The Golden Rule, which asks us to look into our own hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else.
And by a militant rejection of all later accretions, which included medieval fiqh, mysticism and Falsafah, which most Muslims now regarded as normative. Because the Ottoman sultans did not conform to...
True listening means more than simply hearing the words that are spoken. We have to become alert to the underlying message too and hear what is not uttered aloud. Angry
Trade and religion were thus inextricably combined in Mecca. The pilgrimage to Mecca was the climax of the suq cycle, and the Quraysh reconstructed the cult and architecture of the sanctuary so that i...
This strong female presence was remarkable in the aggressive patriarchy of Mecca and may explain why women were among the first to respond to the message of the Qur’an.
The people we hate haunt us; they inhabit our minds in a negative way as we brood in a deviant form of meditation on their bad qualities. The enemy thus becomes our twin, a shadow self whom we come to...
The good leader in war is not warlike The good fighter is not impetuous; The best conqueror of the enemy is he who never takes the offensive. The man who gets the most out of men is the one who treats...
The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) distinguished between a problem, something met which bars my passage and is before me in its entirety, and a mystery, something in which I find myself...
Sumer had devised the system of structural violence that would prevail in every single agrarian state until the modern period, when agriculture ceased to be the economic basis of civilization.
Some Palaeolithic heroes survived in later mythical literature. The Greek hero Herakles, for example, is almost certainly a relic of the hunting period.
Roman coins, inscriptions, and temples extolled Augustus, who had brought peace to the world after a century of brutal warfare, as Son of God, lord, and savior and announced the good news (euaggelia)...
Religious discourse was not intended to be understood literally because it was only possible to speak about a reality that transcended language in symbolic terms. The story of the lost paradise was a...
O călătorie în străfundurile minţii implică mari riscuri personale, deoarece s-ar putea să nu fim în stare să suportăm ce găsim acolo,
Myths are universal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives – they explore our desires, our fears, our longings, and provide narratives that remind us what it means to be human.
Mythology was not about theology, in the modern sense, but about human experience. People thought that gods, humans, animals and nature were inextricably bound up together, subject to the same laws, a...
Marriages conducted in absentia to seal an alliance were often contracted at this time between adults and minors who were even younger than ‘A’isha. This practice continued in Europe
Joden moesten de Tora strikter naleven dan ooit tevoren. Het was niet langer voldoende geen moord te plegen, ze moesten ook hun woede inhouden. Niet alleen overspel was verboden, een man mocht zelfs n...
In the eleventh century, a Jerusalem rabbi still recalled with gratitude the mercy God had shown his people when he allowed the Kingdom of Ishmael to conquer Palestine.
In the Palaeolithic period, human beings had felt a disturbing kinship with the animals that they hunted and killed. They expressed their inchoate distress in the rituals of sacrifice, which honoured...
I had failed to make a gift of myself to God.