Quran Talk Blog

Two of the most consequential moments of insight in the history of religion are staged beneath a tree. The Buddha attains awakening seated under the Ficus religiosa at Bodh Gaya, the tree thereafter called the Bodhi tree, the tree of enlightenment. The Prophet Muhammad, in the vision recounted in Sura 53, is brought to sidrat … Continue reading The Tree at the Boundary of Knowing: Sidrat al-Muntahā and the Bodhi Tree

How does the Quran understand itself in relation to the scriptures that came before it? The usual answer, offered by critics and traditionalists alike, is that it replaces them—that "supersede" means abolish, that the Torah and the Gospel were provisional drafts now rendered void by a final edition. On this reading, the Quran arrives as … Continue reading How the Quran Addresses the Jews About the Gospel, and What It Reveals About the Quran Itself

Set two verses side by side, and the Quran appears to contradict itself outright. The first rebukes the Jewish community for bringing their disputes to the Prophet at all: [5:43] Why do they ask you to judge among them, when they have the Torah, containing GOD's law, and they chose to disregard it? They are … Continue reading Confirm and Supersede: What the Quran Asks of the People of the Book

[51:49] We created a pair (male and female) of everything, that you may take heed. وَمِن كُلِّ شَىْءٍ خَلَقْنَا زَوْجَيْنِ لَعَلَّكُمْ تَذَكَّرُونَ One short sentence advances a claim of staggering scope. Not some things, not most things, but min kulli shayʾ—of every thing—come in twos. And this universal doubling is not offered as a curiosity … Continue reading Duality as the signature of creation, and the One who has no counterpart

In the introduction to his translation of the Quran, Quran: The Final Testament, Dr. Rashad Khalifa writes: "While every religion has been corrupted by innovations, traditions, and false, idolatrous doctrines, there may be 'Submitters' within every religion. There may be Submitters who are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or anything else. These Submitters, collectively, constitute … Continue reading One Religion, Many Rites

Sometime in the fifth century before Christ, in the Greek colony of Elea on the Italian coast, a philosopher named Zeno proposed a thought experiment that has never entirely gone away. Picture an arrow in flight. Now consider a single instant of that flight, a durationless slice of time. At that instant, the arrow occupies … Continue reading The Arrow and the Mountain: Zeno, Timescale, and the Moving Stillness of Sura 27:88

In a previous article, we examined the 9th-century controversy that tore through Abbasid Baghdad: whether the Quran was created or uncreated. The Mu'tazilites argued that God must have preceded His own speech, and therefore the Quran was created. The traditionalists, led by Ahmad Ibn Hanbal, declared the Quran uncreated—co-eternal with God, existing before time, before … Continue reading The Eternal Text with an Expiration Date?

There is a moment in the twelfth sura of the Quran when Joseph, imprisoned on a false charge, is asked by two fellow inmates to interpret their dreams. Before he answers, he delivers a short speech about God—and in it he makes one of the strangest and most penetrating claims in the entire book. Speaking … Continue reading Nothing but Names: The Quran’s Anatomy of Idolatry

The ancient Greeks asked: if you replace every plank of Theseus's ship over time, does it remain the same vessel? The question is elegant, almost gentle. It assumes each replacement is faithful—oak for oak, nail for nail. The ship is renewed, but it remains recognizably itself. But what if we abandon this gentleness? What if … Continue reading The Ship of Theseus: How the Quran Preserves What Tradition Replaced

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) famously wrote that two things filled his mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe: the starry heavens above him and the moral law within him. It is a strange accident of intellectual history that this sentence, perhaps one of the most quoted in all of modern moral philosophy, so perfectly corresponds with the … Continue reading The Starry Heavens Above and the Law Within: Kant’s Ethics in the Quran