دانلود کتاب معراج محمد(ص) در اسپانیای مسلمان

Since the rise of Islam, many Muslims have loved to recount stories of journeys to other worlds beyond this one, especially narratives that describe Muḥammad’s fabulous trip through the heavens during his night journey (isrāʾ) and ascension (miʿrāj). A tale full of significance to elite scholars — from traditionists and theologians to exegetes, philosophers, and mystics — as well as common believers, Muḥammad’s journey from the earliest years served as a heavenly canvas on which subsequent Muslim writers of the premodern period could paint tangible images of angels, gardens, fires, oceans, veils, the divine throne, and even at times God himself. These “ascension narratives” spread wherever Muslims lived and traveled, weaving together anecdotes, storylines, and narrative fragments from the wealth of competing versions that have been passed down in both oral and written accounts. In each case, the telling of the tale engaged and interacted with the languages, tropes, and concerns of the local contexts in which those who transmitted the stories articulated their accounts. This book is the tale of select strands of the fabric of the particular history of Muslim ascension narratives in the western Mediterranean, among those arising out of medieval Spain and North Africa, and especially those of scholars whom contemporary specialists would later come to categorize as “contemplatives.”1 These western Mediterranean authors approached the ascension tale from a particular direction, interacting and competing with otherworldly narratives among their Jewish and Christian contemporaries. A few of them also co-opted some of the messianic and apocalyptic discourses of the Muslim reformist regimes that ruled much of the region of what is now southern Spain and Morocco. As a whole, these “Maghribī” (meaning “western” in the sense of the western lands of Islamdom) Muslim contemplative authors came to play a decisive role in shaping the contours of the beloved legend of Muḥammad’s ascension as it was popularly circulated for centuries thereafter. The history and development of Muslim ascension narratives has been the subject of increasing scholarly attention in recent decades.2 Nevertheless, most studies to date have focused on the accounts composed by a single individual author, or delved into a narrow range of ascension-related themes. Many presume that there is one standard mainstream canonical story of Muḥammad’s ascension that can be identified and classified, with other tellings and interpretations measured by their faithfulness to or divergence from this allegedly “orthodox” version. By examining the creativity and expansiveness of written accounts and commentaries about the night journey and ascension in scholarly works in the Muslim West, primarily from the region known as the “Maghrib” from the eleventh through the twelfth centuries of the Common Era, this study builds on the insights of recent methodological works in the field of Islamic studies to argue that previous conceptions of orthodoxy and heterodoxy as applied to the miʿrāj tales deserve our reconsideration, and the role of Maghribī commentators in the development of key versions of the tale merit much greater attention. Specifically, one begins to see how the discussions in this period regarding Muḥammad’s heavenly journey that originate with some of the most profound premodern contemplative thinkers in what is modern-day Spain, such as Ibn Barrajān (d. 536/1141), Ibn Qasī (d. 546/1151), and the “Grand Master” Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240), creatively reflect and are in dialogue with debates that were salient at the time: Who enjoys divinely sent leadership of the community? How do religious communities relate to one another and to God’s angelic hosts? How do such issues relate to the imminent expectation of the coming End of Times? This work seeks answers to such questions by surveying a range of Maghribī sources from different genres, from Qurʾān commentaries, prophetic biographies (sīra literature), and works dedicated solely to the sayings of the Prophet Muḥammad (reports called in Arabic hadith in the singular, āḥādīth in the plural; hereafter: “hadith” for both) to broader learned mystical treatises and allegorical tales, to show how a variety of Muslims in this specific cultural context debated, delved into, and told competing versions of the story of Muḥammad’s ascension. The sources considered in this study narrate in whole or in part the story of this extraordinary journey that the Prophet was said to have experienced in the middle of his prophetic career, adapting it to their present needs and creatively exploring its boundaries.