Sea Without Shore: A Manual of the Sufi Path

Sea Without Shore is a practical manual for those travelling the path of Sufism or Islamic mysticism, which strives, in Junayd's words, "to separate the Beginninglessly Eternal from that which originates in time," in a word, to be with the Divine without any relation. The book opens with narratives of five Sufis met by the author in Syria, Jordan, and Turkey whose lives exemplified the knowledge and practice of the Sufi path. The second part is a complete handbook of the method and rule of the Shadhili order of Sufism, transmitted to the author by his spiritual mentor, Sheikh 'Abd al-Rahman al-Shaghouri--from devotions, dhikr or 'invocation,' and metaphysical doctrine, to how a Sufi lives, marries, and earns a living in the modern world. A third part treats wider theological questions such as other faiths and mysticisms, universalism and the finality of Islam, the promise of God to Jews and Christians, evolution and religion, and divine Wisdom and Justice in the face of human suffering. The book provides an indelible portrait of a vibrant mystical tradition spanning seven and a half centuries of endeavor to know the Divine face-to-face. Sheikh Nuh Keller was born in the US in 1954. He read philosophy and classical Arabic at the University of Chicago and UCLA, and became a Muslim in Cairo in 1977. He was authorized as a sheikh in the Shadhili order by Sheikh 'Abd al-Rahman in 1996 and is the leading authority on traditional Islam in the West. He has studied jurisprudence, hadith, and other subjects with traditional scholars, produced Reliance of the Traveller, the 1st translation of a standard Islamic legal reference in a English to be certified by al-Azhar, the Muslim world's oldest institution of higher learning. Among his other works and translations are Sufism in Islam, al-Maqasid: Imam Nawawi's Manual of Islam, Port in a Storm, and an illuminated calligraphic edition of Dala'il al-Khayrat.