Certainly the shahadah contained an important theological innovation, but that innovation was not monotheism. With this simple profession of faith, Muhammad was declaring to Mecca that the God of the heavens and the earth required no intermediate whatsoever, but could be accessed by anyone.
Festivals and fasts are unhinged, traveling backward at a rate of ten days per year, attached to no season. Even Laylat ul Qadr, the holiest night in Ramadan, drifts--its precise date is unknown. The iconclasm laid down by Muhammed was absolute: you must resist attachment...
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G. Willow Wilson
Islam deals not only with what man must and must not do, but also with what he needs to know. In other words, Islam is both a way of acting and doing things and a way of knowing.
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Osman Bakar
To the extent that in one's act of faith one participates in the truth through reason and heart, faith already implies a particular level of knowledge and of certainty.
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Osman Bakar
Rationalism is false not because it seeks to express reality in rational mode, so far as this possible, but because it seeks to embrace the whole of reality in the realm of reason, as if the reason coincides with the very principle of things.
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Osman Bakar
Faith in Qur'anic revelation unveils all the possibilities that lie before the human intellect.
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Osman Bakar
More Quotes By Reza Aslan
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The task of defining Jesus's message fell instead to a new crop of educated, urbanized, Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews who would become the primary vehicles for the expansion of the new faith. As these extraordinary men and women, many of them immersed in Greek philosophy and...
The first century was an era of apocalyptic expectation among the Jews of Palestine, the unofficial Roman designation for the vast tract of land encompassing modern day Israel/Palestine as well as large parts of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon (the land would not be officially called...
