Quotes from Lesley Hazleton

She soars with eagles and navigates by rainbows.

Assassination creates an instant hero of its target. Any past sins are not just forgiven but utterly forgotten.

Those who are comfortably established in life tend to have no need to ask what it means. They are the insiders, and for them, how things are is how they should be. The status quo is so much a given that it goes not just unquestioned but unseen, and the blind eye is always turned. It is those whose place is uncertain, and who are thus uneasy in their existence, who need to ask why. And who often come up with radically new answers.

Those who are comfortably established in life tend to have no need to ask what it means.

To idealize someone is also, in a way, to dehumanize them,

Khadija loved him for himself, not for who he would become, and he would never forget her in those later years, turning pale with grief at the sound of any voice that reminded

A boy who had learned to survive by silencing his voice had suddenly been given one, but was it his own voice he had been given, or the voice of God? Or was the voice of God within him, part of him? Had divine words really been planted inside him, or had his own words been an expression of the divine? Where did man end and God begin? What was this boundary so powerfully and briefly broken?

Muhammad's is one of those rare lives that is more dramatic in reality than in legend. In fact the less one invokes the miraculous, the more extraordinary his life becomes.

Man journeys in darkness, and his destiny journeys toward him," he said, and traveled on.

If there was a single moment it all began, it was that of Muhammad's death. Even the Prophet was mortal. That was the problem. It was as though nobody had considered the possibility that he might die, not even Muhammad himself.

The word, 'cube', comes directly from the Arabic, Kaaba.

As with early Judaism and early Christianity, early Islam would be rooted in opposition to a corrupt status quo.

This is the basic insight of the Gnostics, the one known to the great mystical thinkers of all traditions: the divine spark is within each human being.

Why would a happily married man isolate himself this way, standing in meditation through the night?

How did the infant sent away from his family grow up to redefine the whole concept of family and tribe into something far larger: the umma, the people or the community of Islam?

So when dogmatic atheists assume that science has all the answers, or imagine that it soon will, they are no more immune than the most literal religious fundamentalist to the deceptive enchantment of certainty.

In Shia lore, Fatima lives on in another dimension to witness her sons' suffering and to weep for them. She is the Holy Mother, whose younger son would sacrifice himself to redeem humanity just as had the son of that other great mother, Mary. Like her, Fatima is often called the Virgin as a sign of her spiritual purity. Like her, she will mourn her offspring until the Day of Judgment,

Female infanticide was as high in Mecca as in Constantinople, Athens, and Rome - a practice the Quran was to address directly and condemn repeatedly.

If Muhammad weren't standing lonely vigil on the mountain, you might say that there was no sign of anything unusual about him.

The boy who had survived by blending into the background had to accept that he would now be thrust into the foreground, into the unrelenting eye of the world.

The parallels between Muhammad and Jesus are striking. Both were impelled by a strong sense of social justice; both emphasized unmediated access to the divine; both challenged the established power structure of their times.

agree that Muhammad took his uncle's hand as the life began to fade from his eyes and urged him to say the shahada, to accept islam and testify that there was no god but God: "Say it, uncle, and then I shall be able to witness for you on the Day of Judgment.

Machiavelli himself famously put it: "All armed prophets have conquered, and unarmed prophets have come to grief."9

Treated by his own people as one of them yet not one of them, he couldn't help but be aware of the contradictions inherent in a society that was supposed to be his, but seemed to have no place for him.