuine mystical traditions there is no intention of destroying or undermining the Commanding Self. Instead, would-be students are encouraged to “divert vanity from the spiritual arena ... to channel the Commanding Self’s activities to any worldly ambition: while continuing to study the Sufi Way in a modest and non-self-promoting manner”.The Commanding Self enables readers to observe the functioning of their own emotional and conditioned responses. The book was described by Shah as the key to understanding his entire corpus of work. Read more

The new edition of the in-depth manual of Islamic law based on the Shafi'i school of thought, with a detalied index and commentary on specific rulings. 1,200 pages in an exceptional binding with Arabic and facing English text in two column format with occasional diagrams. 'Umdat al-Salik wa 'Uddat al-Nasik (Reliance of the Traveller and tools of the Worshipper) is a classic manual of fiqh. It represents the fiqh rulings according to the Shafi'I school of jurisprudence. The appendices form an integral part of the book and present original texts and translations from classic works by prominent scholars such as al-Ghazali, Ibn Qudamah, al-Nawawi, al-Qurturbi, al-Dhahabi, Ibn Hajar and other, on topics of Islamic law, faith, spirituality, Qur'anic exegesis and Hadith sciences. It has also biographical notes about every person mentioned (391 biographies) , bibliography of each work cited (136 works), and a detailed subject index (95 pages). Of the 136 works drawn upon in its commentary and appendices, 134 are in the original Arabic. The sections and paragraphs have been numbered to facilitate cross-reference. Read more

A ‘veiled gazelle’, as the great mystic Ibn Arabi explains in his Interpreter of Desires, is a subtle perception, or higher experience, obfuscated by our lower natures. A Veiled Gazelle is a compilation of stories, parables and anecdotes designed to help alleviate the mental obstructions that prevent us from seeing what there is to be seen. Idries Shah, in his introduction, tells us that the term ‘veiling’ in Sufi parlance refers to the action of the subjective or ‘commanding’ self, which partly through indoctrination and partly through base aspirations prevents higher vision.The Sufi tales, legends and fables presented in this compact book – most of them from the Middle East and Central Asia – work towards the removal of these veils. A Veiled Gazelle is also a demonstration of Sufi literature in action: regarded in many cultures as some of the world’s greatest and most important writing. Read more

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