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...
If you cannot change the kings, the Sufis argued, then change yourself.
Herod’s penchant for violence and his highly publicized domestic disputes, which bordered on the burlesque, led him to execute so many members of his own family that Caesar Augustus once famously quip...
For the Sufi, reality is neither emptiness nor illusion; reality is God.
Considering how effortlessly religious dogma has become intertwined with political ideology, how can we overcome the clash-of-monotheisms mentality that has so deeply entrenched itself in the modern w...
Cognitive theorists have a term for what Eve just experienced. They call it her Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device, or HADD. This is a biological process that arose deep in our evolutionary past,...
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...
Because human beings do not have the capacity to attain knowledge of God on their own, the Imam becomes a continuous necessity for all societies and in every era. So in addition to the fixed number of...
At the center of Zoroastrian theology was a unique monotheistic system based on the sole god, Ahura Mazda (the Wise Lord). Like most ancients, Zarathustra could not easily conceive of his god as being...
As with everything else in the gospels, the story of Jesus’s arrest, trial, and execution was written for one reason and one reason only: to prove that he was the promised messiah. Factual accuracy wa...
As a text, the Quran is more than the foundation of the Islamic religion; it is the source of Arabic grammar. It is to Arabic what Homer is to Greek, what Chaucer is to English: a snapshot of an evolv...
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 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...
All religions are inextricably bound to the social, spiritual, and cultural milieux from which they arose and in which they developed. It is not prophets who create religions. Prophets are, above all,...
A prophet, claim the Shi‘ah, is someone who has, by the divine will, become conscious of God’s eternal message, which forever envelops creation like a numinous ether we cannot escape, while the Imam i...
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...
A king with no place to lay his head. A king who came to serve, not to be served.
The War on Terror is in fact a war against Islam. After all, this was never conceived of as a war against terror per se. If it were, it would have included the Basque separatists in Spain, the Christi...
Must recognize that greater knowledge about Islam is not enough to alter people’s perceptions of Muslims. Minds are not changed merely through acquiring data or information (if that were the case it w...
Whereas a religion of many gods posits many myths to describe the human condition, a religion of one god tends to be monomythic; it not only rejects all other gods, it rejects all other explanations f...