Sublime

So in the twenty-first century religions don’t bring rain, they don’t cure illnesses, they don’t build bombs—but they do get to determine who are “us” and who are “them,” whom we should cure and whom we should bomb.

the Five Pillars are meant as a metaphor for Islam; they are a summary not just of what is required to be a member of the Ummah, but also of what it means to be a Muslim. Contrary to perception, the Pillars are not oppressive obligations—quite the opposite. These are highly pragmatic rituals, in that the believer is responsible only for those tasks

It is no coincidence that just as they reversed many of Muhammad’s social reforms aimed at empowering women, the Muslim scriptural and legal scholars of the following centuries rejected the notion that Jews and Christians were part of the Ummah, and instead designated both groups as unbelievers. These scholars reinterpreted the Revelation to

Like Judaism, Islam is primarily an orthopraxic religion,

In pre-Islamic Arabia, the responsibility for maintaining the tribal ethic fell upon the Sayyid or Shaykh of the tribe.

Muslim feminists throughout the world have been laboring toward a more gender-neutral interpretation of the Quran and a more balanced application of Islamic law.

apolitical sentiments did not spare him the ire of the government. In 1949, at the behest of Egypt’s khedive and undoubtedly with the encouragement of the colonialist leadership, al-Banna was assassinated. But while this act may have silenced the leader of the Muslim Brothers, it strengthened the Society itself, so that by the 1950s, it had become…

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