Quotes from Lesley Hazleton

The question of morality and conscience, a hallmark of creativity, enters with the sense of injustice that the orphaned child feels and continues to feel into adulthood," and eventually develops into "a thirst for identity, a need to imprint oneself on the world."3

As the boy entered his teens, abu-Talib began to rely on him more, taking him with him as he went about his business.

Moral compasses" are often invoked, as though religion always points north. It doesn't seem to have occurred to the graybeards that religion and morality are not synonymous

Where belief tries to expel doubt, faith walks with it, offering no easy answers. Belief insists, while faith hopes and trusts. The one is demanded, the other freely given, and this freedom means that real faith is both difficult and stubborn. It involves an ongoing struggle, a continual questioning of what we think we know, a wrestling with issues and ideas. It goes hand-in-hand with doubt, in a never-ending conversation with it. And sometimes even in conscious defiance of it.

find more honest ways—both intellectually and emotionally—to talk about such magnificent intangibles as God, infinity, and consciousness.

What made the marriage unusual, then, was not the age difference but its closeness, especially given the difference in social status between husband and wife. And the fact that it was she who proposed to him.

Forty, that is, gives a new lease on life, and this is how the number consistently appears in the sacred books that came out of the Middle East. The duration of the great flood waited out in Noah's ark, the years of Israelite wandering in the desert after the exodus, the nights Moses spent on Mount Sinai, the days and nights Jesus spent in the wilderness—all forty, the number signifying a time of struggle and displacement in preparation for a new beginning

And a very strong one, since it would reach deep into the future. The two fathers-in-law, abu-Bakr and Omar, were to be the first two leaders of Islam after Muhammad's death, each acclaimed as his successor or khalifa—caliph in English—and they would be immediately followed by the two sons-in-law, Uthman and Ali. By both giving and taking in marriage, Muhammad was establishing the leadership matrix of the new Islamic community.

Yet everywhere he looked, what should surely bring people together only seemed to drive them apart. The more they preached what the prophets had said from Moses down through Jesus, the less they seemed to hear those same prophets' words. How could the idea of divine unity result in such human disunity?

Especially the doubt, which is in many ways essential to real faith.

Where certainty is often a refusal to think, to question, to reason - a refusal to engage in the kind of Socratic dialogue with unbelief that the Quran urges - faith requires an awareness of the possibility of being wrong, which is why it is perhaps best defined in Hebrews 11:1 as "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not see.

in the Gospel of Matthew: "We desire to show favor to those oppressed on earth, to make them the leaders and the inheritors.

This was a matter of politics as much as of faith. The scriptures of all three of the great monotheisms show that they began similarly as popular movements in protest against the privilege and arrogance of power, whether that of kings as in the Hebrew bible, or the Roman Empire as in the Gospels, or a tribal elite as in the Quran.

She soars with eagles and navigates by rainbows.

I am come to set a man at variance with his father,"4 Jesus had said. "If any man come to me and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my follower.

He had seen them bowing down low in islam, that supple word whose associated meanings in Arabic ripple out to include peace and wholeness, but which means above all submission. True, it was not a forced submission but a willed and willing acceptance.

It was the posture of utter surrender to the mercy and grace of a far greater power, and thus a clear statement, felt in muscle and bone, of the literal meaning of islam.

The scriptures of all three of the great monotheisms show that they began similarly as popular movements in protest against the privilege and arrogance of power, whether that of kings as in the Hebrew bible, or the Roman Empire as in the Gospels, or a tribal elite as in the Quran.

No matter how far they might have strayed from their origins as they became institutionalized over time, the historical record clearly indicates that what we now call the drive for social justice was the idealistic underpinning of monotheistic faith.

It was as though nobody had considered the possibility that he might die, not even Muhammad himself.