Ella Collins Winter Retreat 2013

http://ellacollinsinstitute.org/winter-retreat-2013/

Signs on the Horizons: Meetings with Men of Knowledge and Illumination

SIGNS ON THE HORIZONS is an enthralling contemporary memoir of one seeker’s interactions with men who have transcended the ordinary and achieved stations of spirituality and enlightenment that in the modern world we only attribute to the Biblical fathers of ancient times or to myth. Michael Sugich, an American writer who was initiated into a traditional Sufi order over forty years ago and who lived for 23 years in the sacred city of Makkah Al Mukaramah, has kept company with some of the greatest Sufi saints of the age from many parts of the world. His book is a unique eye-witness narrative of a mystical tradition that today hides in plain sight, veiled by the turbulence and materialism gripping the Muslim world. It is a spellbinding personal memoir told with eloquence, empathy, self-effacing humor, insight and love.

Amazon

Princeton Muslim Life Program Videos

http://vimeo.com/muslimlifeprogram/videos/sort:date

Some treasures here ma sha Allah.

The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China

http://www.amazon.com/The-Dao-Muhammad-Cultural-Monographs/dp/0674017749

This book documents an Islamic-Confucian school of scholarship that flourished, mostly in the Yangzi Delta, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Drawing on previously unstudied materials, it reconstructs the network of Muslim scholars responsible for the creation and circulation of a large corpus of Chinese Islamic written material--the so-called Han Kitab. Against the backdrop of the rise of the Manchu Qing dynasty, The Dao of Muhammad shows how the creation of this corpus, and of the scholarly network that supported it, arose in a context of intense dialogue between Muslim scholars, their Confucian social context, and China's imperial rulers.  

Overturning the idea that participation in Confucian culture necessitated the obliteration of all other identities, this book offers insight into the world of a group of scholars who felt that their study of the Islamic classics constituted a rightful "school" within the Confucian intellectual landscape. These men were not the first Muslims to master the Chinese Classics. But they were the first to express themselves specifically as Chinese Muslims and to generate foundation myths that made sense of their place both within Islam and within Chinese culture.

This Addiction Has Only Been Around For A Little While, But It's Hurting Our Generation

http://www.upworthy.com/this-addiction-has-only-been-around-for-a-little-while-but-its-hurting-our-generation

Call for Papers: Zaytuna College Conference on Islamic Higher Education

http://www.zaytunacollege.org/static/call_for_papers_jan_20_2014/

Pope Francis on Inequality

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/pope-francis-denounces-trickle-down-economic-theories-in-critique-of-inequality/2013/11/26/e17ffe4e-56b6-11e3-8304-caf30787c0a9_story.html

Intisar A. Rabb, expert on Islamic Legal Studies, to join Harvard Law School Faculty

http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2013/09/17_intisar-a-rabb-to-join-hls-faculty.html

ma sha Allah

10 Tips on How to Write Less Badly [for graduate school]

http://chronicle.com/article/10-Tips-on-How-to-Write-Less/124268/

via Mariem

Prof. Mahmood Mamdani on American universities and students

What are your general opinions on American universities and American students? 

Mahmood Mamdani: What a privileged place is an American university. What amazing resources. My god! I am so acutely aware of the poverty of resources in African universities, just having spent some years writing about Makerere in Kampala. Outside of the war-related industries, this is the only industry where the US has an edge – in education. I don’t see it dominating any other economy in the world market. My sense of Indian and Chinese higher education is that it’s so single-mindedly focused on the instrumental – the engineering, the science, the medical – and the place of the humanities and social sciences is so marginal, whereas in American universities you can do away with medical school and engineering school and the university will still be there. But if you do away with the faculties of arts and sciences, there is no university. So this liberal education is very much a driving force for ongoing confrontation with the world, and at least sustains those who question that. 

About students - Columbia is a privileged place from which to get a sense of American students. I think, quite often, if you take top 20 percent of Columbia undergrads, they are smarter than half the grad students at Columbia. The downside of American students is this thing which runs through – seems to run through – the Western experience, but seems particularly crystallized in the American case, which is this notion that you can save the world. And this determination to save the world. This conviction that they know what’s good for the world, and they know what’s good for you, better than you know. So it’s almost like the medieval Christians who burnt people to save their souls. 

They can be like the modern counterpart of the missionaries. They are not particularly interested in the problem: They are there to give you the solution. By the time they leave the university, they are imbued with the sense of what should be the solution. I always tell them that, before you get unleashed upon the world, let me have a chance to talk to you. Get them to realize that the real question is not, “What’s the solution?” – it’s “What’s the problem?” And the elements of any sustainable solution have to be found inside the problem. Surely, [these students] are not the solution, and can’t be the solution. 

That’s the dangerous thing. Somehow, ways have to be found to impart some degree of modesty to this new generation of Americans.

 http://www.warscapes.com/conversations/conversation-mahmood-mamdani