Muslim Travel, History & Culture
The waqf system (public endowment of property, money, educational institution or land) has served as the backbone of Islamic civilization, providing public services and support over the course of Muslim history. The properties of most major cities consisted of a large portion of awqaf (pl: waqf). The Mamluk and Ottoman periods saw significant development of awqaf and by the 1800s, in Istanbul and…
“There will then be a perfect correspondence between the interior and the exterior, and the work produced can then become the expression… of him who conceived and executed it, and it will then constitute a masterpiece in the true sense of the word.” Sacred art is a conduit for self-refinement and Divine knowledge. Three years ago, I began searching Cairo for what remained of the sacred art…
The humidity of Central Java has a specific, relentless character. It is thick, fragrant with decay and rebirth. On the afternoon I arrived at Bumi Langit Farm, it gave me a tight, welcoming hug that took my breath away. Ahead of me, Tantra, a young man whose grace suggests he has long since made peace with the gravity of the earth, walked barefoot. He did not look back to see if I was stumbling…
In al-Quds, in the shadow of al-Aqsa, a kitchen has fed the poor for five centuries. This is the story of the woman who willed it. Yusuf saw the map before he saw the queen. It lay unfurled on a low table of walnut and mother-of-pearl, held open at its four corners by brass paperweights cast in the shape of falcons. On its surface, Jerusalem was summoned in ink. Roads drawn in the deep obsidian of…
“When Asad looked at the army gathered around him from every side, the horses neighing, the drums beating, and the banners fluttering, he said: ‘There is no god but Allah, alone, without partner. By Allah, Oh assembly of Muslims, neither my father nor my grandfather ever held such a position of command, nor did anyone among my ancestors see anything like this. I have only reached what you see…
At the entrance to Soportújar, a village in the Alpujarra mountains south of Granada, lies a cave in which lived – so the legend tells – two sister witches. At the back of the cave the red-black rock twists like a solidified tornado up into the mountain, a snapshot of geological processes that took place a million years ago as the Sierra Nevada was forming, but which looked, to early modern…
We begin with a key Quranic term, āyah, which we – almost always – translate as ‘verse’ in the Muslim scripture. However, this word also means ‘sign’ and herein emerges the crucial metaphysical node in our discourse. We find the following verse in (41:53): “We shall show them Our āyāt [signs/verses] in the horizons and in their own selves until it is clear to them that this is the truth.” But…
How Abdülmecid II tried to rewrite Islamic history with a new caliphate in the Nizamate of Hyderabad. “I am not a traitor. Under no circumstance will I go” responded Caliph Abdülmecid II. He was found in his library, studying the Qur’an, clinging to whatever claim he had left to the house of Osman. The expulsion order was delivered to him by Haydar Bey, the governor of Istanbul, along with the…
The novelist Flannery O’Connor famously wrote: “An artist prays by creating”. The lasting bastions of Andalusia, Islamic calligraphy and religious odes augment this aspect of art as an intimate form of prayer. They reveal a past where the path of walāya (sainthood) for every human being is that of the craft. And just as God reminded Moses of his memories when he sought to remember God (Q20:33-34),…
Bosnia is one of the unique crossroads and political hotspots of the world. With the memory of a brutal genocide still intact, Bosnia continues to struggle to maintain a profound heritage of religious pluralism. Even before the Ottomans conquered Bosnia in 1463,1 it was a religiously diverse land made up of a tapestry of different cultures, tribes, and people groups. This would set the precedent…