A Nostalgic Remembrance: Sufism and the Breath of Creativity

Adhwaq Center's inaugural publication!
 
This book proceeds with the deep conviction that the mystical experience and creative process are mirrored movements. Artists, saints, and sages in all crafts spend their lives climbing the mountain of mastery, hoping to reach the summit where the siren song calls. There, at the peak, one speaks a universal truth that addresses the poetry of hearts, not grammar of the mind.
 
Between the texture of words, memories of colors, silence of melody, and ascensions on a theater stage, the chapters of this book take us from lahut (divinity) to nasut (world) to appreciate the sacredness of human creativity and the artistry of living fully present in the moment: a present from our inner hidden treasure.
 
 
“It is the stunningly eclectic range of the sources that Hussain uses to engage Qur’anic concepts that makes this a universal contribution to the philosophy of the arts. Putting Hemingway in dialogue with Ghazali, Shakespeare with Langston Hughes, Dr. Hussain dances with the dead, reviving them like the true Christ that was the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation in Islamic studies. 
 
Gliding from Star Wars, to the Qur’anic cosmology of angels, to Maya Angelou, this is above all a moving remembrance. This book is constantly flowing from one world into another, one temporality into the next. In reading the book, time itself is lost like a dervish in a trance. The chapters speed past, in part because of the beauty and clarity of the writing, but also because of its clear and systematic organization.”
- Prof. Rudolph Bilal Ware