A Life in Praise of God: A Compendium of Spiritual Treasures from the Life and Thought of Shaykh Abd al-Halim Mahmud
Book 2 from the Trilogy, “Three Spiritual Luminaries of Twentieth-Century Cairo”
Shaykh ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm Maḥmūd (1910–1978) was the 40th Grand Imam of al-Azhar and one of the most luminous figures of twentieth-century Islam. Trained at al-Azhar, he earned a doctorate at the Sorbonne under Louis Massignon with a thesis on the great early mystic al-Ḥārith al-Muḥāsibī (d.869). He went on to write more than one hundred works on Sufism, theology, philosophy and Qur’anic exegesis.[ A Life in Praise of God brings together, in English for the first time, two of his most cherished books]. The Question of Sufism: The Shadhili School, presents Sufism as it is lived through four “realized knowers of God”, drawing on their lives, litanies and teachings, Abū al-Ḥasan al-Shādhilī (d.1258), founder of one of the most widespread spiritual paths in Islam; his successor Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Mursī; Shaykh ʿAbd al-Wāḥid Yaḥyā (René Guénon), whom the author knew personally; and Shaykh ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ al-Qāḍī.
What makes this work extraordinary is our being able to read a work about saints through the eyes of a saint – with his choice of texts and explanation of spiritual states and stations. The experience is startling.
In This is My Life – Praise God, he gives an account of his own inward intellectual and spiritual journey, a re-evaluation of his life for “both myself and others.” He includes detailed and powerful teachings from his doctoral work on al-Muḥāsibī. But his fascinating autobiography is also a heartfelt open letter to the Muslim world, with the urgency of a spiritual authority who has seen both East and West. He concludes with his own account of Sufism and his definition of its essence.
This work includes a pictorial essay, and is Book II in a trilogy, “Three Spiritual Luminaries of Twentieth-Century Cairo”.
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