New Encyclopedia of Islam:A Revised Edition of the Concise Encyclopedia of Islam
by Cyril Glasse
Price: N30000
Product Code: 1317576754
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Number of Pages: 583
Weight: 3.9kg
Binding: Hard Cover
Publisher: AltaMira Press
Edition: Revised edition
ISSN: 9781610390828
Availability: To be delivered within 6 to 22 working days
Summary: The New Encyclopedia of Islam is the only single-volume work in print which so comprehensively encompasses the beliefs, practices, history and culture of the Islamic world, in over 1300 entries. All aspects of religious belief, ritual, practices, prayer, significant political movements, spiritual and political leaders, art, architecture, sects, law, social institutions, history, ethnography, nations and states, languages, science, major cities and centers of learning are covered.
Born in 1944, Cyril Glasse, author of "The New Encyclopedia of Islam", is an American citizen of mainly Russian descent. He is currently an international lecturer on comparative religion, and is preparing a timeline of Islamic history (alongside other works). He has recently lectured at the University of Saratov, Russia; the Oriental Institutes in St Petersburg and Moscow; at the Grand Mosque, Tashkent; the Badshahi Mosque, Lahore; the University of Calabria, Italy; the Open Center and Cooper Union in New York; and at Lund Sweden. He is the author of "The Berlitz Guide to Saudi Arabia", editor of "A Pilgrim's Guide to Mecca" for the Hajj Research Center of King Abd al-'Aziz University in Jeddah. His graduate degree in Islamic Studies from Columbia College in 1991 had been preceded 15 years earlier with a degree, also from Columbia, in Russian. As a young man, Cyril Glasse worked in Morocco as a volunteer on a United Nations development project. It was in Ouzzanne, the religious center in the foothills of the Rif mountains in Morocco, and site of age-old Arabo-Islamic institutions, that Glasse converted to Islam. In the late 1960s, he studies there with traditional teachers, and "faqihs". At the same period of early life he conversed or studied with the heads of various important mosques and centers of pilgrimmage, including Moulay Idriss Zerhoun, the Imam of the Qarawiyyin, Sidi Boush'arah (one of the last surviving representatives of the Shaykh Tayyib Darqawi), Sidi Ahmad al-'Alawi (of Algeria), and various other "'ulama" (scholars of theology). His acquaintanceship and region of studies included association with wandering dervishes and Sufis of various orders. In parallel, he studied the full range of Western academic authorities on Islam (and the other major religions), in the five langauges of which he has a fluent command. From this period Glasse has continued to travel extensively throughout the Islamic world, attending spiritual centers in Maurentia, Algeria, Egypt, Turkey, Arabia, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the republics of Central Asia. He has an intimate acquaintance with Mecca. From 1972-1978 his main residential base was Switzerland, as editor of an international journal. He know lives in New York City, with his wife and son.