Michael Anthony Sells

The Great Mosque of Córdoba

In eighth-century Cordoba, a public architecture emerged that – like the Palace of Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ – blended Roman, Visigothic-Christian, and Syrian-Muslim elements. Cordoba’s congregational mosque exemplifies the integration of different architectural traditions. It was built on the site of a Visigothic church that, according to legend, stood on the ruins of a Roman temple. Centuries after the founding of the mosque, chroniclers described a church that was first divided into Muslim and Christian halves and then bought and replaced with a new mosque in 169/785–170/787. That this closely resembles the story of the adaption and rebuilding of the Damascus mosque casts doubt on the authenticity of the Cordoba account but indicates that even several hundred years later, the Syrian origins of the mosque resonated. The Great Mosque consisted of a walled courtyard and a rectangular prayer hall of nine or eleven aisles running perpendicular to the qibla wall. A taller and wider central aisle led to the mihrab, a niche in the qibla wall that indicated the direction of Mecca and hence the orientation of prayer. However, in actuality the orientation was incorrectly skewed to the south, either in deference to an earlier mosque on the site or as a mirror of the correct orientation of Damascus, the home of the Umayyads and first great Islamic center.

Apophasis in Plotinus: A Critical Approach

Is apophasis dead? Can there be a contemporary apophatic theology, or critical method, or approach to comparative religion and interreligious dialogue? If such approaches are possible, then a resource of virtually unfathomable richness lies largely untapped. I suggest that apophasis has much to offer to contemporary thought and that, in turn, classical apophasis can be critically reevaluated from the perspective of contemporary concerns.

Moses Ibn Ezra

Of all the Arabized poets of the Hebrew Golden Age in al-Andalus, Moses (Abū Hārān) Ibn Ezra is the one whose poetry most resembles that of an Arabic poet. Yet his literary career was more varied than that of most Arabic poets, reflecting the interests of the Jewish aristocrats of his age. The interplay of Arabo-Islamic and Jewish elements, a fascinating feature of the lives and careers of all the leading Hebrew poets of al-Andalus, is so fully developed in him as to render him a model case of an Andalusian Jewish intellectual. Ibn Ezra’s life is known only in outline (Ibn Ezra, Selected Poems xxiii–xxxix; Schirmann 380–420). He was born in Granada, around 1055, to a distinguished family, several of whose members were, like Samuel and Joseph Ibn Nagrila in the preceding generation, in the service of Ḥabbūs and Bādīs of Granada. Moses’ elder brother Isaac (Abū Ibrāhīm) seems to have been married to one of the Nagid’s daughters. As a young man, Moses studied at the academy of Lucena, training ground for many of al-Andalus’s courtierrabbis. The academy was headed at the time by Rabbi Isaac Ibn Ghiyāth, the premier rabbinic authority of al-Andalus and the premier liturgical poet of his generation.

Translating Sufism@@@Early Islamic Mysticism: Sufi, Quran, Miraj, Poetic and Theological Writings

This volume makes available and accessible the writings of the crucial early period of Islamic mysticism during which Sufism developed as one of the worlds major mystical traditions. The texts are accompanied by commentary on their historical, literary and philosophical context.

Ibn Ḥamdīs and the poetry of nostalgia

In the year 1078 at the age of twenty-four, ʿbd al-Jabbār ibn Ḥamdīs, the scion of a Muslim family that had inhabited Sicily for generations, left his homeland and set out in pursuit of fame and fortune. He had lived his youth in the splendor of a privileged class of landed gentry. But the times were changing: by the beginning of the third Islamic century in Sicily, internal strife was tearing apart the Muslim community. War, disease, and destruction were wreaking havoc on the land, while the hordes of Norman armies lay in wait, preparing to carve their name on Sicilian history. As political stability and economic security declined, so too did the courtly atmosphere of the princely palaces in which poets like Ibn Ḥamdīs could pursue lucrative and prestigious careers. Since the opportunities for a promising professional poet, particularly a court panegyrist, were to be found elsewhere, Ibn Ḥamdīs chose temporary exile, first to al-Andalus and then to North Africa, to make his fame and fortune as a poet-warrior. Like all good native sons of Sicily, Ibn Ḥamdīs had every intention of one day returning home. But the return to his beloved homeland would never come to pass. The pain and regret he suffered would be a constant theme in much of his poetic oeuvre throughout his long life. In the sixty years he lived following his departure from Sicily, Ibn Ḥamdīs witnessed the destruction of Muslim Sicily by the Norman armies, the fall of Muslim principalities to the Reconquista in Spain, civil wars, plagues, the death of most of his relatives, and finally, his own blindness at the end of his life.