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 Shi‘ah believe that salvation requires the intercession of Muhammad, his son-in-law Ali, his grandsons Hasan and Husayn, and the rest of the Prophet’s legitimate successors, the Imams, who not onl...
Such statements are commonplace in John, the last of the four canonized gospels, composed between 100 and 120 C.E. John shows no interest at all in Jesus’s physical birth, though even he acknowledges...
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...
Over the last few years, the Islamic world has produced more female presidents and prime ministers than both Europe and North America combined.
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...
Nestorian Christians argued that Jesus had two completely distinct natures—one human, the other divine—while Gnostic Christians, especially those called Docetists, claimed that Jesus only appeared to...
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....
Modalist Christians conceived of the Trinity as representing God in three successive modes of being: first as the Father, then as the Son, and finally and forevermore as the Holy Spirit.
Matthew has Jesus flee to Egypt to escape Herod’s massacre not because it happened, but because it fulfills the words of the prophet Hosea: Out of Egypt I have called my son (Hosea 11:1). The story is...
Mark’s Baptist admits that he himself is not the promised messiah—There is one coming after me who is stronger than I am, John says, one whose sandals I am not worthy to untie (Mark 1:7–8)—but strange...
It took many years to cleanse Arabia of its false idols. It will take many more to cleanse Islam of its new false idols—bigotry and fanaticism—worshipped by those who have replaced Muhammad’s original...
It has often been noted that the biblical stories recounted in the Quran, especially those dealing with Jesus, imply a familiarity with the traditions and narratives of the Christian faith.
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 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).
He was a man of profound contradictions, one day preaching a message of racial exclusion (I was sent solely to the lost sheep of Israel; Matthew 15:24), the next, of benevolent universalism (Go and ma...
He had been summoned to appear before a meeting of the Apostolic Council to defend his self-designated role as missionary to the gentiles (Paul insists he was not summoned to Jerusalem but went of his...
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,...
Crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved almost exclusively for the crime of sedition. The plaque the Romans placed above Jesus’s head as he writhed in pain—King of the Jews—was called a titulu...