Qalandariyya - The Muslim Hippies Who Drank W...

In this episode we explore one of the most fascinating texts in the history of Western esotericism: Porphyry's Commentary on the Cave of the Nymphs. Written in the 3rd century, this short but remarkable work interprets a mysterious passage from Homer's Odyssey as a profound alleg ...  Show more

The Hare Krishna movement didn't start with chanting monks in airports, it began over 500 years ago with a Bengali mystic named Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. This video traces the full history of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, from its roots in 16th-century devotional Hinduism to its transformatio ...  Show more

In this episode we explore how Muslims experience the fall of the Caliphate and how in turn Islam is shaped by the historical circumstances. Building upon the scholarly Islam developed by the Seljuks, we talk about the fusion of internal spirituality in the form of Sufism with or ...  Show more

In this episode we discuss the formation of Shia orthodoxy. Picking up from our earlier episode on early Shi’ism we explore how the experience of persecution under the Umayyads and Abbasid shaped Shia thought and doctrine. We discuss the Muhammad al Baqir and Jaffar as Sadiq and ...  Show more

This episode we trace the emergence of orthodoxy in Islamic thought. Starting with the debates about predestination and the nature of the Qu’ran we mark the development of Islamic theology from the writings of Hasan i Basri and the Qadarites or Qadiriyyah to the formation of the ...  Show more

In our last episode of the season we wrap up the intellectual history of Islam by examining how the orthodoxies that we discussed in the previous episode were popularized. We talk about the emerging class of legal scholars called the ulema, the madhabs of Hanafi, Maliki, Shaif, a ...  Show more