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Roy Mottahedeh Books

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“Al-e Ahmad was fundamentally different from all the appropriators of his rhetoric. Even Shariati, who resembled him in many ways, never outwardly showed - and perhaps never felt - the doubts that Al-e Ahmad continually had and expressed. Ultimately these doubts prevented Al-e Ahmad from pushing any single solution as the salvation of Iran; he was the master of social and cultural critique but not of social and cultural construction. This failure was a mark of his extreme loyalty to and honesty about his own feelings.”

Iranian RevolutionIranian LiteratureIranian Studies
Book:The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran
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“Combined with this indecision was Ahmad's sense of being intellectually incomplete; he felt he had never really read enough and never studied enough to offer a firm opinion on anything. Privately he would assure his friends that they had no idea, they could not possibly imagine, how ignorant he was. In the semipublic arena of the dowreh on Islamic philosophy that he and Ali attended, when Ahmad entered the conversation he would talk brilliantly about a subject for a few minutes, then think up objections to what he had said, then think of things he should have read before he had spoken on the subject. Then, after adding several times, "What can I say? I don't really know," he would tumble into silence and, in his good-natured way, look even more deeply oppressed than he had before he talked. It was no surprise that Ahmad published so little.”

Iranian LiteratureIslamic Sciences
Book:The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran
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“Nowhere is the case for external obedience put more eloquently than in the writings of al-Ghazzali, the lawyer, theologian, and Sufi who is, perhaps, the greatest moral thinker of the Islamic tradition. [...] [Al-Ghazzali] entered a crisis of doubt that led him to question not only the possibility of certain knowledge of any kind, even certain knowledge of the soundness of one's own senses: "The disease was baffling, and lasted almost two months, during which I was a skeptic in fact though not in theory or outward expression.”

Islamic Philosophy
Book:The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran
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“The really significant way in which Sufism survived, however, was in the individualistic and highly philosophical form called erfan, mystical “knowledge.” The domestication of mysticism among the Shiah mullahs was largely the achievement of Mullah Sadra, although when he died in 1640 he probably had more mullah detractors than mullah admirers. He was a man who, after a formal madreseh education and informal study with the leading Shiah divines of his time, withdrew to a village near Qom to spend fifteen years of ascetic devotion and self-purification until he achieved the “direct” vision of the intelligible world. To see directly the reality of the world that philosophy revealed indirectly was to see through “illumination.”

Islamic Philosophy
Book:The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran
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“Sohravardi also found fault with Avicenna for not going far enough in another area, the master’s critique of the non-mystical theologians of the Islamic world. In Avicenna’s time these nonmystical theologians lived to the west of Iran, and therefore Avicenna called them “Westerners” to indicate not only their geographical location (from Baghdad to Spain) but also their unfortunate lack of interest in “Illumination” offered by the eastern rising of the mystical sun.”

Islamic Philosophy
Book:The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran
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