Ebook: Sufism: a New Translation with Selected Letters

FOREWORD; EDITOR'S PREFACE; PREFACE; Ellipsis and Hyperbolism in Arab Rhetoric; The Exo-Esoteric Symbiosis; Paradoxes of an Esoterism; Human Premises of a Religious Dilemma; Tracing the Notion of Philosophy; The Quintessential Esoterism of Islam; Hypostatic Dimensions of Unity; APPENDIX; EDITOR'S NOTES; GLOSSARY OF FOREIGN TERMS AND PHRASES; INDEX; BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES.;This new edition of perennial philosopher Frithjof Schuon's Sufism: Veil and Quintessence is a fully revised translation from the French original and contains an extensive Appendix with previously unpublished selections from Schuon's letters and other private writings. In seven articles Schuon makes the critical distinction between an "absolute" Islam and a "contingent" Islam, thus distinguishing between the message of Islam in itself, and the pious Arab expressions of that message, which by their style of rhetoric have a tendency to veil it.