I may be caricaturing myself by recommending a summer book that is a) hard to find, and b) obscure in subject matter. Nevertheless: I recommend a search for a book called The Zohar in Muslim and Christian Spain, by Ariel Bension. It can be encountered in the odd Judaica store or online at www.abebooks.com.
This volume is unique: the only extended commentary by a 20th century Kabbalist on the relationship between Kabbalah and Sufism, i.e. Islamic spirituality, with especially interesting remarks on the greatest of all the Sufis, Muhyid’din Ibn ul-Arabi. R. Bension goes further than either Gershom Scholem (who cited him), Moshe Idel, or any other modern Jewish scholar in this direction. His book also illuminates the links between both Kabbalah and Sufism and Spanish Catholic mysticism. The author was a Sephardi born in Jerusalem, and the first Sephardi from the Holy Land to study in modern European universities. He was a rabbi in Manastir, one of the Sephardic and Sufi centers in the Balkans, where Jews frequented the Sufi assemblies of their Albanian and Turkish Muslim neighbors. The book is extremely readable, and a good introduction to the Zohar.
Stephen Schwartz
Stephen Schwartz is the Executive Director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism in Washington, DC and author of the bestselling The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role In Terrorism (Doubleday).
He was born in 1948, and has pursued a long literary and journalistic career, having published seven books on modern political history, with special attention to extremism. He was a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle for 10 years and was secretary of the Northern California Newspaper Guild, AFL-CIO.
In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, his extensive and authoritative writings on the phenomenon of Wahhabism established him as one of the leading global experts on Islam, its internal divisions, and its relations with other faiths.
He began a serious examination of Islam in 1990, when he first visited Yugoslavia. Researching the history of Jews in the Balkans – for articles published in the Jewish Forward and other periodicals – he developed close relations with Balkan Islamic intellectual, religious and political leaders. His writings in Balkan Jews were collected in the 2005 volume Sarajevo Rose: A Balkan Jewish Notebook (Saqi/Palgrave Macmillan).
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