Based on Muhammad al-Zawawi's extraordinary diary of 109 dream conversations with the Prophet Muhammad, this study provides a rare, intimate view of 15th-century North African Muslim life. The study reconstructs Zawawi's lifestory over a critical ten-year period and examines his career as a sufi in the historical context of North Africa and Mamluk Cairo. Psychological aspects of Zawawi's religious experience are thoroughly explored. The concluding chapter provides an introduction to the role of dreams and visions in medieval Islam. Particular attention is paid to the way Zawawi and his...

At an international symposium in Norway, the 100 years' anniversary of the academic study of religion was celebrated. This volume contains the papers that were presented at this conference. A major part of the papers deals with the situation of this discipline around the turn of the last century, focussing especially on the work of the Dutch-Norwegian scholar W. Brede Kristensen (1867-1953) and on other founding fathers in the Scandinavian countries. Other contributors discuss methodological questions relating to the idea of a phenomenology of religion. Furthermore, an attempt is made to...

This book brings together studies by seventeen specialists in the science of religions in which they relate the changes in their discipline to the changes which have occurred in a select number of modern(ising) societies worldwide. It attempts to study these developments in their relation to and as conditioned and constrained by cultural change, changes in educational systems, technology, population (for example migration), economic patterns, politics, and, last but not least, religious systems. The essays focus on resp. France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, the USA, Turkey, Israel,...

This volume deals with the transformation of religious creativity in the late modern West. Its point of departure is a set of esoteric beliefs, from Theosophy to the New Age. It shows how these traditions have adapted to the cultural givens of each successive epoch. The claims of each movement have been buttressed by drawing on various structural characteristics of late modernity. The advance of science has resulted in attempts to claim scientific status for religious beliefs. Globalization has given rise to massive loans from other cultures, but also to various strategies to radically...

In this book leading scholars contribute comprehensive studies of the religious movements in the late 18th and 19th centuries: the Hassidic movements in Judaism, the Mormon religion, in Christianity, and the Bābī-Bahā'ī faiths in Shī'te Islam. The studies, introduced by the editor's analysis of the underlying common source of this religious activity, lead the reader into a rich world of messianism, millenniarism and eschatological thought fueling the intense modern developments in the three major monotheistic religions.

The book supports an ecumenical theory of mysticism through a comparative analysis of Tibetan Dzogchen and German mysticism. Using a systems model of consciousness as an interpretive framework, it shows how the distinct doctrines and practices of these two traditions function in parallal, equally transformative ways.

This book explores the emergence of the science of religion in the Netherlands in the second half of the nineteenth century. The emphasis is on processes of institutionalization, professionalization, and internationalization on the one hand, and on contemporary discussions about method and conceptualization on the other.

Citizens of the World deals with the Baha'is and their religion. While covering the historical development in sufficient detail to serve as a general monograph on Baha'i, emphasis is laid on examining contemporary Baha'i, with the Danish Baha'i community as a recurrent case. The book discusses Baha'i religious texts, rituals, economy, everyday life, demographic development, mission strategies, leadership, and international activism in analyses based on primary material, such as interview studies among the Baha'is, fieldwork data from the Baha'i World Centre in Israel, and field trips around...

This study is focused on the interaction of material and symbolic values ascribed to sacred trees in India and expressed in 3,000 years of ritual practice. Point of departure is the contemporary trend of mining religious narratives in order to mobilise environmental awareness.

This collection of original essays provides fascinating insights into yoga as a historical and pluralistic phenomenon flourishing in a variety of religious and philosophical contexts. They cover a wide variety of traditions and topics related to Yoga: Classical Yoga, Sāṃkhya, Tantric Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, the Guru, Indic Islamic traditions of Yoga, Yoga and asceticism in contemporary India, and the reception of Yoga in the West. The essays are written by eighteen professors in the field of the history of religions, most of them former graduate students of Gerald James Larson, Larson...