I had to remind myself that Islam had once swept north as far as the gates of Vienna; that when the haggadah had been made, the Muslims' vast empire was the bright light of the Dark Ages, the one plac...
His radicalism took many forms. A vegetarian, he founded a commune, Fruitlands, so extreme in its Utopianism that members neither wore wool nor used animal manures, as both were considered property of...
He walked through the woods like a young Adam, naming creation. I learned to shape my mouth to the words—sasumuneash for cranberry, tunockuquas for frog. So many things grew and lived here that were s...
He instructed me how futile it is to wallow in regret for that which cannot be changed and how atonement might be made for even the gravest sins.
God warns us not to love any earthly thing above Himself, and yet He sets in a mother's heart such a fierce passion for her babes that I do not comprehend how He can test us so.
For a girl raised on the rim of a wilderness, it was strange to be in a place where every inch of ground had been settled for hundreds upon hundreds of years. I felt the press of people, and the press...
But while I fill up my mouth with prayers, they bring no comfort. My words rattle against each other like the last beech leaves on a winter branch, and though a hard wind scours the forest, it cannot...
But some things on earth were possible, and some were not, and Ruti knew the difference.
But it is one thing to transmit the divine through a blasting storm of holy noise, another thing entirely to write a history forged from human voices, imperfect memories, self-interested accounts.
Both my mum and dad were great readers, and we would go every Saturday morning to the library, and my sister and I had a library card when we could pass off something as a signature, and all of us wou...
Used personal and place-names in their transliteration
The greatest cruelty of madness is the power it has to blot out a person.
You go on. You set one foot in front of the other, and if a thin voice cries out, somewhere behind you, you pretend not to hear, and keep going.
Women, on the other hand, were easy targets. Any time things started to go wrong in the Middle East, women suffered for it first. A fundamentalist revolution couldn’t instantly fix a national economy,...
Widespread mutilation seems to have originated in Stone Age central Africa and traveled north, down the Nile, into ancient Egypt. It wasn’t until Arab-Muslim armies conquered Egypt in the eighth centu...
Wealthy women who wanted to keep fit maintained well-equipped gyms in their homes and hired personal trainers. The rest led completely sedentary lives.
This morning, light lapped the water as if God had spilt a goblet of molten gold upon a ground of darkest velvet.
This is Islamic dress—but not to them. According to them, the colors in the embroidery are haram. Where
The author of this text did not write to provoke, but merely to express a truth as he conceives it. Your own theologians have tied logic in knots to advance a doctrine addressing this very same point....
The angels enter not into a house where there is a dog or a likeness’—are those not the words of our Prophet?