Sublime

Throughout Islamic history, there have been a number of women who have struggled to maintain their authority as both preservers of the hadith and interpreters of the Quran.

jihad is neither a universally recognized nor a unanimously defined concept in the Muslim world.

Nevertheless, the heirs of Traditionalism have managed to silence most critics of reform, even when that criticism has come from their own ranks. When in the 1990s Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, a Muslim professor at Cairo University, argued that the Quran, while divinely revealed, was a cultural product of seventh-century Arabia, he was branded a heretic by

The fact is that nearly one out of five people in the world are Muslims. And while some of them may share bin Laden’s grievances against the Western powers, very few share his interpretation of jihad.

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Long before his messianic rise to power in Iran, however, Khomeini was a devoted disciple of the great mystics of Islam: the Sufis.

Together, al-Afghani and Muhammad Abdu founded the Salafiyyah movement, Egypt’s version of the Modernist project. After al-Afghani’s death, Abdu joined forces with his close friend and biographer, Rashid Rida (1865–1935), to push the Salafiyyah’s reformist agenda to the forefront of Egyptian politics. Yet, despite its growing popularity throughout

wrote a bestselling book about his experience, Radical, and coauthored another, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, with Sam Harris. He is a lion of human transformation, and I am proud to call him a friend.