No God but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam

by Reza Aslan

circumambulations

tawaf

fetishism

totemism

m...

neo-animism,

animism,

Nakhlah;

Qudayd.

Kahins

henotheism:

Arabized,

(haram

Arians

Zarathustra

Mazdakism

Manichaeism.

Jahiliyyah

Hijaz.

hanif

hnf,

Yathrib,

in’am sabahan)

tahannuth

Quraysh:

ahl

qawm:

monotheism; he was demanding economic justice.

shahadah,

Maxime Rodinson’s

Ali Abd ar-Raziq

Yathrib’s Jews were mostly Arabs who had converted to Judaism.

“not in turning your face East or West in prayer … but in distributing your wealth out of love for God to your needy kin; to the orphans, to the vagrants, and to the mendicants; it lies in freeing the slaves, in observing your devotions, and in giving alms to the poor”

(4:1; 7:189),

God offers forgiveness and a great reward, For men who surrender to Him, and women who surrender to Him,

(33:35)

“Those who disobey God and His Messenger, and who try to overstep the boundaries of this [inheritance] law will be thrown into Hell, where they will dwell forever, suffering the most shameful punishment” (4:14).

“Marry those women who

are lawful for you, up to two, three, or four,” the Quran states, “but only if you can treat them all equally”

“no matter how you try, you will never be able to treat your wives equally”

The most shocking aspect of Muhammad’s marriages is not his ten years of polygamy in Yathrib, but his twenty-five years of monogamy in Mecca,

wives. Thus the tradition, borrowed from the upper classes of Iranian and Syrian women, of veiling and secluding the most important women in society from the peering eyes of everyone else.

But the veil was neither compulsory nor, for that matter, widely adopted until generations after Muhammad’s death, when a large body of male scriptural and legal scholars began using their religious and political authority to regain the dominance they had lost in society as a result of the Prophet’s egalitarian reforms.

Karima bint Ahmad (d. 1069) and Fatima bint Ali (d. 1087),

Laleh Bakhtiar,

Ali Shariati (1933–77) in his celebrated

Fatima Is Fatima.

(and, far more importantly, of the silk route to China).

Your religion was your ethnicity, your culture, and your social identity; it defined your politics, your economics, and your ethics. More than anything else, your religion was your citizenship.

The word jihad literally means “a struggle,” “a striving,” or “a great effort.” In its primary religious connotation (sometimes referred to as “the greater jihad”), it means the struggle of the soul to overcome the sinful