Muhammad¶
Metadata¶
- Author: Juan Cole
- ASIN: B079L5L9SQ
- ISBN: 1568587813
- Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079L5L9SQ
- Kindle link
Highlights¶
Although most of his biographers have treated him as a provincial holy man, Muhammad traveled widely. — location: 509 ^ref-43147
languages. Contrary both to later Muslim apologetics and to the assumptions of Western Orientalists, he was literate, as any great long-distance merchant would have been. — location: 510 ^ref-64148
epiphany implied that his contemporaries were also spiritually blind and deaf in the face of an onslaught from the East. — location: 604 ^ref-38286
Muhammad was a great merchant rather than an ascetic and urged positive engagement with the world. — location: 639 ^ref-614
“The youth and men and lower classes that wanted to, answered God, so that the number of Believers multiplied. — location: 695 ^ref-59130
Cyril employed the techniques of Greek rhetoric here to make heaven real to his listeners by drawing them a powerful word picture that excited their emotions. So too did the Qur’an. — location: 833 ^ref-19146
part. The last verse offers, however, a different kind of compromise, a social one as opposed to a theological one. Let us, the Qur’an is suggesting, agree to disagree as far as daily interactions go. — location: 852 ^ref-14791
The Qur’an thus models for Believers in this world the harmonious relationships God expects of them. — location: 884 ^ref-24675
Christians refuting Greek religion resorted to this argument as well. — location: 908 ^ref-59737
Ironically, that they branded the Arab deities as category errors and mere figments of the imagination rather than as demons may have contributed to the early Believers’ ability to live peaceably with the pagans. — location: 921 ^ref-26715
The pagans rejoiced and gloated and confronted the companions of the prophet, saying, ‘You are people of the Book and the Romans are people of the Book, but our brethren the people of Iran have triumphed over your siblings from the Roman Empire.’” — location: 1002 ^ref-40805
The figure of Pharaoh in the later chapters of the Meccan period may well serve as a veiled reference to the Iranian monarch. — location: 1018 ^ref-43915
If the Qur’an did use such Aesopian techniques, it would be entirely understandable. Muhammad was still going on caravan journeys down to Sasanian Yemen and up to Iranian-held Palestine and Syria, and it would have been dangerous to denounce Ctesiphon openly and repeatedly. — location: 1022 ^ref-10592
the ruling elite of the kingdom of Himyar adopted some form of monolatry (the worship of only one divinity), centered on a figure they called “the All-Merciful.” — location: 1040 ^ref-13609
The Qur’an goes so far as to present peace activism and beneficence as the vehicle of redemption from the fall, rather than, as in Christian theology, the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. — location: 1101 ^ref-4873
“The Jews say, ‘The Christians have nothing to stand on’; and the Christians say, ‘The Jews have nothing to stand on’—even though they both recite the Bible.” — location: 1104 ^ref-13343
The details vary in the many later tellings of Omar’s story, but they have in common that his sister converted before he did and that he was upset about it before he found his own path to the faith. — location: 1137 ^ref-54159
The gender dynamics of this narrative are also suggestive, with a large, angry pagan male abusing a devout woman Believer who stands her ground. Belief is here feminized and made nonviolent, but nevertheless victorious. — location: 1139 ^ref-13120
Muhammad must have been in Sasanian Transjordan or Syria, where there were more likely to be crops and cattle than in arid Mecca. — location: 1179 ^ref-36909
Muhammad’s Believers movement was socially ecumenical, though he steadfastly insisted on his Unitarian theology. — location: 1194 ^ref-2949
disciples of Leon Trotsky in Mexico for our understanding of the 1917 Russian Revolution. They were failed revolutionaries against the new order, which colored their accounts. `Urwa — location: 2938 ^ref-2946
The reality described by the Qur’an, that a ragtag band of Believers walked and rode unopposed into a Mecca suddenly seized with veneration for Muhammad, redounded to no one’s military honor and supported no subsequent assertions of the prerogative to rule. — location: 2941 ^ref-39960
The eighteenth-century reformer Shah Wali Allah of Delhi limited the instances of abrogation in the text to five. — location: 2980 ^ref-26874
The Umayyad Berber and Arab Muslim migration into southern Spain in the 700s did not differ in any obvious respect from earlier Gothic and Slavic movements into Europe except that the Muslims’ implementation of large-scale agricultural irrigation led to significant economic growth there. — location: 3010 ^ref-48267
He described the unprecedented peace that had been afforded by the rule of Abu Sufyan’s son Mu`awiya (658–680) over the “Iranian and Roman Empires” and added, “From each person they only require the payment of tribute, and they leave him the liberty of embracing any belief at all; there are even Christians among them; some of them belong to the heretics and some are our own.” — location: 3038 ^ref-60369
The interesting thing is that this Christian eyewitness says that the early Muslims allowed people to follow any belief they desired, which certainly had not been true under Christian Rome. — location: 3043 ^ref-7410