Muhammad was not yet establishing a new religion; he was calling for sweeping social reforms. He was not yet preaching monotheism; he was demanding economic justice.

Many poets in Iran have learned to speak almost a secret language, where political issues are talked about in allegorical ways.

All these schools of though gradually transformed into legal institutions, the diversity of ideas and freedom of opinion that characterized their early development gave way to rigid formalism, strict adherence to precedent, and an almost...

I believe in God, which means I am open to some absurd possibilities. But I understand the power of that faith, and I understand the metaphor of that belief.

Whether or not you believe that after three days of being dead and entombed, Jesus got up and walked out of his own accord, what you cannot argue about is the fervent belief of the...

Despite two millennia of Christian apologetics, the fact is that belief in a dying and rising messiah simply did not exist in Judaism. In the entirety of the Hebrew Bible there is not a single...

Whether you’re talking about MSNBC or Fox or CNN, it’s all about getting enough interest out there, sensationalizing the story in such a way that people are compelled to tune in.

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...

The Revolutionary Guard controls almost everything in Iran, and this is hurting the people.

[…] there can be no a priori moral framework in a modern democracy […]

The more I started studying the historical Jesus, the man who lived 2,000 years ago… the more I started to realize that there was this chasm between the historical Jesus and the Jesus that I...

Literature offers not just a window into the culture of diverse regions, but also the society, the politics; it’s the only place where we can keep track of ideas.

The plaque the Romans placed above Jesus’s head as he writhed in pain—”King of the Jews”—was called a titulus and, despite common perception, was not meant to be sarcastic. Every criminal who hung on a...

‘Zeal’ is essentially a compromising devotion to God, a commitment to cleansing the Holy Land of all foreign and pagan presences and to re-establish the kingdom of David as God had intended.

[Islam] is the dynamic conviction that a person’s spiritual and worldly responsibilities are one and the same, that an individuals duty to the community is indistinguishable from his or her duty to God.

I wouldn’t call myself a Christian because I do not believe that Jesus is God, nor do I believe that he ever thought that he was God, or that he ever said that he was...

[…] pluralism implies religious tolerance, not unchecked religious freedom.

There were dozens of people who walked through the Holy Land claiming to be the Messiah, curing the sick, exorcising demons, challenging Rome, gathering followers. In a way, there’s nothing unique about what Jesus did....

Mike Huckabee and indeed many of the Christian conservatives in the U.S. have far more in common with the Muslim Brotherhood than they’d like to admit, in that all of them very much want to...

Jesus was surely not the first exorcist to walk the shores of the Sea of Galilee. In first-century Palestine, professional wonder worker was a vocation as well established as that of woodworker or mason, and...

It is the job of the historian to say what is likely, and of faith to say what is possible.

The Islamic Reformation is already here. We are all living in it.

I’m interested in the origins of the religious experience, how the history of religion has evolved over the last umpteen thousand years, and where religiosity is going in the future. I think that’s a topic...

Like most people born into a religious tradition, my faith was as familiar to me as my skin, and just as disregardable.

Anyone who says that Iran will commit suicide with its nuclear power is a moron and has no business in discussion.

Religion is never going to go away, and anyone who thinks it will doesn’t understand what religion is. It is a language to describe the experience of human nature, so for as long as people...

The very purpose of designing the Temple of Jerusalem as a series of ever more restrictive ingressions was to maintain the priestly monopoly over who can and cannot come into the presence of God and...

American Muslims – young American Muslims in particular – are starting to understand that unless they are willing to stand up for all the other oppressed communities in this country, including those discriminated against for...

There’s only one reason to be crucified under the Roman Empire, and that is for treason or sedition. Crucifixion, we have to understand, was not actually a form of capital punishment for Rome. In fact,...

In the 5,000-year history of Jewish thought, the notion of a God-man is completely anathema to everything Judaism stands for.

A politician is a politician whether he’s wearing a suit or a funny hat.

In the history of the prophetic biblical canon that starts with Genesis, the Koran is by far the most tolerant of the views of other religions.

The Jews integrated themselves into American life to the point that the argument that the Jews aren’t American sounded so stupid, that people stopped thinking it.

Pilate, as the histories reveal, was not one for trials. In his ten years as governor of Jerusalem, he had sent thousands upon thousands to the cross with a simple scratch of his reed pen...

What the printing press is to Christianity in the 16th century, that’s what the Internet is doing to Islam now. It has opened up the monopoly over the interpretation of Islam that used to solely...

Many of the prophets of Jesus’s time were thought to just be mad men, just sort of crazy people who were claiming to channel the divine. Perhaps that means we should be a little less...

Is it possible that Jesus, unlike 98 percent of his fellow Jews, was literate and educated? Yes, it’s possible.

Whether for good or for bad, the Iran that ultimately rises out of the ashes of last summer’s uprising will be unlike the Iran we know today, and for that we can thank the Green...

When you forcefully suppress religious nationalism, you radicalize it.

I have watched Muslims chant ‘Death to America!’ on the streets of Tehran, then privately beg me to help them get a visa to the United States.

Thus it is written that the messiah would suffer and rise again on the third day,” Jesus instructs his disciples (Luke 24:44–46). Except that nowhere is any such thing written: not in the Law of...

The key to recognizing who Jesus was is to recognize this fundamental truth: He was a Jew.

Islamophobia has become so mainstream in this country that Americans have been trained to expect violence against Muslims – not excuse it, but expect it. And that’s happened because you have an Islamophobia industry in...

The idea of literalism in the Bible is a very new phenomenon. In many ways, it’s a product of the scientific revolution.

Those who did know Jesus – those who followed him into Jerusalem as its king and helped him cleanse the Temple in God’s name, who were there when he was arrested and who watched him...

It is no exaggeration to say that Syria holds the key for nearly all of America’s foreign policy goals in the Middle East. As Syria goes, so goes the region.

The choice between James’s vision of a Jewish religion anchored in the Law of Moses and derived from a Jewish nationalist who fought against Rome, and Paul’s vision of a Roman religion that divorced itself...

The Muslim community is completely fractured – it doesn’t really exist anymore; the only place it does exist is online.

I’m a person of faith, and the language that I use to define my faith, the symbols and metaphors that I rely upon to express my faith, are those provided by Islam because they make...

The idea that education will lead to a lessening of bigotry is just factually incorrect.