Quotes from Reza Aslan

These abiding words of the Beatitudes are, more than anything else, a promise of impending deliverance from subservience and foreign rule. They predict a radically new world order wherein the meek inherit the earth, the sick are healed, the weak become strong, the hungry are fed, and the poor are made rich. In the Kingdom of God, wealth will be redistributed and debts canceled. "The first shall be last and the last shall be first" (Matthew 5:3–12 | Luke 6:20–24).

Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world," he accused the British nation-state—his nation-state. "And your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters.

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 time was killed.

conservation of energy and matter

only the high priest can enter the Holy of Holies, and on only one day a year, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when all sins of Israel are wiped clean. On this day, the high priest comes into presence of God to atone for the whole nation. If he is worthy of God's blessing, Israel's sins are forgiven. If he is not, a rope tied to his waist ensures that when God strikes him dead, he can be dragged out of the Holy of Holies without anyone else defiling the sanctuary.

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.

It is simply up to the individual to decide what "the One" is: how it should be defined, and how it should be experienced

In recognition of his service, Rome named Herod King of the Jews, granting him a kingdom that would ultimately grow larger than that of King Solomon

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 the self utterly consumed by God.

Herod was convert,after all. His mother was Arab. His people, the Idumeans, had come to Judaism only a generation or two earlier.

The loss of Abu Talib's protection was certainly demoralizing, if not detrimental to Muhammad's physical security. But returning home after one of his painfully violent revelatory experiences, or after suffering another indignity from the Quraysh—his head covered in dirt, his tunic defiled with blood—and not having Khadija there to wrap him in her cloak and hold him in her arms until the terror subsided must have been an unimaginable sorrow for the Prophet.

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.

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

When Herod the Great died in 4 B.C.E., Augustus split his realm among his three sons

No more client-kings. No more King of the Jews. Jerusalem now belonged wholly to Rome.

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.

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.

The fact is that for fourteen centuries, the science of Quranic commentary has been the exclusive domain of Muslim men. And

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 define.

As the ninth-century legal scholar Malik ibn Anas, founder of the Maliki school of law, once quipped, "This religion is a science, so pay close attention to those from whom you learn it.

I believe in God, which means I am open to some absurd possibilities. But I understand the power of that faith, and I understand the metaphor of that belief.

God doesn't make you a bigot. You're just a bigot.

I have watched Muslims chant 'Death to America!' on the streets of Tehran, then privately beg me to help them get a visa to the United States.

I'm a person of faith, and the language that I use to define my faith, the symbols and metaphors that I rely upon to express my faith, are those provided by Islam because they make the most sense to me.