The Secret of Secrets
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Translator
Tosun Bayrak
Description
About The Book
An interpretative translation by Shaykh Tosun Bayrak of Sirr al-Asrar by Hadrat Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani (1077-1166 AD), considered by many to be one of the greatest saints of Islam and the eponymous founder of the Qadiriyya order.
This book, appearing in English for the first time, contains the very essence of Sufism, giving a Sufi explanation of how the outward practices of Islam - prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and pilgrimage - contain a wealth of inner dimension which must be discovered and enjoyed if external actions are to be performed in a manner pleasing to God. When this is achieved the soul finds true peace and the spiritual life becomes complete.
Table of Contents
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The Places of the Souls within the Body |
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On Knowledge |
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On Repentance |
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On Remembrance |
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On the Vision of God |
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The Veils of Light and Darkness |
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On the Purification of the Self |
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On the Meaning of Ritual Worship and Inner Worship |
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On Charity |
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On Fasting Prescribed by the Religion and on Spiritual Fasting |
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On the Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Inner Pilgrimage of the Heart |
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On Withdrawing from the World |
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On Dreams |
About the Contributor(s)
About the author
Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani: Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani (470-561 AH / 1077-1166 CE) was a Hanbali jurist, preacher, and one of the most beloved spiritual masters in Islamic history, honored across the Muslim world as the eponymous founder of the Qadiriyya Sufi order. He was born in the Persian province of Gilan, south of the Caspian Sea, and as a young man traveled to Baghdad, then the great center of Islamic learning, where he studied Hanbali law, hadith, and the Qurʾanic sciences under leading teachers of the age. After years devoted to study, worship, and seclusion, he emerged as a public preacher and teacher whose gatherings drew enormous crowds and whose disciples carried his way to nearly every corner of the Muslim world. He came to lead a Hanbali madrasa and ribat in Baghdad, combining juristic authority with the sober, ethical spirituality for which he is remembered. His landmark works include al-Ghunya li-Talibi Tariq al-Haqq, a comprehensive guide to belief, worship, and conduct; al-Fath al-Rabbani, a collection of his discourses; Futuh al-Ghayb, rendered in English as Revelations of the Unseen; and Jala al-Khawatir, The Removal of Cares. He died in Baghdad in 561 AH, where his tomb became, and remains, one of the most visited shrines in the Islamic world. The Qadiriyya named for him grew into one of the earliest and most widespread Sufi brotherhoods, shaping devotional life from West Africa to South and Southeast Asia.
About the translator
Tosun Bayrak: Tosun Bayrak al-Jerrahi al-Halveti (1926–2018 CE) was a Turkish-American Sufi shaykh, artist, and translator whose accessible English versions of classical Sufi works reached a generation of Western readers. Born in Istanbul in 1926, he studied biological sciences at Robert College before turning to art and architecture, training in Paris, at the University of California, Berkeley, the Courtauld Institute in London, and earning a master of fine arts from Rutgers University. He worked for a time as a government official and as honorary consul of Turkey in Morocco. A turning point came in 1970 when he met Muzaffer Ozak at the Jerrahi lodge in Istanbul and entered the Halveti-Jerrahi path. Believing his artistic ambitions fed the ego, he left that career behind, and from 1977 served as the spiritual guide of the Jerrahi order in the Americas, founding the order's American mosque in Chestnut Ridge, New York, in 1990. He is remembered above all as a translator. His landmark renderings include Ibn ʿArabi's The Tree of Being and The Name and the Named, ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Jilani's The Secret of Secrets and Divine Governance of the Human Kingdom, al-Sulami's The Way of Sufi Chivalry, and Suhrawardi's The Shape of Light. Through this body of work he helped open the inner sciences of Islam to English-speaking audiences. He died in 2018.
Specifications
EAN 13 / ISBN
9780946621293
Publisher
Islamic Texts Society
Author
Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani
Pages
172
Translator
Tosun Bayrak
Year Published
1997
Size
W-5.5 in | H-8.5 in | D-0.6 in
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