Welcome to the first guide on our website, the Beginner’s Guide to Islam! Despite its predominance and history, the practice of Islam has been far from monolithic since the establishment of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. For Mamlūk administrative personnel, al-Qalqashandī composed an encyclopaedia in which he surveyed not only local practice but also all the information that a cultivated administrator should know. To the west the similarly constituted Mamlūk state continued to resist Mongol expansion. He was born a Muslim in the Syr Darya valley and served local pagan Mongol warriors and finally the Chagatai heir apparent, but he rebelled and made himself ruler in Khwārezm in 1380. He planned to restore Mongol supremacy under a thoroughly Islamic program. To the east the Delhi Sultanate of Turkic slave-soldiers withstood Mongol pressure, benefited from the presence of scholars and administrators fleeing Mongol destruction, and gradually began to extend Muslim control south into India, a feat that was virtually accomplished under Muḥammad ibn Tughluq. Muslim Delhi was a culturally lively place that attracted a variety of unusual persons. In Konya, Jalāl al-Dīn, attracted to Sufi activities, attached himself to the master Shams al-Dīn.

The most famous Muslim ever to live at Konya, Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, had emigrated from eastern Iran with his father before the arrival of the Mongols. In his poetry Jalāl al-Dīn explored all varieties of metaphors, including intoxication, to describe the ineffable ecstasy of union with God. Sharīʿah-minded studies were elaborated: the ulama worked out a political theory that tried to make sense of the sultanate, and they also explored the possibility of enlarging on the Sharīʿah by reference to falsafah and Sufism. At the same time, ulama from more-settled Islamic lands to the east encouraged them to abide by the Sharīʿah and tolerate the Christians as protected non-Muslims. His impact was twofold: his defeat of the Ottomans inspired a comeback that would produce one of the greatest Islamicate empires of all time, and one of the Central Asian heirs to his tradition of conquest would found another great Islamicate empire in India. However, in much the same way as al-Shāfiʿī had responded in the 9th century to what he viewed as dangerous legal diversity, another great legal and religious reformer, Ibn Taymiyyah, living in Mamlūk Damascus in the late 13th and early 14th century, cautioned against such extralegal practices and pursuits.

While the Persian language was becoming the language of administration and high culture over much of Islamdom, Arabic alone continued to be cultivated in Mamlūk domains, to the benefit of a diversified intellectual life. We are here to help you if you have special requirements or specific preferences for your life partner. 3. How Did Life Begin? For how can my reason presume to know how the highest realities operate, what effects would arise from them, and what sort of relation all these realities would have to each other? Sometimes when we know a way in which we should go, we don’t, simply because we may have to give up others and things that are comfortable or whatever reason. Indeed, paleontologists now know enough about the ages of sediments to predict where they will be able to find particularly significant transitional fossils, as happened with Tiktaalik and the ancestors of modern humans.

For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will be seen upon you. I have absolute faith that God is at the helm of this ship and that His-story will unfold exactly as He has planned. Our hope is that our website will be one of many ways you stay connected to our church community. In India, Sufism, which inherently undermined communalism, was bringing members of different religious communities together in ways very rare in the more westerly parts of Islamdom. Like him, Ibn Taymiyyah attacked all practices that undermined what he felt to be the fundamentals of Islam, including all forms of Shīʿite thought as well as aspects of Jamāʿī-Sunni piety (often influenced by the Sufis) that stressed knowledge of God over service to him. Its recitation, along with music and movement, was a key element in the devotional activities of Jalāl al-Dīn’s followers, who came to be organized into a Sufi ṭarīqah-named the Mevleviyah (Mawlawiyyah) after their title of respect for him, Mevlana (“Our Master”). During the Middle Ages, the term “religious” was used as a noun to describe someone who had joined a monastic order (a “religious”).