After decades of prohibition, Mevlana ceremonies of whirling dervishes attract renewed interest as forms of sacral music, both in formal and popular genres. This trend runs parallel to an increasing concern for cultural, ethnic and religious identities, where the rising tide of religious revivalism sets the tone.

The most broadly accepted explanation of Sufism is the etymological derivation of the term from the Arabic for “wool,” ṣūf, associating practitioners with a preference for poor, rough clothing. This explanation clearly identifies Sufism with ascetical practice and the importance of manifesting spiritual poverty through material poverty. In fact, some of the earliest “Western” descriptions of individuals now widely associated with the larger phenomenon of Sufism identified them with the Arabic term faqīr, mendicant, or its most common Persian equivalent, darwīsh. Sufism, as presented here embraces a host of features including the ritual, institutional, psychological, hermeneutical, artistic, literary, ethical, and epistemological. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Sufism contains a chronology, an introduction, a glossary, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1,000 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, major historical figures and movements, practices, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Sufism.

From Rumi poetry and Sufi dancing or whirling, to expressions of Africanicity and the forging of transnational bonds to remote locations in Senegal, Sri Lanka, and Turkey, Varieties of American Sufism immerses the reader in diverse expressions of contemporary Sufi religiosity in the United States. It spans more than a century of political, cultural, and embodied relationships with Islam and Muslims. American encounters with mystical Islam were initiated by a romantic quest for Oriental wisdom, flourished in the embrace of Eastern teachings during the countercultural era of New Age religion, were concretized due to late twentieth-century possibilities of travel and immigration to and from Muslim societies, and are now diffused through an explosion of cyber religion in an age of globalization. This collection of in-depth, participant-observation-based studies challenges expectations of uniformity and continuity while provoking stimulating reflection on a range of issues relevant to contemporary Islamic Studies, American religions, multireligious belonging, and new religious movements.

Mohammad Reza Shajarian’s Avaz in Iran and Beyond, 1979–2010 is a comprehensive study of the legacy of Mohammad Reza Shajarian, the greatest living exponent of avaz, the traditional art of singing classical Persian poetry. Picking up where the authors’ previous volume (The Art of Avaz and Mohammad Reza Shajarian: Foundations and Contexts) left off, this study examines the landmark recordings Shajarian made following the Islamic Revolution of 1979 as artistic masterpieces of avaz and as shrewd, mass-mediated expressions of frustration and dissent that boldly crystallized public sentiments under highly repressive conditions. These recordings transformed Shajarian into a national icon in Iran and through the diaspora. The book traces the subsequent expansion of Shajarian’s music and presence in ever-widening circles to his current global profile, powerfully underlined by his receipt of prestigious awards from UNESCO and other global institutions. Shajarian’s artistic accomplishments, including his recent activity in designing and crafting a range of new stringed instruments, and socio-political significance are placed in the broader context of Iranian musical culture in the decades following the Revolution. In surveying Shajarian’s legacy, this study concludes with questions arising from the Election Crisis of 2009—where he was popularly proclaimed as “Master of the Green Movement” (Ostad-e Sabz) for his outspoken opposition to the violent crackdown—the subsequent political stalemate, and how these dynamics resonate with issues of the present state and relevance of Persian classical music in the twenty-first century. This book forms the conclusion of the most detailed study to date of the music, life, and environment of the most influential musician in Iranian classical music of the past three decades.

Religious life and public life are both passionately performed, but often understood to exclude one another. This book's array of voices investigates the publics hailed by religious performances and the challenges they offer to theories of the democratic public sphere.

Explore the relationship between music and society around the world This comprehensive introductory text creates a panoramic experience for beginner students by exposing them to the many musical cultures around the globe. Each chapter opens with a musical encounter in which the author introduces a key musical culture. Through these experiences, students are introduced to key musical styles, musical instruments, and performance practices. Students are taught how to actively listen to key musical examples through detailed listening guides. The role of music in society is emphasized through chapters that focus on key world cultural groups.

This book traces the mixing of musical forms and practices in Istanbul to illuminate multiethnic music-making and its transformations across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It focuses on the Jewish religious repertoire known as the Maftirim, which developed in parallel with "secular" Ottoman court music. Through memoirs, personal interviews, and new archival sources, the book explores areas often left out of those histories of the region that focus primarily on Jewish communities in isolation, political events and actors, or nationalizing narratives. Maureen Jackson foregrounds artistic interactivity, detailing the life-stories of musicians and their musical activities. Her book amply demonstrates the integration of Jewish musicians into a larger art world and traces continuities and ruptures in a nation-building era. Among its richly researched themes, the book explores the synagogue as a multifunctional venue within broader urban space; girls, women, and gender issues in an all-male performance practice; new technologies and oral transmission; and Ottoman musical reconstructions within Jewish life and cultural politics in Turkey today.

This Encyclopedia covers the full range of Islamic thought. It takes substantial note of contemporary trends across the Muslim world, and the material on historical Islam has contemporary reference.

Many of us feel a pressing desire to be different—to be other than who we are. Self-conscious, we anxiously perceive our shortcomings or insufficiencies, wondering why we are how we are and whether we might be different. Often, we wish to alter ourselves, to change our relationships, and to transform the person we are in those relationships. Not only a philosophical question about how other people change, self-alteration is also a practical care—can I change, and how? Self-Alteration: How People Change Themselves across Cultures explores and analyzes these apparently universal hopes and their related existential dilemmas. The essays here come at the subject of the self and its becoming through case studies of modes of transformation of the self. They do this with social processes and projects that reveal how the self acquires a non-trivial new meaning in and through its very process of alteration. By focusing on ways we are allowed to change ourselves, including through religious and spiritual traditions and innovations, embodied participation in therapeutic programs like psychoanalysis and gendered care services, and political activism or relationships with animals, the authors in this volume create a model for cross-cultural or global analysis of social-self change that leads to fresh ways of addressing the 'self' itself.