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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 8b29724 | 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, reformers who redefine and reinterpret the existing beliefs and practices of their communities, providing fresh sets of symbols and metaphors with which succeeding generations can describe the nature of reality. Indeed, it is most often the pr.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 878d7da | Thus, the Quran promises that "all those who believe--the Jews, the Sabians, the Christians--anyone who believes in God and the Last Days, and who does good deeds, will have nothing to fear" | Reza Aslan | ||
| 12cad10 | 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. Certainly, | Reza Aslan | ||
| 4bdc893 | 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. Tafsir answers questions of context and chronology, providing an easily understandable framework for Muslims to live a righteous life. Ta'wil delves into the concealed message of the text, which, becaus.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| fb7ea1a | 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 absorb the qalb as though it were a drop of dew plunged into a vast, endless sea. When this occurs, the individual achieves fana: ecstatic, intoxicating self-annihilation. This is the final station along the Sufi Way. It is here, at the end .. | Reza Aslan | ||
| ab941fc | Grateful for their generosity, Muhammad orders the land to be leveled, the graves dug up, and the palm trees cut down for timber to build a modest home. He envisions a courtyard roofed in palm leaves, with living quarters made of wood and mud lining the walls. But this will be more than a home. This converted drying-ground and cemetery will serve as the first masjid, or mosque, of a new kind of community, one so revolutionary that many year.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 3eed86c | Caesar Augustus once famously quipped, "I would rather be Herod's pig than his son." | Reza Aslan | ||
| c89db98 | 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 during the turbulent 1920s. After a brief stint in the Ministry of Education, Qutb traveled to the United States in 1948 to research its educational system. What he discovered was a nation committed to individual freedom, yet "devoid of human symp.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 57e299c | Indeed, everything that is currently being said about America's diverse Muslim population--that they are foreign and exotic and un-American--was said about Catholic and Jewish immigrants nearly a century ago. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 750b1be | The hadith, insofar as they addressed issues not dealt with in the Quran, would become an indispensable tool in the formation of Islamic law. However, in their earliest stages, the hadith were muddled and totally unregulated, making their authentication almost impossible. Worse, as the first generation of Companions passed on, the community had to rely increasingly on the reports that the second generation of Muslims (known as the Tabiun) h.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| c033010 | there is no mistaking the tension that exists in the gospels between how the early church viewed Jesus and how Jesus seems to view himself. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 9fca23c | Rhodes, founder of the De Beers diamond company and at one time the virtual dictator of modern-day South Africa, famously declared, "We Britons are the first race in the world, and the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race." Among" | Reza Aslan | ||
| 8eff431 | Acesta este locul in care vei fi cel mai aproape de Dumnezeu. Duhoarea carnagiului este imposibil de ignorat. Intra in piele si in par ca o povara otravitoare de care vei scapa cu greu. Preotii ard tamaie pentru a alunga duhoarea si boala, dar amestecul de mirt, scortisoara, sofran si tamaie nu poate masca mirosul pestilential al macelului. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 86051b9 | The Prophet himself sometimes openly suppressed or negated older verses, considering them to have been replaced by newer ones. That is because Muhammad did not consider the Quran to be a static Revelation, which may be why he never bothered to authorize its collection into a codified book. The Quran was for Muhammad a living scripture that consciously evolved alongside the Ummah, continually adapting itself to meet the specific needs of the.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 9a0f35e | 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 assassinated Ali were, like their spiritual successors among the Jihadists of today, far more concerned with maintaining their personal ideal of Muhammad's community than with protecting that community from external enemies. After | Reza Aslan | ||
| a7b399a | To accommodate the rapid influx of Europeans, entire cities were built on the outskirts of Cairo, far away from the indigenous population. The foreigners quickly took charge of Egypt's principal export of cotton. They built ports, railroads, and dams, all to implement colonial control over the country's economy. With the construction of their crowning achievement, the Suez Canal, Egypt's fate as Britain's most valuable colony was sealed. To.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 39e7c12 | Consider, for example, how the following verse (4:34) regarding the obligations of men toward women has been rendered into English by two different but widely read contemporary translators of the Quran. The first is from the Princeton edition, translated by Ahmed Ali; the second is from Majid Fakhry's translation, published by New York University: Men are the support of women [qawwamuna 'ala an-nisa] as God gives some more means than others.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 7415d45 | 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 the source of both good and evil. He therefore developed an ethical dualism in which two opposing spirits, Spenta Mainyu ("the beneficent spirit") and Angra Mainyu ("the hostile spirit"), were responsible for good and evil, respectively." | Reza Aslan | ||
| 61ade98 | What most puzzled Rome about the Jews was not their unfamiliar rites or their strict devotion to their laws, but rather what the Romans considered to be their unfathomable superiority complex. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 96fd680 | The relationship between the Jews and pagan Arabs was symbiotic in that not only were the Jews heavily Arabized, but the Arabs were also significantly influenced by Jewish beliefs and practices. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 457552b | daunted by the group. She said hello | Danielle Steel | ||
| fab70c8 | Pilate, as the histories reveal, was not one for trials. In his ten years as governor of Jerusalem, he had sent thousands upon thousands to the cross with a simple scratch of his reed pen on a slip of papyrus. The notion that he would even be in the same room as Jesus, let alone deign to grant him a "trial," beggars the imagination. Either the threat posed by Jesus to the stability of Jerusalem is so great that he is one of only a handful o.. | pilate trial | Reza Aslan | |
| 60e2009 | 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 for God. | Reza Aslan | ||
| da01b06 | A king with no place to lay his head. A king who came to serve, not to be served. | Reza Aslan | ||
| a900628 | According to Mark, it was a custom of the Roman governor during the feast of Passover to release one prisoner to the Jews, anyone for whom they asked. When Pilate asks the crowd which prisoner they would like to have released--Jesus, the preacher and traitor to Rome, or bar Abbas, the insurrectionist and murderer--the crowd demands the release of the insurrectionist and the crucifixion of the preacher. "Why?" Pilate asks, pained at the thou.. | fiction history pilate | Reza Aslan | |
| d9fa960 | The intention of the United States government in supporting Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war was to curb the spread of Iran's revolution, but it had the more disastrous effect of curbing its evolution. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 09564d9 | Paul's portrayal of Jesus as Christ may sound familiar to contemporary Christians--it has since become the standard doctrine of the church--but it would have been downright bizarre to Jesus's Jewish followers. The transformation of the Nazarean into a divine, preexistent, literal son of God whose death and resurrection launch a new genus of eternal beings responsible for judging the world has no basis in any writings about Jesus that are ev.. | jesus paul | Reza Aslan | |
| fd5d66a | Yet al-Afghani rarely spoke of Islam in religious terms. Perhaps his greatest contribution to Islamic political thought was his insistence that Islam, detached from its purely religious associations, could be used as a sociopolitical ideology to unite the whole of the Muslim world in solidarity against imperialism. Islam was for al-Afghani far more than law and theology; it was civilization. Indeed, it was a superior civilization because, a.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 71173b8 | It is a miracle that we know anything at all about the man called Jesus of Nazareth. | Reza Aslan | ||
| e142b87 | Simply put, the infancy narratives in the gospels are not historical accounts, nor were they meant to be read as such. They are theological affirmations of Jesus's status as the anointed of God. The descendant of King David. The promised messiah. | Reza Aslan | ||
| bcbd434 | Despite the common perception in the West, the Muslim conquerors did not force conversion upon the conquered peoples; indeed, they did not even encourage it. The fact is that the financial and social advantages of being an Arab Muslim in the eighth and ninth centuries were such that Islam quickly became an elite clique, which a non-Arab could join only through a complex process that involved becoming first the client of an Arab. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 1aa5591 | When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the Saudi regime saw an opportunity to rid itself, however temporarily, of the holy warriors it had nurtured for nearly a century. With economic and military support from the United States and tactical training provided by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the Saudis began funneling a steady stream of radical Islamic militants (known as the Mujahadin, or "those who make jihad") from.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 34cb202 | they gradually transformed Jesus from a revolutionary zealot to a Romanized demigod, from a man who tried and failed to free the Jews from Roman oppression to a celestial being wholly uninterested in any earthly matter. | Reza Aslan | ||
| dbb7301 | Ezekiel declared, "in the center of all nations" | Reza Aslan | ||
| 3cf49ae | James's epistle was probably written by someone from within his inner circle. Again, that is true of almost every book in the New Testament, including the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and John, as well as a good number of Paul's letters (Colossians, Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus). | Reza Aslan | ||
| ef50e27 | there, at the casino. He's a very spiritual | Danielle Steel | ||
| 37e1594 | 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 striving for kingly rule (i.e., treason), the same crime for which nearly every other messianic aspirant of the ti.. | inri jesus | Reza Aslan | |
| 8f88623 | 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 him. They are testimonies of faith composed by communities of faith and written many years after the events they describe. Simply put, the gospels tell us about Jesus the Christ, not Jesus the man. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 6d57ef5 | Yet lost in the debate about America's true intentions in the Middle East was the fact that large majorities in every Muslim-majority state surveyed told pollsters they wanted to see their countries move toward greater democracy. A wave of democratic fervor across the Middle East created a renewed sense of hope for scores of people who had spent their lives in autocratic societies but who now looked forward to the possibility of having a sa.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 0af1a47 | 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 world? Clearly, education and tolerance are essential. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 284ec82 | For most of the Western world, September 11, 2001, signaled the commencement of a worldwide struggle between Islam and the West--the ultimate manifestation of the clash of civilizations. From the Islamic perspective, however, the attacks on New York and Washington were part of an ongoing clash between those Muslims who strive to reconcile their religious values with the realities of the modern world, and those who react to modernism and ref.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| c4935c7 | Two thousand years later, the Christ of Paul's creation has utterly subsumed the Jesus of history. The memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic preacher who defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost, has been almost completely .. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 083e79a | But in the end, he is the only Jesus that we can access by historical means. Everything else is a matter of faith. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 4cf4216 | If you cannot change the kings," the Sufis argued, "then change yourself." | Reza Aslan |