Book Description

Excerpt from The Dervishes, or Oriental Spiritualism The object of this volume is to afford information in regard to the Belief and Principles of the Dervishes, as well as to describe their various modes of worshipping the Creator. That the Spiritual Principles of the Dervish Orders existed in Arabia previous to the time of the great and talented Islam Prophet cannot be doubted. The historical portions of the Old and New Testaments were also well known among the Arabs, differing traditionally, however, in many respects from the narratives of the Sacred Writings; and if a conjecture may be made as to the starting point of Islamism, we would say that it originated in the act of perfect submission of Abraham to the will of the Almighty, when he determined to offer up his son Isaac in obedience to the Divine command. The Spiritualism of the Dervishes differing in many respects from Islamism, and having its origin in the religious conceptions of India and Greece, perhaps the information I have been enabled to collect together on the subject may not be without interest to the reader. Much of this is original; and having been extracted from Oriental works, and from Turkish, Arabic, and Persian mss., may be relied upon as strictly accurate. In procuring materials from original sources, valuable assistance has been rendered me by personal friends. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.