Quotes from Reza Aslan

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.

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).

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.

We believe in God, and in that which has been revealed to us, which is that which was revealed to Abraham and Ismail and Jacob and the tribes [of Israel], as well as that which the Lord revealed to Moses and to Jesus and to all the other Prophets. We make no distinction between any of them; we submit ourselves to God. (3:84)

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.

Whoever sacrifices to any god but the Lord alone shall be utterly annihilated" (Exodus 22:20).

A king with no place to lay his head. A king who came to serve, not to be served.

A la mañana siguiente, cuando los romanos llegaron triunfantes a lo alto de la hasta entonces inexpugnable fortaleza de Masada, todo lo que hallaron fue una calma espectral: novecientos sesenta hombres, mujeres y niños muertos. La guerra, finalmente, había acabado.

creciente ira y el descontento entre los judíos.

Our Paleolithic ancestors lived in small-scale communities—an extended family sharing a shelter. Their sense of solidarity was engendered first and foremost by birth and blood, not by symbols and rituals.

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.

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.

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 Ali's death, Mu'awiyah was

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.

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

Some have argued, a few of them violently, that the Caliphate should be restored as the emblem of Muslim unity. These Muslims believe that the ideals of Islam and nationalism are "diametrically opposed to each other," to quote Mawlana Mawdudi, founder of the Pakistani sociopolitical movement Jama'at-i Islami (the Islamic Association).

The cognitive science of religion begins with a simple premise: Religion is first and foremost a neurological phenomenon.

Every impulse—every impulse without exception—is generated by complex electrochemical reactions in the brain. Why would the religious impulse be any different? Knowing the neural mechanics of the religious impulse does not undermine the legitimacy of religious belief any more than knowing the chemical process of romantic attraction makes the feeling any less real or the object of our affection any less worthy.

It is a miracle that we know anything at all about the man called Jesus of Nazareth.

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.

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.

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 élite clique, which a non-Arab could join only through a complex process that involved becoming first the client of an Arab.

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.

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).