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09a0363
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Like so many prophets before him, Muhammad never claimed to have invented a new religion. By his own admission, Muhammad's message was an attempt to reform the existing religious beliefs and cultural practices of pre-Islamic Arabia so as to bring the God of the Jews and Christians to the Arab peoples. "[God] has established for you [the Arabs] the same religion enjoined on Noah, on Abraham, on Moses, and on Jesus," the Quran says (42:13)."
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Reza Aslan |
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e986d04
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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.
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Reza Aslan |
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00d2931
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Consider this: 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 titulus and, despite common perception, was not meant to be sarcastic. Every criminal who hung on a cross received a plaque declaring the specific crime for which he was being executed. Jesus's crime, in the eyes of Rome, was striv..
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Reza Aslan |
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228b65b
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RELIGIONS BECOME INSTITUTIONS when the myths and rituals that once shaped their sacred histories are transformed into authoritative models of orthodoxy (the correct interpretation of myths) and orthopraxy (the correct interpretation of rituals), though one is often emphasized over the other. Christianity may be the supreme example of an "orthodoxic" religion; it is principally one's beliefs--expressed through creed--that make one a faithful..
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Reza Aslan |
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5d2f357
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Whatever sartorial choices a woman makes are hers and hers alone. It is neither a man's nor the state's place to define proper "womanhood" in Islam. Those who treat the Muslim woman not as an individual but as a symbol either of Islamic chastity or secular liberalism are guilty of the same sin: the objectification of women."
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Reza Aslan |
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b88b61c
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As the Quran suggests over and over again, and as the Constitution of Medina explicitly affirms, Muhammad may have understood the concept of the Umm al-Kitab to mean not only that the Jews, Christians, and Muslims shared a single divine scripture but also that they constituted a single divine Ummah.
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Reza Aslan |
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e16ec20
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throughout the first two centuries of Islam, Muslims regularly read the Torah alongside the Quran.
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Reza Aslan |
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7dda056
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The bedrock of evangelical Christianity, at least as it was taught to me, is the unconditional belief that every word of the Bible is God-breathed and true, literal and inerrant. The sudden realization that this belief is patently and irrefutably false, that the Bible is replete with the most blatant and obvious errors and contradictions--just as one would expect from a document written by hundreds of hands across thousands of years--left m..
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Reza Aslan |
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a866a0e
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Athena was originally worshiped as a flat piece of olive wood that was washed and bejeweled, wrapped in garments, and carefully tended by a cadre of her priestesses.16
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Reza Aslan |
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ccb5432
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Montanist Christians like Tertullian believed that Jesus possessed the same divine quality as God, but not in the same quantity as God. 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. Nestorian Christians argued that Jesus had two completely distinct natures--one human, the other divine--while Gnostic Ch..
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Reza Aslan |
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b95d48d
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Because the concept of the Trinity is not explicitly mentioned in the New Testament (the term was coined by one of the oldest and most formidable church fathers, Tertullian of Carthage, early in the third century C.E.), it was neither widely adopted nor universally construed by the early Christian communities.
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Reza Aslan |
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9ebd640
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874 The occultation of the Twelfth Imam, or the Mahdi
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Reza Aslan |
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7ec05d3
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God is, in other words, wholly Other: the Mysterium Tremendum, to borrow Rudolph Otto's famous phrase.
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Reza Aslan |
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3bb7490
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The Ka'ba, like the Pyramids in Egypt or the Temple in Jerusalem, may have been constructed as an axis mundi, sometimes called a "navel spot": a sacred space around which the whole of the universe revolves, the link between the earth and the solid dome of heaven."
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Reza Aslan |
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3f69032
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In contrast, paganism among the sedentary societies of Arabia had developed from its earlier and simpler manifestations into a complex form of neo-animism, providing a host of divine and semi-divine intermediaries who stood between the creator god and his creation. This creator god was called Allah, which is not a proper name but a contraction of the word al-ilah, meaning simply "the god."
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Reza Aslan |
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6f5dd22
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While the details of the Amirs' religion have been lost to history, most scholars are convinced that by the sixth century C.E., henotheism had become the standard belief of the vast majority of sedentary Arabs, who not only accepted Allah as their High God, but insisted that he was the same god as Yahweh, the god of the Jews.
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Reza Aslan |
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a27c084
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Thus began the long process of transforming Jesus from a revolutionary Jewish nationalist into a pacifistic spiritual leader with no interest in any earthly matter. That was a Jesus the Romans could accept, and in fact did accept three centuries later when the Roman emperor Flavius Theodosius (d. 395) made the itinerant Jewish preacher's movement the official religion of the state, and what we now recognize as orthodox Christianity emerged.
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Reza Aslan |
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707cbec
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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)."
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Reza Aslan |
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a4110d8
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the city that had served as the religious, economic, and political capital of the Jewish nation for a thousand years, was, by the time Pompey strode through its gates, recognized less for its beauty and grandeur than for the religious fervor of its troublesome population.
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Reza Aslan |
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ecfdfd0
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The messiah was popularly believed to be the descendant of King David, and so his principal task was to rebuild David's kingdom and reestablish the nation of Israel. Thus, to call oneself the messiah at the time of the Roman occupation was tantamount to declaring war on Rome.
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Reza Aslan |
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8979f46
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Karima bint Ahmad (d. 1069) and Fatima bint Ali (d. 1087), for example, are regarded as two of the most important transmitters of the Prophet's traditions, while Zaynab bint al-Sha'ri (d. 1220) and Daqiqa bint Murshid (d. 1345), both textual scholars, occupied an eminent place in early Islamic scholarship. And it is hard to ignore the fact that nearly one sixth of all "reliable" hadith can be traced back to Muhammad's wife Aisha."
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Reza Aslan |
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ce1764a
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Rome named Herod "King of the Jews," granting him a kingdom that would ultimately grow larger than that of King Solomon."
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Reza Aslan |
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4b21019
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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 quipped, "I would rather be Herod's pig than his son."
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Reza Aslan |
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6415761
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When Herod the Great died in 4 B.C.E., Augustus split his realm among his three sons
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Reza Aslan |
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fc38869
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No more client-kings. No more King of the Jews. Jerusalem now belonged wholly to Rome.
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Reza Aslan |
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75796f3
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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 was born who would one day claim for himself Herod's mantle as King of the Jews.
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Reza Aslan |
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30a08c9
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That he came from this tightly enclosed village of a few hundred impoverished Jews may very well be the only fact concerning Jesus's childhood about which we can be fairly confident.
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Reza Aslan |
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95f627d
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RELIGIONS BECOME INSTITUTIONS when the myths and rituals that once shaped their sacred histories are transformed into authoritative models of orthodoxy (the correct interpretation of myths) and orthopraxy (the correct interpretation of rituals), though one is often emphasized over the other.
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Reza Aslan |
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7dc68fd
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However, because the Ulama have tended to regard Islamic practice as informing Islamic theology, orthopraxy and orthodoxy are intimately bound together in Islam, meaning questions of theology, or kalam, are impossible to separate from questions of law, or fiqh.
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Reza Aslan |
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63c524d
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The single most important factor in the performance of any Muslim ritual is the believer's intention, which must be consciously proclaimed before the ritual can begin.
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Reza Aslan |
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6b84968
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But tawhid, which literally means "making one," implies more than just monotheism. True, there is only one God, but that is just the beginning. Tawhid means that God is Oneness. God is Unity: wholly indivisible, entirely unique, and utterly indefinable. God resembles nothing in either essence or attributes."
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Reza Aslan |
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bea1bca
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For the Sufi, reality is neither emptiness nor illusion; reality is God.
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Reza Aslan |
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f1f8d09
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The Spanish philosopher and physician Ibn Rushd (1126-98), better known as Averroes in the West, pushed al-Jabbar's conception of truth to its limit by proposing a "two truths" theory of knowledge in which religion and philosophy are placed in opposition to each other. According to Ibn Rushd, religion simplifies the truth for the masses by resorting to easily recognizable signs and symbols, regardless of the doctrinal contradictions and rat..
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Reza Aslan |
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5801809
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The Rationalists argued that God's attributes could not possibly exist coeternally with God, but must be a part of creation.
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Reza Aslan |
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b7c6b16
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Manichaeism, the doctrine founded by the Prophet Mani, was a Gnostic religious movement heavily influenced by Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Judaism which preached a complex, radical dualism between the forces of darkness/evil and the forces of light/good.
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Reza Aslan |
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e72250b
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The Perfect Man is he for whom individuality is merely an external form, but whose inward reality conforms to the universe itself. He is "the copy of God," in the words of al-Arabi's greatest disciple, Abdul Karim al-Jili: he is the mirror in which the divine attributes are perfectly reflected; the medium through which God is made manifest."
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Reza Aslan |
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1ac1a2f
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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 only serve as humanity's intercessors on the Last Days, but who further function as the eternal executors (wali) of the divine Revelation.
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Reza Aslan |
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3445187
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The word Imam has multiple connotations. In Sunni Islam, the imam is merely the person who stands at the head of the mosque and leads the congregation in prayer. While the Shi'ah sometimes employ this definition for their religious leaders as well, they also recognize a "fixed" number of Imams--the number of whom depends on the sect of Shi'ism--who, as the Prophet's legitimate successors, bear the responsibility of guarding and preserving M..
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Reza Aslan |
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68ef7b9
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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 Imams who succeeded Muhammad's earthly authority, there must also exist an "ever-present" or "pre-existent" Imam who, as the eternal guardian of the Revelation, functions as "the Proof of God on Earth." Thus, the first Imam was neither Muham..
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Reza Aslan |
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cebda44
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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 is someone who explicates that message for those who possess neither the prophetic consciousness necessary to recognize it nor the power of reason to understand it. Put another way, the prophet transmits the Message of God, while the Imam transl..
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Reza Aslan |
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9c53ca1
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There are two distinct methods of interpreting the Quran. The first, tafsir, is primarily concerned with elucidating the literal meaning of the text, while the second, ta'wil, is more concerned with the hidden, esoteric meaning of the Quran.
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Reza Aslan |
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6a280d1
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A true Sufi, Shaykh Haeri writes, "does not separate the inner from the outer," for when you "start by purifying your inner self, you end up being concerned with the outer and with society."
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Reza Aslan |
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5273ee8
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In Muhammad's lifetime, the Quran was never collected in a single volume; in fact, it was never collected at all.
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Reza Aslan |
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ba9a6e3
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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, through reunions and abandons. And now I am Yourself. Your existence is my own, and it is also my will."
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Reza Aslan |