The New Encyclopedia of Islam Fourth Edition

The New Encyclopedia of Islam, Fourth Edition is a fully comprehensive encyclopedic dictionary of Islam from A to Z. with over 1600 entries in one volume. Additional entry topics anticipate the reader's search to direct the reader to the right place. The level of depth and length of each entry corresponds to the needs of an interested, educated, intelligent non-specialist and varies in length from a line to many pages. It covers all rites, and all important sects, dogmas, doctrines, as well as history, literature, poetry, biographies, arts, Sufism, Shi`ism, law, folklore, heresies, modern developments, and more, from the very beginning and even earlier, down to the present in 2014. It includes important Arabic texts transliterated and translated where appropriate. Cross indexed with special attention paid to the Koran and Sayings of Muhammad. It contains extensive extracts and quotations from literature and historic texts when they are interesting. In addition it has an in-depth annotated chronology and analysis of events in Islam and in many other religions including world culture several hundred pages long. The first edition was published in 1989, it is now newly updated and vastly expanded. It has been translated into French, Bosnian, and Indonesian. It was selected for publication into Bosnian by the heads of the Islamic University of Sarajevo. It is intended for journalists, scholars, students of history and religion and the general public. It explains in detail all the rites needed to practice Islam including prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage along with the necessary Koranic texts transcripted so they can be pronounced without a knowledge of Arabic. This book is essential in today's world and the most useful key to understand the religion, and other religions as well, both from the outside, and from the inside with a broad philosophical and intellectual foundation, sympathetic to belief and Islam in particular but not uncritical. It is written from a Western point of view and not fundamentalist. Perhaps it can be viewed as an antidote to fundamentalism and does not seek to convert but to increase understanding.