Download or read book The Making of Religious Texts in Islam written by Asma Hilali and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers an interdisciplinary study of the modalities, actors, technicalities and consequences of the evolving of religious texts within the perspective of the fragment versus the whole. The focus is on fragmentary texts from Islamic religious sources, and includes contributions on Qur'anic manuscripts, early graffiti, the formation of the Qur'anic canon, the Hadith literature, and Old Babylonian extispicy texts. Three main topics are addressed: the text and its materiality; the structure of the text and the dynamic relationship between the fragment and the whole; and methods of shaping and reshaping traditions. The hermeneutical experience of the fragment versus the whole is explored in depth throughout, and the consequences addressed for the history of the religious text, its composition, its reception and its interpretation.
Download or read book What the Qur an Meant written by Garry Wills and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America’s leading religious scholar and public intellectual introduces lay readers to the Qur’an with a measured, powerful reading of the ancient text Garry Wills has spent a lifetime thinking and writing about Christianity. In What the Qur’an Meant, Wills invites readers to join him as he embarks on a timely and necessary reconsideration of the Qur’an, leading us through perplexing passages with insight and erudition. What does the Qur’an actually say about veiling women? Does it justify religious war? There was a time when ordinary Americans did not have to know much about Islam. That is no longer the case. We blundered into the longest war in our history without knowing basic facts about the Islamic civilization with which we were dealing. We are constantly fed false information about Islam—claims that it is essentially a religion of violence, that its sacred book is a handbook for terrorists. There is no way to assess these claims unless we have at least some knowledge of the Qur’an. In this book Wills, as a non-Muslim with an open mind, reads the Qur’an with sympathy but with rigor, trying to discover why other non-Muslims—such as Pope Francis—find it an inspiring book, worthy to guide people down through the centuries. There are many traditions that add to and distort and blunt the actual words of the text. What Wills does resembles the work of art restorers who clean away accumulated layers of dust to find the original meaning. He compares the Qur’an with other sacred books, the Old Testament and the New Testament, to show many parallels between them. There are also parallel difficulties of interpretation, which call for patient exploration—and which offer some thrills of discovery. What the Qur’an Meant is the opening of a conversation on one of the world’s most practiced religions.
Download or read book Understanding the Koran written by Mateen Elass and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2009-08-19 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Find out how the Koran resembles the Bible—and the drastic ways in which it differs. Understanding the Koran gives you an essential grasp of Islam's holy book: where it came from, what it teaches, how Muslims view it, and how the Allah of the Koran compares with the God of the Bible. Cherished as the final, perfect revelation of God's will by 1.2 billion Muslims worldwide, the Koran has become a part of American life. What do you know about the holy book that shapes the lives and views of your neighbors and a fifth of the world's population? Written by a pastor who was born to a Muslim father and raised in Saudi Arabia, Understanding the Koran gives you a fascinating, easy-to-understand overview that will show you: Why the background behind the Koran is important to understanding it. How the Koran came into existence. A summary of the main teachings of the Koran, including what it says about Jesus and the crucifixion. Similarities and differences between Muslim and Christian views of God. What the Koran teaches about Jihad and holy war. What the Koran teaches about heaven and hell and the final destinies of the human soul. Giving you an essential grasp of Islam's holy book, Understanding the Koran points you to the one thing that can draw your Muslim friends to Jesus—his love, demonstrated to them through you. Discussion questions make it possible to use this book in group studies.
Download or read book Christian Martyrs Under Islam written by Christian C. Sahner and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at the developing conflicts in Christian-Muslim relations during late antiquity and the early Islamic era How did the medieval Middle East transform from a majority-Christian world to a majority-Muslim world, and what role did violence play in this process? Christian Martyrs under Islam explains how Christians across the early Islamic caliphate slowly converted to the faith of the Arab conquerors and how small groups of individuals rejected this faith through dramatic acts of resistance, including apostasy and blasphemy. Using previously untapped sources in a range of Middle Eastern languages, Christian Sahner introduces an unknown group of martyrs who were executed at the hands of Muslim officials between the seventh and ninth centuries CE. Found in places as diverse as Syria, Spain, Egypt, and Armenia, they include an alleged descendant of Muhammad who converted to Christianity, high-ranking Christian secretaries of the Muslim state who viciously insulted the Prophet, and the children of mixed marriages between Muslims and Christians. Sahner argues that Christians never experienced systematic persecution under the early caliphs, and indeed, they remained the largest portion of the population in the greater Middle East for centuries after the Arab conquest. Still, episodes of ferocious violence contributed to the spread of Islam within Christian societies, and memories of this bloodshed played a key role in shaping Christian identity in the new Islamic empire. Christian Martyrs under Islam examines how violence against Christians ended the age of porous religious boundaries and laid the foundations for more antagonistic Muslim-Christian relations in the centuries to come.
Download or read book The Origins of the Koran written by Ibn Warraq and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2010-10-05 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars of Islam are familiar with the Koran's many errors and contradictions, but these have rarely been revealed to a wider public. THE ORIGINS OF THE KORAN is an attempt to remedy this deficiency by bringing together classic critical essays which raise key issues surrounding Islam's holy book. Indispensable to scholars and all those interested in the textual underpinning of one of the fastest growing religions in the world.
Download or read book Isl m and the People of the Book Volumes 1 3 written by John Andrew Morrow and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-04-18 with total page 1782 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Islam and the People of the Book features three dozen scholarly studies on the treaties that the Prophet Muhammad concluded with Jewish, Samaritan, Christian, and Zoroastrian communities, along with translations of Six Covenants of the Prophet in over a dozen languages. The combined effort of over forty-five academics, intellectuals, and translators from around the world, this work powerfully confirms the conclusions drawn by Dr John Andrew Morrow in his critically-acclaimed book on The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of the World, offers unprecedented insight into the original intent of the Messenger of God, and sheds light on the pluralistic nature of the constitutional state that he created.
Download or read book Making Islam Democratic written by Asef Bayat and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks anew at the vexing question of whether Islam is compatible with democracy, examining histories of Islamic politics and social movements in the Middle East since the 1970s.
Download or read book Opening the Qur an written by Walter H. Wagner and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Walter H. Wagner "opens" the Qur'an by offering a comprehensive and extraordinarily readable, step-by-step introduction to the text, making it accessible to students, teachers, clergy, and general readers interested in Islam and Islam's holy Book." "Wagner first places the prophet Muhammad, the Qur'an, and the early Muslim community in their historical, geographical, and theological contexts. This background is a basis for interpreting the Qur'an and understanding its role in later Muslim developments, as well as for relationships between Muslims, Jews, and Christians. He then looks in detail at specific passages, moving from cherished devotional texts to increasingly difficult and provocative subjects. The selected bibliography serves as a resource for further reading and study. Woven into the discussion are references to Islamic beliefs and practices. Wagner shows great sensitivity toward the challenges to non-Muslims who attempt to interpret the Qur'an, and sympathy for the long struggle to build bridges of mutual trust and honest appreciation between Muslims and non-Muslims."--Jacket.
Download or read book The Making of a Gay Muslim written by Shanon Shah and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book highlights the lived experiences of gay Muslims in Malaysia, where Islam is the majority and official religion, and in Britain, where Muslims form a religious minority. By exploring how they negotiate their religious and sexual identities, Shah challenges the notion that Islam is inherently homophobic and that there is an unbridgeable divide between ‘Islam’ and the ‘West’. Shah also gained access to gay Muslim networks and individuals for his in-depth research in both countries, and the book investigates the different ways that they respond to everyday anti-homosexual or anti-Muslim sentiments. Amid the many challenges they confront, the gay Muslims whom Shah encountered find innovative and meaningful ways to integrate Islam and gay identity into their lives. The Making of a Gay Muslim will appeal to students and scholars with an interest in contemporary Islam, religion, gender and sexuality.
Download or read book What Is Islam written by Shahab Ahmed and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 629 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold new conceptualization of Islam that reflects its contradictions and rich diversity What is Islam? How do we grasp a human and historical phenomenon characterized by such variety and contradiction? What is "Islamic" about Islamic philosophy or Islamic art? Should we speak of Islam or of islams? Should we distinguish the Islamic (the religious) from the Islamicate (the cultural)? Or should we abandon "Islamic" altogether as an analytical term? In What Is Islam?, Shahab Ahmed presents a bold new conceptualization of Islam that challenges dominant understandings grounded in the categories of "religion" and "culture" or those that privilege law and scripture. He argues that these modes of thinking obstruct us from understanding Islam, distorting it, diminishing it, and rendering it incoherent. What Is Islam? formulates a new conceptual language for analyzing Islam. It presents a new paradigm of how Muslims have historically understood divine revelation—one that enables us to understand how and why Muslims through history have embraced values such as exploration, ambiguity, aestheticization, polyvalence, and relativism, as well as practices such as figural art, music, and even wine drinking as Islamic. It also puts forward a new understanding of the historical constitution of Islamic law and its relationship to philosophical ethics and political theory. A book that is certain to provoke debate and significantly alter our understanding of Islam, What Is Islam? reveals how Muslims have historically conceived of and lived with Islam as norms and truths that are at once contradictory yet coherent.
Download or read book Islam and Colonialism written by Muhamad Ali and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-08 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comparative and cross-cultural history of Islamic reform and European colonialism as both dependent and independent factors in shaping the multiple ways of becoming modern in Indonesia and Malaya during the first half of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Religion as Critique written by Irfan Ahmad and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-11-20 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Irfan Ahmad makes the far-reaching argument that potent systems and modes for self-critique as well as critique of others are inherent in Islam--indeed, critique is integral to its fundamental tenets and practices. Challenging common views of Islam as hostile to critical thinking, Ahmad delineates thriving traditions of critique in Islamic culture, focusing in large part on South Asian traditions. Ahmad interrogates Greek and Enlightenment notions of reason and critique, and he notes how they are invoked in relation to "others," including Muslims. Drafting an alternative genealogy of critique in Islam, Ahmad reads religious teachings and texts, drawing on sources in Hindi, Urdu, Farsi, and English, and demonstrates how they serve as expressions of critique. Throughout, he depicts Islam as an agent, not an object, of critique. On a broader level, Ahmad expands the idea of critique itself. Drawing on his fieldwork among marketplace hawkers in Delhi and Aligarh, he construes critique anthropologically as a sociocultural activity in the everyday lives of ordinary Muslims, beyond the world of intellectuals. Religion as Critique allows space for new theoretical considerations of modernity and change, taking on such salient issues as nationhood, women's equality, the state, culture, democracy, and secularism.
Download or read book Islam written by John Kaltner and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Recent events have focussed attention on Islam, the often-misunderstood faith of one billion people. Westerners are showing a new openness to learning about Islam and other religions, in part perhaps because religion is arguably the single most important and volatile factor in geopolitics today. Islam needs to be understood on its own terms, John Kaltner argues." "This little Facet offers the most basic information about Islam in an accessible and sympathetic presentation. Kaltner portrays Islam as first and foremost a religion of prescribed practices - the five pillars of Islam. Showing the deep humanism of Islam and its most cherished commitments, Kaltner presents Islam through assertions that counter frequent misconceptions of the faith."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book The Qur an and the Christian written by Matthew Aaron Bennett and published by Kregel Publications. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding Islam's sacred text is integral to understanding your Muslim neighbor Cross-cultural missionary and scholar Matthew Aaron Bennett blends the insights of Islamic believers, secular Qur'an scholars, and missionaries to Muslims, making The Qur'an and the Christian like no other resource for Christian ministry to Muslims. Combining these perspectives in one guide better equips Christians to communicate the biblical gospel to friends and neighbors who are adherents to Islam--both in and out of majority-Muslim cultures. The Qur'an and the Christian addresses issues both simple and profound, such as: 1. How the Qur'an came to be, including Muhammed and the Qur'an's textual precursors 2. The major themes of the Qur'an and how these shape the practice of Islam 3. The presence of Bible characters, Jews, and Christians in the Qur'anic text 4. Whether and how a Christian should read the Qur'an 5. Avoiding miscommunication with Muslims when the Qur'an and Christian teaching seem to overlap This book will help Christians learn how to explore Islamic faith with missiological wisdom and biblical precision. The Qur'an and the Christian will give believers the insight to deepen friendships, promote understanding, and clarify the biblical gospel among Muslim friends and neighbors.
Download or read book Muhammad and the Empires of Faith written by Sean W. Anthony and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction : the making of the historical Muḥammad -- The earliest evidence -- Muḥammad the Arabian merchant -- The Beginnings of the corpus -- The letters of 'Urwah ibn al-Zubayr -- The court impulse -- Prophecy and empires of faith -- Muḥammad and Cædmon -- Epilogue : The future of the historical Muḥammad.
Download or read book Making Moderate Islam written by Rosemary R. Corbett and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-23 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a decade of research into the community that proposed the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque," this book refutes the idea that current demands for Muslim moderation have primarily arisen in response to the events of 9/11, or to the violence often depicted in the media as unique to Muslims. Instead, it looks at a century of pressures on religious minorities to conform to dominant American frameworks for race, gender, and political economy. These include the encouraging of community groups to provide social services to the dispossessed in compensation for the government's lack of welfare provisions in an aggressively capitalist environment. Calls for Muslim moderation in particular are also colored by racist and orientalist stereotypes about the inherent pacifism of Sufis with respect to other groups. The first investigation of the assumptions behind moderate Islam in our country, Making Moderate Islam is also the first to look closely at the history, lives, and ambitions of the those involved in Manhattan's contested project for an Islamic community center.
Download or read book Islam written by Bernard Ellis Lewis and published by Pearson Prentice Hall. This book was released on 2008-08-19 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for Bernard Lewis "For newcomers to the subject[el]Bernard Lewis is the man." TIME Magazine “The doyen of Middle Eastern studies." The New York Times “No one writes about Muslim history with greater authority, or intelligence, or literary charm.” British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper “Bernard Lewis has no living rival in his field.” Al Ahram, Cairo (the most influential Arab world newspaper) "When it comes to Islamic studies, Bernard Lewis is the father of us all. With brilliance, integrity, and extraordinary mastery of languages and sources, he has led the way for[el]investigators seeking to understand the Muslim world." National Review "Bernard Lewis combines profound depth of scholarship with encyclopedic knowledge of the Middle East and, above all, readability." Daily Telegraph (London) "Lewis speaks with authority in prose marked by lucidity, elegance, wit and force." Newsday (New York) "Lewis' style is lucid, his approach, objective." Philadelphia Inquirer "Lewis writes with unsurpassed erudition and grace." Washington Times An objective, easy-to-read introduction to Islam by Bernard Lewis, one of the West’s leading experts on Islam For many people, Islam remains a mystery. Here Bernard Lewis and Buntzie Ellis Churchill examine Islam: what its adherents believe and how their religion has shaped them, their rich and diverse cultures, and their politics over more than 14 centuries. Considered one of the West’s leading experts on Islam, Lewis, with Churchill, has written an illuminating introduction for those who want to understand the faith and the global challenges it confronts and presents. Whatever your political, personal, or religious views, this book will help you understand Islam’s reality. Lewis and Churchill answer questions such as... • How does Islam differ from Judaism and Christianity? • What are the pillars of the Islamic faith? • What does Islam really say about peace and jihad? • How does the faith regard non-Muslims? • What are the differences between Sunni and Shi’a? • What does Islam teach about the position of women in society? • What does Islam say about free enterprise and profit? • What caused the rise of radical Islam? • What are the problems facing Muslims in the U.S. and Europe and what are the challenges posed by those minorities?
