The Children of Time: The Aga Khan and the Ismailis (Hardcover)
by Malise Ruthven (Author), Gerald Wilkinson (Author)
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List Price: $45.00
This title will be released on January 6, 2009.
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Product Description
From highland peasant farmers in Central Asia to Canadian industrialists, South Asian buisinessmen and Europe-based scholars, the Nizari Ismailis are one of the Muslim world's most diverse Shi'a communities. With adherents living in more than twenty-five countries in Central Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Europe and North America, they embrace peoples of widely different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. The spiritual leadership of this highly dynamic community has in recent generations come to be known as the "Aga Khan." This book, which coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the present Aga Khan's succession as Imam, or spiritual leader, of the Ismailis, assesses the achievements of his "Imamat" in modernizing the communities' institutions and creating one of the world's leading development agencies, the Aga Khan Development Network. In the process, the book explores how the present Harvard-educated Aga Khan has attempted to preserve and build on a religious tradition rooted in medieval theology while at the same time embracing the modern world without loss of faith or cultural identity.
About the Author
Malise Ruthven is one of the leading writers on Islam in English and is the author of Islam in the World, A Fury for God: the Islamist Attack on America, Fundamentalism: A Very Short Introduction and several other highly praised books. Gerard Wilkinson had a distinguished thirty-year career with the Aga Khan in Kenya, Italy and latterly with his secretariat in France, where he was head of public affairs.
http://www.amazon.com/Children-Time-Aga ... 1845117220
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Orations of the Fatimid Caliphs: Festival Sermons of the Ismaili Imams (Ismaili Texts and Translations) (Hardcover)
by E. Paul Walker (Author)
Product Description
The Fatimid empire was a highly sophisticated and cosmopolitan regime that flourished from the beginning of the 10th to the end of the 12th century. Under the enlightened rule of the Fatimid Caliphs, Cairo was founded as the nucleus of an imperium that extended from Arabia in the east to present-day Morocco in the west. Dynamic rulers like the the fourth caliph al-Mu'izz (who conquered Egypt and founded his new capital there) were remarkable not only for their extensive conquests but also for combining secular with religious legitimacy. As living imams of the Ismaili branch of Shi'ism, they exercised authority over both spiritual and secular domains. The sacred dimension of their mandate was manifested most powerfully twice a year, when the imam-Caliphs personally delivered sermons, or khutbas, to their subjects, to co-incide with the great feasts and festivals of fast-breaking and sacrifice.While few of these sermons have survived, those that have endured vividly evoke both of the atmosphere of the occasion and the words uttered on it. Paul E Walker here provides unique access to these orations by presenting the Arabic original and a complete English translation of all the khutbas now extant. He also offers a history of the festival sermons and explores their key themes and rhetorical stategies.
About the Author
Paul E Walker is a Research Associate in Near Eastern Languages at the University of Chicago and an historian of ideas specialising in medieval Islamic history. He has written and edited many books on Fatimid history and the formative period of Ismaili thought including Early Philosophical Shi'ism (1993), Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani: Ismaili Thought in the Age of al-Hakim (I.B.Tauris, 1999) and The Advent of the Fatimids: A Contemporary Shi'i Witness (I.B.Tauris, 2000). In 2001 he was the recipient of a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.