General Islamic Books

LET US BE MUSLIMS is a new edited English version of Sayyid Mawdudi’s Urdu Khutubat. It is no ordinary book, says Khurram Murad in his long Introduction, for it has stirred more hearts and impelled more lives to change their course than any of his more erudite works. In these Friday congregational addresses, Sayyid Mawdudi expounds such familiar themes as Iman, Islam, the Prayer, Fasting, Almsgiving, Pilgrimage and Jihad. But, in an unusually beautiful, powerfully reasoned, eloquent and passionate, and yet simple and lucid style,

“Sayyid Abul A’la Al-Mawdudui (1903-1979), one of the chief architects of contemporary Islamic resurgence, was the an outstanding Islamic thinker and writer of his time. He devoted his life to expound the meaning and message of Islam and to organise a collective movement to establish the Islamic Order. In this struggle, he had to pass through all kinds of sufferings.
Between 1948-67, he spent a total of five years in different prisons of Pakistan. In 1953, he was also sentenced to death by a Martial Law court for writing a ‘seditious’ pamphlet, this sentence being later commuted to life imprisonment. In 1941, he founded Jama’at-I Islami, of which he remained Amir, until 1972 and which is one of the most prominent Islamic movements of our day. He authored more than one hundred works on Islam, both scholarly and popular, and his writings have been translated into forty languages.”

The secular mind had a grand plan, to establish an earthly paradise, a utopia of the here and now, a modern civilization governed by human reason, rationality, and the triumph of progress. Whilst ideals are one thing, the means to realize them is something else. Away from the hype, emancipating humanity from the shackles of God and religion has proved no easy matter. Mapping the Secular Mind critically examines issues of reason, rationality, and secular materialism, to explore how these mental perceptions, or ways of mapping the world, have affected human interaction and sociological development. It does this by comparing and contrasting the ideas of Abdelwahab M. Elmessiri (1938 2008) a leading Arab intellectual, and Zygmunt Bauman (1925), one of the world s foremost sociologists. In the last few decades, an emergent Western critique of modernity has inspired Muslim intellectuals to develop new ideas, images, terms and concepts that state their positions towards the tendencies of secular modernity, its transformations and consequences, and how it manipulates perceptions of reality. The book challenges foundations of secular ideology to argue that its aspirations have deeply transformed human consciousness and man s sense of self, leaving him a creature of purposeless consumption, wearied by the search for fulfillment, and controlled by materialistic laws governing physical phenomena. It also offers a more darker thesis, that Fascist Germany and the Eugenics movement were a form of Social Darwinism taken to its logical course. These were not an aberration from the principles of modernity, Ali argues, but a consistent outcome of the modern worldview, with the seeds of self-destruction being woven into the very fabric of the philosophy.

The brilliant contributions of Islam to science, art, and culture, are a timeless and precious heritage, which should be historically preserved for future generations. The great achievements of Muslim scholars are rarely if at all acknowledged in formal education, and today their identity, origins and impact remain largely obscure. This collection of papers aims to give readers a brief introduction to the intellectual history of Muslims and the contributions that eminent Muslim scholars have made in certain specific fields of knowledge including basic and applied physical and biological sciences, medicine, legal and political theories and practices, economic and financial concepts, models, and institutions, etc.

In Volume 4, the author shows that Islam honours women in all that it makes permissible for a Muslim woman to wear and with what she may adorn herself. This Eight volume series is the author’s abridged version of his longer work with the same Arabic title, Tahrir al-Mar’ah fi ‘Asr al-Risalah spanning a twenty-five year study comprising fourteen great anthologies of ahadith, but in this book he only rarely includes hadiths from any anthology other than the two most authentic ones of al-Bukhari and Muslim.

Many of us imagine that in the early periods of Islam, women were largely confined to the home. They are surprised when they learn that some of the Prophet’s women companions were professional women, and that women took part in the political life of the early Muslim state, implementing the teachings of the Qur’an and the Sunnah. This Eight volume series is the author’s abridged version of his longer work with the same Arabic title, Tahrir al-Mar’ah fi ‘Asr al-Risalah spanning a twenty-five year study comprising fourteen great anthologies of ahadith, but in this book he only rarely includes hadith from any anthology other than the two most authentic ones of al-Bukhari and Muslim.