Quotes from Reza Aslan

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

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.

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 pay for these massive

In the words of the Iranian political philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush, "We no longer claim that a genuinely religious government can be democratic, but that it cannot be otherwise.

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.

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 the peasants and day laborers of Galilee.

Ezekiel declared, "in the center of all nations

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.

Los judíos incluso estaban exentos de rendir culto directo al emperador, algo que Roma imponía prácticamente a cualquier otra comunidad religiosa bajo su dominio. Todo

Never mind that Jewish law forbade the charging of interest on loans; the massive fines that were levied on the poor for late payments had basically the same effect.

The choice for the early church was clear: either Jesus was just another failed messiah, or what the Jews of Jesus's time expected of the messiah was wrong and had to be adjusted

Like a Jewish rabbi, a Sunni cleric is a scholar, not a priest. His judgment is followed not because it carries the authority of God (it does not), but because the cleric's scholarship, his intimate knowledge of tradition, and his unbreakable bond with the past grant him special insight into God's will.

Iran's previous attempts at democracy were thwarted by foreigners—the British and Russians in 1905–1911; the United States in 1953—whose interests were served by suppressing all democratic aspirations in the region.

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.

Muhammad may have been, there is one detail that should not be lost in the tumult and confusion

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.

Nothing can be substantially independent of God because there is nothing else but God." In other words, what we call the world and what we call God are not independent or discrete. Rather, the world is God's self-expression. It is God's essence realized and experienced.2

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.

Rome named Herod "King of the Jews," granting him a kingdom that would ultimately grow larger than that of King Solomon.

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.

The origin of the religious impulse, in other words, is not rooted in our quest for meaning or our fear of the unknown. It is not born of our involuntary reactions to the natural world. It is not an accidental consequence of the complex workings of our brains. It is the result of something far more primal and difficult to explain: our ingrained, intuitive, and wholly experiential belief that we are, whatever else we are, embodied souls.

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.

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 me confused and spiritually unmoored.

When it comes to dealing with a social movement, society has only two options: either it can address the members' grievances, thereby making the movement irrelevant, or it can deflect those grievances and further radicalise the movement. Or as Sidney Tarrow puts it, actions that begin in the streets [can be] resolved in the halls of government or by the bayonets of the army.