Almond - Sufism and Deconstruction (Routledge Studies in Religion)

What possible relationship can there be between a contemporary French postmodern thinker and a twelfth-century Sufi? How closely can Sufi oppositions to rationality in medieval Islamic thought resemble the contemporary, deconstructive resistance to reason and the Enlightenment project? How far is the medieval debate in Islamic tradition, concerning the extent to which we can talk truthfully and meaningfully about God, analogous to the postmodern debate of more recent times, concerning the extent to which we can talk truthfully and meaningfully about the world and the text?

This book provides a fascinating exploration of these questions by discussing a variety of common features in the vocabularies of two thinkers, Jacques Derrida and Ibn Arabi, situated almost eight centuries apart. These features include the opposition to systematizing representations of God/reality/the text; a re-emphasis on the radical unthinkability of God and the text; a common conception of rational thought as restrictive, commodifying and ultimately illusoryand a subsequent appraisal of confusion as leading to a higher state of knowledge; a positive belief in the infinite interpretability of the text; a suspicion of representationand an awareness of its semantic futility, along with a common, welcoming affirmation of openness and errancy towards God and the text.

This book will be essential reading for advanced students and academics of Religious Studies, Arabic and Islamic Studies and those interested in the work of Jacques Derrida and Ibn Arabi.

Ian Almond teaches English Literature at Bosphorus University, Istanbul, Turkey. He has published a wide variety of articles in a range of journals such as ELH, Modern Fiction Studies, The Harvard Theological Review, German Life and Letters , and New Literary History . This is his first book.

Sufism and Deconstruction

A comparative study of Derrida and Ibn Arabi

Ian Almond

First published 2004
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
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This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.

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2004 Ian Almond

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ISBN 0-203-69450-3 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-67049-3 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-32043-7 (Print Edition)

List of transliterations

Arabic characters