Memoirs of a Dervish: Sufis, Mystics and the Sixties by Robert Irwin

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By Robert Irwin

In the summertime of 1964 Robert Irwin trigger for Algeria looking for Sufi enlightenment. There he entered an international of marvels and ecstasy, switched over to Islam, and got an initiation as a faqir. He learnt the rituals of Islam in North Africa and he studied Arabic in London.

Political violence, torture, rock song, medicinal drugs, Oxbridge intellectuals, old flame, and losses are all a part of this tale from the 1960s.

Robert Irwin is likely one of the most sensible recognized writers at the historical past and tradition of the Islamic world.

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When the created Koran is said to be a miracle, the miracle referred to is the presence of the Uncreated Koran within the letters and sounds of its created (and therefore necessarily in certain ways circumscribed) manifestation. The words of the Koran came to Muhammad in manageable segments over twenty-three years through voices that seemed at first to vary and sometimes sounded like “the reverberating of bells,” but which gradually condensed into a single voice that identified itself as Gabriel’s.

This reckoning and its correlate, responsibility, lead directly to the issue of the soul’s freedom, and it must be admitted that in Islam human freedom stands in tension with God’s omnipotence, which points toward predestination. Islamic theology has wrestled interminably with this tension without rationally resolving it. It concludes that the workings of the Divine Decree remain a mystery to humans, who nevertheless are granted sufficient freedom and responsibility to make genuine moral and spiritual decisions.

Instead, it turns to the practical issue of what should be done about the disparity. Its answer is simple. Those who have much should help lift the burden of those who are less fortunate. It is a principle that twentieth-century democracies have embraced in 54 Islam secular mode in their concept of the welfare state. The Koran introduced its basic principle in the seventh century by prescribing a graduated tax on the haves to relieve the circumstances of the have-nots. Details aside, the figure the Koran set for this tax was 2 1/2 percent.

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