Friends of God pdf download

Friends of God. Islamic Images of Piety, Commitment, and Servanthood by John Renard

Friends of God.

One of the richest repositories of lore about such exemplary religious figures belongs to the world’s approximately 1.3 billion Muslims. 

Prophets, saints, martyrs, sages, and seers—one of the richest repositories of lore about such exemplary religious figures belongs to the world’s approximately 1.3 billion Muslims. 

This entertaining book is the first completely comprehensive study of Islamic hagiography, illuminating some of the most delightful tales in world religious literature. 

Beyond the Qur’an and Hadith, John Renard presents the stories of characters whose stories of piety and service to God and humanity have captivated hearts and minds for than fourteen centuries. 

Renard’s thematic approach to the principal characters, plots, social and cultural situations, and theoretical notions of this unique collection of tales, which spans the eighth to the twentieth centuries, is based on material from the eighth to the twentieth centuries.

The majority of scholarly analysis, originating particularly in the disciplines of history, anthropology, and political science, has focused on the history of Sufism. 

But the story these sources tell is a much bigger one, and a study of Friends of God must look to a broader canvas than that of Sufism.

 The immense patrimony of Islamic hagiographical sources has yet to generate adequate interest in the windfall of insights into the religious and ethical life of Muslims that await discovery in these sources.

 Interrogating the sources about “what really happened” is, of course, an essential ingredient in understanding them. 

However, we must also let the sources speak for themselves, even — perhaps 

especially — when they seem to venture into the realm of the preternatural. 

To do so by no means calls for a naive, uncritical reading of this often multi- 

layered material.

It simply acknowledges that though many written sources 

offer potentially important historically verifiable data, much hagiographical 

material offers a great deal more.

 Even when an author appears to have slipped 

off the straight path of “fact” onto the mucky byways and quick sands of