Imam Ja’afar as Sadiq (700-765 CE) was a giant among Islamic sages. He was the Shaykh of great Shaykhs, the teacher of Imam Abu Haneefa, Imam Malik, Abu Yazid al Bastami and Wasim ibn Atta. His scholarship embraced the esoteric as well as the exoteric, ilm ul ishara as well as ilm ul ibara, the sciences of kalam as well as the sciences of hadith, sunnah, the natural...

Eid ul-Fitr, often simply called Eid, is one of the most important festivals in the Islamic calendar. Eid ul-Fitr marks the end of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting. For Muslims, it is a time of great religious and social celebration.The date of Eid is set by the visual sighting of the new moon and so may fall on different Gregorian calendar dates each year. However, it always occurs on the...

The origins of the Ottoman Empire are to be found in a combination of Turkish asabiyah and the Islamic spirit of ghazza (meaning, struggle in the cause of God). Asabiyah, a term used by Ibn Khaldun to denote tribal cohesion, is the force that holds together tribes through bonds of blood, a characteristic found in abundance among peoples of the desert and the nomads of...