Here are 100 books that Creation and the Timeless Order of Things fans have personally recommended if you like
Creation and the Timeless Order of Things.
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I am a Professor of Islamic Thought and Global Philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Perpetually drawn to ideas and concepts that seek to explain the underlying nature of things, I predictably read and write books on such topics as consciousness, self-awareness, mysticism, God, philosophy of religion, metaphysical poetry, and virtue ethics. The titles listed here are in my own area of expertise (Sufi philosophy). Intellectually rigorous and spiritually informed, they each represent perfect points of entry into Sufism, which is an ocean without a shore.
Written for contemporary audiences by a living Sufi
philosopher and world-renowned authority of comparative philosophy and
mysticism, The Garden of Truth is a must-read for anyone who wants to
have an understanding of, awaken to, and joyously live in the present moment. Unlike
any book I’ve seen in English, this work explains how the Sufi path of
liberation is all about realizing that one can only return to the present
moment by proceeding from where we are in the here-and-now. Once we get There,
we realize that Here is Now, since Now was always Here.
Sufism has made significant contributions to the spread of Islam and the development of various aspects of Islamic civilisation. Many conservative Muslims disagree with many popular Sufi practices, particularly saint worship, the visiting of tombs, and the incorporation of non-Islamic customs. Consequently, in recent centuries Sufism has been a target for Islamic reformist and modernist movements. Nasr is the preeminent Sufi scholar in the U.S., and in the tradition of Martin Buber's I and Thou, here provides the beliefs and vision of the mystical heart of Islam. A gentle anitdote to the extremist Muslim fundamentalists who capture the headlines and…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
My exploration of Sufism began in the unlikely environment of the Soviet Union where Sufism was considered a relic of the past to be replaced by the atheist, world-asserting ideology. The fact that my Muslim academic advisor assigned this topic to me, an active customs officer, was nothing short of a miracle. It was the beginning of a chain of miracles that punctuated my teaching and research career in the USSR, UK, US, EU, and the post-Soviet republics of Eurasia, especially Tatarstan and Kazakhstan. Having observed Sufism in various shapes and forms for over thirty years, my knowledge of its precepts and rituals is of great help to me in everyday life.
This book was a revelation for me when it came out, and I continue to use it as both reference and a source of new ideas and inspiration. The author felicitously combines a deeply personal perspective on Sufism’s greatest thinker Ibn ‘Arabi (1165–1240) with academic rigor and precision in translation. His comments on Ibn ‘Arabi’s teachings are unobtrusive and helpful in navigating the Sufi master’s breathtaking exploration of the universe that he presents, paradoxically, as a giant reflection of the [self-]image and imagination of the Divine Absolute. The subtle interaction of mundane and divine imaginations determines how we ourselves imagine the world. After reading this book, you will understand why Ibn ‘Arabi looms so large in Eastern and Western imaginings of Sufism and why he is compared to Plato in the Western intellectual tradition.
"For the first time in the history of Orientalism, a thorough study of Ibn al-'Arabi's thought is now available. William Chittick has given us a translation of numerous passages from the work of the Magister Magnus and placed them in their theological context, thus removing many misunderstandings that have prevailed both among Muslims and in the West when interpreting Ibn al-'Arabi's mystical worldview. Chittick has done this with admirable clarity, and his book will always remain a most important milestone in the study of Islamic mystical theology." -- Annemarie Schimmel, Harvard University
I am a Professor of Islamic Thought and Global Philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Perpetually drawn to ideas and concepts that seek to explain the underlying nature of things, I predictably read and write books on such topics as consciousness, self-awareness, mysticism, God, philosophy of religion, metaphysical poetry, and virtue ethics. The titles listed here are in my own area of expertise (Sufi philosophy). Intellectually rigorous and spiritually informed, they each represent perfect points of entry into Sufism, which is an ocean without a shore.
This book is one of a kind. It draws upon an array of Sufi texts in translation in order to explain how the Sufi vision of reality is fundamentally rooted in a kind of yin/yang complementarity at every level of being—from the human, to the cosmic, to the divine.
This is a genuine foundational work in Islamic studies, an open door into the very heart of Islamic civilization. It suggests the bases of important comparisons and insights for those interested in cognate areas in Western cultures. The Tao of Islam is a rich and diverse anthology of Islamic teachings on the nature of the relationships between God and the world, the world and the human being, and the human being and God. Focusing on gender symbolism, Sachiko Murata shows that Muslim authors frequently analyse the divine reality and its connection with the cosmic and human domains with a view…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I am a Professor of Islamic Thought and Global Philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Perpetually drawn to ideas and concepts that seek to explain the underlying nature of things, I predictably read and write books on such topics as consciousness, self-awareness, mysticism, God, philosophy of religion, metaphysical poetry, and virtue ethics. The titles listed here are in my own area of expertise (Sufi philosophy). Intellectually rigorous and spiritually informed, they each represent perfect points of entry into Sufism, which is an ocean without a shore.
The findings in this book have
opened my eyes to a truly unique moment in the history of cross-cultural
translation and non-Western philosophy by showing how pre-modern Indian
metaphysical teachings in Sanskrit were refashioned by the Persian Sufi
philosophical tradition in early modern South Asia. I particularly recommend Translating
Wisdom because it clearly points to an alternative quest for wisdom for those
who wish to escape the stranglehold of Anglo-American and European epistemic
systems.
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.
During the height of Muslim power in Mughal South Asia, Hindu and Muslim scholars worked collaboratively to translate a large body of Hindu Sanskrit texts into the Persian language. Translating Wisdom reconstructs the intellectual processes and exchanges that underlay these translations. Using as a case study the 1597 Persian rendition of the Yoga-Vasistha-an influential Sanskrit philosophical tale whose popularity stretched across the subcontinent-Shankar Nair illustrates how these early modern Muslim and Hindu scholars drew upon their respective religious, philosophical, and literary traditions to forge a common vocabulary…
I've always been fascinated with the idea that humans have so many layers of consciousness, and reality is multi-faceted. I've studied Zen Buddhism, yoga, and for the past 43 years, Sufism. My experience of life has developed into a journey of changing difficult situations into exhilarating discoveries, finding hidden patterns in nature that delight me and tell me I’m not alone in the universe, and helping many people transform into beings of joy and gratitude. I’m beginning to see that our transformation delights and changes the Divine; we are not a passing phenomenon but contributors to new creation on a major scale.
This book, for serious students of mysticism, dances between the worlds of Persia a thousand years ago and the present. For me, it took the topic of creative imagination out of the realm of fantasy and established it as a cornerstone of the way we perceive and give meaning to reality, and the way we connect to God and inner worlds.
"Henry Corbin's works are the best guide to the visionary tradition...Corbin, like Scholem and Jonas, is remembered as a scholar of genius. He was uniquely equipped not only to recover Iranian Sufism for the West, but also to defend the principal Western traditions of esoteric spirituality."--From the introduction by Harold Bloom Ibn 'Arabi (1165-1240) was one of the great mystics of all time. Through the richness of his personal experience and the constructive power of his intellect, he made a unique contribution to Shi'ite Sufism. In this book, which features a powerful new preface by Harold Bloom, Henry Corbin brings…
I began writing Ali’s incredible international odyssey as a film, but once I discovered the epic breadth of his journey, I decided on a book first.
For 3 years I worked intensely with Ali. Not only was it a passionate and personal epic tale about love and loss, overcoming insurmountable odds, endurance and survival, but it hit a chord with readers from all walks of life, bringing understand to why people fled their countries, and help to change attitudes on refugees from fear to compassion. After three years on the road with the book I have now completed the screenplay.
Kooshyar Karimi wrote this stunning memoir so beautifully it blew me away. Now a Sydney-based doctor and writer, he grew up as a Jew in Muslim Iran, hiding his origins from a brutal regime, always with a humorous eye.
It is such a powerful story of survival, torture, and spying, plus forced deceptions and betrayal of others for helping desperate female rape victims. The struggle for redemption and eventual escape make his journey an unforgettable one.
Whilst many stories have come out of Iran in the last few decades, nothing matches the grittiness of this portrayal of life in the crumbling alleyways and damp cellars of an Iranian slum district--the extreme poverty and desperation, and the regular betrayals and compromises, even within families, in the fight for survival. Born on the back seat of a police car in the subzero temperatures of a bleak and icy winter's night, Karimi summons extraordinary and unwavering dedication throughout his childhood to break free of this hopeless existence, culminating in the achievement of his dream to become a surgeon. But…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
My connection to books about Iran goes beyond simple curiosity—it's personal. Reading these stories feels like going back to the streets and memories that shaped my childhood. The books I’ve chosen to highlight here offer powerful and moving portraits of Iranian life. They reflect the struggles and beauty of a country that has played a big role in my own journey, both personally and as a writer. Each one shows a different side of Iran, capturing voices and experiences that are often overlooked or misunderstood. Together, they offer a deeper understanding of what it means to be Iranian.
This book tells the story of the Islamic Revolution in Iran through the eyes of a young girl. Satrapi uses simple black-and-white drawings to share memories that are both heartbreaking and honest, with small moments of humor and childhood mixed in.
She shows what it was like to grow up during a time of fear and change while also trying to figure out who she was in a society full of rules. It’s a personal story, but one that many people can relate to. More than just a history lesson; it’s a story that sticks with you and helps you understand how big events shape everyday lives.
An attractive boxed set of Marjane Satrapi's best-selling, internationally acclaimed graphic memoir of growing up as a girl in revolutionary Iran
“A wholly original achievement.... Satrapi evokes herself and her schoolmates coming of age in a world of protests and disappearances.... A stark, shocking impact.” —The New York Times: "The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years"
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood Wise, funny, and heartbreaking, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi's memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six…
My career has taken me zero millimeters from a large college, Christ Church, to a small, adjacent one, Corpus Christi, in 1971. In my mind, though, I have crisscrossed the world, leaping back in time to late antiquity and the Middle Ages, and nowhere proved more fascinating than Iran, which I have visited twice, in 1998 and 2002. I have written about different facets of its history at the end of antiquity, in particular its dominant role in the India trade and the coming of the Arabs.
Great writers of the past are revered in Iran, none more so than Hafiz. One of the most magical places in the country is the garden around his alabaster tomb in Shiraz. Dominic Brookshank whisks one far from the Western present into an extraordinary world of high culture in Shiraz in the fourteenth century.
He has helped me understand Hafiz’s ghazals, short lyric poems full of cryptic allusions. I am still dumbfounded at what they reveal of small elite gatherings of the court, at which wine is drunk (and praised), and Hafiz casts rapt, homoerotic gazes at young males. What an extraordinary disjunction with ordinary life in the Islamic world!
Despite his towering presence in premodern Persian letters, Shams al-Din Muhammad Hafiz of Shiraz (d. 1390) remains an elusive and opaque character for many. In order to look behind the hyperbole that surrounds Hafiz's poetry and penetrate the quasi-hagiographical film that obscures the poet himself, this book attempts a contextualisation of Hafiz that is at once socio-political, historical, and literary. Here, Hafiz's ghazals (short, monorhyme, broadly amorous lyric poems) are read comparatively against similar texts composed by his less-studied rivals in the hyper competitive, imitative, and profoundly intertextual environment of fourteenth-century Shiraz. By bringing Hafiz's lyric poetry into productive, detailed…
Allison Levy holds a PhD in Italian Renaissance art and architecture from Bryn Mawr College. She has published five books on Italian visual culture, and has taught in the US, Italy, and the UK. She oversees the digital publishing program at Brown University.
This #1 New York Times bestseller grapples with what houses say about who we are—or want to become. Slip into a tragic entanglement between Massoud Behrani, a recent immigrant from Iran intent on restoring his family’s honor by purchasing a California bungalow up for auction, and Kathy Nicolo, the house’s owner, and a recovering drug addict determined to hold on to her family property. This penetrating novel will satisfy readers’ unquenchable thirst for stories that explore the psychological ramifications of emotional and social overinvestment in the promise of a house.
A recent immigrant from the Middle East-a former colonel in the Iranian Air Force-yearns to restore his family's dignity in California. A recovering alcoholic and addict down on her luck struggles to hold onto the one thing she has left?her home. And her lover, a married cop, is driven to extremes to win her love.
Andre Dubus III's unforgettable characters-people with ordinary flaws, looking for a small piece of ground to stand on-careen toward inevitable conflict. Their tragedy paints a shockingly true picture of the country we live in today.
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I’ve been fascinated with ancient history since childhood, but really fell in love with the Achaemenids in college while taking classes on Greek history and wondering about the other side’s perspective on familiar stories of the Persian Wars. I was fortunate to get the opportunity to study both Greek and Persian history in graduate school at the University of Chicago, a leading center of scholarship on the Achaemenid world since the Persepolis excavations in the 1930s. Since 2006, I’ve taught in the History department at Christopher Newport University, a liberal arts university in Newport News, Virginia. I’m currently working on my next book, a new history of Persia’s Greek campaigns.
This monumental two-volume collection, published in 2021, contains 110 accessible essays by some of the most prominent scholars of Achaemenid Persian history. It introduces the ancient evidence, including written sources, artistic materials, and archaeological remains, for every major region from the Indus to the Nile and the Aegean, and ably surveys the disciplinary history of the modern study of ancient Iran. Thematic chapters trace numerous aspects of Persia’s imperial world, including geography, languages, gender, religion, court dynamics, administration, communications, war, diplomacy, economics, art, science, and many more. The narrative chapters place the empire’s rise and fall, including but hardly limited to the Persian-Greek wars, into a longer context of Ancient Near Eastern empire formation, setting up valuable insights through comparison with Assyria, Babylonia, and other predecessors.
A comprehensive review of the political, cultural, social, economic and religious history of the Achaemenid Empirem
Often called the first world empire, the Achaemenid Empire is rooted in older Near Eastern traditions. A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire offers a perspective in which the history of the empire is embedded in the preceding and subsequent epochs. In this way, the traditions that shaped the Achaemenid Empire become as visible as the powerful impact it had on further historical development. But the work does not only break new ground in this respect, but…
