The Vocational Society

by Dr. Karim Lahham

A speech addressing the social philosophies and institutions, many of them common to Muslims and Christians, comprising a vocational and godly society.

The Road to Mecca

Book Review by A. Razzaq Pérez Fernández

The Way of Mesa by Muhammad Asad / Translation: A. Razzaq Pérez Fernández

This work is the spiritual biography of Muhammad Asad, Austrian journalist, writer and traveler, born in 1900 in the city of Lvov, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and today in Ukraine. The son of a Jewish lawyer and grandson of an Orthodox rabbi. He died in Mijas, Malaga, in 1992, and is buried in the Rauda de Granada.
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Pearls of faith

Book Review by Ian Whiteman

Pearls of the Faith by British Victorian journalist and traveller Sir Edwin Arnold.

First published in 1884 Pearls of the Faith was an attempt to present Islam in an appealing and intelligent manner to a world steeped in prejudice and colonial disdain for Islam. When I first saw the text ten years ago it seemed archaic and written in a kind of verse that reminded me of the stories of Rupert Bear, an illustrated childrens' story book awned in verse form which I had up with grown. I didn't really understand Hamza Yusuf's motives in wanting to republish it but after ten years and a now very different world that we live in, it actually makes a lot of sense to re-present it to the public. After careful editing involving many spelling changes and the addition of the essay by Gai Eaton, a foreword by Robert P George, a prominent professor of Law from Princeton who gives a Christian perspective, the book has been given a new lease of life. Hamza's preface unlocks his own motives behind its publication and how he came to find the book in the first place. Part of his preface I have reproduced here.

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Calligraphy

MATS ABDELKARIM CEDERBERG

Calligraphy and Islamic art in several mediums produced in Argiva by Abdelkarim Cederberg.

Carpentry

Floorshapes Carpentry

Bespoke mezzanines, storage solutions, flooring and furniture designed and produced in Argiva by Michael Wheeler. Floorshapes

The Four Imams

Four Schools of Law


The Four Imams and their Schools

by Gibril Fouad Haddad

One of many books on traditional Islam typeset and designed by CWDM in Orgiva, The Four Imams and their Schools provides an in-depth study of the founders and leading students of the primary schools of jurisprudence in Islam.

“THE GREAT EDIFICE of Islamic Law is held up by four towering figures of the early middle ages: Abu Hanifa, Malik, al-Shafi i, and Ibn Hanbal. Because of their immense dedication and intellectual acuity, these men enjoy recognition to this day as Islam s most influential scholars. By assessing and ranking hadith, by cultivating a deep knowledge of the Arabic language, and by virtue of their great native intelligence, they are credited with having shaped the development of the fundamental systems of Muslim jurisprudence, avoiding the twin pitfalls of subjective rationalism and blind literalism. By doing so they not only protected their religion from chaos and disorder, but showed the Muslims, both ordinary and expert, the safest and most reliable ways of avoiding error in the understanding and practice of the divine law. This detailed study offers biographies of these four men and their leading pupils. It surveys the distinctive features of their jurisprudence, and assesses their achievement. An especially helpful feature is a long and detailed glossary of Islamic technical terms. Meticulously rooted in the core texts of Islamic scholarship, this book will be an important resource for Shari’a students everywhere.”

Respecting The Madhabs – Shaykh Gibril Fouad Haddad

Shaykh Gibril Fouad Haddad on respecting the madhabs, and respecting the differences that exist among them.

Aqida

Essentials of Aqida

Dr Umar Faruq Abd-Allah presented this important series of five discourses on the essentials of Islamic aqida during the 2013 Al-Ghaz Retreatali in Los Rosales, Spain.

(Please note that there are some brief sound quality issues throughout the course that are usually quickly corrected so please be patient!)

Living Islam for a purpose

Living Islam with Purpose Dr. Umar Abdullah discusses five operational principles to facilitate the acquisition of deeper knowledge and understanding of Islam.

"While this paper is written with the American Muslim community in mind, its five operational principles are relevant for Muslims everywhere, especially those in Canada, Britain, and Western Europe."

http://www.tabahfoundation.org/research/pdfs/Tabah-Paper-5-En-Living-Islam-with-Purpose.pdf

15th-century poem reinvented in 21st century Andalusia

Classic Persian Poem sung in English, Arabic and Farsi to Celtic tunes

Abdal Hakim Murad returns to Andalusia with his Alborán ensemble to join Ali Keeler and Abdallateef Whiteman in Argiva for their latest recording session.

by Bob Shingleton

“If the featured album was pitched as the world premiere recording of a newly discovered 16th century Celtic a cappella setting of the liturgy uncovered in a remote Calvinist church on the Isle of Lewis it would, doubtless, attract attention. But as Rawdat al-Shuhuda‘ is a contemporary setting of excerpts from the 14th Islamic century Dhikr – litany – by Husayn Vayiz Kashifi of Herat in Afghanistan in English, Arabic and Farsi to Celtic tunes in Irish, Manx and Scottish modes, it has been consigned to the lost baggage area where it is waiting to be reclaimed. Read more

The legacy of Andalusian agriculture

The Andalusian Books of Filāḥa

While agriculture improved and expanded throughout the Muslim lands, it was in Al-Andalus that it reached its apogee. In the opinion of Scott in his History of the Moorish Empire in Europe the agricultural system of Moorish Andalusia was “the most complex, the most scientific, the most perfect, ever devised by the ingenuity of man”14. Superlatives aside, it surely marks one of the high points in world agricultural history, supporting a 10th century population of about 10 million15 as well as major exporting sugar-refining and textile industries, the latter based on the fibre cotton crops, flax and hemp and dye-plants including indigo, henna, madder and wo
Ad. The extraordinarily bio-diverse agro-ecosystem of Al-Andalus was composed of cultivated lands – a mosaic of tree crops, orchard or market-garden crops, and field crops, both irrigated and rain-fed – permanent meadows and pasture lands, and commons with rights of usage by local inhabitants. The range of crops available to the medieval Andalusi farmer was extensive. Towards the end of the 11th century Ibn Ba’l mentions more than 180 cultivated crops and plants, and at the end of the 12th century Ibn al-‘Aww’m notes 585 different species and cultivars, not though all of these would have been cultivated. It is worth listing the most important of these:

Tree crops included olives, vines, almonds, carobs, figs, peaches, apricots, apples, pears, medlars, fifteens, chestnuts, walnuts, pistachios, hazelnuts, hawthorns, date palms, lemons, citrons, orange sours, jujubes, ne treesttle and mulberry trees, as well as holm-oaks, arbutus and myrtles.

Kitchen gardens grew lettuces, carrots, radishes, cabbages, cauliflowers, melons, cucumbers, spinach, leeks, onions, aubergines, kidney beans, cardoons, artichokes, purslane and numerous aromatic plants as basil, cress, caraway, saffron, cumin, capers, mustard, marjoram, fennel, lemon verbena.

Fields of cereals and pulses were sown with wheat, barley, rice, millet and spelt among the former, and broad beans, kidney beans, peas, chickpeas, lentils, vetch, lupine and fenugreek among the latter; sugar-cane was grown on the coast of Almuñécar and Vélez-Málaga; fibre plants included flax, Asian cotton and hemp; dye plants included safflower, madder, henna, woad and saffron, and sumac was grown for tanning; wild species such as esparto, osier and oil-palm were harvested; numerous ornamental species were planted in gardens and an enormous number of medicinal herbs were also employed16.

It was here too in Al-Andalus that an important development in Islamic agriculture took root and flourished in the form of an Arabic literary genre – the Books of Fil’a – which attempted to synthesize the accumulated knowledge and theories of the past with practical husbandry on ground the, the systematizing a new science of agriculture. The Books of Fil’a are scattered in hundreds of manuscripts, many of a miscellaneous character and frequently mis-catalogued, in dozens of libraries across the world, and it is only relatively recently that these texts and their authors have been established with reasonable certainty. Nevertheless many questions remain and there is still much work to be done on the corpus of Arabic agricultural literature in general.


excerpt from the Filaha Text Project