Originally published in 1952, al-Din, by prominent Egyptian scholar Muhammad Abdullah Draz (1894–1958), has been critically acclaimed as one of the most influential Arab Muslim studies of universal 'religion' and forms of religiosity in modern times. Written as an introductory textbook for a course in the "History of Religions" at King Fuad I University in Cairo-the first of its kind offered at an Egyptian institution of higher learning-this book presents a critical overview of classical approaches to the scholarly study of religion. While ultimately adapted to an Islamic paradigm, the book is a novel attempt to construct a grand narrative about the large methodological issues of Religious Studies and the History of Religions and in relation to modernity and secularism. Translated for the first time in English by Yahya Haidar, this book demonstrates how the scholarly academic study of religion in the West, often described as 'Orientalist', came to influence and help shape a counter-discourse from one of the leading Arab Muslim scholars of his time.

"Queer Companions is an ethnographic account of Sufi fakirs at Pakistan's most important Sufi site, the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalander. Omar Kasmani argues that these pilgrims' affective connections to the site's patron saint, who lived and died in the thirteenth century, lead them to queer forms of living. While some of the ethnographic interlocutors in the book are themselves LGBTQI, and a few are women who trouble the gendered ordering of the shrine, Kasmani attends to the queer forms of relationality, intimacy, and affinity that the site allows for rather than on the individual identities of the people themselves. He shows how their relation to the world is altered by embodied and imaginative modes of moving away from social objects and expectations and toward the saintly. As the site is a state-run national heritage site, Kasmani considers how this form of queer living brings individuals, society, and the state together through a public architecture of intimacy. In tracing the veering paths of these religious figures, Kasmani demonstrates how this form of intimacy might offer not a withdrawal from the world, but rather a different kind of queer worldmaking"--

"Why do human beings believe in divinities? Why do some seek eternal life, while others seek escape from recurring lives? Why do the beliefs and behaviors we typically call "religious" so deeply affect the human personality and so subtly weave their way through human society? Ideal as a supplementary text in introductory religion courses or as the main text in theory and method in religious studies or in sociology of religion courses, Ten Theories of Religion, Fourth Edition, offers an illuminating treatment of this controversial and fascinating subject"--

Three Treatises on the I’jAz of the Qur’An contains three important Arabic treatises from the fourth and fifth centuries of Islamic history, published here in English translation for the first time. They deal with the Islamic concept of I’jaz, that is, the inimitability of the Qur’An because of its sublime style and divine content. While analyzing I’jaz, they also partake in the development of the science of rhetoric in Arabic and the evolution Arabic literary criticism. The inimitability of the Qur’An is considered a miracle authenticating the holy scripture of Islam and proving the veracity of Muhammad s prophethood. Yet despite its importance in Islamic thought and Qur’Anic studies, few of the Arabic works on I’jaz have been translated into Western languages. The three Arabic treatises in this book are relatively short ones: they afford different points of view and offer a variety of literary and theological approaches that give the reader a virtually comprehensive understanding of I’jaz and the issues related to it, meanwhile contributing to the knowledge of Arabic rhetoric and literary criticism.