Voices of Islam (122 page)

Authors: Vincent J. Cornell

BOOK: Voices of Islam

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KARIMA DIANE ALAVI is Director of Education at the Dar al-Islam educational center in Abiquiu, New Mexico. She presents workshops on Islam both at Dar al-Islam and at national conferences. She has been

280 About the Editor and Contributors

interviewed on Spirituality TV and on National Public Radio. In the 1970s, she taught at the University of Isfahan, Iran. Upon her return to the United States, she taught Islamic Studies at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. With Susan Douglass, she authored the curriculum unit
Emergence of Renaissance: Cultural Interactions Between Europeans and Muslims.
Alavi has also published articles for social studies publications and for Muslim and Christian magazines.

LESLIE CADAVID began her studies of the Arabic language at the age of 16, when she moved with her family to Cairo, Egypt. She attended the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Besides the autobiography of Fatima al-Yashrutiyya on which she is presently working, she has also published
Two Who Attained
(2005), a translation of selected works by the twentieth-century Muslim saints, Ahmad al-‘Alawi and Fatima al- Yashrutiyya. She is also working on translations from Spanish into English for a publisher in Spain.

DAOUD STEPHEN CASEWIT currently resides in Rabat, Morocco, where he has been serving as Executive Secretary of MACECE (the Moroccan-American Commission for Educational and Cultural Exchange) since 1996. He holds an MA in Applied Linguistics (1984) and a BA (1983,
summa cum laude
) in Arabic Studies from the American University in Cairo. He also served as Director of ALIF (Arabic Language Institute in Fez) from 1991 to 1996. From 1984 to 1988, he resided in Medina with his family of four and taught at the university there. He has published articles on various subjects in scholarly journals dealing with the unique traits of Medina, the concept of Hijra, and teaching English as a second language to Muslim learn- ers. He is currently working on a book-length historical guide to Medina.

RKIA ELAROUI CORNELL is Senior Lecturer in Arabic at Emory University. For the previous six years (2000–2006), she was Research Associate Professor of Arabic Studies at the University of Arkansas. A native of Morocco, she obtained a degree in secondary education from the Women’s Regional Normal School in Mekne`s, Morocco, and finished an eight-year contract with the Moroccan Ministry of Education. From 1991 to 2000, she was Assistant Professor of the Practice of Arabic at Duke University. In 1999, she published
Early Sufi Women,
a translation of an early work about Sufi women by the Persian mystic Abu ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sulami (d. 1021
CE
). Cornell has given numerous lectures and conference presenta- tions on the subjects of Qur’anic exegesis, women in Islam, and language pedagogy. She is currently preparing a book on the woman saint Rabi‘a al- ‘Adawiyya and an advanced reader in premodern Arabic literature.

About the Editor and Contributors 281

VIRGINIA GRAY HENRY-BLAKEMORE is the director of the interfaith publishing houses Fons Vitae and Quinta Essentia. She is a writer and video producer under contract with the Book Foundation, U.S. director of photography and children’s book publisher Dar Nun, and cofounder and trustee of the Islamic Texts Society of Cambridge, England. She is an accomplished lecturer in art history, world religions, and filmmaking. She has taught at Fordham University, Cairo American College, and Cambridge University. She is also a founding member of the Thomas Merton Center Foundation. Virginia Gray Henry-Blakemore received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College, studied at the American University in Cairo and Al-Azhar University, earned her MA in Education from the University of Michigan, served as Research Fellow at Cambridge University from 1983 to 1990, and is scheduled to receive her PhD from Canterbury, Kent, in 2008.

SHAYKH ‘ALI JUM‘A is the Grand Mufti (Chief Jurisconsult) of Egypt. He is considered to be one of the most respected and qualifi traditional Islamic scholars alive. He has mastery of numerous Islamic sciences but specializes in the science of the Foundations of Islamic Law (
usul al-fi
). He follows the Shafi school of Islamic jurisprudence. Shaykh ‘Ali Jum‘a did not enter the religious establishment in his boyhood. He first studied at the Faculty of Commerce, obtaining his BA from Ain Shams University in 1973. He then enrolled at the University of Al-Azhar, obtaining a BA in 1979, an MA in 1985, and a PhD in Shari‘a and law in 1988. Shaykh ‘Ali Jum‘a is also the preacher (
khatib
) of the Sultan Hassan Mosque in Cairo. He has authored around two dozen books on various aspects of Islamic thought and jurisprudence. He is Editor of the
Encyclopaedia of Hadith,
a subproject of the greater Sunna Project of the Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation, which aims at documenting and publishing all works related to Prophetic narrations or Hadith. He is also a member of the editorial advisory board of Fons Vitae, an interfaith publishing house based in the United States.

SHAYKH MUHAMMAD HISHAM KABBANI is a world-renowned author and religious scholar. He has devoted his life to the promotion of the traditional Islamic principles of peace, tolerance, love, compassion, and brotherhood, while opposing extremism in all its forms. The Shaykh is a member of a respected family of traditional Islamic scholars. Shaykh Kabbani received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and studied medicine. In addition, he holds a degree in Islamic Law and a license to teach, guide, and counsel religious students in Islamic spirituality from Shaykh Muhammad Nazim Adil al-Haqqani of the Naqshbanidiyya Sufi brotherhood. Shaykh Kabbani has published a large number of books in English on classical Islam and spiritual- ity. He has hosted three international conferences, which drew leaders and

282 About the Editor and Contributors

scholars from around the world. As an important voice for traditional Islam, Shaykh Kabbani is sought for counsel by journalists, academics, and government leaders. He serves on the boards of a number of religious and educational organizations.

BARRY C. M
C
DONALD edited
Seeing God Everywhere: Essays on Nature and the Sacred
(2003). He also coedited, with Patrick Laude,
Music of the Sky: An Anthology of Spiritual Poetry
(2004). His poetry has appeared in numer- ous journals, including
Sacred Web, Crosscurrents, Sophia, The American Muslim,
and
Sufi.

DANIEL ABDAL-HAYY MOORE is a widely regarded American Muslim poet. His fi book of poems,
Dawn Visions,
was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books in San Francisco (1964). He became a Sufi Muslim in 1970, performed the Hajj in 1972, and lived and traveled in Morocco, Spain, Algeria, and Nigeria. Upon his return to California, he published
The Desert is the Only Way Out
in 1985 and
Chronicles of Akhira
in 1986. A resident of Philadelphia since 1990, he has published
The Ramadan Sonnets
(1996) and
The Blind Beekeeper
(2002). He has also been the major editor for a number of works, including
The Burda of Shaykh Busiri
(2003), translated by Hamza Yusuf, and
State of Siege
(2004), the poetry of the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Munir Akash.

SEYYED HOSSEIN NASR is University Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He is one of the most prolific and influential Islamic scholars alive. Professor Nasr is the author of over 50 books and 500 articles on Islamic science, religion, and the environment, in four languages. His best known works include
Three Muslim Sages, An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines, Science and Civilization in Islam, Ideals and Realities of Islam,
and
The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity.
He attended MIT as an undergraduate. Upon his graduation from MIT, Nasr obtained a master’s degree in geology and geophysics and went on to pursue his PhD in the history of science and learning at Harvard University. After Harvard, he returned to Iran as a professor at Tehran University, and then at Arya Mehr University, where he was appointed President in 1972. He was Dean of the Faculty and Academic Vice Chancellor of Tehran University from 1968 to 1972. He was also a student of ‘Allama Tabataba’i, a traditional Iranian scholar whose commen- tary on the Qur’an,
Tafsir al-Mizan,
is very popular. In the 1970s, Empress Farah Pahlavi of Iran appointed Professor Nasr head of the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, the fi academic institution to be created in accordance with the intellectual principles of the Traditionalist School. He was forced to leave Iran after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Nasr took

About the Editor and Contributors 283

up positions at the University of Edinburgh and then at Temple University, followed by George Washington University, where he has been since 1984 to the present day.

NASROLLAH POURJAVADY was born in Tehran. He went to the United States in 1963 to study Western philosophy and having obtained his BA in 1967 returned to Iran and earned his MA and PhD from the University of Tehran. Subsequently, he taught philosophy and mysticism at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, and then at the University of Tehran, where he is now a full professor. He has also taught as a visiting professor at Colgate University (2002) and at Gregorian University in Rome (2005). Over the last 30 years, Professor Pourjavady has written some 20 books as well as over 100 essays and articles in the fields of Islamic mysticism, philosophy, and Persian literature. He was the general editor of a monumen- tal three-volume work on Iranian art and culture,
The Splendour of Iran
(2001). As the founding director of Iran University Press, the largest academic publishing house in Iran, he supervised the publication of some 1,200 academic books and 11 periodicals in Persian, English, French, and German for 24 years, until the spring of 2004. He is a member of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature, which awarded him the Academy’s Persian Literature Award in 2004. He received the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award in 2005.

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