URS TODAY-Hazrat Baha-ud-din Zakariya (RA) Multan
Iftikhar Chaudri’s excellent note on the great saint: Hazrat Baha-ud-din Zakariya(RA) was a Sufi of Suhrawardiyya order (tariqa). His full name was Al-Sheikh Al-Kabir…
Reclaiming Pakistan’s soul
By Rizwan Qureshi The Sufi Council was formed in October 2006 with the aim of popularizing pristine Sufi music and disseminating Sufi thought among…
Itihaas : Was Hussaiyn bin Mansour Al Hallaj inspired by India?
By Akhilesh Mittal In the third century of its advent Islam and its world were in ferment about forms of polity such as the…
Extracts from Empires of the Indus by Alice Albinia
From The Guardian In a land where it seldom rains, a river is as precious as gold. Water is potent: it trickles through human…
Miracle Worker Explores Sufism
By Archana (Mail Today) WHEN it comes to weaving a web of words, no one does it as well as Khushwant Singh. The nonagenarian…
New book: Wanted: Equality and Justice in the Muslim Family
Reviewed by: Yoginder Sikand Muslim family laws have for long been—and continue to be—a hugely controversial subject. Critics contend that these laws seriously militate…
Pakistan’s Sufis Preach Faith and Ecstasy
Read this great blog and was tempted to cross-post a few bits here: Every year, a few hundred thousand Sufis converge in Seh- wan,…
Build The Peace Consensus
By Sadia Dehlvi The trail of terror continues with cricketers as the latest target. The Mumbai and Lahore attacks, public executions and the murder…
Mystical power
Philip Jenkins writes why Sufi Muslims, for centuries the most ferocious soldiers of Islam, could be our most valuable allies in the fight against…
Of saints and sinners
James Astill writing for The Economist says that the Islam of the Taliban is far removed from the popular Sufism practised by most South…
Data Ganj Baksh: Lahore’s oldest guide
Perhaps the greatest of the experiences at Data Darbar is to find oneself connected to a stream of humanity, shoulder to shoulder, with a…
Revisiting the concept of Jihad in Islam
By Maulana Wahiduddin Khan (Translated from Urdu by Yoginder Sikand)* The word ‘jihad’ is derived from the root juhd, which means ‘to strive’ or…
Origins and traditions of Sufism and its music
By Rasha Elass Sufism is the ascetic element of Islam and it derives from the Sunni tradition. Scholars trace the word to two possible…
Imam Hussain: The Beloved of the Beloved
By Syed Salman Chishty Shah Ast Hussain Among the Belivers are Men ,who delivered their promise to Allah (Ayah 23/ Surah Al-Ahzab) On the…
Sufism and its reality
Summary of a speech delivered by Syed Asmat Gilani Up till the 19 century, the dominant thought in the West was that ‘science’ was…
Weird science – the perils of Muslim scholarship
I am posting Ziauddin Sardar’s article published in the New Statesman (August 21,2008) that explores the ‘nonesense” of some Muslim scholars who claim that…
Issues in Madrassa Education in India
Yoginder Sikand’s new book Issues in Madrasa Education in India published by Hope India, Gurgaon is a promising publication. Here is a review by…
A modern Ottoman – the Turk Gulen wins the intellectuals’ poll
The Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, winner of the intellectuals poll undertaken by Prospect, has been hailed as “the modern face of the Sufi Ottoman…
Kabir, Bulleh and Lalon – Petals of a mystic lotus
The subcontinent during the 15th century witnessed the coming of age of a process that started brewing with the arrival of Central Asian Sufis,…
William Chittick on Islamic Mysticism
Farah at her blog has done a remarkable thing by selecting some excellent quotes from an essay called “Islamic Mysticism” by William Chittick Full…