Thesis (Ph. D)--UCLA, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 324-350).

No description available.

The thesis "Tuba: an African eschatology in Islam" adopts afrocentric hypotheses for the study of Islam. First, the thesis demonstrates how certain phenomena specific to Islam in Africa, those usually qualified as products of religious syncretism, are on the contrary indicative of the ongoing process of synthesis and enrichment within Islam, and, secondly, that African spiritual tradition continues today as in the past to participate along with others in this constructive process. In order to demonstrate this hypothesis the spiritual significance of the modern Islamic holy city of Touba in Senegal will be analyzed. / Touba is named for the Tree of Paradise (Tuba) of Islamic tradition and the holy city has been constructed around the singular arboreal image. The spiritual meaning imparted by Touba, a deliberate creation, is expressed in the topography of the holy city, in its geographic configuration. The thesis adapts the methodologies of spatial analysis, and specifically the semiotic reading of landscape, to the study of a religious phenomenon, i.e., the creation of a holy city. / in order to explain the significance of this holy city for Islamic eschatology, the meanings which three distinct religious traditions (Islam, West Africa, Ancient Egypt) have attached to the image of the cosmic tree are inventoried. The tree as archetype here serves to establish the continuity of African religious thought from pharaonic Egypt to modern Muslim Senegal.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Anthropology, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 317-341).

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Carleton University, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 102-108). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

This dissertation asks how Muslims in north India today understand four paradoxical aspects of Sufi saint shrine traditions. The shrines of Sufi saints are sometimes regarded as apolitical, sacred, all-inclusive, and anti-elite religious spaces. At the same time, they are sites that are politicized, illegally bought and sold as commercial real estate, fuel for Islamic sectarian divisions, and often controlled by upper-caste Muslim elites. Based on the analysis of historical archival materials and twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh), this dissertation argues that shrines are sites that straddle the dīn-duniyā distinction in Islam. Dīn (understood as “religion” in the modern period) is the atemporal, immaterial domain of true spirituality, whereas duniyā (“world”) is the realm of this-worldly material concerns and temporal impermanence. As sites imbued with the ethereal barakah (love of God manifest as the power of a blessing) of Sufi saints that aid individuals in drawing near to God by transcending “worldly” desires and also material commodities that are aggressively competed over by adversarial stakeholders (e.g., the state, real estate mafias, sectarian rivals), these shrines are paradoxically both of dīn and of duniyā. When asked how one can differentiate between dīn and duniyā—for example, when a Sufi politician is acting a religious manner or in a worldly manner—many of my interviewees explained that one can distinguish between these two domains based on the material presence of money. In this dissertation, I argue that the concept of money (paisā; also, “money” in English) acts as a symbol to help Muslims in Lucknow navigate this paradoxical quality. By attributing to the materiality of money those aspect of shrine operations associated with duniyā, interviewees effectively identified the boundary line dividing dīn from duniyā, thereby resolving the ostensibly contradictory nature of, for example, the politicization of an apolitical space. As a key signifier in the broader neoliberal context of Lucknow and the global politics of Sufism, money is an important concept by which Muslims make sense of the social, economic, and political complexities of Muslim life in the north India.

Univ., Diss. (rev.)--Princeton, 1973.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 317-341) An ethnography of fakirs' mystical mastery based on fieldwork at the thirteenth century Muslim shrine of Nizamuddin Auliya.