Zionism was originally a rebellion against religious Judaism and the PLO Charter was essentially secularist. But because the conflict was allowed to fester without a resolution, religion got sucked in...
The Quran did not put forward any philosophical arguments for monotheism; its approach was practical, and, as such, it appealed to the pragmatic Arabs. The old religion, the Quran claimed, was simply...
The great genius of the Shiah was its tragic perception that it is impossible fully to implement the ideals of religion in the inescapably violent realm of politics.
Mythology is usually inseparable from ritual.
Fundamentalist movements in all faiths share certain characteristics. They reveal a deep disappointment and disenchantment with the modern experiment, which has not fulfilled all that it promised. The...
We have domesticated God's transcendence. We often learn about God at about the same time as we are learning about Santa Claus but our ideas about Santa Claus change, mature and become more nuanced, w...
Our version of the same event is also likely to be a reflection upon our own situation and suffering rather than a dispassionate and wholly factual account. We
People derived their faith in Jesus from the experience of living together in a close-knit, minority community that challenged the unequal distribution of wealth and power
I no longer think that any principle or opinion is worth anything if it makes you unkind or intolerant.
The ancients had believed that nothing came from nothing, but Heidegger reversed this maxim: ex nihilo omne qua ens fit. He ended his lecture by posing a question asked by Leibniz: Why are there being...
Fundamentalism therefore reveals a fissure in society, which is polarized between those who enjoy secular culture and those who regard it with dread. As time passes, the two camps become increasingly...
Far from being the father of jihad, [Prophet] Mohammad was a peacemaker, who risked his life and nearly lost the loyalty of his closest companions because he was determined to effect a reconciliation...
Yes, all fundamentalists feel that in a secular society, God has been relegated to the margin, to the periphery and they are all in different ways seeking to drag him out of that peripheral position,...
Muhammad had close links with three of the leading hanifs of Mecca. ‘Ubaydallah ibn Jahsh was his cousin and Waraqah ibn Nawfal was a cousin of Khadijah: both these men became Christians.
The more deeply he entered the gentile world, the more Paul’s Christos parted company with the historical Jesus, which had never really interested him in the first place. Far more important to Paul wa...
The implications for politics were immense. If instead of ruthlessly pursuing his own self-interest to the detriment of others, a ruler would curb his ego and submit to li for a single day, Confucius...
The humiliation of the ummah was not merely a political catastrophe, but touched a Muslim’s very soul. This new weakness was a sign that something had gone gravely awry in Islamic history. The Quran h...
In a theologian such as Lessius we can see that as Europe approached modernity, the theologians themselves were handing the future atheists the ammunition for their rejection of a God who had little r...
The dispassion of paedeia also informed the doctrine of the Trinity, which these three men, often known as the Cappadocian Fathers,
نفرط في أيامنا هذه، في الحديث عن الله، بيد أن معظم ما نقوله يتسم بالسطحية والتبسيط. نعتقد، في مجتمعنا الديمقراطي، أن مفهوم الرب يجب أن يكون سهلًا، وأن يكون الدين متاحًا للجميع، كثيرًا ما يقول لي القرّ...
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