Politics and religion in the Orthodox Caliphate – 1
AS THIS CONFUSION began to take root, the Rightly-Guided Caliphate descended into non-stop strife – wars with those who opposed zakāh,…
Progressive, Enlightened Voices from the Arab World
AS THIS CONFUSION began to take root, the Rightly-Guided Caliphate descended into non-stop strife – wars with those who opposed zakāh,…
AS THESE HAVE accumulated, the problems have become all the more convoluted and the threads of argument confused, to the point…
WHAT GOVERNED, and still governs, the quicksilver, reverential, justifying mentality, is the assumption of divine intervention in the course of historical events. The course…
AS LONG AS ORDINARY Muslims swallowed these uncritically and without applying reason, any contradiction that emerged in the Qur’ān or…
KEEP IN MIND that this literature included the art of public speaking and sermons and dealt with social and moral…
AND THEREIN LIES the dilemma of the early history of Islam, a history founded mainly upon oral narration, repetition, transmission…
THE ‘AMR IBN AL-‘ĀS MOSQUE in Fusṭāṭ, built in 641 AD, was modernized in 673 AD during the reign of Mu‘āwiya ibn Abī Sufyān who…
BY THE END of the first century AD maritime trade via the Red Sea was flourishing because it was cheaper…
IN THE WRITINGS of the Greeks and Romans, and also in the Torah, southern Arabia was depicted as a rich…
THE HISTORY of the pre-Islamic era (the ‘jāhiliyya’) that they set down is a forgery from A to Z, and was…