One of the reasons I do not to write about early Islamic history is that I find it very difficult to manage the constant clash of faith claims and appeals to empirical evidence. When it comes to religion in general, Islam in particular, and the origins of Islam even more particularly, scholars find it difficult…
Tom Holland, the Five Daily Prayers and they Hypocrisy of Revisionism
On a radio show on BBC 4 a couple of weeks ago, Tom Holland raised his claim (made originally in his book In the Shadow of the Sword on the origins of Islam) that the famous five daily prayers in Islam were not originally part of the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings. They were actually imported into…
Break the Fear Barrier – Write to a Prisoner
Dozens of Muslims in the US have been imprisoned on trumped up charges or as the result of entrapment by the authorities. They are often abandoned by their friends and communities, sometimes even by their families. One of the few things that give them hope is a letter from the outside. Don’t let society intimidate…
NPR: Egypt’s Islamic Salafi Party Walks Political Tightrope
The Salafi Al-Nour party won the second-most seats in the last parliamentary election and is now the only major Islamist political force allowed to operate in Egypt. The group supported Mohammed Morsi’s overthrow and lent Islamist credibility to the military’s decision. But it quickly found itself at odds with the interim rulers, and now faces…
Human Sin, Divine Forgiveness and Human Reconciliation
Note: this lecture begins with Georgetown University’s President Jack DeGioia speaking and then Dr. Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen giving an excellent talk on the Christian tradition. The thirteenth Building Bridges Seminar, chaired by Professor Daniel A. Madigan, S.J., was held April 27-30, 2014 at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and the Airlie Center in Warrenton, Virginia. This…
The Rules of Matn Criticism: There are No Rules
In an effort to avoid the subjectivity of individual reason, Sunni Islam elaborated a method of ḥadīth criticism that subordinated evaluating the meaning of a report to an examination of its chain of transmission. With the fourth/tenth-century epistemological compromise of Ashʿarism, however, Sunni ḥadīth scholars adopted rationalist criteria of content criticism that included explicit rules…
Faithful Dissenters: Sunni Skepticism about the Miracles of Saints
Faithful Dissenters – Sunni Skepticism about the Miracles of Saints Belief in the miracles of saints (karāmāt al-awliyāʾ) is a requirement in Sunni Islam. Challenges to this position are generally seen as limited to Islamic modernists effected by Western historical criticism. This article demonstrates that there have actually been leading Sunni Muslim scholars from the…