Quran Talk Blog

The Quran makes the freeing of a slave the very definition of the steep and difficult climb toward righteousness. "He should have chosen the difficult path," it says. "Which is the difficult path? The freeing of slaves" (90:11-13). Yet the civilization that carried the Quran's banner across three continents became one of the most prolific … Continue reading The Difficult Path: Slavery, Manumission, and the Slaves Who Came to Rule Islam

The Quran describes a remarkable encounter in which a heavenly being appears to Mary to announce the birth of Jesus. Traditionally, Muslims identify this being as the angel Gabriel. But a closer reading of the Quran reveals an important distinction: the Quran never explicitly identifies the being who appeared to Mary as an angel. Instead, … Continue reading Was It an Angel or a Spirit That Appeared to Mary? What the Quran Actually Says

One of the recurring accusations some Christian apologists level against Islam is that it has pagan origins. The Kaaba was a sanctuary used by pagan Arabs. The pilgrimage to Mecca existed before Muhammad. The circumambulation of the Kaaba and other pilgrimage rituals were already practiced in pre-Islamic Arabia. Therefore, the argument goes, Islam must be … Continue reading Can Something Pagan Become Sacred? The Bible’s Answer to a Common Argument Against Islam

Every religious community has to settle what counts as authority. For Muslims the first answer is the Quran, the scripture revealed through Muhammad. Sunni Islam adds a second source: hadith, the reports of what Muhammad said and did, collected and written down generations after his death. This article traces how that second source rose until … Continue reading The Missing Science: Why Hadith Was Authenticated and the Torah and Gospel Were Not

A new objection to the Quran has been making the rounds. Its authors call it the Talmudic Dilemma, and it is built on the frame of an older argument they named the Islamic Dilemma. The original ran like this: the Quran confirms the previous scriptures, yet the Quran contradicts them, so the Quran must be … Continue reading The Talmudic Dilemma That Isn’t

The Bible contains a good deal of law about slavery, and most readers have never seen it, because it sits in the legal sections of Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy rather than in the stories people know. A more useful question than whether the Bible "supports" slavery is what the texts actually do: describe it as … Continue reading The Bible & Slavery

Every reader approaches a new text with a question, usually unspoken: What kind of thing is this? Genre is the first act of interpretation. We read a legal code differently from a love poem, a chronicle differently from a prophecy. Misjudge the genre and everything downstream goes wrong. Readers coming to the Quran from the … Continue reading The Quran Is a Genre of Its Own