Scripture, law and the shape of a civilisation.
10 topics · 11 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Meaning of the Glorious Koran
Anonymous · 632
Islam's central scripture, understood by Muslims as the literal word of God revealed to Muhammad over twenty-two years and arranged not…
+1 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Nahj al-Balagha
Ali ibn Abi Talib (compiled by al-Sharif al-Radi) · 1010
Collects sermons, letters and sayings attributed to Ali, the fourth caliph and first Imam in Shia belief, on justice and governance, and remains…
+4 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Sahih al-Bukhari
Muhammad al-Bukhari · 846
The most authoritative Sunni collection of hadith, compiled by sifting some 600,000 reports down to roughly seven thousand judged reliable by a…
+3 more at this level
11 works
Anonymous
Islam's central scripture, understood by Muslims as the literal word of God revealed to Muhammad over twenty-two years and arranged not chronologically but roughly by chapter length.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Al-Nawawi
Forty-two hadith selected as together covering the essentials of the religion, still memorised as a basic curriculum across the Sunni world.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ali ibn Abi Talib (compiled by al-Sharif al-Radi)
Collects sermons, letters and sayings attributed to Ali, the fourth caliph and first Imam in Shia belief, on justice and governance, and remains central to Shia devotional and intellectual life.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Al-Ghazali
Al-Ghazali's own popular distillation of his theology, presenting the disciplined purification of the heart as the only genuine route to felicity in this life and the next.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Al-Ghazali
Recounts a personal crisis of scepticism resolved only by direct mystical experience, arguing that certainty is available to Sufi practice in a way closed off to theology, philosophy and legal scholarship alike.
about 55 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Jalal al-Din Rumi
A six-book Persian poem of stories and commentary organised around the soul's separation from and longing to return to God, and the central text of the Mevlevi Sufi order.
link checked 17 Sept 2026W. Montgomery Watt
A concise survey of how Muslim theologians developed rational argument in defence of doctrine, from the early rationalist Mu'tazila through al-Ash'ari's synthesis into classical kalam.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Muhammad al-Bukhari
The most authoritative Sunni collection of hadith, compiled by sifting some 600,000 reports down to roughly seven thousand judged reliable by a strict chain-of-transmission method.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Burhan al-Din al-Marghinani
The classical Hanafi compendium of positive law, moving case by case from worship through contracts to punishment, that British colonial courts later adopted wholesale as the working text of Anglo-Muhammadan law in India.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Muhammad Iqbal
Argues Islamic theology has to be rebuilt with the tools of modern philosophy and science rather than defended by repeating medieval kalam, treating independent reasoning as a permanent engine of renewal rather than a door already closed.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Majid Fakhry
Surveys the scriptural, theological, philosophical and mystical strands of Islamic ethics as genuinely distinct theories of the good, against the idea of a single monolithic 'Islamic ethics'.
link checked 17 Sept 2026