"Inner and Outer Aspects of Sunnah" Professor Arthur Buehler

"Inner and Outer Aspects of Sunnah" Professor Arthur Buehler,Lecture delivered at NFIE International Mawlid un Nabi conference,Chicago.(Video Part 2 starts with translation of Shaykh Masum's Keynote Address & then Dr.Buehler's Lecture)

Video Part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPboz5C6BHg

Video Part 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=We_mD-bSrcM&feature=related

Video Part 4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj_nzbHex7Q&feature=related


Video Part 5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBMyxLCo2m0&feature=related

Professor Arthur Buehler
PhD (Harvard University)Senior Lecturer ,Victoria University of Wellington,NZ
Art Buehler, a scholar of transregional sufi networks and the transmission of Islamic revivalist ideas, is senior editor of the Journal of the History of Sufism. He began his career teaching Arabic in Yemen for the British Council. After five years in the Arab world he entered the History of Religions Program at Harvard University specialising in South Asian Islam under the tutelage of the late Annemarie Schimmel. His subsequent two books are the result of four years of fieldwork in Indo-Pakistan.
Current Research Projects
The Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya sufi lineage
Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624 in Sirhind northern India) is the founder figure and renewer (mujaddid) of a transnational sufi lineage, the Naqshbandiyya, named after Baha’uddin Naqshband (d. 1389 near Bukhara, Uzbekistan), the patron saint of Uzbekistan. Presently Art is working on translating a book-length portion of Ahmad Sirhindi’s Collected Letters from the Persian and Arabic into English.
Sufi studies in general
Sufism does not always translate easily into the problematic category of “mysticism.” The focus in Art's research is on the mechanisms and directions occurring in the transformation of Sufi activities, whether spiritual or political, from pre-modern to modern societies, or from modern to post-modern societies.
Contemplative/transformative practices
Our knowledge of these practices runs something like this (as said by Baker roshi of San Francisco) – “Enlightenment is an accident and meditation just makes one accident prone.” Scholars should be able to do better than this.
Selected Publications
Sufi Heirs of the Prophet: The Indian Naqshbandiyya and the Rise of the Mediating Sufi Shaykh, Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1998 (with a Foreword by Annemarie Schimmel)- explores the sources of authority in Islamic societies, Naqshbandi contemplative practices in detail, and the historical transformation of the Naqshbandi sufi lineage in the modern period
Analytical Indexes for the Collected Letters of Ahmad Sirhindi [in Persian], Lahore: Iqbal Academy, 2001- enables scholars reading Persian to find connecting threads in the 536 letters of Sirhindi’s Collected Letters
"What is the Primary Social Responsibility of Sufis in the Modern World?" Paper given at the International Association of Sufism conference in Philadelphia, PA USA 20 May 2007.