Sufi Master and Qur’an Scholar

The Quran and Modern Science

This booklet by Dr. Maurice Bucaille has been in circulation for the past nineteen years and has been a very effective tool in presenting Islam to non-Muslims as well as introducing Muslims to aspects of the scientific miracle of the Quran. It is based on a transcription of a lecture given by Dr. Bucaille in French. In this reprint, I decided to improve its presentation by simplifying the langu...

Retrieval Performance for Malay Quran

Information Retrieval (IR) plays an important role in retrieving information related to the user’s query. IR relies on finding relevant data from a set of knowledge resources, such as the Quran. Finding information from the Quran can be based on metadata, indexing, or other content-based methods. The Quran is the most widely read book in the world and automating knowledge retrieval from this re...

A matrilineal Sufi shaykh in Sri Lanka

This article explores the influence of local concepts of matrilineal kinship and descent through women in the construction of a modern Sufi silsila (an authorized ‘chain’ of spiritual and genealogical ancestry) in Sri Lanka. Makkattar Vappa, a popular Sufi shaykh in the Tamil-speaking eastern region of the island, asserts hereditary maulana (sayyid) status as a member of the Prophet’s household...

Semantic Scholar

Revisiting Hell’s Angels in the Quran

Ādam pictured the zabāniya as duplicates of the angel of death who, according to the Quran (4:97, 32:11), seizes the souls of sinners when they die and interrogates them about their wrongdoings. This is also how later tradition pictured them: as black creatures who appear at the moment of death to pull people’s souls out of their bodies and drag them into hell, where they torture them.2 However...