The Religious Attitude and Life in Islam; Being the Haskell Lectures on Comparative Religion Delivered Before the University of Chicago in 1906 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1909. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... LECTURE I THE ATTITUDE OF THE SEMITES TOWARD THE UNSEEN WORLD; PROPHECY AS A SEMITIC PHENOMENON AND ESPECIALLY AMONG THE ARABS You may remember how Robertson of Brighton used to say, speaking of his sermons and their inspiration, "I cannot light my own fire; I must convey a spark from another's hearth." The same idea and the same expression occur in Islam. Muhammad, following the usage and speech of the desert, tells (Qufdn, xx, 10; xxvii, 7) how Moses left his family and went aside to the Burning Bush to seek from it a brand, a qabas, for their own fire, Thence iqtibds, "brand-seeking," persists in the rhetorical language of Islam, for such borrowing of fire from predecessors. Permit me, then, having both Christian and Muslim authority, to quote, by way of text for these lectures, a couple of sentences from Mr. William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, that give very precisely the thesis which I propose to set before you as illustrated in Islam. At the beginning of his third lecture, when approaching the broad question of the reality of the Unseen, he says: Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this adjustment are the religious attitude in the soul. This religious attitude, then, as developed in Islam, I desire to put before you now. With some danger of cross-division it can be analyzed into three points: first, the reality of the Unseen, of a background to life, unattainable to our physical senses; second, man's relation to this Unseen as to faith and insight therein; that is, the whole emotional religious life rang...