this book consists of prayers ctaegorized according to various occasions: mroning and evening prayers connected with prufuication, food, drink, pilgrimage, marriage, everyday life situtations. Additional sections include the most beatiful names of God, prayer for help and victory, and other prayers to be read at any time.

This thought-provoking and amusing selection, taken from Attar's Memorial of the Saints, is an enlightening introduction to the deeds, parables, and mirades of Muslim saints and mystics, and evokes the riches of the interior Sufi world.

Coursing though cultures and time, tuneful verse has given moving expression to the human longing for the divine. As poetry strung on sweet melodies, hymns bear testimony to the religious life of the devout, and to the inspiring teachings of minstrels and saints. Such is the ginan tradition of the Satpanth Isma'ilis, Indian successors of the Fatand Nizari Isma'ili sect of the Shi'ah Muslims. Traditionally recited during daily ritual prayers, ginans have been revered for generations among the Satpanth Isma'ilis as sacred compositions. This work offers for the first time an extensive translation of hymns attributed to the Isma'ili saint-composer, Pir Shams (ca. 13th century), who is at once one of the most pivotal and yet most enigmatic figures of this literary tradition. It also presents a cogent historical reconstruction of the beginnings of Satpanth Isma'ilism-a phase of Isma'ili history that has spanned over eight centuries.

Through a detailed examination of a renowned Arab mystical poet, Th. Emil Homerin provides one of the first case studies to illustrate an obscure aspect of popular Islamic faith--the sanctification of saints and the creation of shrines in medieval times. Despite the fact that Muslims have venerated saints for more than a thousand years, Islam has never developed a formal means of canonization, and the process of sanctification remains an important but largely neglected dimension of Islamic scholarship. In "From Arab Poet to Muslim Saint", Homerin explores this uncharted territory by following the fortunes of a single Sufi saint over seven and a half centuries.
Regarded as a saint within a generation of his death, 'Umar Ibn al-Farid (1181-1235) is still venerated at his shrine in Cairo. Contemporary religious singers and writers, including Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, continue to cite the poet's verse. Using biographies, hagiographies, polemics, legal rulings, histories, and novels, Homerin traces the course of Ibn al-Farid's saintly reputation. He relates the rise and fall of Ibn al-Farid's popularity to Egypt's changing religious, cultural, and political environment.

As a world religion Islam is based on a highly abstract and absolute notion of the transcendent, which its followers establish and celebrate, in a seemingly contradictory fashion, at very specific sites: Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, and in the vast and complex landscapes of mosques and Muslim saints' shrines around the world. Sacred locality has thus become a paradigm for the relationship between the human and the transcendent, a model for urban planning, regional networks, imaginary spaces, and spiritual hierarchies alike. This importance of saintly places has, however, become increasingly complicated and troubled by reformist currents within Islam, on the one hand, and the emergence of modern archeology and anthropology, on the other. While they have often tended to posit the local in opposition to the universal, in this volume islamologists, anthropologists, and sociologists offer new ways of thinking about the local, the place, and the conceptual landscapes and spaces of saints.

Georg Stauth teaches sociology of Islam at the University of Bielefeld (Germany).

Samuli Schielke is a fellow at ISIM, Leiden (the Netherlands).

This book studies the veneration practices and rituals of the Muslim saints. It outlines principal trends of the main Sufi orders in India, the profiles and teachings of the famous and less known saints, and the development of pilgrimage to their tombs in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. A detailed discussion of the interaction of the Hindu mystic tradition and Sufism shows the polarity between the rigidity of the orthodox and the flexibility of the popular Islam in South Asia.

An in-depth scholarly study of the institution of ziyara (visiting tombs), and its central role in the cult of Muslim saints in late medieval Egypt (1200-1500 A.D.), this text aims to contribute to the study of the social history of religion. It explores the range of meanings that saints held for the contemporary imagination through richly-textured descriptions and analysis of the great cemetery of al-Qarafa, the rituals of the ziyara, and the entertaining stories told to pious visitors about the saints. It thus provides a sense of the expression of Muslim spirituality. Through an examination of legal debates surrounding ziyara, the dichomotous view of "high" versus "popular" religion is effectively challenged in favour of a more fluid model of cultural discourse.

This book studies the veneration practices and rituals of the Muslim saints. It outlines principal trends of the main Sufi orders in India, the profiles and teachings of the famous and less known saints, and the development of pilgrimage to their tombs in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. A detailed discussion of the interaction of the Hindu mystic tradition and Sufism shows the polarity between the rigidity of the orthodox and the flexibility of the popular Islam in South Asia.