While the exact changes Muhammad made to this tradition are far too complex to discuss in detail here, it is sufficient to note that women in the Ummah were, for the first time, given the right both t...
Together, these three gospels—Mark, Matthew, and Luke—became known as the Synoptics (Greek for viewed together) because they more or less present a common narrative and chronology about the life and m...
Thus began the long process of transforming Jesus from a revolutionary Jewish nationalist into a peaceful spiritual leader with no interest in any earthly matter.
They fully bloomed in the pages of the Bible and the Quran, where the Sumerian word ilu became transliterated as Elohim in Hebrew and Allah in Arabic.
The tearing of the Temple’s veil is a fitting end to the passion narratives, the perfect symbol of what the death of Jesus meant for the men and women who reflected upon it many decades later. Jesus’s...
The loss of Abu Talib’s protection was certainly demoralizing, if not detrimental to Muhammad’s physical security. But returning home after one of his painfully violent revelatory experiences, or afte...
The Romans may not have understood the Jewish religion, with its strange observances and its overwhelming obsession with ritual purity—The Jews regard as profane all that we hold sacred, Tacitus wrote...
That, more than anything else, explains why, throughout human history, religion has been a force both for boundless good and for unspeakable evil; why the same faith in the same God inspires love and...
Religion, it must be understood, is not faith. Religion is the story of faith.
Regardless, 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 hi...
Prophets such as Micah, Amos, and Jeremiah, who appear to be predicting the coming of a future salvific character from the line of King David that would one day restore Israel to its former glory, are...
Poet, novelist, journalist, critic, and social activist Sayyid Qutb (1906–66) would come to be known as the father of Islamic radicalism. Born in Upper Egypt, he had, like al-Banna, moved to Cairo dur...
Paul’s breezy dismissal of the very foundation of Judaism was as shocking to the leaders of the Jesus movement in Jerusalem as it would have been to Jesus himself. After all, Jesus claimed to have com...
Nor is it surprising that three of the first four leaders of Islam were killed by fellow Muslims, though it is important to recognize that both the rebels who murdered Uthman and the Kharijites who as...
Muhammad’s example must have had a lasting effect on his early followers: as Nabia Abbott has shown, throughout the first two centuries of Islam, Muslims regularly read the Torah alongside the Quran....
Luke means that Jesus is the new David, the King of the Jews, placed on God’s throne to rule over the Promised Land. Simply put, the infancy narratives in the gospels are not historical accounts, nor...
Jesus, on the other hand, was America. He was the central figure in America’s national drama. Accepting him into my heart was as close as I could get to feeling truly American.
For European colonialists like Alfred, Lord Cromer, the British consul general to Egypt at the end of the nineteenth century, the veil was a symbol of the degradation of women and definitive proof tha...
Even al-Hallaj admitted that his experience of unity with God came after a long journey of inward reflection. Your Spirit mixed with my Spirit little by little, he wrote of God in his Diwan, by turns,...
But what is most desperately needed is not so much a better appreciation of our neighbor’s religion as a broader, more complete understanding of religion itself.