Long before Christianity or the revelation of the Quran, the Torah had already placed two extraordinary commands at the center of man's relationship with God and with one another. The first appears in Deuteronomy: You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. … Continue reading Love of God, Love of Neighbor, and the Core Every Scripture Names
The Verse in the Middle: Quran 2:143 and Aristotle’s Golden Mean
There is a detail about Sura 2 that is easy to pass over and difficult to forget once it has been noticed. The chapter runs to 286 verses, the longest in the Quran. Divide that number in half, and the result is 143. The first hundred and forty-three verses form one half of the sura; … Continue reading The Verse in the Middle: Quran 2:143 and Aristotle’s Golden Mean
The Due & the Overflow: What We Owe God and What We Owe Each Other
There are two relationships that scripture returns to again and again: what we owe God and what we owe one another. Love God. Love your neighbor. The vertical and the horizontal. But putting them beside each other raises a deeper question. Why do they belong together? The Quran does more than repeatedly mention them in … Continue reading The Due & the Overflow: What We Owe God and What We Owe Each Other
Two Kinds of Law
Not every law in the Quran is the same. Some are universal—meant for all people, in every place, for all time. Be just and never biased. Do not commit murder. Do not steal. You could drop these commands into any century and any country, and they would hold without a word of adjustment. Others are … Continue reading Two Kinds of Law
The Moral Philosophy of the Quran
Most treatments of Quranic ethics begin and end with a catalog: a list of things enjoined and things forbidden, prayer and charity on one side, theft and slander on the other. This is jurisprudence, not moral philosophy. It answers what but never why, and it mistakes the surface for the structure. A command is only … Continue reading The Moral Philosophy of the Quran
“That’s Just an Argument from Silence”
Watch enough debates, and you will see the same move on repeat. Someone raises a point that a source we would expect to speak stays strangely quiet. The reply comes back, clean and final: "That's just an argument from silence." Then, for good measure: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." The conversation is … Continue reading “That’s Just an Argument from Silence”
The House the Center Forgot: How Mecca Preserved the Lost Abrahamic Practices
There is a well-known and slightly counterintuitive law in historical linguistics: the oldest form of a word is often found not at the center of a language's homeland but at its farthest margins. Linguists call the principle by several names—lateral areas, peripheral archaism, the conservatism of the isolated dialect—but the mechanism is the same everywhere. … Continue reading The House the Center Forgot: How Mecca Preserved the Lost Abrahamic Practices
The Gym and the Soccer League
Two people decide to get in shape. The first joins a soccer club. From the moment she signs up, she has joined something larger than herself. There are rules she did not write and cannot rewrite. There is a schedule she did not set. There are positions, a season, a league table, and beyond her … Continue reading The Gym and the Soccer League
The Tree at the Boundary
Some of the most consequential encounters between the human and the divine are staged beneath a tree. Adam is settled in the Garden and given a single prohibition, and it concerns a tree. Moses turns aside toward a fire and is addressed by God from a tree. The Prophet Muhammad, in the vision of Sura … Continue reading The Tree at the Boundary
How the Quran Addresses the Jews About the Gospel, and What It Reveals About the Quran Itself
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
