Thesis (M.A.)--Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, MA, 2005. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 90-95).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Diss.--Universität Bayreuth, 1998. / Bibliogr. p. 167-215.

In the early ninth century Muslim renunciants developed the metaphor of devotion to God is a path to teach their disciples how to cultivate virtues that would enable them to escape attachment to the world. Alongside these virtues were ascetic practices, sometimes extreme, that demonstrated their commitment to God. The earliest example of this renunciant path is the ascetic manual Adab al-'ibadat attributed to Shaqiq al-Balkhi (d. 198/809-10). Al-Harith al-Muhasibi (d. 243/857-8) took exception to exaggerated practices of Shaqiq's path and insisted that religious devotion must adhere to the commands God gave in the Quran and in the Sunna. Unique in the ninth century, Muhasibi also insisted that God's commands were not limited to exterior actions, but included specific expectations of the interior dimension of religious devotion. Abu Sa'id al-Kharraz (d. 277/890-91 or 286/899) expanded the renunciant path of Saqiq's followers, but also responded to Muhasibi's censure and softened the more extreme practices of the renunciant path. He was firmly committed to the interior dimension of religious devotion, but gave no indication that he accepted Muhasibi's insistence that these virtues were incumbent. Rather, he argues that the noblest expression of these virtues exists only among God's friends, whose religious devotion has its origin in the excellence of their primordial condition. This thesis will introduce a conceptual hierarchy of religious devotion that facilitates the analysis and comparison of each of these authors. Current discussions of ninth-century Islamic piety are limited by inadequate definitions of asceticism and mysticism. A holistic approach to their religious devotion will provide tangible indicators of the ascetic or mystical orientation of their piety. This provides better parameters for discussing the relationship between asceticism and mysticism in the ninth century.

This dissertation project employs both ethnographic and textual research to study the role of rational coherence and paradox in Javanese Muslims’ theological understandings and political positionings. My research site is the Javanese city of Yogyakarta known for its mixture of traditionalist or Sufi and modernist Muslim reform organizations. The project intervenes in two distinct scholarly debates concerning the everyday practice of Islam and the social ties it engenders and brings them into a new synthesis: 1) debates around the paradigm of Islam as a coherent discursive tradition and the meaning of coherence, given the complexity, ambivalence, and fragmentation of Muslims’ everyday lives; and 2) studies of the relation and meaning of traditionalism and modernism as distinct orientations, embedded in larger movements of global Islamic reform, and responding to political pressures on Muslims to position themselves as moderate. It focuses on discourses and practices around memory as a node where questions of coherence and ideological belonging intersect. Both traditionalists and modernists remember their history, claiming stewardship over their past, or preserving and commemorating it to bring about a desired present and future; but the politics of commemoration diverge widely as traditionalists and modernists, in their memory practices, navigate multiple, conflicting demands and diverging epistemologies and ideologies. The study seeks to highlight how memory is mobilized to make claims of legitimate knowledge and power; how different kinds of discursive or ritual traditions around memory are legible as identity markers of particular religious and ideological orientations, especially traditionalism and modernism; and how the juxtaposition of conflicting epistemologies and ontologies is negotiated and understood within and between these different orientations.

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In this essay I aim to identify and explain the ways four young Muslims search for knowledge of Islam by using qualitative research interviews. The questions I intend to answer are: In what ways do young Muslims search for information of Islam? In what arenas do they search for information? And, why does their search for knowledge take these forms?In the light of works by Jonas Otterbeck and using theories put forward by Anthony Giddens and Philip Sutton, Göran Larsson and Ann Frisén I have answered the questions of the study.The results show that the three young men who are actively searching for knowledge of Islam do most of their searching on the internet. They do however consider their parents and close relatives, and the local and foreign imams to be the most reliable sources of information. Two of the young men also consider certain family friends their most important sources. What makes these sources authorities to the young people seems to be their apparent religious knowledge, experience and their religious way of life in general. Two of the young men consider connections to the Muslim world, especially Saudi Arabia, a sign of expertise among their sources.Socialization theory can partly explain why the young men search for knowledge of Islam among their close relatives and family friends. Their choices of authorities as sources may also be explained by a quest for a “true” Islam, which is a phenomenon among young Muslims born or raised in a non-Muslim country.

The present research aims to investigate whether atheism is present in the thought of medieval Muslim thinkers. So far, these thinkers have been usually disregarded or poorly addressed in studies about the historical evolution of atheism. Previous studies about the evolution of atheism have pointed out that this concept is expressed both through the rejection of a specific, usually the most dominant religion, as well as through claims that do not aim to reject the divinity, but that considerably limit the presence of the supernatural in human affairs. In order to identify whether atheism is present in medieval Islam, this study focuses on the thought of Ibn al-Rāwandī, al-Rāzī and al-Ma'arrī, three major representatives of the Muslim medieval intellectual milieu. They never rejected God explicitly, but they clearly doubted the possibility that Allāh existed, attributing traditional monotheistic views about Him to an invention of the prophets. What is more, their atheism appears evident in the view they had of the world. They believed in an essentially secular world, where the individual should seek a personal and collective realisation; human existence is not finalised to the realisation of divine plans, rather to the individual contribution to the creation of a better existence in the present moment; reason and critical thinking should never be subordinated to religious considerations; and, finally, morality is independent from religious considerations. These aspects, highlighted in the studies about the evolution of atheism in Western thought, are central elements of the Muslim medieval thinkers analysed as well. The research shows that during the period of the formation of the Islamic dogma, views that excluded God from the ways human existence was regulated were well known and debated among Muslim thinkers, anticipating of many centuries the European Enlightenment.

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