A Concise Encyclopedia of Islam pdf download

A Concise Encyclopedia of Islam Gordon D. Newby

A CONCISE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ISLAM

Writing about Islam in a single volume is a daunting task, but it is one that I happily took on because of my longstanding desire to help more people in the English-speaking world understand and appreciate this religion.

 Islam is not only a world religion, claiming about a fifth of the world’s population, it is also a system of culture and politics.

Muslims are found in most countries of the world, speaking most of the world’s languages.

There is no central authority that can speak for all Muslims, and there is no single way to be a Muslim. It is, like the other great religions of the world, diverse, dynamic, and difficult to define in only a few words, terms, and entries.

This Concise Encyclopedia of Islam is meant to represent Islam’s diversity and offer the reader a short definition of major terms and introduce major figures.

 In writing this Encyclopedia, I have chosen to use the distinction that was made by the late M.G.S. Hodgson in his Venture of Islam, between those subjects that are “Islamic” and those that are, in his word, “Islamicate.”

 By “Islamic,” he meant those subjects that have to do with the religion, and by “Islamicate,” he meant those subjects that are products of the culture that Muslims, and Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Hindus, and others living under Islam, have produced.

We speak of “Islamic science,” meaning the scientific advances during the time of the Western Middle Ages, but those scientific advances were a product of the interaction of Jews and Christians as well as Muslims living in Islamic countries.

The religion of Islam contributed to the development of that and other branches of learning because Muslim rulers chose to sponsor learning as part of their vision of themselves as Muslims.

I have chosen to leave the political and cultural material to others. This volume contains terms that are related to Islam as a religious system.

As I mentioned, Islam is a diverse and dynamic religion. No Muslim will accept everything that I have presented in this volume as Islamic.

In attempting to represent Islam’s diversity, I have tried to include material that tells the story of the major groups within Islam. This means that the views of the Shˆı^cıˆ, as well as the Sunnıˆ, are included.

My choice to do this is, in part, a corrective. Works of this kind have often been heavily weighted toward the Sunnıˆ perspective.

The reasons for this are complicated, but it had much to do with the history of how the West came to learn about Islam and the desire of Western Orientalist writers to essentialize Islam and not acknowledge the nuances and differences that they did in Western Christianity.

 Recognizing complexity in someone else or in another religious system is an important step toward understanding that religion as well as one’s own.

This single volume is not intended to be the end and the answer to questions about Islam, but, rather, a beginning.

At the end of the volume, the reader will find a bibliography listing additional English- language reference works, monographs, and introductory texts. I strongly urge readers to seek out as many of those texts as possible. Many of the references should be available in local libraries. There is also a wealth of information about Islam on the Internet.

Many basic Islamic texts are available in English translation online. I have listed a few of the gateway URLs that should serve as a start in the rapidly growing world of the Islamic Internet.

One caution, however, is that the Internet is rapidly changing, with many varied opinions expressed on the sites.

Remember that the many different opinions reflect the great diversity within the religion called Islam. There is also a timeline of major dates and events in Islamic history to assist the reader in placing the information in the Encyclopedia in a historical perspective.

The terms in the Encyclopedia are transliterated from their appropriate Islamic languages. The diacritic marks on the terms represent the consonants and vowels in the original language.

This is meant to be an aid to the student of those languages in locating the term in an appropriate language dictionary or encyclopedia. Without the diacritics, it is difficult, particularly for the beginner in the language, to distinguish what appear to be homonyms.

For the reader who doesn’t know the Islamic languages, the pronunciation guide that follows this preface will assist in a reasonable approximation of the sound of the terms to be able to talk with those who do know how to pronounce them.

The information for this volume has been drawn from many different sources. In the bibliography, I have left out the many specialty monographs and other works for lack of space. Additionally, I have