Description: Religion and Revolution provides a comprehensive study of spiritual and political Islām in Ernesto Cardenal, the great Latin American poet, priest, and revolutionary. The work studies the relationship between Thomas Merton and Ṣūfism, Cardenal's connection to spiritual Islām, as well as the Ṣūfī sources cited in his Cosmic Canticle. The work equally examines the impact of political Islām on his ideology, focusing particularly on his trip to Iran during the very triumph of the Islāmic Revolution. Using Cardenal's "Interlude of the Revolution in Iran" as a starting point, the work provides a vivid and detailed description of the early days of the revolution as well as the ties between the Islāmic Republic of Iran and the Latin American left.
Brief description: Dr John Andrew Morrow received his PhD from the University of Toronto where he specialized in Hispanic Studies, Native Studies, and Arabic-Islamic Studies. He has taught at numerous institutions of higher learning, including the University of Toronto, Park University, Northern State University, Eastern New Mexico University and Ivy Tech. In the fall of 2011, he served as Professor of Advanced Spanish, Travel Literature, and Islamic Culture for the Institute for Shipboard Education's prestigious Semester at Sea program which is academically sponsored by the University of Virginia. Besides a large body of peer-reviewed academic articles and edited works, Professor Morrow is the author of Islamic Insights: Writings and Reviews, the Encyclopedia of Islamic Herbal Medicine, Amerindian Elements in the Poetry of Ernesto Cardenal: Mythic Foundations of the Colloquial Narrative, Amerindian Elements in the Poetry of Ruben Dario: The Alter Ego as the Indigenous Other, and Arabic, Islam, and the Allah Lexicon: How Language Shapes our Conception of God.