Belated Congratulations to Some New PhDs!

I meant to post this info a while ago, but somehow it slipped my mind.

I’ve relaunched the (Up)loaded Canon, the blog of the Dept. of Religious Studies at the University of Lethbridge, and our admin. assistant Bev posted some great news we have been celebrating for some time. Two people associated with the Dept. of Religious Studies here at the University of Lethbridge successfully completed their doctoral programs.

Craig Ginn, has done a lot of sessional teaching for us in past years and is now doing some contract teaching at the University of Calgary and Mt. Royal University in Calgary.  He hasn’t taught anything for us for several years, and that’s a shame because the students really like him. Anyway, he just finished his University of Leeds dissertation: Theological authority in the hymns and spirituals of American Protestantism, 1830-1930

Go to the (Up)loaded Canon for the abstract.

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Atif Khalil, who has been on faculty here for two years has also defended his dissertation (from the University of Toronto). Atif teaches courses on Islam, and is very interested in the medieval Sufi movement.

Early Sufi Approaches to Tawba: From the Qur’ān to Abū Tālib al-Makkī

Despite the central place of tawba in Islamic faith and practice, the concept has to date been the subject of very little serious academic research. The purpose of this study is to fill something of this scholarly lacuna by examining early Sufi approaches to tawba with a particular focus on the period that spans the 8^th to the 10^th centuries. The thesis is divided into two parts. It begins with an elaborate semantic analysis of tawba through a survey of the most important classical lexicons of Arabic, the aim of which is to problematize our common understanding of tawba as “repentance.”  The study then proceeds to examine tawba in the Qur’ān through an internal semantic analysis of the text by employing a method utilized by T. Izutsu in his own key studies of the Qur’ān, the purpose of which is to retrace the scriptural origins of many early Sufi notions of tawba and demonstrate L. Massignon’s observation that the Sufis made the first concerted attempt “to interiorize the Qur’ānic vocabulary and to integrate it into ritual practice.” The second part of the thesis begins by examining some of the early tawba-narratives in the Sufi hagiographical literature. It is shown that tawba is presented in the Sufi tradition as a life-altering process of “interior conversion,” and not merely a simple act of turning away from a particular sin or vice.  Tawba is therefore a process in which the seeker is moved to give himself entirely to the inner spiritual life of Islam. A taxonomy of this kind of “interior conversion” is also proposed to account for the differing means through which conversion might be sparked. The study then moves to examine the place of tawba within the ascending Sufi hierarchy of “states (ahwāl)” and “stations (maqāms)” in the thought a number of early, pivotal Sufi figures. It is shown through a close textual analysis of extant early works of the mystical tradition that the most overarching concern in regards to the question of tawba in the early period was not with theoretical or metaphysical issues, but with the Sufi science of praxis or the ‘ulūm al-mu‘āmalāt.

Congratulations Dr. Ginn and Dr. Khalil!