Welcome to our monthly newsletter, dear reader,

Our first new library addition today is a biographical portrait of Shaykh Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, the famous jurist and Sufi mystic still revered and emulated throughout the Islamic world.

If your heart is sound… then you will never lose the intimations of the Almighty Truth, and His wisdom will reach you through your sirr (inner consciousness); the sirr informing the heart, the heart informing the tranquil self, the self informing the tongue, and the tongue informing the people. One should either speak to the public in this method, or not speak at all.

• We continue with the famous “Definitions” of Hermes Trismegistos to Asclepios, a brief text among the Hermetica coming from Antiquity, including theological and philosophical precepts which would inform countless speculation and doctrinal developments through the Middle Ages.

Wherever man is, also is God. God does not appear to anybody but man. Because of man God changes and turns into the form of man. God is man-loving and man is God-loving. There is an affinity between God and man. God listens only to man, and man to God.

• Finally we have a chapter on the patronage of the Mediterranean by the Virgin Mary, and especially on the multi-confessional veneration of the Virgin as the helper of sailors of all faiths.

The Virgin of the Navigators, by Alejo Fernández, 16th c.

Anyone, regardless of faith, who braved a sea voyage, had one paramount need: to survive the trip… When crisis overtook Latin Christian ships at sea, those Jews, Muslims and Greek Christians aboard probably first invoked God as they thought of him along with their own saints, but if those prayers had no effect, they could have added their voices to the chorus of Latins calling on Mary. Greek and Muslim sailors working on European ships would have had particular reason to adopt these Latin ways, given the transconfessional solidarities that bound ships’ crews together.