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In his fifth essay since 9/11 on the subject of Islam and violence, the author again makes the urgent case for an Islamic reformation, particularly in Western Europe, home to millions of Muslims, where Christianity and Judaism coexist with secular humanism and positivist law. He is not advocating so-called moderate Islam, which he characterizes as thinly disguised Wahhabism, but rather an Islam inspired by the great Sufi thinkers whose practice was not bound by doctrine. But to accomplish this, we need to reconsider the doctrinal question of the Koran as transcription of the uncreated word of God, and calls upon Muslims to distinguish between Islam's spiritual message and the temporal, historically grounded origins of its founding scriptures. This book revisits periods of Islamic history when philosophers and theologians engaged in lively dialogue with other faiths, other civilizations, and indeed contributed to transmitting the Hellenist tradition to early modern Europe. The author asks how it is that Islam today is the grip of such collective amnesia. It is a war of interpretations that he wages in this book, in his attempt to demonstrate that Muslims cannot join the concert of nations unless they set aside outmoded notions such as jihād, and realize that the feuding among monotheisms must give way to the more important issue of what it means to be a citizen in today's post-religious global setting. He closes with a short piece in praise of President Barack Obama's Cairo speech, which echoes many of this book's points.

Abdelwahab Meddeb is concerned with the roots and history of Islam and with crossings, like his own, between Islam and Europe. White Traverses is a poetic memoir about growing up in Tunisia and the contrasts between Islamic and European influences. In it, the intense colors and blinding whites of the Maghreb interweave with the rich traditions of French poetic discourse. In Africa as in Europe, white designates purity. Yet the complex Mediterranean streams of culture that flow together in Tunis problematize this myth. Meddeb captures their white refractions in vignettes that teach us the truth of the coincidence of contraries, of how the impure lodges in the pure. Tombeau of Ibn Arabi is a series of prose poems that draw their inspiration from the great Sufi poet of mediaeval Andalusia, Ibn Arabi, whose fervent love poetry both scandalized and transformed Islamic culture, and from Dante, who learned from Ibn Arabi a poetry of sensual love as initiation into spiritual experience. It seeks to show how a text written in the present day can maintain a link with the great dead. Ibn Arabi and Dante are two symbolic figures confirming the author's twofold spiritual genealogy—Arabic and European.

This contribution to the field of Islamic studies, philosophy, and comparative religion achieves a twofold objective. First, it draws from a broad and authoritative well of sources, especially in the domain of Sufism, or Islamic mysticism. Second, it is an in-depth meditation on the relationship between love and knowledge, multiplicity and unity, the example of the Prophet Muhammad viewed as Universal Man, spiritual union, heart and intellect, and other related themes—conveyed in fresh, contemporary language. The book is as much a work of Sufism as it is a book about Sufism. Many of these themes have a universal appeal for those interested in mysticism; consequently, there are distinct resonances with other traditions, especially within certain schools of Christian mysticism dominated by the language of love. In our day, when the divisions between many Muslims and many Christians have broadened into chasms of suspicion and fear, books such as this one are important for the help they can offer in bridging these rifts. The capacity of scholars to understand these two religions, which stem from the same Abrahamic source, is of the utmost significance, and the best approach to better understanding may be through the mystical traditions, which tend to reflect more tolerance and to recognize a potential for seeing unity in a multiplicity of perspectives. This work conveys the beauty at the heart of the Islamic tradition in a language devoid of technical terminology.

This book is an extended meditation on a dimension of Islam unfamiliar to most Western readers. The mosque, this book argues, is not an analogue of the Christian church, not least because in Islam there is no priesthood and no institutionalized hierarchy. Rather, every Muslim is his or her own priest, and most religious obligations are performed in the home. The function of the mosque is thus dispersed throughout society and, indeed, throughout the natural world as well. The Arabic word from which English mosque derives means literally “place of prostration”—the place one performs the daily ritual prayer of submission to God, so as to become a guest at the table God has sent down to manifest himself. That table is also the world's mosque, the world as mosque. Among the many tragic victims of the Bosnian genocide are its mosques; more than a thousand were destroyed. A part of the essential fabric of Bosnian life was changed. This book seeks to rebuild the spirit and majesty of each mosque that was destroyed, the spiritual grace it lent the Bosnian landscape.