Tag: Quran
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A Journey to the Heart
Carla Power. If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Qur’an. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2015. [An installment of the “Read Me” Project] If the Oceans Were Ink ended up on the Read Me shelf because it was an accessible book about Islam, in particular…
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Just Wondering
What could the idea of being “famous” have meant to the people who decide to build a city with a tower in Genesis 11:4? For us, being “famous” more or less means being known by lots of people, widely dispersed. But according to the way the story is told, the people of the time are…
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“Lux umbra dei”
Going through the mail that has been piling up for the past several weeks; skimmed through a publisher’s catalog (Paulist Press), and ran across the description of Home by Another Route: A Journal of Art, Music and Faith, by Charles Scribner, III; in the course of this, was introduced to the Latin proverb – evidently, ancient…
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Against “Proof-texting” in the Qur’an
Chapter 3 of Qur’an in Conversation begins with Jamal Badawi’s discussion of the factors affecting the interpretation of “one of the most misunderstood verses of the Qur’an”(78) 9:5, “Kill the idolaters [mushrikin] wherever you find them, capture them, besiege them, lie in wait for them at every place of ambush.” Badawi uses the verse as…
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Close Reading in the Qur’an
Notes on Chapter 2 (“Close Readings, Old and New”) of Michael Birkel, ed. Qur’an in Conversation (Waco, TX: Baylor UP, 2014) 33-35.] Mohammad Hassan Khalil unpacks the meaning of the opening line of the Qur’an, the bismillah, rendered into English in various ways, such as “In the name of God, the all-compassionate, the all-merciful.” He…
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An Ayah on Guidance
MuslimPro’s verse of the day from the Qur’an was Surah 28, Al-Qasas, (The Story or The Narrative) 56. This is how it reads in Pickthall’s translation: Lo! thou (O Muhammad) guidest not whom thou lovest, but Allah guideth whom He will. And He is Best Aware of those who walk aright. It struck me that…
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God’s Communication Problem?
Why is God’s communication with humanity so ineffective? Serious question – not rhetorical, not flippant, frankly curious. The ineffectiveness of God’s communication with humanity is amply attested in the Bible, and the Qur’an. This could be documented, as needed. God communicates, but people don’t respond in anything like the appropriate or desired fashion to the…
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Eternal Word
It seems to me that the way Nicene orthodoxy solves the problem of Jesus being the self-revelation of God (“of one substance with the Father …”) is fundamentally similar to the way Asharite tradition in Islam solves the problem of the Quran being the self-revelation of God (eternal, uncreated). It also seems to me that…
Matters of Interpretation 