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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| ecfdfd0 | 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. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 8979f46 | 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." | Reza Aslan | ||
| ce1764a | Rome named Herod "King of the Jews," granting him a kingdom that would ultimately grow larger than that of King Solomon." | Reza Aslan | ||
| 4b21019 | 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." | Reza Aslan | ||
| 6415761 | When Herod the Great died in 4 B.C.E., Augustus split his realm among his three sons | Reza Aslan | ||
| fc38869 | No more client-kings. No more King of the Jews. Jerusalem now belonged wholly to Rome. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 75796f3 | 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. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 30a08c9 | 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. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 95f627d | 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. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 7dc68fd | 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. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 63c524d | 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. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 6b84968 | 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." | Reza Aslan | ||
| bea1bca | For the Sufi, reality is neither emptiness nor illusion; reality is God. | Reza Aslan | ||
| f1f8d09 | 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.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 5801809 | The Rationalists argued that God's attributes could not possibly exist coeternally with God, but must be a part of creation. | Reza Aslan | ||
| b7c6b16 | 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. | Reza Aslan | ||
| e72250b | 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." | Reza Aslan | ||
| 1ac1a2f | 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. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 3445187 | 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.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 45b72f0 | the community, and respected. She | Danielle Steel | ||
| 68ef7b9 | 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.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| cebda44 | 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.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 9c53ca1 | 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. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 6a280d1 | 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." | Reza Aslan | ||
| 5273ee8 | In Muhammad's lifetime, the Quran was never collected in a single volume; in fact, it was never collected at all. | Reza Aslan | ||
| ba9a6e3 | 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." | Reza Aslan | ||
| c615e06 | 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" along the Way, each of which is marked by an ineffable experience of spiritual evolution, until one finally reaches the end of the journey: that moment of enlightenment in which the veil of reality is stripped away, the ego obliterated, and th.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| f234b7d | 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. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 45c8157 | Unshackled by the state, the Ulama were now free to ascend to a position of unquestioned religious authority in the Ummah, which they used not only to institutionalize their legal and theological opinions into distinct schools of thought but also to formulate a binding, comprehensive code of conduct called the Shariah, forever transforming Islam from a religion into an all-embracing way of life: one that the Ulama claimed sole authority to .. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 19ea52c | The so-called Muslim women's movement is predicated on the idea that Muslim men, not Islam, have been responsible for the suppression of women's rights | Reza Aslan | ||
| 0d67551 | This is no simple declaration. It is, in fact, an act of treason. In first-century Palestine, simply saying the words "This is the messiah," aloud and in public, can be a criminal offense, punishable by crucifixion. True, the Jews of Jesus's time had somewhat conflicting views about the role and function of the messiah, fed by a score of messianic traditions and popular folktales that were floating around the Holy Land. Some believed the me.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| a61d053 | The Jesus that is uncovered in the process may not be the Jesus we expect; he certainly will not be the Jesus that most modern Christians would recognize. But in the end, he is the only Jesus that we can access by historical means. Everything else is a matter of faith. | jesus-christ jesus-christ-of-nazareth jesus-of-nazareth judaism | Reza Aslan | |
| 5879b09 | 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 that Jesus was a "Nazarean" (John 18:5-7). In John's view, Jesus is an eternal being, the logos who was with God from the beginning of time, the primal force through whom all creation sprang and without whom nothing came into being (John 1:3)." | Reza Aslan | ||
| fa62f5c | Luke places Jesus's birth in Bethlehem not because it took place there, but because of the words of the prophet Micah: "And you Bethlehem ... from you shall come to me a ruler in Israel" (Micah 5:2). 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 were they meant to be read as such. They are.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| c80efce | is possible that Jesus had some basic knowledge of Greek, the lingua franca of the Roman Empire (ironically, Latin was the language least used in the lands occupied by Rome), enough perhaps to negotiate contracts and deal with customers, but certainly not enough to preach. The only Jews who could communicate comfortably in Greek were the Hellenized Herodian elite, the priestly aristocracy in Judea, and the more educated Diaspora Jews, not t.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 5bf5624 | It could be known only through six divine "evocations" that it brought forth into the world from its own being: wisdom, truth, power, love, unity, and immortality. These are not so much Ahura Mazda's attributes as they are the six substances that make up its essence." | Reza Aslan | ||
| a2c93f2 | To attempt to apply normal law and government to the Border area was a waste of time, and both countries had long recognised this. Thus there grew up a body of local law and custom, often extremely complex, seldom consistent, and in practice all too rough and ready, by which the two governments attempted to keep their frontier subjects in order. It can probably be said to have worked moderately well, in that it prevented a decline into comp.. | George MacDonald Fraser | ||
| 4d70cb1 | there were solid gold and silver vessels and ornaments, crusted with gems, miles of jewel-sewn brocade, gorgeous pictures and statues that the troops just hacked and smashed, beautiful enamel and porcelain trampled underfoot, weapons and standards set with rubies and emeralds which were gouged and hammered from their settings--all this among the powder-smoke and blood, with native soldiers who'd never seen above ten rupees in their lives, a.. | George MacDonald Fraser | ||
| 191a993 | And it was understood that Scottish Borderers did not take kindly to outside Wardens. The oustanding example was the unfortunate Frenchman, Anthony Darcy, the Sieur de la Bastie, who in 1516 was ill-advised enough to accept the Wardenry of all the Scottish Marches, with particular responsibility in the east. This was Hume country, and they regarded Darcy with "horrid resentment". He seems to have been a brave, honest and conscientious Warde.. | George MacDonald Fraser | ||
| 31d9af4 | In her, ignorance and stupidity formed a perfect shield against the world: this, I suppose, is innocence. It | George MacDonald Fraser | ||
| 35c3e9d | It's always the same before the shooting begins--the hostesses go into a frenzy of gaiety, and all the spongers and civilians crawl out of the wainscoting braying with good fellowship because thank God they ain't going, and the young plungers and green striplings roister it up, and their fiancees let 'em pleasure them red in the face out of pity, because the poor brave boy is off to the cannon's mouth, and the dance goes on and the eyes gro.. | George MacDonald Fraser | ||
| 8ca777c | The Border reivers were aggressive, ruthless, violent people, notoriously quick on the draw, ready and occasionally eager to kill in action, when life or property or honour were at stake. They were a brave people, and risked their lives readily enough; when they had to die, they appear to have done so without undue dramatics or bogus defiance which would have been wasted anyway. They lived in a society where deadly family feud was common, a.. | George MacDonald Fraser | ||
| df2fd9c | By God, I wish that spit had been a real one, with me to turn it. | George MacDonald Fraser | ||
| ac71477 | Ga'n git 'em, marras! Remember Arroyo!" "Booger Arroyo!" roared Grandarse, and the corporal pulled himself up into a sitting position, and as we swung past he was trying to sing, in a harsh unmusical croak. Aye, Ah ken John Peel an' Ruby too, Ranter an' Ringwood, Bellman an' True From a find to a check, from a check to a view | George MacDonald Fraser |