In many ways, the partition of India was the inevitable result of three centuries of Britain’s divide-and-rule policy. As the events of the Indian Revolt demonstrated, the British believed that the be...
In first-century Palestine, nearly every claimant to the mantle of the messiah neatly fit one of these messianic paradigms. Hezekiah the bandit chief, Judas the Galilean, Simon of Peraea, and Athronge...
In fact, the Quran proposes the unprecedented notion that all revealed scriptures are derived from a single concealed book in heaven called the Umm al-Kitab, or Mother of Books (13:39).
If you cannot change the kings, the Sufis argued, then change yourself.
Certainly the shahadah contained an important theological innovation, but that innovation was not monotheism. With this simple profession of faith, Muhammad was declaring to Mecca that the God of the...
An individual enters the final stages of the Way when the nafs begins to release its grip on the qalb, thus allowing the ruh—which is present in all humanity, but is cloaked in the veil of the self—to...
All these schools of though gradually transformed into legal institutions, the diversity of ideas and freedom of opinion that characterized their early development gave way to rigid formalism, strict...
All that matters is to be on a path, to be constantly moving toward the top—one measured, controlled, and strictly supervised step at a time—passing diligently through specific abodes and stations alo...
A la mañana siguiente, cuando los romanos llegaron triunfantes a lo alto de la hasta entonces inexpugnable fortaleza de Masada, todo lo que hallaron fue una calma espectral: novecientos sesenta hombre...
Under a practice called evocatio, the Romans would take possession of an enemy’s temple—and therefore its god, for the two were inextricable in the ancient world—and transfer it to Rome, where it woul...
The gospels are not, nor were they ever meant to be, a historical documentation of Jesus’s life. These are not eyewitness accounts of Jesus’s words and deeds recorded by people who knew him. They are...
Practically every word ever written about Jesus of Nazareth, including every gospel story in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, was written by people who, like Stephen and Paul, never actually knew Jesus...
Another tradition told about the demise of Herod the Great: that sometime between his death in 4 B.C.E. and the Roman takeover of Judea in 6 C.E., in an obscure hillside village in Galilee, a child wa...
Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world, he accused the British nation-state—his nation-state. And your support of them makes yo...
What the Romans could not understand was that this Jewish exceptionalism was not a matter of arrogance or pride. It was a direct commandment from a jealous God who tolerated no foreign presence in the...
Today, Medina is simultaneously the archetype of Islamic democracy and the impetus for Islamic militancy. Islamic Modernists like the Egyptian writer and political philosopher Ali Abd ar-Raziq (d. 196...
To begin with, with the possible exception of the gospel of Luke, none of the gospels we have were written by the person after whom they are named.
There are striking similarities between the Christian and Quranic descriptions of the Apocalypse, the Last Judgment, and the paradise awaiting those who have been saved.
The story of the zealous Galilean peasant and Jewish nationalist who donned the mantle of messiah and launched a foolhardy rebellion against the corrupt Temple priesthood and the vicious Roman occupat...
Obviously James did not himself write the epistle; he was, like his brother Jesus and most of the apostles, an illiterate peasant with no formal education.