Sublime

And it was precisely this self-image that so greatly disturbed the Quraysh. For by proclaiming himself “the Messenger of God,” Muhammad was blatantly transgressing the traditional Arab process through which power was granted. This was not authority that had been given to Muhammad as “the first among equals.” Muhammad had no equals.

Muhammad did not consider the Quran to be a static Revelation, which may be why he never bothered to authorize its collection into a codified book. The Quran was for Muhammad a living scripture that consciously evolved alongside the Ummah, continually adapting itself to meet the specific needs of the developing community.

Zunun Qadir,

The significance of losing Abu Talib is obvious: Muhammad could no longer rely on his uncle’s unwavering protection to keep him from harm. The new Shaykh of Banu Hashim, Abu Lahab, loathed Muhammad personally and made a formal withdrawal of his protection. The results were immediate. Muhammad was openly abused on the streets of Mecca. He could no l

Muhammad understood what the Hanifs could not: the only way to bring about radical social and economic reform in Mecca was to overturn the religio-economic system on which the city was built; and the only way to do that was to attack the very source of the Quraysh’s wealth and prestige—the Ka‘ba.

The point is that one can refer to Muhammad’s community in Yathrib as the Ummah, but only insofar as that term is understood to designate what the Orientalist explorer Bertram Thomas has called a “super-tribe,” or what the historian Marshall Hodgson more accurately describes as a “neo-tribe”: that is, a radically new kind of social organization, bu

In true Kharijite fashion, Jihadists segregate all Muslims into “the People of Heaven” (themselves) and “the People of Hell” (everyone else). Anyone whose interpretation of scripture and observance of the Shariah does not correspond to the Jihadist model is considered a member of the latter…

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He made the man who had forcibly married her sign and seal a divorce decree before witnesses, and got Nader’s secretaries to write a raqam saying that the girl was to remain a Christian and should marry a Christian, and that the abductor should not be allowed to bring litigation over the case. Then he gave the girl and the raqam to the father, and

Umar’s misogynist tendencies were apparent from the moment he ascended to the leadership of the Muslim community. He tried (unsuccessfully) to confine women to their homes and wanted to prevent them from attending worship at the mosque.