Thesis (D. Litt.--University of Calcutta, 1960). / Spine title: Rūmī and his Sufism. Includes bibliographical references (p. [415]-423).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology, June 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2005. / Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center; full text release delayed at author's request until 2010 May 31.

This thesis examines a cluster of recent films that feature people of Maghrebi heritage and position corporeality as a site through which subjectivity and self-other relations are constituted and experienced. These films are set in and between the countries of the Maghreb, France and, to a lesser degree, Switzerland, and often adopt a sensual aesthetic that prioritises embodied knowledge, the interrelation of the senses and the material realities of emotional experience. However, despite the importance of the body in these films, no study to date has taken corporeality as its primary point of concern. Existing research in French and Francophone Studies focuses almost exclusively on the socio-political issues raised by the phenomenon of French “beur” cinema (films by and/or about young Maghrebi-French people), meaning that there has been no extended scholarly investigation into the importance of corporeality in recent films featuring people of Maghrebi heritage. Underpinned by an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that interweaves corporeal phenomenology with theological and feminist scholarship on the body from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), this thesis seeks to provide the first longitudinal and comparative account of how Maghrebi people of different genders, ethnicities, sexualities, ages and classes have been represented corporeally in post-millennial Maghrebi and French cinemas. Via its acute focus on images of people of Maghrebi heritage and how their representations show them engaging with their environments through their bodies, this thesis is the first to apply the recent turn to corporeal phenomenology in Film Studies and feminism to critical interrogations of Maghrebi identities in Maghrebi and French films since the new millennium.

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.

Magister Artium - MA / The objective of this thesis was the translation of an original defence of Sufi practice titled "A Kind word in response to those who reject sufism" by Shaykh Aòhmad ibn Muòsòtafá °Alawåi. This book was written in defence of Sufis and Sufism. This research provide some notes on the life, spiritual heritage and writings of the Shaykh °Alawåi in conjunction with a critical introduction to complement the translated text. The Shaykh's methodology applied in his ijtihåad to validate and defend the Sufis and their practices was also reviewed. / South Africa

This paper examines the anecdotes of ʿAttār’s Mosibat-nāmeh as temporal phenomena from the perspective of a reader moving progressively through the text; it is argued that that these anecdotes do not function primarily as carriers of dogmatic information, but as dynamic rhetorical performances designed to prod their audiences into recommitting to a pious mode of life. First, the article shows how the poem’s frame-tale influences a reader’s experience of the embedded anecdotes by encouraging a sequential mode of consumption and contextualizing the work’s pedagogical aims. Next, it is demonstrated that these anecdotes are bound together through formulae and lexical triggers, producing a paratactic structure reminiscent of oral homiletics. Individual anecdotes aim to unsettle readers’ ossified religious understandings, and together they offer a flexible set of heuristics for pious living. Finally, it is argued that ʿAttār’s intended readers were likely familiar with the mystical principles that underlie his poems; he therefore did not use narratives to provide completely new teachings, but rather to persuade his audience to more fully embody those pious principles to which they were already committed.

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