The Best Books on The Essence of Islam – Five Books Expert Recommendations

tell me about the book of strangers by ian dallas.

If you turn back the clock in the late 1960s, early 1970s, everybody was looking for something and barking at a lot of different trees. i had looked at a lot of different philosophies and religions and writings, i got to the point where i read siddhartha by herman hesse, and i always remember a line in that book where it says, ‘you could tell by the way his one hand rested on his thigh that it was a man of knowledge.’ that indication that knowledge is something existential and embodied, rather than theoretical, was something that immediately appealed to me. i met ian dallas in the early 1970s, and what struck me on our first meeting was that he barely spoke about islam. he talked about this society, and how when you look at it, despite all the freedom people have, in many ways it’s a sick society.

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who is ian dallas?

at that time he was a muqaddam, the representative in london and america of a well-known shaykh of morocco, shaykh muhammad ibn al-habib. he seemed to know everyone worth knowing at the time. he knew the beatles, he knew edith piaf, he had acted in a couple of federico fellini movies. he had written some of the first plays for the bbc when they were just starting out. so he had been at this pivotal point in the development of media as we understand it today. he clearly was someone who had been through everything that people were looking for, and beyond that, I found him very interesting. and in the book of strangers I saw what he had been looking for: it was a description of a society that was very information-based, but very poor in terms of wisdom. In the opening stages of the book there is a young man at a university, thirsty for knowledge but not knowing where to find it. looking at all the people around him, he says: they don’t understand life, and then he goes out looking for this strange book.

It’s a work of science fiction, isn’t it?

It’s not science fiction, but it’s set at a point in the future, where very few people have access to physical books: all “knowledge” is on microfiche or electronically recorded data. so he foresaw the digital information age.

And imagine a people isolated from knowledge?

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It is an information-based society, where even students are monitored and their access to information is restricted according to what is considered necessary for their requirements. so there’s that big brother element that you can’t figure out too much. but then the main character of the book decides to leave. he has this meeting with a nomad, and the nomad tells him: ‘I’m leaving tomorrow at dawn, if you want come with me’, and they go out into the desert, beyond this bubble of so-called civilization, into a completely different world, which is society would define as backward and primitive, but, in fact, among whose people there are people of great wisdom and knowledge. even though it was written before the movie, it’s a bit like thx 1138, the first george lucas movie: it’s that journey from a completely covert society, where everything is regulated and monitored and conditioned, and escaping from that into the open world. , to the fresh air of creation.

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his next book is also by ian dallas, written as shaykh abdalqadir as-sufi.

the way of muhammad: this was written not many years after ian dallas accepted islam, and again one finds in it this extraordinary illumination and understanding of the meaning of the various acts of worship. it is based on the quran, it is based on the sayings of the prophet, blessings and peace be upon him, it is based on the writings of some of the great people of wisdom of the past. The purpose of the book is to convey something that you were never taught in school – it’s really talking about a whole zone of knowledge that has been held in check, if you will, by established educational institutions in what is called the West – but at the same time west of what ?

Is it a criticism of the capitalist system?

Not really. I think Shaykh Abdalqadir’s later works are much more critical of the mainstream culture, if you can fancy that word. but the point of this book is not to say that this is what is wrong with the world. it is actually based on the five pillars of Islam, which have to do with the worship of the divine. and goes to the meaning of what these acts of worship are and what they do to you. the more you follow the path of muhammad, the more you embody what he embodied, the more you will understand what he understood. and, what is more important, what this book does is to trace in detail what is the path of knowledge, and what is the man of knowledge, and what is knowledge. shaykh abdalqadir has the gift of articulating knowledge that one has felt, but cannot put into words, and somehow when you read it you say, yes, that’s what i was trying to point out.

the Koran?

when i accepted islam, i did it on the basis of meeting shaykh abdalqadir and the people around him, and i realized i didn’t really know anything about it. so obviously one of the first things was to learn the basics, and i thought i’d better read the quran because that’s the book of muslims! at that time i had arberry’s translation which is accurate, and which to some extent conveys the poetry of the very pure arabic of the original. in fact, in the time of the prophet, may peace and blessings be upon him, some people accepted islam on the basis of the purity of the arabic in which the quran is written: they said, ‘this could not have been written! for a human being!” Over the years I have had access to Muhammad Pickthall’s and Yusuf Ali’s translations, which are written in fairly biblical English. his use of vocabulary was not always adequate, as he sometimes included words that have acquired certain connotations due to their use in the European Christian tradition. For example, the word ‘sin’ is used to translate the word dhanb in Arabic, but dhanb really means a wrong action that takes you away from the mercy of your lord. so this is a completely different way of looking at a wrong action, and there’s no blame attached to it.

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bewley’s translation is a beautiful translation, in which some of the key terms are not translated, but transliterated, with a small glossary at the back defining the meaning of each term. this helps you keep the original meaning of the quran: it is a clear and sharp interpretation of its meaning in english. I often read a translation of a verse and I think I never remember reading it before, and I compare it to how pickthall or yusuf ali translated it, and they missed the point.

tell me about the muwatta of imam malik.

Imam Malik lived about 100 years after Muhammad, in the 8th century AD. after the prophet’s death, islam became very concentrated in the medina, but then it spread extraordinarily fast, almost at the speed of light. it was initially spread by the companions of the prophet, and later by the followers, who had met the companions of the prophet, but had not met the prophet muhammad. and the heart of this process was madina, and people would come from all over the rapidly expanding Muslim world to learn and gain knowledge by direct transmission from the people of madina. imam malik was one of the followers of the followers, and established himself as one of the great people of knowledge in medina.

Perhaps his best-known book is the muwatta, which means “the beaten path.” it’s like survival kit islam, if you will: here’s the gist, here’s what you need to know. and then you would find that all the great people of knowledge of that time would know both the quran and the muwatta by heart. it’s not just a collection of sayings, it’s about action, behavior: he often says: ‘this is what people of knowledge (in medina) do’. there are many wonderful stories about imam malik. people would come from many hundreds of miles just to ask a question: he would ask: ‘do you want me to transmit a hadith (including the human chain of transmission to the person who saw or heard it)? , or do you have a case law question?” and often if they had a case law question, he would do a full body wash beforehand, and put on perfume, listen to the question, and then say, ‘I don’t’ I don’t know. ‘, so I didn’t pretend to know what I didn’t know.

We are more than 14 centuries from the time of the prophet now, and if you look at the history of Islam, there have been high points and low points. as within any religion, you find people of wisdom and also people of great ignorance who use islam for political convenience, knowingly or unknowingly distorting it. and so for anyone who wants to follow in the footsteps of the prophet muhammad may peace and blessings be upon him he must get to the point before there are schools of jurisprudence before there are sunni and shia and if you go to that point there is no argument, just knowledge. for anyone who wants to get to that point and in doing so sidestep some of the nonsense out there today, whether it’s people who don’t know what they’re talking about or ignorant attacks in the media, if you want to stay clear . from that and return to a pure Islam, this is an essential book. translated by aisha bewley and ya’qub johnson

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This is another extraordinary book. It was written by Qadi (judge) ‘iyad, who lived in Spain in the 12th century AD, when it was ruled by Muslims. he was a great scholar, and at that time there were so many collections of hadith and commentaries on the quran that it could be disconcerting to a seeker who wanted to know more about the prophet muhammad, may peace and blessings be upon him. like today, there were questions of: where do I start and how do I know what is reliable? as with imam malik, who was 100 percent reliable, with confirmed sources, qadi ‘iyad had read it all, he had considered it all, and he was familiar with the events that happened in the life of the prophet, and he puts these events together in a way that makes it digestible. what qadi ‘iyad was able to do was somehow translate his love for the prophet into an account that was not limiting or limiting and was trustworthy.

he has a section of the book, for example, on the miracles of the prophet, and we say that his greatest miracle was the koran, because he was illiterate and yet he had this revelation in pure arabic that he could not invented, which contained knowledge that he could not have had unless it was revealed to him. but, in fact, he had many other well-documented miracles. for example, qadi ‘iyad speaks of events in the prophet’s life such as the well-known miraculous journey of the night, where he traveled on a winged beast called the buraq of makka to jerusalem and prayed there with all the prophets who came before him, and then traveled to through the seven heavens, beyond the limit of forms into the unseen, and beyond that into the realms of formlessness, and into the presence of allah – although we know from the qur’an that allah does not it’s ‘far away’, but closer to us than our jugular veins, and then back to makka, all in an instant. this journey has been debated for the last 14 centuries but in the shifa you have an account of him with all the evidence and proof and what has been recorded and he puts it together in a way that you can come to an understanding of what really happened the best you can.

These five books are trustworthy and inspiring books for people who want to ask themselves, what is Islam really about? As they say, the closer you get to the source, the purer the drink. If you go to the source of the Thames, it doesn’t know the same as where it reaches the sea.

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