Pictured: Naqsh-e Jahan Square, the Qeysarie Gate • Isfahan, built 1598–1629
Photo Credit: Amir Pashaei via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)

Overview

Before we cover any Islamic content, we will separate the nonsectarian point of view from the sectarian — scholarship from theology — and knowledge from belief. We meet the three tests a claim must pass before it counts as scholarly knowledge: the insider/outsider problem that has occupied scholars of religion for a century, and the distinction between describing what a tradition is and prescribing what it ought to be — the distinction every later section depends on.

Assigned Reading
None for this Section.

Key Terms for this Section
Nonsectarian · Sectarian · Descriptive claim · Normative claim · Theology
Islam · Mosque (Masjid) · Madrassa

1.1 | Welcome to the Scholarly Study of Islam

An Introduction to this Series

This is a survey of Islam: its history, its literature, its thought, and the civilizations it has built. No foreknowledge of Islam or Arabic is required. Key Arabic terms are introduced and taught as we go, and by the end you’ll carry a working vocabulary of several dozen of them.

Here’s the map.

Module 1 | The Rise of Islam. We begin with method (this section), then move to the socio-political world into which Muhammad ﷺ was born, the Ka’ba, the tribal order of pre-Islamic Arabia, the monotheisms already circulating through the peninsula.* We follow Muhammad’s life, his revelation, his flight to Medina, his war with Mecca, and then the succession crisis that fractured the community within thirty years of the Prophet’s death.

Module 2 | The Qur’an. A close reading. How an oral recitation became a written codex, what the text says about war and tolerance, about evil and mercy, about paradise and judgment, and how Muslims have argued for fourteen centuries over how to read the foundational text of 2 billion adherents.

Module 3 | The Golden Age. Baghdad. Philosophy, medicine, mathematics, mysticism. The centuries when the Islamicate world was the intellectual center of gravity for half the planet, and the invasions (Turkish, Crusader, Mongol) ended them.

Module 4 | Islam & Modernity. Empire, colonialism, secularism, nationalism, oil. How the Islamic world met the modern West, and the range of responses it produced.

Three principal writers guide us. The first is Reza Aslan (Iran), whose No god but God carries the narrative spine of the early centuries. The second is Tamim Ansary (Afghanistan), whose Destiny Disrupted tells world history from the inside of the Islamic world looking out — a genuinely disorienting experience if you learned history the other way around. The third is the University of London’s M.A.S. Abdel Haleem (Egypt), whose scholarly descriptions and translation of the Qur’an are unparalleled.

Note: ﷺ (“peace be upon him”) is a traditional honorific for Muhammad in religious circles. It’s used sparingly in this course to illustrate its usage in the printed and digital world. But as this is a scholarly endeavor and not a religious one, it will not be used throughout.

About Me

Today, I serve as an adjunct professor of religion at the University of Texas at Tyler, where I’ve taught World Religions, Intro to Islam, and Islamic Philosophy since 2019. I’m also the Department Chair of Philosophy, Humanities, and Foreign Languages at Tyler Junior College, where I’ve been a full-time professor since 2012. This series is the culmination of that teaching. (Link to CV)

Before that, I held a teaching fellowship with the Religion Department at Florida State University (2009–2011). At Florida State, I studied Islam at the graduate level under Dr. Adam Gaiser, himself an alum of the University of Virginia’s prestigious Religion program. His mentor was Dr. Abdulaziz Sachedina, a renowned scholar who advised the writing of the 2005 Constitution of Iraq. My research with Dr. Gaiser prepared me to publish a 2012 article, “Islam in the Early Modern Protestant Imagination (1528–1588),” in the ERAS journal of Monash University, one of Australia’s “Group of Eight” top-tier universities. It’s available online, and it has been cited internationally.

I also had the opportunity at Florida State to assist in a course called “Introduction to Islamic Culture,” and that experience had a lasting effect on my ability to teach this material to an undergraduate audience. On the strength of it, I taught my own sections of World Religions for Florida State’s Religion department through 2010 and 2011. In 2019 I published “Forgiveness in Judaism” in The Philosophy of Forgiveness (Vernon Press), and in 2020 I received the Thomas H. Shelby Jr. Endowed Chair for Teaching Excellence at Tyler Junior College. I’m happy to note that students have consistently lauded my treatment of Islam in this course.

Defining this Project

Islam is the name of the religious tradition that emerges in 7th-century Arabia through the teachings of Muhammad.

It is not a single institution, not a denomination, and not a set of practices frozen in time. From the very beginning, Muslims have disagreed with each other: about politics, theology, law, interpretation, and authority. Those disagreements are not an inconvenience we need to smooth over. They are the history of Islam, and several of the most consequential ones will occupy us for entire sections.

That means we’ll be careful with the phrases like “Islam says” or “Islam believes.”

Sometimes it’s perfectly appropriate. But often what we really mean is that the Qur’an says something, or a particular scholar says something, or that Sunni Muslims in one century said something that Shia Muslims in another rejected. Learning to pull those apart is not a prerequisite to learning the subject. It is the subject.

Along the way you’ll encounter Muslims praying in a mosque (masjid), studying in a madrassa (Islamic religious school), reading the Qur’an, practicing Sufism, interpreting Islamic law, and disagreeing vigorously with one another about what Islam requires. Our job is never to decide which of them is the “real” Muslim. Our job is to understand what people believe in a specific time and place, why they believe it, how those beliefs developed, and what those beliefs have meant in practice.

Which brings us to the one rule this whole series runs on:

We are here to study Islam, not to practice or prosecute Islam.

All are welcome to study in my courses. But I do not allow proselytization — for or against a religion — in my public courses. This rule isn't there to protect Islam from scrutiny, and it isn't there to protect anyone's faith from history. It's there so that every reader — Muslim, Christian, atheist, or none of the above — can look directly at the same fourteen centuries of evidence without wondering whose side the author is on. The material is far more interesting than any verdict I could render on it.

So the first question we ask is not “Is Islam true?”
That question belongs to someone else, and we’ll meet him shortly.

Our question is: “What can we know about Islam?”

That is the question the scholar brings into the room.
The rest of this section builds the toolkit for answering it.

1.2 | The Scholar’s Toolkit

Sectarian vs. Nonsectarian

The first and most fundamental piece of our method is a word you must know to make any sense of the academic study of religion: nonsectarian.

Nonsectarianism is the attitude that secular institutions of higher learning take toward the study of religion. What it means is that we do not take sides in religious debates. We don’t rank one religion above another. We’re not in the business of proving or disproving any tradition’s tenets. We don’t privilege Sunni over Shia, traditionalist over reformer, mystic over legalist. This series is not “pro-Islam” or “anti-Islam,” any more than it is pro-Christian or antisemitic. This series, proudly, is a nonsectarian study of Islam fit for all readers.

So what does that look like in practice?

Take History, a subject we’ve all sat through. A good history teacher can give you a detailed account of American politics without making one party the good guys and the other the bad guys. That doesn’t mean the teacher has no political opinions. It just means the classroom isn’t being used to advance them. The opinions are not the method.

This stands in stark contrast to a sectarian center of learning, like a religious private school, a Sunday school, a madrassa, or a seminary. What’s the difference?

It’s simple.
A sectarian program of study picks sides. A nonsectarian course like ours does not.

And notice that “sectarian” is not an insult here. A seminary that refused to say what Christians ought to believe would be failing at its job! A madrassa that refused to promote Islamic theology and law would be failing at its job too. These are institutions with a theological purpose, and their purpose is a legitimate one: adherent formation within a religious tradition. I have friends and family who’ve paid good money to attend such institutions, and would be upset if it didn’t take a theological side.

However, ours is a different purpose. And with Islam, the nonsectarian method earns its keep quickly. The tradition contains enormous internal diversity, which means a scholar is constantly standing between Muslim communities that disagree about what Islam requires of Muslims. A theologian may resolve that disagreement. A scholar studies it. For us, the disagreement is not an obstacle to the subject; it is the subject.

What a Theologian Does

That brings us to Theology: the discipline of belief.
Literally from the Greek for the study (logos) of God (Theos).

In a sectarian setting, a theologian — an imam, a pastor, a rabbi — will generally tell you that their view of religion is correct and try to persuade you of it. (There are notable exceptions.) It’s the job of theologians to make religious truth-claims (eg. there is only one God), and part of the job is defending those claims and contesting the rival claims of others. Whether God exists, what God is like, which reading of scripture is correct, what the faithful ought to believe and do: this is theology’s home turf, and Islam’s theological tradition is long, internally contentious, and extraordinarily sophisticated. We will study those arguments with real admiration.

Theology also has an institutional home. Walk into a mosque, and you will find the theologian’s whole world in one room. Prayer. Counsel in a crisis. Instruction. Community. The Friday sermon, delivered from a raised platform, where someone stands up and tells the assembled what God requires of them this week. A church and a synagogue are doing the same work in a different setting. And notice what the person on that platform is doing: not reporting that a community believes something, but telling the community what it ought to believe. That’s the job of a theologian.

This series will describe everything that happens in that room.
It will never perform any of it.

One more thing, because people sometimes assume that “academic” means “skeptical,” or that “nonsectarian” means “anti-religious.” Neither is true. The scholar doesn’t have to reject a religious claim to study it; she simply can’t treat her own acceptance or rejection of the claim as evidence about it. The line between scholarship and theology runs between jobs — not people. A Muslim can be a first-rate scholar of Islam. So can a Christian, and so can an atheist. A theologian can also be an excellent historian (some of them are better historians than the “historians”). The question is never what the author believes when she goes home. The question is which chair she’s sitting in when she writes.

Why They Don’t Compete

At first glance, it might look like theologians and secular scholars are rivals.
Two parties fighting over the same territory.

They’re not, and the reason is simple: they have different goals.

The theologian’s work is directed toward a religious community: preserving a tradition, defending its beliefs, reforming its practices, separating orthodoxy from error. A nonsectarian scholar does something else entirely. I share peer-reviewed scholarship while making no claim whatsoever about metaphysical or absolute truth. The foundation of a nonsectarian claim is empirical evidence and the evolving consensus of scholars worldwide — which is exactly why researchers of every nationality and religious affiliation can sit at the same table and study Islam together. They aren’t trying to prove or disprove Islam’s truth-claims. They’re fascinated by the subject and want to add to what we know about it.

Consider prayer, since we’ll spend some of Section 5 on it.

A theologian teaches a Muslim how to perform the daily prayers correctly — according to his school, and not the school down the road. A scholar asks how daily prayer developed historically, why the schools disagree about its performance, and why the practice looks different in Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey, Iran, and Texas. Both are looking at the same prayer. But they are asking different questions of it.

The theological question is: What should we believe?

The scholarly question is: What can we know about what people believe?

Neither question cancels the other. Keeping them separate helps make both useful.

Now here’s the part readers sometimes find strange. Like most people, your humble professor has deeply held religious beliefs. But you will not find them in this series. I don’t intend to convince you of my religious beliefs or dissuade you from yours. Your beliefs are likewise not the subject. For some, that restraint is a challenge. For many, it’s a breath of fresh air — a chance to learn about Islam with no one trying to convince you into or out of a religion while informing you.

1.3 | Knowledge & Belief

The Three Tests

To get at the real differences between the theologian and the scholar, we have to get at the epistemic difference between belief and knowledge. And the difference between those two is not a difference in subject matter. It’s a difference in justification.

All of us carry beliefs: about God, politics, beauty, family, and the world. Some are deeply considered, some inherited, some born of experience, and many are held with enormous confidence. None of that, by itself, makes any of them knowledge.

The knowledge of a scholar must be logical, falsifiable, and precise. Beliefs don’t have to be any of the three. Let’s take them one at a time.

Knowledge is logical when it’s limited to rigorous, valid, evidence-based reasoning.
“I know force equals mass times acceleration” clears the bar.

• The conclusion follows from the premises (valid)

• There’s no counter-evidence against it (undisproven)

• It’s been tested by an enormous variety of experts (scholarly consensus)

Compare the above scientific claim to this: “I believe the president must be a great banjo player, because great musicians make great leaders.” Not tested. It’s invalid, as the conclusion doesn’t follow. And there’s abundant evidence against it (ie. there are successful former presidents who cannot play the banjo). A person may believe this sincerely. But it does not count as knowledge.

Knowledge is falsifiable when there is some conceivable way to show it’s wrong — the criterion the philosopher Karl Popper put at the center of scientific reasoning, and it does just as much work in history. “Ottawa is the capital of Canada” can be checked. “The Mona Lisa is the most beautiful painting in the world” cannot be checked against anything, because there is no empirical test for the prize most beautiful. That may be a meaningful personal judgment. Which makes it a belief, not knowledge.

Knowledge is precise when it isn’t assembled out of arbitrary parts. “A calorie is the energy needed to raise 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius” — precise. Now consider a spiritualist’s claim that “a person’s well-being depends on their overall sense of unity and balance.” What is specifically meant by well-being? Balance of what measurable thing? What evidence would even bear on it? The sentence sounds impressive right up until you ask it to mean something.

Watch how the three tests behave the moment religion enters.

“I believe God exists” is a belief, and a common one. “Muslims have believed in one God since the emergence of Islam in 7th-century Arabia” is an historical claim about a belief, checkable against texts, evidence, and fourteen centuries of scholarship. While the subject is religious in both cases, the kind of claim is entirely different. The theologian deals in the first kind; the scholar deals only in the second.

Now, before you walk away thinking we’re looking down on beliefs… Beliefs are a great deal of what makes a life meaningful, and none of us would be who we are without them. Your humble professor has beliefs about God, about his country, about his community, and about family and friends.

But they’re my beliefs. As smart as I am, my beliefs do not count as knowledge.

The Insider/Outsider Problem

Here’s a question that has occupied scholars of religion for a century:
Do you have to be a member of a religion to study it?

In our case: do you have to be Muslim to study Islam?

Let’s grant the insider his due first. An insider brings something to the table no training can supply: lived experience. A Muslim scholar may understand from the inside why a particular prayer matters, what Ramadan feels like in a practicing household, why a theological distinction that looks like hair-splitting on paper carries real spiritual weight. And the outsider has plenty of ways she can fail if not careful: she can mistake unfamiliarity for irrationality, or confidently assign a ritual a meaning its practitioners would laugh at.

So the naive answer — only Muslims should discuss Islam — at least starts from something true. But follow the next three steps, and it collapses.

First: who counts? To privilege insider voices, someone has to decide who the insiders are. Imagine a professor saying: “We’ll cite Omar, because he’s a real Muslim — but not Yusuf, because although he calls himself Muslim and attends the mosque, he doesn’t act like a Muslim.” That judgment belongs to a theologian. The scholar has no instrument for measuring the sincerity of anyone’s faith, and no business building one.

Second: who gets the last word? If the subjects of a study can simply object to its findings and have them revised to their liking, it is hardly a study at all. Letting the people under examination dictate what may be written about them isn’t scholarship. It’s public relations. And an eager, advocating outsider falls into the same pit from the other side: reproducing the image of a community most desired by those in charge of it. What he produces may be perfectly respectable. It just isn’t research.

Third (and this is the sharpest point), as the University of Chicago’s Bruce Lincoln argues, information from inside a community is complicated by the fact that one’s consciousness is itself a product of that system. Or, as the old line has it: whoever coined the concept of water probably wasn’t a fish. A fish doesn’t notice water. The deeper inside a community you stand, the harder it is to see its shape.

This is one of the real strengths of nonsectarian scholarship — not an apology for it.

So the solution is not to crown the insider, and not to crown the outsider. The solution is scholarship — the method that makes every claim, from either side of the line, answer to evidence and survive criticism.

Let’s run the whole argument back through History, where the stakes feel lower, and the logic is identical. Say I want to know President George Washington…

I’ll read books by Americans and non-Americans alike, and I’ll dismiss anyone who claims a non-American can’t write about Washington. I’ll set aside books that advocate too warmly for him, because I want to see the whole man — his strengths and his faults. I won’t rely on books by politicians, who’ll primarily use Washington to prop up their own positions. And I’ll be wary of texts about Washington produced where the press isn’t free, and peer review isn’t real, because I want my Washington vetted by Washington scholars across the globe.

Now go back through that paragraph and substitute Muhammad for Washington, Muslim for American, and theologian for politician.

That’s what we’re doing here.

The Aslan Interview

Among nonsectarian scholars, there is no assumption that an expert on a religion is a member of that religion. It is, at best, a non-issue.

A famous cable-news interview (I won’t link it here) illustrates the point well. Dr. Reza Aslan — the scholar of religion who wrote the first book on our reading list — had published a scholarly study of Jesus of Nazareth. The interviewer opened by asking why he, a Muslim, would write a book about a Christian topic.

Aslan’s visible bewilderment is what made the exchange famous.

The question didn’t compute for Aslan. He’s a scholar of religions. He holds advanced degrees in the subject and has studied Christianity’s history for decades. That he happens also to be a Muslim is, to every other scholar in the field, completely beside the point — the way it would be beside the point to ask a non-Roman why she studies Ancient Rome.

For scholars, the question is never who are you?

The question is what do you know? For any scholar of any subject, the primary question is: What do you add to the sum of what we understand about this subject?

And notice that this cuts both ways. The insider/outsider problem is not an argument that outsiders make better scholars. It’s an argument that the question is simply the wrong question. Aslan is a Muslim who writes about Christianity — and a Muslim who writes about Islam, and neither fact qualifies or disqualifies him. Some of the finest scholarship on Islam has been produced by Muslims, and some of it by people who’ve never set foot in a mosque except to take notes. The tradition doesn’t belong to its critics, and it doesn’t belong exclusively to its adherents. It belongs to whoever does the work.

What the scholar owes, in either case, is the same: evidence, argument, and a willingness to be corrected.

Which is why I can write this series, and why you can read it.

1.4 | Normative & Descriptive Claims

Two Kinds of [Dental] Claims

So how does a scholar talk about religion without turning into a theologian?
Here’s the machinery.

A Descriptive claim describes what something is.
A Normative claim tells you what something ought to be.

A dentist might tell you, descriptively, that the average adult has 32 teeth. That same dentist might tell you, normatively, that people with good teeth floss daily — if you want good teeth, you ought to floss. One statement reports. The other prescribes.

The distinction is quite old. The philosopher David Hume (d. 1776) warned against sliding from is to ought, and philosophers still call it the is–ought problem — and it is absolutely essential to everything that follows in this series. Get careless with it and you’ll find yourself making strong normative claims about Islam, at which point you’ve stopped doing scholarship and started doing theology.

Now consider these:

A Christian must not serve in the military.
A Jew must have a Jewish mother.
A Muslim woman must cover her face in public.
A Hindu shouldn’t eat beef.
A Buddhist should meditate every day.

Every one of them is normative, because every one draws a line in the sand: on this side is our religion, and on that side is not. They are theological statements, and notice that whether any of them is true isn’t the issue. The issue is what kind of work the sentence is doing.

Here’s where it gets genuinely difficult. Normative claims are very good at dressing up as descriptive ones.

“That group isn’t practicing real Islam” — it looks like a report. It has the grammar of a report. But there’s no fact in the world it corresponds to; it’s a judgment about who belongs, wearing a scholar’s tweed jacket. Watch for the tell: real, true, authentic, proper, genuine. When one of those words shows up in front of the name of a religion, a normative claim is almost always hiding behind it. Real Christianity. True Judaism. Authentic Islam. Somebody is drawing a boundary and hoping you won’t notice their pencil.

One more pair, stripped of religion entirely:

Johnny is a good person.
Bob claims Johnny is a good person.

The first is normative — because it presumes the speaker knows what makes a person good. The second is descriptive, because it simply reports a fact about something Bob said. The scholar’s sentence is almost always the second kind. Not “that isn’t real Islam,” but “this community regards that practice as illegitimate, and here is the argument they make.” Same information about the dispute. None of the refereeing.

The Ahmads & Haddads

Let’s put it to work on a live dispute.

Imagine two Muslim families: the Ahmads and the Haddads. Both identify as Muslim. But the Ahmad family believes Muslims should oppose a particular war, while the Haddads support it.

A Muslim theologian compares good Islam with bad Islam — that’s his job, and he does it in the open. He might say: “The Ahmad family are good Muslims because they are pacifists, but the Haddad family are bad Muslims because they support the war.”

That is a normative, theological claim.
It sorts. It ranks. It tells the reader which family to admire.

But a descriptive, historically defensible claim is the kind nonsectarian scholars are focused on. A scholar of religion makes no claim about who is a “true” Muslim, a good Jew, or a bad Christian. Instead, she pays attention to the people making such claims and reports them as historical and cultural facts. So the scholar may write:

“While both the Ahmads and the Haddads identify as Muslim,
the Haddads support the war, while the Ahmads do not.”

Read those two versions again, back to back. The second one tells you more. It preserves the disagreement instead of resolving it. It treats both families as Muslims because both families say they are. And it leaves the theological question exactly where it found it: with the theologians, who have the standing to argue it out.

This is the tool we will reach for at every moment of live sectarian tension in the weeks ahead. When Sunni and Shia accounts of the same afternoon diverge, when a practice one community treasures is called an innovation by another, when a reformer says a tradition must change and a traditionalist says it cannot: as nonsectarian scholars, our work is to describe both sides as accurately as possible. You’ll see that sentence again.

Not a verdict.
A description accurate enough that both parties would recognize themselves in it.

Which is harder than it sounds, but scholars think it's worth the trouble.

Long Live Theology!

Let me be unmistakably clear about something. None of the above is a criticism of theology. In fact, it’s a defense of it!

Theological training belongs in a religious institution — a private school, a madrassa, a seminary. That’s what those institutions offer and what their tuition buys. A public college has a different purpose: it proudly serves people of many beliefs and none, all of whom have decided together that greater knowledge of religion serves everyone’s interest. So my task is a survey of Islam from a nonsectarian standpoint. I never presume to tell my readers what is and isn’t proper Islam. I leave that work to my friends on the minbar (the pulpit) at the head of the mosque.

The scholarly approach may feel irreverent — especially when scholars discuss a tradition you’re personally invested in. If that happens, remember our objectives. This is an academic study of religion — not a religious course. And no scholar of religion is trying to replace anyone’s theologian.

Consider the limits of my office.

A nonsectarian scholar can’t lead a prayer in a mosque.
A nonsectarian scholar can’t marry a couple.
A nonsectarian scholar doesn’t counsel the grieving in the middle of the night.
A nonsectarian scholar doesn’t exhort you to repent.
A nonsectarian scholar can’t tell you the secrets of the universe, and wouldn’t dare try.
A nonsectarian scholar works neither to bring someone to Islam nor out of it.
A nonsectarian scholar doesn’t take sides on the divisive questions within Islam.
A nonsectarian scholar doesn’t work to shape Islamic doctrine.

Theologians are not only permitted but expected to do all of these things and more!

So we both have jobs. Both of us are looking at religion, though our methods and our goals are entirely different. Some people have use for one. Some for the other. Some for neither. And some of us, myself included, find real value in both — reading scholars and theologians alike while never confusing the two.

That’s the toolkit.
Nonsectarian, not theological. Knowledge, not belief. Description, not prescription.

Now, with that toolset in front of you, we go back 1,400 years to a dusty settlement in the Arabian desert built around a single cube of stone, to the age the tradition itself remembers as the Jahiliyyah, and to an orphan born there who will change the world.

Salaam.

This Section: Normativity & Religion
Next Section: Pre-Islamic Arabia & Muhammad

Pictured: Shia Muharram mourning gathering in Iran • Nov 2014
Photo Credit: Payam Moein via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)

Overview

In this section, we pick up where Section 4 left us: on a plain in Iraq in 680, standing next to the Prophet's grandson, Husayn. We trace how that afternoon turned a political faction into a religious tradition — through the Penitents, the mourning of Ashura, and the doctrine of the Imams — and follow that tradition forward to the Mahdi, to Safavid Iran, and to the Islamic Republic. We then turn from what divides the Ummah to what unites almost all of it: Islam as an orthopraxic tradition, in which Islamic theology (kalam) is inseparable from Islamic law (fiqh), and the Five Pillars by which a Muslim builds a life. The section closes with Salat, the communal prayer that encompasses the other four pillars.

Assigned Reading
Reza Aslan, No god but God, chapters 6- 7

Key Terms for this Section
Kalam · Tawhid · Shirk · Zakat · Sawm · Hajj · Salat · Sunni
Imamah · Twelver · Khomeinism · Mahdi · Husayn

5.1 | Karbala

Iraq • 680 🇮🇶

It is the Christian year 680 CE.
The Muslim year 61 AH. 61 years since the Hijra to Yathrib (Medina).

Muhammad’s dream of a free, peaceable, egalitarian community of believers has become so much dust in the desert, and in its place sits a new Islamic empire ruled from Damascus by the sons of the men who once hunted the Prophet.

Here, on a dry plain in Iraq called Karbala, the Prophet’s grandson is about to die.

Husayn (Hossein) is the son of Ali and Fatima (Fatemeh), leader of the Hashemite clan, and, to a great many Muslims, the rightful heir to the Caliphate. Against him rides Yazid, the 33-year-old son of Mu’awiya (Mo'aviyeh), the second Umayyad caliph. Here in Iraq, the sons are fighting their fathers’ war. Ali and Mu’awiya had settled nothing at Siffin (cf. Sec. 4.3); they had only partitioned the disagreement and postponed the war.

The two forces are nowhere near evenly matched, and everyone knows it. Husayn bravely rides out with fewer than a hundred followers, his own family of women and children near him — back at the camp. Yazid meets Husayn with a large, well-paid, mounted Syrian army. What follows is not a battle. Over three days, without water or food, it is the slaughter of a family in the open Iraqi desert.

Husayn’s 18-year-old son, Ali Akbar, dies armed on the field. So does his brother’s 14-year-old son, Qasim (Ghasem). Even Husayn’s infant son is killed, shot in the neck by a soldier’s arrow as Husayn carries the child toward the Syrian lines to beg for water.

Bloodied, and with few left to hear it, Husayn calls out to the riders closing on him:

These are the last words of Husayn, son of Ali, Grandson of the Prophet, Master of Martyrs. Moments later, Yazid’s general decapitates Muhammad’s grandson and carries his head away as a prized trophy. The new Umayyad Caliphate in Damascus celebrated this as the beginning of the first Islamic empire. And it was. But it also gave rise to a rival tradition that fervently mourns the Battle of Karbala to this day.

The Penitents

Husayn had ridden out to Karbala from Kufa, in Iraq: a city of freed slaves and Persian converts, where his father Ali had governed as the fourth Rashidun caliph.

Kufa was the heart of the Party of Ali (Shi’atu Ali, cf. Sec. 4.3). Its people had written to Husayn, promising him an army. But when Husayn came, almost none of them went with him to Karbala.

Four years later, a small group of Kufans gathers at the site of the massacre. They are remembered as the tawwabun, the Penitents. They blacken their faces. They tear their clothes. They weep openly, in public, for a man they had failed. They name their own failure as the reason he died.

This is the moment the Party of Ali stops being a political faction and becomes the religious tradition of Shi’ism. Not at Siffin, where the argument was about who should govern. Shia Islam is born where the argument became about what we owe the one who suffered for us, and what it means that we did not go.

At the heart of Shia Islam is a 1,400-year-old grief. Reza Aslan puts the theology plainly: Shi’ism rests on the conviction that the righteous believer sacrifices himself in the struggle for justice, as Husayn did in the face of his oppressors. He went to Karbala knowing — that’s the whole point. He was not ambushed. He was not outmaneuvered. Husayn chose certain death rather than swear fealty to the Umayyads.

And the Shia reading places that choice in a very long line

The sacrifice-theology of Shia Islam begins in Genesis with Abraham (Ibrahim) raising the knife over his son and ends with Husayn’s brave and willing sacrifice at Karbala. Between those historical bookmarks were the Lawgivers: Moses (Torah/al-Tawrat), Jesus (the Gospel/al-Injil), and Muhammad (al-Qur’an). For the Shia, what starts and completes this circuit is the sacrifice: opened by Abraham and closed by Husayn.

Ashura: Honoring Martyrdom

Every year, on the 10th of Muharram, the largest act of communal devotion in Shia Islam takes place.

Ashura is the anniversary of Husayn’s death. It is less a commemoration and more of a public atonement. The tears that should have been shed at Karbala, by the people of Kufa who stayed home, are shed now, to redeem the tragedy. Hence the Shia saying: a tear shed for Husayn washes away a hundred sins.

The observance takes many forms. Congregations gather for majlis, lamentation assemblies where the story is recited and the room weeps together. In Iran and South Asia, communities stage ta’ziya, passion plays that put Karbala on a stage — one of the very few dramatic traditions in the Islamic world. Processions carry black banners through the streets. Mourners beat their chests in rhythm (latm). And in some communities, a minority practice of ritual bloodletting with blades or chains (tatbir) has drawn cameras (out of all proportion to how common it is), and has been discouraged or forbidden by major Shia authorities, including Ayatollah Khamenei in Iran and Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani in Iraq, who direct the faithful toward blood donation instead.

Many Sunni Muslims regard the mourning rites as bid’ah, an innovation with no warrant in the Prophet’s practice. That objection is old, sincere, and widely held among the Sunni. At the same time, Sunnis keep the 10th of Muharram too, as a fast, for completely different reasons. Tradition states that Muhammad, arriving in Medina, found the Jews of the city fasting and fasted with them (cf. Sec. 3.4).

So the same date is, in one tradition, a fast for a people delivered, and in the other, a public mourning for a family who were not. As non-sectarian scholars, our work is to describe both as accurately as possible.

For the Shia, one does not understand Islam without Karbala.

5.2 | The Imams

Imamah

For the Sunni, nothing stands between the Believer and the Message. But for the Shia, there is a critical link: salvation comes through Muhammad, through his son-in-law Ali, through his grandsons Hasan and Husayn, and through the line of successors the Shia hold to be legitimate. That line is the Imams, and Ali is the first.

There are two basic uses of the word imam.

The word imam (إمام) comes from a Semitic root meaning to go before. The first use of imam is as a title for the Muslim who stands before the congregants at the Friday prayers (analogous to a pastor or rabbi). But there’s nuance in this first form that informs the second. The Qur’an also uses this title for Abraham, an “imam for humankind” (2:124). In honor of this Quranic precedent, the Sunni world honors its four great jurists with the title Imam (Imam Abu Hanifa, Imam Malik, Imam al-Shafi’i, and Imam Ahmad). For those great men, English translators use a capital “I” for Imam.

Following this, the Shia world uses the vaunted Imam for the twelve figures after Muhammad who define their tradition. So, if you visit a Sunni mosque for Jummah on a Friday afternoon, you can meet the imam. For them, imam is a job. Every major American city has imams. But an Imam (capital I) in Shia Islam is a wholly other thing.

For the Shia, the Imams are specific members of Muhammad’s family who are ismah — morally protected from error (like God’s prophets and angels). This doctrine is called Imamah, and it is the theological engine of the entire tradition.

In Shia tradition, a Prophet (eg. Moses, Jesus, Muhammad) transmits the message, while an Imam (eg. Ali, Hasan, Husayn) translates the message.

Abraham transmitted monotheism. His sons carried it.
Moses transmitted the Torah. His brother Aaron established it.
Jesus transmitted the Gospel. Peter built the Church around it.

For the Shia, Muhammad transmitted the Qur’an. The Imams translated it.

Which is why the Imams are said to possess what no one else does. They carry the living spirit of the Prophet. They know the secret name of God. And where the rest of the Ummah reads the Qur'an through tafsir (standard meaning), the Imams alone can perform ta'wil (fathom the esoteric meaning), tracing a verse back to the hidden meaning beneath its surface. Humanity is made from the dust of the earth; the Imams, tradition holds, were made from light.

The Twelfth Imam

The line of Imams begins with Ali (1), then to his sons Hasan (2) and Husayn (3), then Husayn’s son Ali (4), then his son Muhammad (5), and his son Jafar (6).

Jafar as-Sadiq (Sadegh, d. 765) is the most consequential figure in this list after Ali himself. He formalized the rites of Karbala. He founded the school of law the Shia still follow — Jafari fiqh — which recognizes the teachings of the Imams alongside the Sunnah of the Prophet. And, critically, his school built reasoned interpretation into the machinery of Shia law. As the Shia legal scholar Hossein Modarressi renders the principle: whatever is ordered by reason is also ordered by religion.

That principle has a name — ijtihad, independent legal reasoning — and it produced a powerful Islamic institution. Those qualified to practice it are mujtahids. The highest rank of mujtahid is an ayatollah, a title meaning the sign of God. The title takes decades to earn, and few ever reach it. Those who do gather followers are bound by their rulings (a strong contrast to the Sunni, who have no such practice).

The line continues, and then it splits. Jafar’s eldest son Ismail (Esmail, 7) was to succeed him but died first — or did he?? A small sect of Ismaili Shia, the Seveners, hold that Ismail did not die but entered concealment, and will return at the end of time.

However, for the vast majority of Shia, Jafar’s son Musa (7) succeeded him, followed by Rida (Reza, 8), Jawad (Javad, 9), and then Hadi (10) and Askari (11) — two Imams the later Abbasid caliphs (cf. Sec. 9) feared so thoroughly that they spent most of their lives under guard. Which is why the twelfth, Muhammad al-Mahdi, was hidden from public view almost from birth.

The Twelver Shia — the overwhelming majority of Shia Muslims today — hold that the Twelfth Imam did not die but entered occultation: hidden, living, ever-present in the world. He is the Mahdi, the one who guides divinely, and he will reveal himself at the end of days to restore justice to the world.

For the Shia, Muhammad* al-Mahdi, the twelfth Imam (*not to be confused with the Prophet Muhammad), is the summation of history, morality, and Islamic theology. At the end of time, he returns to fill the earth with justice as Jesus the Messiah (Isa al-Masih) descends to pray behind him before hunting down and killing the antichrist (Dajjal). For Sunnis, almost none of this is settled. The Mahdi may be (a) identified with Jesus outright, (b) folded into prophecies of black banners out of Khorasan, or (c) set aside entirely.

As the Mahdi appears nowhere in the Qur’an, if you ask ten Sunni theologians about the Mahdi, you may get ten different answers. Ask a Twelver, and you will get one.

Quietism vs Khomenei 🇮🇷

According to Shia tradition, the Imam is alive today, divinely appointed, and thoroughly unavailable to the Islamic world. He is God’s answer to every hard question, but no one can reach him to ask him.

Every argument about religious authority in Shia Islam for the last 1,100 years descends from this problem.

During the Lesser Occultation (ca. 874-941), the Hidden Imam is held to have communicated through 4 successive named deputies, one after the other. Questions went in; rulings came out. Then the fourth deputy died, naming no successor, and the Greater Occultation began. From that point on, there is no one with a direct line.

What develops instead is the doctrine of niyaba — deputyship. If the Imam appoints no individual, then the qualified jurists together stand as his general deputies, and this is precisely why an ayatollah’s rulings bind his followers in a way no Sunni scholar’s do. He is not merely learned. He is standing in for someone.

But standing in for him for how long and how far? That question has never been settled among the Shia, and the tradition’s two answers are genuinely far apart.

The quietist reading is the older and, for most of Shia history, the majority one: the jurist’s deputyship covers law, worship, and the care of the community — and stops there. Politics is not the Imam’s portfolio to lend out. The world will be set right when he returns and not before, so no government, however pious, may claim his authority. On this reading, a cleric who takes power has misunderstood his own office.

The activist reading pushes the argument the other way. If the jurist truly deputizes for the Imam, then he inherits what the Imam held — including the right to govern. This is referred to as the guardianship of the jurist, and it is the contemporary doctrinal core of what 20th-century scholars called Khomeinism.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (d. 1989) worked his namesake doctrine out while living in exile in Najaf: the quietist capital (6 miles from Kufa) where Ali lies buried. Ironically, the most consequential argument for clerical rule in modern Islam was written in the city most opposed to it.

By 1979, in Qom, Iran, Khomeini’s activist reading was penned into a modern Constitution, fusing three things that had never sat together: Twelver theology, a modern state, and an ayatollah as its Supreme Leader. Meanwhile, also from Najaf, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani continues the quietist reading of Shia governance and has trained generations to carry it forward — a Shia scholarship entirely free of Khomeini’s politics.

Two cities, Najaf and Qom, led by two ayatollahs, utterly opposed in their view of what the hidden, Twelfth Imam requires of the awaiting Shia Muslim population.

5.3 | Orthopraxy & the Five Pillars

Right Belief, Right Practice

Every religious tradition is held together by two poles: orthodoxy (Gr. ortho “right” and doxa “belief”) and orthopraxy (Gr. ortho “right” and praxis “practice”). Every tradition has both. No tradition weights them equally.

Focused on belief, Christianity is an exemplar of orthodox religion.

Christian practice varies greatly across the world. A Pentecostal service in South Texas and a Russian Orthodox liturgy share almost no choreography; what makes someone a Christian is what they believe about Jesus. Creedal claims have been the primary Christian instrument. The Council of Nicaea was a fight about belief (cf. Sec. 2.2).

Judaism sits at the opposite pole.

Jewish identity is bound far more tightly to what one does: an observant Jew walks Halacha (the Path), a body of practice covering food, time, labor, and speech. Theology, in Judaism, has never been the membership test.

Broadly writ, Islam belongs closer to the Jewish side of this distinction. While belief matters enormously to Muslims, correct practice has generally been the greater concern of Muslim communities. So much so that the Ulama (Learned Ones) took to calling Islamic theology kalam, from an Arabic word meaning talking — and ahl al-kalam, “the People of Talking,” is what critics called the speculative theologians. The label stuck, which tells you how the argument went.

With this attitude in mind, it comes as no surprise that questions of kalam (theology) are always bound to fiqh, Islamic jurisprudence. In other words, the great theological questions of Islam are always aimed at a practice question: how should a Muslim live?

The Sunni, over 90% of Muslims today, frame their responses along a moral architecture they refer to as the Five Pillars* — Shahadah, Zakat, Sawm, Hajj, and Salat.

With these five building blocks, a person builds a penitent Muslim life.

*The Shia add to these Five Pillars with five beliefs (all but one shared by the Sunni) and six more obligations (two not shared by the Sunni). The Shia belief in Imamah (explained above) and special Shia obligations to Muhammad’s family (loyalty to him and his descendant Imams and disavowal of their enemies) are not shared by the Sunni.

The Shahadah

The first pillar is a sentence. The creed of the Islamic tradition.

The Shahadah is where Islamic belief and Islamic practice meet, because saying it is the doing of it. One performs this belief out loud.

Its first clause is the whole of Islamic theology compressed. In the Qur’an’s language, the Oneness of God is tawhid — literally, to make one. Tawhid is not a claim Islam introduced; it is central to the 5,000 year-old claim of the Jewish Shema in Deut 6:4.

For Muslim and Jew alike, God is indivisible and without equal.

God has no parts, personhood, or children. There is no essence of God that a human sentence can hold. Whatever one can image God to be, the Islamic response is always, Allahu Akbar, God is Greater. Not great. Greater. Greater than the thought you just had.

The 10th-century al-Tahawi put it in five words: imagination does not reach Him.

So the tradition reaches for metaphor and knows it is doing so. The Qur’an calls God Compassionate and Merciful in nearly every surah, and among the ninety-nine names are the Sacred (62:1), the Peace and the Omnipotent (59:23), the Creator (6:102), the Eternal (59:24), the Forgiving (20:82), the Provider (51:58), the Omniscient (2:158), and the Gentle (22:63). Ninety-nine names, and the tradition’s own position is that all ninety-nine fall short.

The opposite of tawhid is shirk: worship directed anywhere but to God. On its face, that means idolatry, and in Islamic theology it includes the Christian Trinity. The claim that Jesus is God, or part of God, is shirk by definition.

But the concept stretches, and the stretch is where it gets interesting. Shirk comes to name anything a person puts between themselves and God. Greed is shirk when the alms go unpaid. Pride is shirk when the ego takes the first seat. Even piety is shirk when it is performed for an audience. One can commit shirk in a mosque!

Which reframes the sentence entirely. To say There is only One God is not to pass a theology quiz. It is to concede sovereignty over every part of one’s own life — and to keep conceding it as a practice of daily living.

The second clause does different work. Muhammad is Rasul Allah, the Messenger of God. The Qur’an he recited is the final revelation — his example is the path — and there is no prophet coming after him. Note what the sentence does not say. Not Muhammad and others. Not Muhammad was. Muhammad is the Messenger — present tense, permanently.

And this sentence is the door. Say it sincerely, before witnesses, and you are a Muslim — no clergy, no committee, no ceremony. It is your choice; it cannot be made for you, and it cannot be taken from you.

Zakat, Sawm, & Hajj: The Great Levelers

The next three pillars all have the same job, but from different angles.
They level the world in the spirit of Muhammad’s teachings.

Zakat is obligatory almsgiving for the poor. The great economic leveler.

For each Muslim, 2.5% of their excess wealth is paid to those in need. This does not include income or homeownership. If you owe more in credit card debt than you have in the bank, you pay nothing. Muhammad built the Ummah as a community that carried its burdens collectively. Simply put, zakat is the debt society owes one another. If a prosperous Muslim lets their neighbor go hungry, it is a sin. How? That Muslim has put their wealth in front of God. Can a Muslim be wealthy? Many are, and zakat is in place to purify their wealth. In fact, the word zakat literally means to purify.

Sawm is an obligatory annual fast. The great hunger leveler.

During the holy month of Ramadan (the first month of the first revelation), from dawn to sunset, physically capable Muslims abstain from food, drink, smoking, and physical pleasure. Children, the sick, the elderly, travelers, and pregnant/nursing mothers are exempt. Islam’s fast has Jewish roots: in the earliest Medina years, Muhammad had the Ummah fast on Yom Kippur (cf. Sec. 3.4), and the Qur’an is explicit that the practice is inherited — fasting is prescribed for you, just as it was prescribed for those before you (2:183). How does it level society? It guarantees that every observant Muslim on earth, prince and poor alike, knows exactly what it feels like to want food and not have it.

Hajj is an obligatory pilgrimage to Mecca. The great class leveler.

Once in a lifetime, every able Muslim is to travel to Mecca and to enter the Grand Mosque. Once there, every pilgrim, of every nation and class and station, must put on the same plain white cloth. There are no social classes on Hajj. This was Muhammad’s dream, made visible for one week of the year.

At the center stands the Ka’ba, the same sacred cube, now emptied of its 360 idols, draped in black (cf. Sec. 3.4). Pilgrims circle it seven times, retracing the circuits Muhammad walked 1,400 years ago. They run between two hills (cf. Hagar), stand at Mount Arafat (cf. Adam and Eve), and throw stones at three pillars representing the Devil. It ends with an animal sacrifice — the meat given to the Meccan poor.

For a quarter of humanity, the Ka’ba is the axis mundi — the center point every Muslim on earth faces to orient themselves to each other and God. So a pilgrim standing at the shrine (whether they be Sunni or Shia) is faced from every direction at once: from the west, Muslims in the Americas; from the south, African Muslims; from the east, Iran, Pakistan, and Indonesia; from the north, Europe, Russia, and the Levant.

Afterward, the pilgrim puts his ordinary clothes back on and returns to the world a Hajji. But he keeps the white cloth. He will wear it once more as his burial shroud.

5.4 | Salat: the Tent Pole of Islam

Du’a & Salat (Namaz)

This leaves the fifth pillar: prayer (salat).

Islam distinguishes two kinds of prayer. Du’a is the informal prayer of an individual. Any words, any time, at any place where the believer speaks to God directly. Salat is something else: formal, communal, choreographed prayer, performed five times daily: at dawn, midday, afternoon, sunset, and night.

Here’s a link to those times in major US cities.

The name tells you what it is. Salat comes from a root meaning to bow, bend, or stretch. It is named for what the body does. Not for what the mind intends, not for what the heart feels, but for the social posture.

The Friday midday prayer, Jummah, is the congregational gathering of the week: the structural counterpart to the Jewish Shabbat service on Friday evening and the Christian service on Sunday morning. Three siblings, three days, one weekend.

Wudu (Vozu) & Prostrations

Like the other four pillars, Salat has sacred conditions.

The worshipper must be modestly dressed, physically clean, and in a clean space. Then comes wudu, ritual ablution: washing the hands, mouth, nose, face, arms, hairline and neck, ears, and feet, in order.

Outside, the muezzin turns toward Mecca and calls the adhan (azan) — the Call to Prayer — traditionally from a tower so the whole city hears it. It is easily the most recognizable sound in the Islamic world, and it has marked the hours in Damascus and Cairo and Istanbul for well over a thousand years. Translated, it says:

What follows is a far more physical practice than what most Christians or Jews do in worship. Hands rise and fall together. The congregation goes to hands, then knees, then forehead to the floor — and rises again shoulder to shoulder, in ranks, in time. Qur’anic verses are recited throughout, and God is Greater punctuates the movements.

Allahu Akbar.

Consider what that costs a person. Five times a day, you stop what you are doing, wash, and put your face on the ground in a room full of people doing the same thing at the same moment. There is nothing private about it and nothing convenient about it. Salat is a physical decentering of the self — a body trained, several times daily, to be one rank among many rather than the center of anything.

There are few sacred rituals today more thoroughly opposed to the casual, entertainment-centered instincts of the modern world.

The Tent Pole

So why is salat the greatest of the pillars?
Because salat contains all five pillars at once.

In prayer, the Shahadah is recited. The first pillar, nine times a day over five prayers. The five prayers take roughly half an hour out of 24 hours, which is about 2.5% of the day: the Zakat proportion — in time instead of money. Throughout, the worshipper abstains from food, drink, and physical pleasure — a Sawm in miniature. And every prayer is performed facing Mecca, in rank with other believers — a brief Hajj, made from anywhere a Muslim may find herself.

One pillar, a tent pole, holding the other four inside it.

We opened this section on a plain in Iraq, with a family dying from a question over who should lead. A question that has not been settled in 1,400 years and will not be settled here. Nevertheless, at dawn tomorrow, roughly two billion people will wash their hands and faces, turn toward the same draped cube in the same desert valley, and put their foreheads on the ground in submission to God. Sunni and Shia. Najaf and Medina. The same words, under the same sun, in the same direction.

The Ummah may never agree on who leads.
It has never once disagreed about which way to face.

And the words recited in every one of those prayers — the same verses, in the same 7th-century Arabic, from Jakarta to Dallas — are the subject we take up next.

Last Section: After Muhammad
This Section: Kalam & Shia Islam
Next Section: Philosophy & the Qur’an

Pictured: Folio from the Birmingham Qur’an, 20th Surah • 7th c.

Overview

In this section, we describe the crisis that followed Muhammad's death in 632: the invention of the Caliphate, the office built to answer a question the Ummah had never had to ask. We trace the reigns of the first four caliphs — the Rashidun — from Abu Bakr and the Riddah Wars, through Omar’s conquest decade, to Uthman's canonization of the Qur'an and the contested rule of Ali. We then situate the factions whose quarrel over succession broke into open civil war (fitnah) at the Battle of the Camel and at Siffin. The section closes with the Umayyad turn of 661 and the origins of the divide between Sunni and Shia Islam.

Assigned Reading
Reza Aslan, No god but God, chapter 5
Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted, chapter 4

Key Terms for this Section
Caliph · Rashidun · Ulama · Fitnah · Kafir · Shia (Shi'atu Ali) · Kharijite · Umayyad Abu Bakr · Umar (Omar) · Uthman (Osman) · Ali · Fatima (Fatemeh) · Aisha · Mu'awiya

4.1 | The Succession Crisis

The Prophet is Dead • 570-632

Mecca is safeguarded, the idols are broken, but Muhammad does not stay long.

Many in Arabia assumed he meant to make himself King of Mecca. But he had no such political ambition. He wanted change, not power. And once change came to the Arab world, he wanted to go home, to his true home, in Medina. It’s there, two and a half years after the emptying of the Ka’ba, that Muhammad rests his head against his wife Aisha’s (Ayesheh) lap and dies quietly in his home — finally at peace, in Islam’s first mosque.

It is the Jewish year 4392, the Christian year 632, and the Muslim year 11.

After the Prophet’s untimely death, the Ummah comes apart at the seams. His old friend Umar (Omar), a large, hot-tempered man who had spent a decade defending the Prophet with his fists, simply refuses to accept his death. He stands in the mosque loudly insisting Muhammad is not really dead and threatening anyone who says otherwise. It falls to Abu Bakr, who had been leading prayers during the Prophet’s illness, to calm and put the death into perspective for a grieving congregation:

“If anyone worships Muhammad, Muhammad is dead. If anyone worships God, God is alive, immortal.” Abu Bakr

It is, in a sentence, the whole problem of the next thirty years. The message survives its Messenger. But who leads, and by what right?

The Prophet Muhammad had named no successor, and (this is the part that matters) he left no procedure for choosing one either. He had collapsed every office of Arab authority into himself — Elder, Judge, Warlord, Mystic — and above them all, Lawgiver and Messenger of God (cf. Sec. 3.2). Now all of those seats were suddenly vacant. The position of Messenger — of Rasul Allah — was sealed forever.

For context, consider the Biblical alternatives known to Muhammad. In the Torah, Moses lays his hands on Joshua before the whole assembly and transfers his authority in public (Num. 27:18-23). In the early Church, when the Apostles replace Judas, the community assembles and casts lots (Acts 1:15-26). But, for reasons lost to the sands of time, Muhammad left the Ummah without a prescribed method of succession. Instead, a grieving Ummah had to find a method on the spot.

The pressure to choose Muhammad’s successor was felt both inside Medina’s mosque and in tribal meetings far away. Client tribes concluded their agreements had been with Muhammad personally, not God, and ended their zakat payments. Additionally, copycat prophets began to spring up in Yemen and eastern Arabia who tried to imitate Muhammad and reproduce his social programs. Some drew real followings.

But perhaps the worst problem the Ummah now faced was the ephemeral nature of Muhammad’s teachings. At the time of his death, there was no Qur’an. Instead, the teachings of the Prophet survived in the memories of his Companions and on the occasional scrap of parchment. The Ummah had no legal code, no settled theology, and no institutional religion. And now, there was no longer anyone to ask.

Successor to the Messenger of God

The argument begins immediately, and it begins over geography.

Should the new leader of Islam come from Medina, the Prophet’s City that had sheltered the movement? Or from Mecca, home of the Ka’ba and of the newly converted Quraysh? Maybe one of each, sharing power?

The debate eventually settles on continuity: the succeeding man should be one of the Companions who had made the original Hijra ten years earlier, and a Meccan of the Quraysh. After hours of heated argument at the shura (the ancient Arab tribal council), the assembly lands on the calming voice that had taken over when Muhammad fell ill and had steadied the community at the funeral. The majority choose Abu Bakr.

But what to call Abu Bakr? This was a political, theological, and philosophical problem that required nuance. He could not be called “prophet,” as the holy revelation had ended with Muhammad (he was very clear on that point). The community decided on the rather modest title of Khalifat Rasul Allah — the ‘Successor’ to the Messenger of God. Caliph for short.

The word is worth pausing on, because it defines an office that governs the rest of this course. A caliph is a successor, a deputy. He’s never a prophet, and never a source of revelation. Abu Bakr inherits Muhammad’s political authority: Shaykh, Hakam, Qa’id. He inherits none of his religious authority. That falls instead to the Ulama — the Learned Ones — (alim in the singular), the scholars who would carry the religious direction of the Ummah forward.

This split — caliph as political successor and alim as theological successor — is the single most consequential piece of institutional design in early Islam. Nearly every fight throughout Section 4 will be about the line between these two forces.

As Caliph, Abu Bakr tells the assembled Muslims in his inaugural address:

“As long as I obey God and the Prophet, obey me; if I neglect the laws of God and the Prophet, I have no right to your obedience.” Abu Bakr

Think about that for a moment. The caliph’s legitimacy comes from the consent of the governed — and it can be withdrawn! Not from bloodline, not from conquest, not from divine appointment. Aslan points out that nowhere else in the 7th-century world had such an experiment in popular sovereignty even been imagined. And the practice the shura embodies is not an Arab political habit the Ummah merely carried forward. The Qur’an lists it among the marks of the faithful, set directly alongside prayer itself:

“…respond to their Lord; keep up the prayer; conduct their affairs by mutual consultation…” QUR’AN 42:38

But consent has a shadow side: somebody has to be left out of the room.

The most obvious alternative to Abu Bakr was Ali — Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, raised in his home, the first child to accept his message, and the one who had stood beside him at the Ka’ba. Ali was also a Hashemite, of Muhammad’s own clan. And, interestingly, the Hashemites were not present at the shura when Abu Bakr was chosen by the majority.

The Qurayshi answer was blunt and, on its own terms, principled: no one wanted the whole authority of the Ummah consolidated into one small family. If this community was going to be a new kind of tribe — one anybody could join — it could not become the private property of the Prophet’s relatives. Prophethood and the Caliphate, Abu Bakr and Umar both insisted, cannot live in the same clan.

But the Hashemites, with plenty to lose, simply did not accept this. Neither did the Ansar of Medina, who resented watching a Meccan take the office in their own city. Umar eventually went to the house of Ali and Fatima (Fatemeh) — Muhammad’s own daughter — and threatened to burn it down unless they submitted to the new authority. But Abu Bakr restrained him at the last moment. This was the level of tension around the choice of caliph. Umar’s threat was withdrawn, but the message was still received. In the end, Ali would swear his allegiance to the new caliph.

The Ummah had its caliph. It also had its first faction.

The Riddah Wars

Abu Bakr was the first of the Rashidun — the Rightly Guided Ones, the four caliphs who ruled from Muhammad’s death to 661.*

Abu Bakr’s reign barely lasted two and a half years, and he spent nearly all of it at war.

The campaign is remembered as the Riddah Wars — the Wars of Apostasy — and it was aimed at both problems at once: the copycat, rival prophets and the tribes who had stopped paying zakat. The fighting was led by the formidable general Khalid ibn al-Walid, whom our second author, Tamim Ansary, calls the “hero of the Apostate Wars.”

Abu Bakr’s reasoning is the hinge of the whole episode. The deadbeat tribes, he argued, had not made their agreements with the Shaykh of Medina; they had made their agreements with God Almighty. Refusing zakat was therefore not a broken contract or a tax dispute. It was treason against the Ummah and a sin against God — and the penalty for treason was death.

Abu Bakr won his wars against the apostates. Arabia held. But Aslan notes the long shadow the victory cast: by treating the refusal of zakat as apostasy, and apostasy as treason, the Riddah Wars welded the two together in Islamic thought for centuries to come — pay zakat or die by the sword. The Qur’an, by the way, never taught this.

For Abu Bakr’s administration, there was one more piece of critical domestic business. He wanted to check Hashemite influence for good. So Abu Bakr announces an official ruling on inheritance: ‘the Prophet Muhammad left no heirs.’ The widows of Muhammad — the “Mothers of the Faithful,” including Abu Bakr’s own daughter Aisha — would be provided for directly by the Ummah instead. And, as a father and caliph, he kept that promise scrupulously.

Muhammad’s daughter was heartbroken. Fatima (Fatemeh) had lost her father’s estate by decree, and she never spoke to Abu Bakr again. When she died a short time later, Ali washed and buried his wife himself, the daughter of the Prophet, quietly, at night, without informing the caliph. One can imagine his sadness and anger.

It is a small, personal act of protest. 1,400 years later, it is still remembered by those with allegiance to Ali.

*A word of caution on the term. “Rashidun” is not a neutral historical label; it is the Sunni tradition’s own retrospective judgment that these four reigns, and only these four, were rightly guided. Shia Muslims do not read the period this way at all. We use the term because the sources do, not out of deference to either side.

4.2 | Omar’s Conquests & Uthman’s Codex

Commander of the Faithful

When Abu Bakr died in 634 (13 AH), he did something the shura had not authorized: he named his own successor. Ali’s popularity had grown considerably in the two years since the Prophet’s death, and Abu Bakr and Umar remained convinced that the Hashemites must not inherit the office.

So Abu Bakr named his protégé, Umar, as second Caliph of the Ummah.

It has to be said, though, that naming him settled nothing by itself. Umar could not rule without the consensus of the Ummah — the same requirement Abu Bakr had faced. And, like Abu Bakr, he was granted it.

The loud and powerful Umar styles himself Amir al-Mu’manin — Commander of the Faithful. He was an enormous, bald, physically intimidating man, and under his command the Ummah expands at a rate almost impossible to wrap your head around. He personally meets both superpowers of the period in the field of battle and beats them decisively. Damascus, Jerusalem, Egypt, Libya — they fall like dominoes.

In 636, at Yarmuk, the Muslim armies destroy the main Christian Byzantine field army in Syria. Against the Sassanid Persians near Qadisiya, there is a famous parley in which the Persian commander dismisses the Arabs as poor and starving, comparing them to a mouse that gorges itself until it is too fat to escape its own hole — trapped by its own greed. The Arabs were unimpressed. Within a few years, the Persian capital of Ctesiphon falls. Under Umar, the Ummah destroys the Sassanid (Persian) Empire.

Jerusalem surrendered too. The story goes that the caliph traveled to accept the surrender of the holy city with a single servant and a single donkey, the two men taking turns riding and walking, so that when they finally arrived the waiting Christians mistook the servant for the caliph. “No pomp,” Tamim Ansary writes. “That was Omar’s style, according to legend.”

These were Christian cities, and not incidentally so. Damascus was a Byzantine provincial capital built around the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist; Muslims and Christians would share that site for two generations before it became an Umayyad Mosque. The Jerusalem once burned by the Romans had been rebuilt as a Christian pilgrimage city over centuries of imperial patronage. Egypt was Christian, too.

And Caliph Umar took each of these wealthy Christian provinces as his own. So why didn’t the Eastern (Byzantine) Christians fight harder for them?

Recall the theological fractures we traced back in Sec. 2.2. Most of these Christians were the wrong kind of Christian by Byzantine standards. Syria leaned Miaphysite. Egypt was overwhelmingly Coptic Miaphysite. These were precisely the communities the imperial church in Constantinople had spent centuries pressuring to conform — the losing side of Nicaea’s long aftermath, taxed and legislated and occasionally persecuted by their own emperor for believing the wrong things about Christ.

So consider the arithmetic from a Miaphysite doorway in Damascus, or a Coptic one in Alexandria. Trading a Byzantine emperor for a Muslim caliph was not an obvious downgrade — and, in tax terms, it was frequently a huge win (ie. the jizyah discussed in Sec. 3.4 was often more favorable than eastern imperial Christian tax requirements). Historians still argue over how much this actually accelerated the early Islamic conquests, and we won’t settle it here. But either way, an army at the gate isn’t always a loss for those inside.

To problematize the image of the ‘conquering Islamic horde’ further, consider how Umar garrisons his men. The caliph would deliberately set his standing army apart from conquered populations, rather than letting soldiers settle among them. His standing orders to new regional governors emphasized slow change. And, interestingly, he worked to treat non-Arab Muslims as the equal of Arabs — just as the former began to outnumber the latter.

Back home, in an attempt to make amends with Ali’s clan, he offered to give the Hashemites full control of Muhammad’s Medina estates. He also married Ali’s own daughter, and consulted Ali, now his father-in-law, on matters of state. But the one political reality on which Umar would never move was his and the late Abu Bakr’s position: that the Prophethood and the Caliphate cannot reside in the same clan.

The Deathbed Shura

In 644 (23 AH), Umar is stabbed in the mosque at Medina while leading prayers.

The once hot-headed man who had refused to believe the Prophet was dead had evolved into a shrewd, if not disciplined, ruler. In his final act as caliph, Umar refuses to name a successor — so that the Hashemites, his wife’s clan, cannot be slighted a second time. Instead, he summons the six leading candidates to his deathbed and instructs them to settle it among themselves in the ancient form of the shura, with the Companion Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf serving as Hakam — their neutral arbitrator.

They narrow it down to two: the Hashemite Ali, and the Umayyad Uthman (Osman).*

Uthman was an early convert who had known Muhammad personally. He was wealthy, well-connected, and mild-mannered to the point of utter dullness. In fact, his dullness was his chief qualification. He was the exact opposite of the passionate, brilliant, uncompromising (and, thus, deeply polarizing) Hashemite, Ali.

The Hakam put two questions to each man. The second was whether, as caliph, he would follow the precedents set by the first two caliphs. Uthman said yes. Ali, insulted, said no.

Uthman was then endorsed by the Ummah as the third caliph.

Predictably, the Hashemites went into a rage — not because Uthman was dull, but because he was an Umayyad. The Umayyad clan was among the most powerful of the Qurayshi tribe. In life, they were among Muhammad’s most bitter enemies. Their clan’s part in the Meccan war was devastating — Uthman’s uncle had led the Qurayshi armies against the Prophet and the Ummah! Now, the clan of Muhammad (Ali and the Hashemites) was being asked to bend the knee to the clan of Muhammad’s enemies (the Umayyads), all in the name of Islam.

Then Uthman made it worse. Much worse…

After taking office, he replaced most of the regional governors with members of his immediate family and began handing his relatives enormous sums from the public treasury. And he adopted a bizarre new title: Khalifat Allah, the Successor to God.

Abu Bakr had been Successor to the Messenger of God, and had pointedly refused anything grander. Uthman now presented himself as successor to God Almighty.

The Uthman Codex

All of this has to be set against the other side of Uthman, who was genuinely and strenuously pious. When his wives refused to accept Islam, he divorced them and married two of Muhammad’s daughters. When a group of persecuted Muslims fled to Abyssinia, he went along as their financial backer. In Medina, he expanded the Prophet’s Mosque and bought the community a strategic well out of his own pocket.

But all of this is a small footnote to what he did next.

Uthman set the Ulama, the Learned Ones, to the holiest and most critical task left after the Prophet’s death: to produce one authoritative written edition of the Qur’an.

Until then, the revelation had been preserved chiefly by the Qurra, the Prophet’s authorized reciters, and committed to writing only piecemeal: verses scratched onto pieces of bone, scraps of leather, and the flat ribs of palm leaves. Written verses were collected from across the Islamicate world. Surviving Companions were interviewed. Discrepancies among early local Islamic traditions were resolved.

Around 650 CE, a single binding text was authorized — and the variant collections, tradition states, were rounded up and burned.

Objections came at once, from Iraq, Syria, and Egypt. But note what the objectors were not saying. Their specific complaint, Aslan carefully observes, was never that the local Qur’ans were better or more accurate. It was that Caliph Uthman had overstepped the bounds of his secular authority in dictating the sacred text. Which is to say: the fight over the codex was another fight about that line between political power and religious authority — the line Abu Bakr had drawn on his first day in office, and that Uthman had now stepped across in the most conspicuous way imaginable.

Uthman’s authorized edition arranged its surahs roughly by length, which is how they stand today. And the result is extraordinary. The Qur’an that Uthman held in his hands, in the original Meccan Arabic, is the same recited by nearly two billion Muslims this morning.

4.3 | The First Fitnah

The Murder of Uthman, Successor to God

Uthman made enemies at a rate that would have alarmed a less confident man: not just the old enemies of the Umayyad clan, but senior Companions, and eventually even the Hakam who had handed him the office in the first place.

By 655 (34 AH), eleven years in, revolts are breaking out across the Islamicate world — and the grievance is nearly always the same: the corruption and incompetence of the caliph’s relatives in the provinces. The anger reaches into the Medina mosque itself, where the elderly caliph is pelted with stones during Friday Jummah prayers and knocked clean off the minbar (pulpit) onto the floor.

Several Companions urge him to repent publicly of his nepotism and make amends. But his kinsman and adviser Marwan talks him out of it. Uthman holds his course.

Two of his kinsmen governed the richest provinces in the empire, and both were notorious. From Damascus, Uthman’s cousin Mu’awiya (Mo'aviyeh) was enriching himself at great expense to his subjects. And in Egypt, Uthman’s foster brother Abdullah ibn Sa’d was squeezing his once Coptic Christian province dry.

Prominent Egyptians write to the caliph and get no reply. So they send a delegation to Medina in person, and are joined en route by delegates from Basra, Kufa, and elsewhere. Uthman hears them out and agrees to replace the Governor of Egypt. The delegation starts for home satisfied.

And then, on the road, they intercept a letter. It is carried by one of Uthman’s own slaves. In the letter, Uthman instructs the Governor of Egypt to arrest and execute the delegates the moment they arrive.

Some historians claim the letter is a forgery. Uthman swore he never wrote it, and both of our scholars, Aslan and Ansary, record the judgment of later historians that its likely author was, in fact, Marwan. Honestly, though, it made no difference. The petitioners march back to Medina and arrive as an angry mob. They demand the caliph abdicate his throne. He refuses and goes back to reading his Qur’an.

Touchingly, among Uthman’s defenders were Ali’s sons. Hasan helps to hold the door, as Husayn (Hossein) carries water through the siege. Uthman himself forbids his supporters from shedding blood on his behalf.

Nevertheless, the mob breaks into the house, smashes Uthman’s belongings, and then beats the old leader to death. The tradition remembers his blood soaking into the pages of the open Qur’an he had been reading.

The Party of Ali

Ali was at prayer when word reached him.
His first thought was for Hasan, who had tried to shield the caliph from the mob.

The day after the murder, a congregation gathers at the mosque and begs Ali to take the Caliphate. After twenty-five years of watching other men hold the office, he still says no. The assassination was appalling; the mob still controlled Medina, and to accept the office from them was to accept rule from a mob.

But the support for Ali kept building: the Hashemites, the Ansar of Medina, several prominent Companions, a few Qurayshi clans, and many of the non-Arab Muslim communities. Collectively, these supporters became known as the Shi’atu Ali, the Party of Ali. More commonly known today as the Shia.

Ali finally accepts and takes his oath in the mosque before all of Medina. Believing that Uthman’s bizarre antics had tainted the word itself, he refuses to be called “Caliph,” taking Umar’s old charge instead: Commander of the Faithful. Ali then declares a general amnesty for the mob, and he removes the problematic Umayyad governors, replacing them with qualified local men.

Both decisions were defensible. Both were catastrophic.

By this point the Ummah has sorted itself into four distinct positions on what the Caliphate even is — and it is worth discussing them, because the next thirty years are, by and large, these four arguments conducted with weapons.

The Party of Uthman, led now by Aisha and carrying the convictions of her late father Abu Bakr and his protégé Umar: the caliph’s power should be confined to political matters, with religious questions left to the Ulama.

The Party of Ali, the Shia: Ali and the Hashemites, as the family of the Prophet, should govern both the political and the religious destiny of the Ummah.

The Kharijites, a smaller faction within Ali’s own camp: the most pious living Muslim should lead the divinely ordained Ummah, irrespective of tribe, lineage, or ancestry. At the moment, that man was Ali. But it need not stay Ali. This group also grew obsessed with labeling those who disagreed with them kafir: unbeliever.

The Party of Mu’awiya: the Umayyad clan, who had run Arabia’s economy from Mecca for generations and now held a claim to the office through the murdered Uthman, should rule the expanding empire. To that end, the Umayyad Governor of Damascus was already raising an army on Egyptian taxes.

By Ali’s time as leader of the Caliphate, the neo-tribal dream of Muhammad is all but gone. Larger financial and imperial ambitions have flooded into his Ummah. And the future of Islam is about to be decided on a battlefield.

The Camel & Siffin

Aisha, Muhammad’s youngest widow and Abu Bakr’s daughter, goes to Mecca to raise an army against Ali (her own stepson-in-law, if you’re counting).

Aisha’s position was that of her father’s, held consistently for 24 years: the clan of Muhammad cannot hold both religious and political authority over the Ummah. It is too much power for one family. She rallies the Meccan elite, and with a group of Meccan warriors she rides out to meet Ali in the field, leading the cavalry herself from the back of a camel.

It is remembered as the Battle of the Camel (36 AH), and it is the Ummah’s first taste of fitnah — their first civil war. Muslims are now killing Muslims over the question of who should be their leader.

Talha and Zubayr, two of Ali’s most prominent opponents, both Companions of the Prophet, are killed. Aisha herself is wounded by an arrow. Ansary reckons the field left some 10,000 Muslim dead.

When it’s over, Ali pardons Aisha (his stepmother-in-law and late wife's stepmother, if you’re counting). She lives out her days as a revered teacher and transmitter of the tradition, and her authority in the Hadith remains considerable to this day.

Ali then moves his seat of government to Kufa, in Iraq, to reward the city’s loyalty. He will never return to Medina. Instead, Ali turns west, toward his enemy Mu’awiya — who had by then been parading the alleged bloody shirt of Uthman from town to town, asking local leaders to join him in a coup against Ali.

The two armies met at the Battle of Siffin.

The battle opens with Mu’awiya’s forces trying to block Ali’s army from reaching the river, and then settles into months of stalemate before the real fighting begins. When it comes, the slaughter is staggering: some sources, Ansary hedges, put the toll as high as 65,000 Muslims dead over four blood-soaked days.

Ali tries repeatedly to stop it. He asks Mu’awiya to negotiate, again and again. There was even an offer to settle the Caliphate by single combat — both in their mid-50s — a slender, battle-ready Ali agreed, while a rich and portly Mu’awiya declined.

Then, with the battle apparently turning in Ali’s favor, Mu’awiya orders his soldiers to fix pages of the Qur’an to the points of their lances.

It was a cynical maneuver, and everyone knew it. The Kharijite faction pushes Ali to ignore the stratagem — to cut down the rebels, the kafirs, for their insubordination. He does not. Facing the Qur’an on the field, Ali grounded his refusal in the Qur’an’s own rule of restraint:

“if [the enemy] desists, then you must also cease hostilities.” QUR’AN 2:193

So Ali calls for a parley. A Hakam led lengthy negotiations, and with tens of thousands already dead, the best that could be agreed was a partition: Mu’awiya and the Umayyads would hold Egypt and Syria. Ali would keep everything east.

Ali had obeyed his scripture. It cost him everything.

4.4 | The Umayyad Turn

No Judgment but God Alone

The Kharijites regard Ali’s agreement to arbitration as a grave sin.

Their thinking was, if the Caliphate is a divinely ordained office, then submitting its disposition to a panel of human negotiators is a categorical error. God’s judgment is not the sort of thing men arbitrate.

Crying “No judgment but God alone!” the Kharijites abandon Ali on the blood-soaked field. To their view, Ali forfeited his office the moment he agreed to discuss it.

Three years later, in the mosque at Kufa, Ali is at prayer when a Kharijite named Ibn Muljam pushes through the crowd. “Judgment belongs to God, Ali, not to you!” he shouts, and kills the fourth and final Rashidun caliph with a poisoned sword.

The Kharijite movement itself eventually dwindled into an historical footnote. But what remains of them was their penchant for declaring another Muslim an unbeliever, and treating that declaration as a license for violence. This Kharijite view has resurfaced in every century since, and Muslim critics of modern extremist groups routinely reach for exactly this comparison, naming ISIS in particular as the Kharijites coming round again.

Hasan Steps Aside

Ali’s supporters then turn to his eldest son, Hasan, to take up the Hashemite claim.

He declines.

And Hasan’s reasoning is the epitaph for the whole era. Like it or not, the Caliphate was now a global empire, stretching from the Zagros Mountains of Persia to the desert sands of Libya. It was no longer the holy egalitarian community it had once been dreamed to be. To claim the office at this point, Hasan judged, would be little more than a power grab — one more round of court intrigue ending in the deaths of tens of thousands of Muslims.

So he steps aside. And with that, the first era of Islamic history was over.

In Ali’s place, Mu’awiya — Uthman’s cousin, the Governor of Damascus — moves the seat of power from Kufa in Iraq to Damascus in Syria, and, in 661, inaugurates the Umayyad Caliphate — just 40 years after the Hijra.

The first Islamic empire. Not a shura. Not a community of consent. A dynasty, seated in a Roman provincial capital, that would pass from father to son.

Sunni & Shia

The question that opened this section — who leads the Ummah, and by what right? — was never actually settled. Not at the Camel, not at Siffin, not at Damascus.

In a real sense, it is still an open question,
as the two great Islamic traditions grew out of it.

Sunni Muslims (the Majority) hold that the community was right to choose its leaders by consensus, beginning with Abu Bakr, and that the Rashidun era is the model of legitimate succession. Shia Muslims (the Party of Ali) trace their name to the Shi’atu Ali and hold that leadership belonged by right to Ali and to the family of the Prophet, and that the community, however sincerely, chose wrong in a courtyard in Medina in 632. As non-sectarian scholars, our work is to describe both readings accurately and to leave the adjudicating to those who hold to them.

What is striking is how much the two share. Ali is revered across both branches. For Sunnis, he is the fourth of the Rightly Guided Caliphs. For Shia Muslims, he is something considerably more — the first Imam.

Today, roughly two billion people are Muslims. About 90% are Sunni. Nearly all the rest are Shia, concentrated in Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, and Lebanon. Think about that — a quarrel among a few thousand people over who should lead a desert oasis community now defines the religious lives of a quarter of our planet.

And it only gets worse from here. Because what makes the Shia claim really burn, what turns a political grievance into a theology of martyrdom and suffering, has not happened yet in our telling. It will take place 20 years later…

In a dusty plain in Iraq called Karbala.

Last Section: Jihad & the Holy City of Medina
This Section: After Muhammad
Next Section: Kalam & Shia Islam

Pictured: Al-Masjid an-Nabawi | The Prophet’s Mosque, Medina, Saudi Arabia
est. 622 CE, expanded many times, last major expansion 1994 CE

Overview

In this section, we trace the Hijra: the emigration that marks Year 1 of the Islamic calendar (AH), and describe the founding of the Ummah at Medina. We situate Muhammad's social reforms within 7th-century Arabian society: the Constitution of Medina, the reform of the ancient Law of Retribution, zakat, and the changing status of women. We then describe the war with Mecca (at Badr, Uhud, and the Trench) and trace the two doctrines of jihad that emerge from this period. The section closes with Islam's early relationship to the Jews and Christians of Arabia: the dhimmi, the jizyah, and the Qibla (direction of prayer).

Assigned Reading
Reza Aslan, No god but God, chapters 3–4

Key Terms for this Section
Hijra · Ummah · Zakat · Hijab · Hadith · Jihad · Dhimmi · Jizyah

3.1 | The Hijra & the Constitution of Medina

The Secret

In 622, the weeklong exodus of Muhammad's Sahabah (Companions) to the distant city of Yathrib was a well-guarded secret in Mecca.

Known as the Hijra, the flight of the Sahabah was as dangerous as it was alienating. In all, about 70 Meccans left the comforts of home and family for the promise of Muhammad's profound message. These 70 Companions are known as the Muhajirun — those who have made the flight. And those who received them in Yathrib and assisted them became known as the Ansar — the Helpers. Together, Muhammad establishes the first masjid (Arabic word for mosque), which is also his home, in Yathrib. Eventually, the loose collection of villages of Yathrib will become known as Medina, literally the City (Madinat an-Nabi, the City of the Prophet), and will become the capital city of the initial Muslim community. This period is so central to the story of Islam that it marks Year 1 of the Islamic Calendar (“After the Hijra,” A.H. 1).

Muhammad, Settler of Disputes

When Muhammad arrives in Yathrib, he is effectively the Shaykh of the Muhajirun — the political clan leader of the new Meccan émigrés. As such, he is one of several Shaykhs in Yathrib. He also makes a name for himself as a Hakam — a settler of disputes between the clans.

Of course, to his 70 or so followers, Muhammad is much more than a mere Shaykh or Hakam. For them, Muhammad is Rasul Allah — the final Messenger of God.

The prevailing political and economic authority of Yathrib was a loose confederation of about 20 Jewish-Arab clans. The Jews of Yathrib, who numbered in the thousands, were craftsmen, weaponsmiths, and cultivators of dates and wine, while the nearby pagan Bedouins herded sheep and camels. These two strata — the settled Jewish Arabs and the nomadic Bedouins — benefited each other in Yathrib’s oasis. Five of these clans held an especially large share of that wealth, including the Banu Qaynuqa, who also controlled the oasis’s only marketplace, along with the Banu Nadir and the Banu Qurayza. But (Aslan is careful to note this), for the most part, the Jews and Arabs of Yathrib lived in relative peace, bound together by strategic alliance and economic interdependence. The real fault line ran between the Arabs themselves: the rival confederations of the Aws and the Khazraj, locked in a feud whose origins had been long lost to memory by Muhammad’s time, and which even the ancient Law of Retribution had failed to settle. By the time Muhammad arrived in Yathrib, the eternal quarrel had spread among the Jewish clans as well. The Jewish Nadir and Qurayza clans sided with the Bedouin Aws, while the Jewish Qaynuqa sided with the Bedouin Khazraj. This split the oasis in two. What Yathrib needed was an outsider — a Hakam and Shaykh — with no kin and no old grievance in Yathrib to answer for.

Muhammad was the right man at the right time, now in the right place to help bring an ancient blood feud to an end.

The Birth of the Ummah

In Yathrib, Bedouin Aws and Khazraj tribes see Muhammad as a wise Hakam — an outsider brought in to end their feud. To the wider oasis, he is one Shaykh among many, and leader of a small clan of outsiders. But to the Muhajirun (those who left Mecca) and the Ansar (the Helpers), he remains Rasul Allah, the Messenger of God.

This is where the Ummah begins.
Not yet an Islamic nation.
Not yet a regional power the Quraysh in Mecca need fear,
but a community of common belief.

Today, the Ummah specifically refers to the international Muslim community. But it’s important to note, as the scholar Frederick Denny shows, that this term has evolved from its Medinan beginnings. The Arabic word ummah (أُمَّة) can be traced at least as far back as Genesis (25:16), where it’s used in Ancient Hebrew to mean tribe. In Muhammad’s 7th-century Arabic use, the ummah came to mean those who agreed to the Prophet’s message. Moreover, Denny ties the ummah to political and theological decisions Muhammad makes as his standing in Medina firms up — decisions this section will follow, including the day he turns the direction of prayer away from Jerusalem and toward the Ka’ba in Mecca.

3.2 | The Medina Reforms: Women & Hadith

The Lawgiver

Over the last 1400 years, the Ummah of Medina has remained the classical standard for Islamic society. Why? Because it was there that Muhammad was finally able to enact the radical social reforms he had once dreamed of pursuing in his native Mecca.

First, he collapses the ancient Arab tribal offices — Elder (Shaykh), Judge (Hakam), Warlord (Qa’id), and Mystic (Kahin) — into one: Lawgiver. And Muhammad, like Moses before him, takes on the mantle of Lawgiver of his people.

No pre-Islamic Arab ever held all four at once; the Arabs were too wary of concentrated power to allow it. The Elder carried the least formal authority but the most moral weight: elected as first among equals, his sole job was to guarantee the protection of every member of the tribe, especially those who could least protect themselves, and his standing rested on a personal oath of loyalty (bay’ah) that could be withdrawn the moment he failed. The Judge was the neutral party brought in to arbitrate disputes the tribe’s Law of Retribution left unclear — his rulings, accumulated over years, hardened into a tribe’s Sunna, its body of unwritten legal precedent. The Warlord led the tribe in battle. And the Mystic held the Kahin‘s office, the tribe’s one sanctioned channel to the divine.

Muhammad now held all four titles in a single person, the Lawgiver.

As Lawgiver to the Ummah, Muhammad opens the tribe to new members. Under the old system, you were born into a clan. Now anyone may join the Ummah by swearing an oath of allegiance, the Creed (called the Shahadah in Arabic): “There is only One God, and Muhammad is His Messenger.”

This makes the Ummah a new kind of tribe — one that can accept anyone and expand forever.

Within the Ummah, the Law of Retribution (ie. an eye for an eye) is reformed. Muhammad implores his followers to grant forgiveness instead — a Jewish and Christian custom — which, he maintains, God will reward (Qur’an 42:40). And where the Law of Retribution is followed, everyone in the Ummah is now treated equally. A Shaykh’s eye is now worth the same as a destitute orphan’s.

The Women of the Ummah

As Lawgiver, Muhammad also makes reforms for women without precedent in Arabia.

After a decisive battle in 625 (cf. Sec. 3.3), the widower Muhammad ensured that the widowed women of the Ummah had the right to inherit their husbands’ property and to keep their wedding dowries as their own. He also limits the number of wives a man may marry, and he grants women permission to divorce their husbands (and keep the dowry!). No doubt this deference to women owes much to the abiding love Muhammad carried for his late wife of 25 years, Khadija.

And what about the men who came to the Prophet complaining about a woman’s traditional place? Muhammad’s answer is simple: those who do not honor these reforms will burn in Hell forever (Qur’an 4:14). End of discussion.

Over his 10 years in Medina, the widower Muhammad will marry nine different women. Generally, these are unions with a political framing — paralleling European aristocratic practices well into the 20th century. In short, marriage was a political act for most of history. It certainly was among the élite of 7th-century Arabia. His betrothal to Aisha (Ayesheh) links him politically to Abu Bakr, while his marriage to Hafsah links him to Umar (Omar) — both central figures of the early Ummah. He joins a powerful Meccan clan by marrying Umm Salamah. He also marries both a Jew and a Christian, Rayhana and Mariyah. He even marries an elderly widow, Sawdah, as an example to other men to marry those in need.

As wives of the Prophet, living in a house that also served as a mosque to countless guests, these women covered themselves with a veil (ie. hijab) to preserve their modesty among visitors in a holy place. In this way, taking the veil — darabat al-hijab — became a way of saying, “married to Muhammad.” She has ‘taken the veil.’ Conversely, in the Qur’an, the term hijab is only ever applied to the Prophet’s wives and to no other woman in the Ummah. (Compare this to the Christian teaching in
I Corinthians 11:5-6, which instructs all Christian women to cover their heads.)

Traditionalist Islamicists read the Qur’an’s modesty verses (24:31; 33:59) as extending the practice of hijab to all Muslim women — and their reading remains authoritative across much of the Islamicate world today. As non-sectarian scholars, we can describe both readings without adjudicating between them.

Almsgiving & Hadith

Muhammad also outlaws interest loans (ie. usury) — the practice the Quraysh had used to keep the poor of Mecca poor. In the Prophet’s City, the market is tax-free, and loans carry no interest. In their place, Muhammad redistributes wealth through zakat: 2.5% of a person’s accumulated wealth, given to the poor.

And make no mistake: zakat is not charity. Islamic almsgiving is a holy obligation, second only to prayer. Every capable member of the Ummah must do this to be a Muslim.

After Muhammad’s eventual death (cf. Sec. 4), a great variety of religious questions (like the hijab) continued to need answers. The Ummah will look first to the early Companions (Sahabah), and their stories will become the beginnings of the Hadith: the oral accounts of the life, deeds, and words of Muhammad not found in the Qur’an.

The practice of looking back on the accounts of eyewitnesses* to Muhammad becomes a research skill in and of itself. Sussing out the authenticity of a teaching’s chain of transmission — its isnad — will become a subject of great study and debate in Islamic theology. Entire schools of thought will swing on the hinge of an Islamic teaching’s credibility via its isnad.

*Especially important to scholars of Hadith is how a teaching was transmitted: sami'tu (direct, as in, “I heard [him say]”), or 'an (the more ambiguous, “on the authority of”). An 'an-report from a trustworthy narrator is generally accepted, but from a narrator with a record of concealing his sources, the vague form can be grounds for theological rejection. The Hadith collectors even disagreed on how much proof of contact between narrators an 'an required.

3.3 | Jihad & the War with Mecca

Jihad: History & Caricature

For years, there has been an unfortunate stereotype of Islam: a horde of savage warriors with scimitars raised, charging on camelback, hellbent on world domination.

Reza Aslan traces this caricature of the “warrior religion” to the Middle Ages, when the leaders of Christendom sought to take the Holy Land (and the lucrative trade roads to China) from the Islamicate world. Whether it’s King Richard fighting Saladin for Jerusalem, the Holy Roman Empire against the Turks, or the Allies seizing oil fields in the modern Middle East, Aslan argues there has always been an economic incentive in the West to draw the Islamic world as a caricature of evil barbarity.

As scholars, our interest is in looking past the headlines, the speeches, and the propaganda to ask how this image actually developed.

7th-century Islam came about in an era of great socio-religious empires. To the north lay the Christian Byzantine Empire — inheritors of the Roman world, from Constantinople to Jerusalem. To the east lay the ancient Zoroastrian Sassanian Empire — descendants of the mighty Persians of Biblical and historical legend. All else was little more than desert and ocean.

The early Islamic attitude toward religion ran parallel to that of their Byzantine and Sassanian neighbors:

“Your religion was your ethnicity, your culture, and your social identity; it defined your politics, your economics, and your ethics. More than anything else, your religion was your citizenship.” Reza Aslan, No god but God

As such, the early Ummah was not out to force converts (despite how it is often otherwise portrayed). Conversion for non-Arabs was, in fact, a complicated matter. It’s more accurate to say the Arab Muslims formed a kind of aristocratic clique in the lands they conquered, slow to accept outsiders.

So, was Islam a “religion of the sword” as is often claimed?
Actually, this is the wrong question — or, at least, a question posed in bad faith. Why?

Because the early Ummah had swords just like the Christian Byzantines, the Zoroastrian Persians, the kingdoms of India, the Daoists of China, the Vikings, the Saxons, the Welsh, the Mayans, the Pueblo, and every other culture living in the 7th century. Calling early Islam a “religion of the sword” pretends it is different than their 7th-century Christian, Zoroastrian, and pagan neighbors who also carried swords. Calling it another religion of the 7th century, that also had swords like everyone else, is certainly more fitting.

The fact is, Islam would not have survived the Meccan Quraysh — much less the Byzantines or the Sassanids — without the sword.

Now, what the question of Islam being a “religion of the sword” is often really asking is what role jihad (جِهَاد) has in Islam. Jihad (meaning “to struggle”) may be the most misunderstood concept in all of Islam and is worthy of our attention here, before we start counting off battles in which the Prophet Muhammad engaged.

There are two forms of jihad (struggle) in the Qur’an.

The Greater Jihad is the internal struggle to overcome sin and the obstacles standing between oneself and God — analogous to the “narrow way” Jesus describes in his Sermon on the Mount (Matt 7:14). The Lesser Jihad is the outer struggle to secure the peace and welfare of one’s community. When the community comes under attack, the lesser jihad takes the form of defensive war.

The theological logic here is simple. If the battle is defensive, it is just. If the battle is offensive, it is unjust (Qur’an 2:190). This is why Aslan argues that there is no concept of “holy war” in Islam — only the struggle for peace for one’s community (ie. the lesser jihad) and peace for one’s own soul (ie. the greater jihad).

Such is his normative, modern Islamicist view. But the concept has been put to other uses by other Islamicists. Since the Medieval era of the Crusades, a stream of thought has developed that Aslan calls the “Classical Doctrine of Jihad.” In this way of thinking, the world splits in two — the Islamic world (dar al-Islam) who fights the World at War (dar al-Harb). Here, the former must fight the latter until it yields to Islam. This is the view of breakaway, Islamist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda.

However, the backlash among Muslims to the so-called Classical Doctrine cannot be overstated. The medieval theologian and jurist Ibn Taymiyya undermines the Classical Doctrine with the Qur’an itself:

“There is no compulsion in religion.” QUR’AN 2:256

Nevertheless, leaders like the Ayatollah Khomeini, Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, and Osama bin Laden have used the classical doctrine of jihad to justify modern campaigns of violence and terror in the name of Islam. While the vast majority of their victims have been other Muslims.

Two Fronts, One Victory

In 7th-century Medina, Muhammad comes to understand two things about his prophetic work.

First, the success of the Ummah has shown him that the larger world could benefit from his message (Qur’an 12:104). His vision of a radically egalitarian society could reach millions.

Secondly, it immediately follows from the first point that there will be no expansion of the Ummah so long as the powerful Qurayshi elite control Arabia’s dominant religious and economic center, the Ka’ba in Mecca.

This is why Muhammad comes to confront Qurayshi power on two fronts.

First, Muhammad declares the city of Medina itself a ḥaram — a holy sanctuary — placing it in direct competition with Mecca. Merchant caravans now have a choice: trade in Mecca, or trade in Medina, 300 miles to the north. (This declaration will later be written into the Constitution of Medina, once Muhammad has the standing to make it official.)

Secondly, Muhammad sends members of the Ummah on caravan raids. In 7th-century Arabia, this was a legitimate and traditional way for small clans to take a share of the riches of the super-wealthy. It rarely ended in bloodshed; merchants counted such petty thievery as a normal cost of doing business on the frontier. But Muhammad isn’t aiming to be a nuisance; he does this to disrupt Meccan power.

And it works!
Caravans begin skipping Mecca for Medina, and the Quraysh take decisive notice.

The first flashpoint comes at the Battle of Badr in 624 (AH 2). Nearly 1,000 Qurayshi warriors surprise 300 of Muhammad’s men along a caravan road. After days of eyeing each other across the valley, Muhammad will not allow his men to fight until they are attacked (cf. jihad). In fact, he continues his prayers even after the fighting starts — until Abu Bakr insists he rise and join the fight. Muhammad then leads his men to a 3-to-1 stunning victory! The Quraysh lose about 70 men, among them several key leaders. Muhammad loses 14.

For the Believers, Muhammad’s triumph shows that God has clearly blessed His Messenger. His 3-to-1 victory at Badr signals that the new Ummah has a real chance at eventual victory over the mighty Quraysh — and beyond them, perhaps the entire Arabian Peninsula! From that day until now, the Islamic Ummah controls the desert region of the Hijaz. And Yathrib becomes known as Medina. The City [of the Prophet].

From Badr also come the first principles of Islamic Just War. Unlike the pre-Islamic Quraysh, Muhammad acknowledges moral differences between combatants and non-combatants, and between offensive and defensive war. Later Islamic teaching will expand on these themes — prohibiting the torture of prisoners, the mutilation of the dead, sexual violence, the destruction of property, and protecting religious sites.

The Constitution of Medina

Victory changes everything, including what Muhammad can claim at home.

Islamic tradition places the Constitution of Medina at the very start of his time in Yathrib, drafted almost as soon as he arrived. But scholars like Reza Aslan and Michael Lecker date the document after the victory at Badr. The powers therein make little sense coming from a recently arrived Shaykh, while they fit well with a Lawgiver returning home with a defensive victory enjoyed by all.

It is often held up as history’s first written constitution. The Constitution of Medina binds the Companion émigrés, the Helpers (Ansar), and the rest of Medina’s clans — Jewish, Christian, and pagan alike — into a single pact of mutual defense. Each community keeps its own faith tradition outright: “to the Jews their religion and to the Muslims their religion.” But every signatory, Jewish clans included, now owes the others loyalty against outside attack. And the document grants Muhammad authority no mere Hakam had ever held: sole arbiter of every dispute in Medina, its recognized war leader (Qa’id), and — the Constitution states plainly — the Messenger of God.

The historian Moshe Gil reads it more bluntly still: less a ‘peace treaty’ than an early exercise in ‘sorting friend from foe’ before the war everyone sees coming. And the Constitution comes to immediate relevance: when Muhammad comes to suspect the Banu Qaynuqa (one of Medina’s most powerful Jewish clans) of breaking their sworn protection, the Constitution is what gives him the grounds to act. What that action looks like, and what it costs, picks up on the other side of Mecca.

3.4 | Jews, Christians, & the Return

The People of the Book

Antisemitism, by and large, has been far more a feature of Christendom than of the Islamicate world.

As the Muslim world expanded after Muhammad into Christian (northwest) and Zoroastrian (northeast) lands, the Jews the Ummah encountered generally received better rights and treatment than they had under their previous rulers. Put plainly: for Jews in the Middle Ages, trading a Christian ruler for an Islamic ruler was historically a net positive — both in terms of safety and prosperity.

Medieval Christians persecuted Jews for their beliefs, forced conversions on them, or killed them outright. The Muslims generally did not. Under Islamic law, Jews and Christians alike were known as dhimmi — protected peoples — because they were also the People of the Book (ahl al-Kitab): the ones who brought the Bible and the knowledge of the prophets to Arabia and the wider world. The tradition recounts Muhammad’s warning: He who wrongs a Jew or a Christian will have me as his accuser on the Day of Judgment.

Because they were not Muslims, the dhimmi did not pay zakat. Instead, they paid a (now controversial) protection tax: the jizyah. In exchange, Jews and Christians received religious autonomy and an elevated social status in the Islamic world. Facing the Christian antisemitism to the north, Medieval Jews came to call the Islamicate world “an act of God’s mercy.”

All of this arises from a central tenet of Islam: Muhammad’s message is indistinguishable from the message of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the People of Israel, Moses, and Jesus (Qur’an 3:84). As Moses brought the Torah (al-Tawrat), David the Psalms (Al-Zabur), and Jesus the Gospel (Al-Injil), so Muhammad — the Seal of the Prophets — brings the Qur’an. When Jews speak of the Jewish prophets, and when Christians speak of Jesus, Muslims happily honor these forebears of their own religion of Islam.

Muhammad takes special care to align the Ummah with the Jewish people. He first sets the Qibla (the Islamic direction of prayer) toward the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the same direction as Jewish prayer, then and now. He mandates an Islamic fast to coincide with Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. He sets the hour of Muslim congregation called “Jummah” at midday Friday — early enough not to interfere with the Jewish Sabbath at sundown. He adopts many of the Jewish dietary and purity laws. And he encourages his followers to marry Jews, as he has done.

However, as Islam develops its own features and traditions, the Qibla is eventually turned to face the Ka’ba in Mecca (as it is now), and the annual fast is moved to Ramadan (Ramazan) — the month in which the Qur’an was first revealed. But the esteem Muhammad placed on the Jewish people never wavers. To this day, after Mecca and Medina, Jerusalem remains the third holiest city of the Islamic world.

As for the Christians: Muhammad holds Jesus in great esteem. The Qur’an confirms that Jesus was born of a virgin (3:47), performed miracles (3:49), was the promised Messiah (3:45), and will judge humanity at the end of time (4:159).

The principal Islamic theological disagreement is specific to the Christian doctrine of Trinitarianism. As we covered in Sec 2.2, there were centuries-old communities of Christians, in Arabia and elsewhere, who honored Jesus as a holy prophet but not as God. Trinitarianism, by contrast, is the belief that God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all God. And this belief in particular — that a flesh-and-blood man could also be God — was anathema to Jews and Muslims alike. The Qur’an’s 112th surah answers it directly:

“Say, ‘He is God the One, God the eternal. He begot no one nor was He begotten. No one is comparable to Him.’” QUR’AN 112:1–4

And yet the Qur’an does not encourage bickering among the three sibling religions:

“People of the Book, let us arrive at a statement that is common to us all: we worship God alone, we ascribe no partner to Him, and none of us takes others beside God as lords.” QUR’AN 3:64

Allegiances & War

After Badr, the Jews, Christians, Hanifs, and growing Muslim population take sides.

Many flee Mecca and the surrounding region for Medina and join the Ummah. Others, particularly the Hanifs who disagree with the new prophet, head south to the Ka’ba and the Quraysh — seeking the way things used to be.

Amid the great exchange of allegiances, Muhammad comes to suspect that the Jewish Qaynuqa in Medina are in secret contact with the Quraysh in Mecca. Following a two-week siege, Muhammad exiles the Jewish Qaynuqa from Medina (Arab custom demanded their deaths, but Muhammad chose a lighter sentence). Their view was simple: the Quraysh were their primary financial partners, and they did not expect an upstart like Muhammad to win.

History proves them momentarily right. The next fight, the Battle of Uhud, proves an unmitigated disaster. Mid-battle, Muhammad’s undisciplined archers break ranks to take spoils from the field. The break opens his forces to be flanked by the Qurayshi army, and Muhammad barely escapes with his life.

This is all the proof the Jewish-Arab élites of Medina need to prove that Muhammad is unfit to lead. A second Jewish clan attempts to assassinate him. The plot is discovered, and Muhammad once again exiles the conspirators. Many veterans of Uhud are enraged at the mercy of this decision. They want blood — as custom demands.

Two more years of skirmishes follow, and neither side gains ground. So the Quraysh send a 10,000-strong Bedouin army to lay siege to Medina, and Muhammad answers with engineering: he orders a trench to be dug around the city.

The trench protecting Medina holds.
After a month, the besiegers run out of supplies and abandon the fight.

Then comes the darkest episode of the Medina years. It turns out that during the siege, a third Jewish-Arab clan — the Banu Qurayza — had been supplying the Bedouin army. For the Ummah, this is the last straw. They again plead with Muhammad to have the conspirators killed. Muhammad recuses himself, asking another Hakam to render the final judgment. The decision sides with ancient Arab custom: the men are killed, the women and children are enslaved, and their property is divided.

Aslan figures this involves about 1% of Medina’s Jewish population, alongside hundreds of fellow Arabs; after which, thousands of Jews continued to live peacefully with Muhammad in Medina throughout his life. To be clear, the Banu Qurayza were killed for their wartime alliance with a besieging army — not because they were Jews. It is later, under the caliph Umar (after Muhammad’s death), that the Jews of Medina are collectively exiled* from the Hijaz.

*It should be noted here that from the time of Umar until the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of Jews continued to thrive in Yemen, Iraq, Iran, and other Muslim regions.

Return to Mecca

Which brings us, at last, back to Mecca.

In the midst of a protracted war with the Quraysh, Muhammad makes a surprising announcement: he and 1,000 followers plan to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca. He will enter the holy city unarmed. And he will circumambulate the Ka’ba.

This decision confounds everyone. Just before his arrival, the Quraysh sign the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah with Muhammad, offering him and the Ummah an empty sanctuary the following season. He agrees. And when the Ummah return the next year as peaceful pilgrims, the people of Mecca see their character with their own eyes.

The treaty also lets other tribes across Arabia ally with either side without joining the war themselves — and it's this clause that ends up breaking the peace. Some ally with Muhammad while others choose the Quraysh. Two years later, a rival tribe attacks one of Muhammad's allies — with Qurayshi backing, chasing survivors into Mecca's own sacred sanctuary, where violence is supposed to be forbidden. It's a direct violation of the treaty: an attack on Muhammad's ally is an attack on Muhammad. The attacked tribe sends word to Medina pleading for help. The Quraysh, realizing what they've done, send their chief, Abu Sufyan, to Medina to try to salvage the peace, but Muhammad refuses to see him. Instead, the Ummah marches on Mecca with 10,000 warriors. Moreover, the people of Mecca have seen the quality of Muhammad's character first-hand. They know the truth about him, his message, and his community. And the people of Mecca accept Muhammad with open arms.

There are no forced conversions.
In total, only 10 Meccans are put to death.
Contrary to Arab custom, a general amnesty is declared for the whole city.
Even the slaves are freed.

At the city center, Muhammad and his son-in-law Ali approach the Ka’ba. One by one, Muhammad removes the pagan idols, raising them over his head, and smashes them to shards before a cheering crowd. The tradition recounts that the only image he spares is a Christian icon of Jesus and Mother Mary.

The last idol to go is the great Syrian god Hubal — in whose name so many of Muhammad’s enemies had hunted the Ummah. For Hubal, Muhammad draws his sword and hacks the idol to pieces. The shards are then refashioned as a doorstep to the Ka’ba. One now steps on Hubal to pray to Allah.

On the day Muhammad emptied the Ka’ba of Mecca, a new universal faith was declared, Islam. Today, two billion Muslims — roughly a quarter of our species — now celebrate the Ka’ba as the holy House of God.

North of Mecca, in the city of Medina, the small mosque that was once Muhammad’s home has grown over the centuries into the mighty al-Masjid an-Nabawi — the Prophet’s Mosque — raised over the site of that first structure and Muhammad’s tomb. It is the second holiest site in the Islamic world, after the Great Mosque of Mecca, and it draws millions of visitors each year.

And, to think, all of this started with a prophet on the run and a few dozen followers.

Last Section: Pre-Islamic Arabia & the Prophet
This Section: Jihad & the Holy City of Medina
Next Section: After Muhammad

The Gospel of Mark | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

γάρ gar • “for/because”: a small connective that reaches forward

Gar is a hinge, joining one thought to the next: this happened, because of that — and in Greek it rarely ends a sentence, because “because” needs something to come after it.

It is the last word of the Gospel of Mark.

Central Question for Part 5
Why doesn’t gMark end the story?

Hello!

Two comments this morning for anyone new, because it shapes how I read this text: I am a Jewish philosopher and historian, and I’ve spent much of my career examining the Middle World, particularly the first century. On this final occasion of our five-part series, I offer this single personal comment: I take what this text describes axiomatically for my own life. What is called herein the Kingdom of God — a world without war, run on God’s terms instead of Caesar’s, ever-present wherever two come together in peace — I hold this with my whole heart. I come to the kingdom as a Jew, but then, that’s also how the apostles came to it as well. It’s the reason I hope I am able to hand you something surprising from the text. Especially this morning, at the end.

In our first four Sundays together, we picked a fight with gMark’s opening sentence (the “good news,” the “Son of God”), as they were first engraved on monuments to the divine Caesar, then hung on a crucified Galilean Jew. We then witnessed the Kingdom arrive — without manger, angel, or star — irrupting from the wilderness, seeking John the Baptizer. Then we read a Gospel obsessed with sight — who sees, who’s blind, and who only half-sees — that ended with a blind beggar who saw clearly and followed. And, in our fourth lesson, we arrived at Jesus’ Last Week, in Jerusalem, and watched two powers — the Roman politicians and the Temple priesthood — see this Galilean as a threat that ended in Roman mockery on a Roman cross.

And here is our key word for the morning — the last of the five we’ve gathered on this walk: evangelion, the empire’s declaration of victory, which gMark reverses; exousia, the authority which Jesus illustrates by doing; horaō, the Greek verb for not just seeing with one’s eyes but perceiving a thing’s true nature, and lēstēs, a word which is often translated thief but in the first century was closer to insurgent. And today, perhaps the strangest key term of this series: Gar. It’s small. Depending on its usage, it can mean “for,” or “because.” It’s the kind of word you’d probably never notice — a little hinge that joins one thought to the next: this happened, because of that. It is, in Greek, almost always a word in the middle of a sentence, because “because” needs something to come after it. So I want you to hold onto that “because” — that gar. Because gMark is going to do something with gar that, as far as we can tell, practically no one in the ancient world ever did on purpose. He’s going to end his entire gospel with it. He’s going to stop his scroll — the first story of Jesus — on the word “because,” and we’re going to investigate why and what follows from it.

Now, a fellow scholar might stop me right there and say a handful of ancient texts do trail off on gar — and that’s fair; I’m not claiming it’s grammatically impossible. My point is, nobody ends an ancient story this way. You don’t close the most important account you will ever write on a word that is still reaching for the next phrase. That is the move gMark makes — and that broken-off sentence is the puzzle the whole morning will be built on.

Part One · The Women’s Terror

In this series, we generally begin each lesson with something strange, but I believe this one takes the cake. The oldest copies of this earliest gospel end mid-sentence. The text on our oldest copies ends on the word “because.”

The women go to the tomb. A man dressed in white tells them Jesus has been raised and sends them to go and tell the others. Instead, they run away terrified and say nothing to anyone. No appearance of the risen Jesus in this earliest gospel. No reunion with the disciples. No “go therefore into all the world.” The women flee in silence, the sentence breaks off on the word “because,” and the Gospel of Mark simply… stops. The earliest, best manuscripts we have give you nothing after that. And the question I want to sit with on our last morning together is this: why doesn’t gMark end the story?

There were also women looking on from a distance. Among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome, who followed him when he was in Galilee and ministered to him, and there were many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem. MARK 15:40-41

When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for (gar) they were afraid. MARK 16:1-8

Let’s start with who is standing there. Mark has been building toward this moment for sixteen chapters, and most readers will walk right past it.

Who’s at the cross? Not the twelve. The twelve are gone.

Judas sold him out and is shortly thereafter found dead.
Peter, the Rock, denied Jesus three times before the rooster finished crowing.
And at the arrest, gMark tells us flatly, “all of them deserted him and fled.” (14:50)

The men with the names — the men who’d asked the Christ for thrones and position, the inner circle — they all ran.

Then who stayed? gMark gives us a list: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joses, and Salome — and, the text adds, many other women who had followed him from Galilee (15:41). The women stayed. They stayed through the violence of the crucifixion. They watched where the body was laid. And at first light after the Sabbath, while the men are completely absent from the story (gMark won’t even tell you where they’ve gone), the women are walking to the tomb of an enemy of the state, with spices in their hands to honor their crucified Messiah.

Now notice the rhyme gMark builds into this scene. Just days earlier in this story — it’s one of the last things gMark shows you before the arrest — a woman at Bethany pours a jar of costly perfume over Jesus’s head. The men in the room called it a waste. And Jesus defended her with a strange sentence: she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial (14:8). This unnamed woman anointed Jesus for the grave while he is yet alive. And now, here, these women come to anoint his body in the grave. But this time, the body is gone. One woman prepared him for burial before he died; these three women arrive to finish the burial and find there’s no body to anoint. So, the women in this earliest gospel arrive at the truth, over and over again, while the men keep missing it. Here, at the end, we’re seeing the pattern repeated.

Now, let’s focus again on the tomb. The stone (a huge one — they’d worried the whole walk over about moving it) is found already rolled back. And inside, a young man in a white robe. gMark doesn’t call him an angel, by the way; gMatthew will, later. But this earliest telling of the story simply identifies him as a young man, dressed in white, just sitting there. And he says to the women, “Do not be alarmed. You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified. He has been raised. He is not here.”

Now, listen closely because this gets missed by the crowd who says “gMark has no resurrection.” The Gospel of Mark absolutely proclaims the resurrection. It’s right there, in our oldest manuscripts: he has been raised. The announcement is made (the evangelon, if you will) at the empty tomb. So when I tell you Mark “ends without a resurrection appearance,” it’s important that you hear my exact word: appearance. What gMark gives us is the announcement. What gMark withholds is the seeing. He never lets you lay eyes on the risen Jesus. gMatthew, gLuke, and gJohn — they all bring you face to face with the risen Jesus: in a garden, on a road, on a beach over breakfast. But this earliest gospel refuses those reassurances.

Here, the resurrection is declared. It is never displayed.

So let’s turn our attention to the announcement itself; it’s full of amazing insight if we slow down and read it carefully. Go, tell his disciples (the disciples who ran) and Peter (16:7). And Peter. The young man names him specifically. Peter, who swore three times he’d never even met Jesus — and the very first message from the empty tomb makes a point of including him by name. Here, I am reminded of the prophet Isaiah.

O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you.
I have called you by name, you are mine. Isaiah 43:1

Here, after the crucifixion, Peter is called by name. Qarati veshimcha. “I have called you by name.” The denier is not written off; he is sent for! A few weeks ago in this Gospel, Jesus healed a blind man in two touches — the first left the man ‘seeing people as walking trees,’ while the second touch made him whole. That miracle was gMark’s picture of Peter — he sees Jesus’ title right (“Messiah”), but his sight is blurred. Peter doesn’t see Jesus clearly yet — in Lesson 3 we discussed why Peter can’t fathom a crucified Messiah. Like the half-healed man before him, Peter is waiting on that second touch. It arrives with being called by name from the tomb.

Now Jesus has risen. Peter is redeemed. And his sight is made full.

And where is Jesus going? To Galilee — back where the whole thing started, Mark chapter one, the wilderness and the lakeshore. In gMark, the risen Jesus doesn’t go up; he goes back — back to the beginning, back to where the apostles were ‘first called,’ as if to say: we start again, from there, and you’re all invited again, even those who denied me.

But the women… the women have it. They feel, and act on, and understand the good news of this Gospel in ways that leave the men behind. And in the last chapter, they have a direct command to carry it. So let’s look at the last sentence of the text. “They went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (16:8). They said nothing. To anyone. They were told to go and tell, and they ran, and they were silent, because they were afraid.

Here, gMark pays off something that has been building since the first chapter. All through this Gospel, the truth keeps getting hushed. The demons name Jesus, and he silences them (1:34). He heals, and tells people to say nothing (1:43-44). Peter names Jesus the Messiah, and is ordered to keep it quiet (8:29-30). The truth of this Gospel seems too much to speak out loud — pressed down, redirected, silenced. And now, at the empty tomb, the command comes full circle. Now that it is accomplished, the young man says to the women, don’t be silent. Go and tell!

For the whole Gospel the order was to hush the truth. Here, at the end, that order is rescinded, and the new order is to carry the truth forward. Yet the women — who have followed more faithfully than anyone else — are also struck silent. Not by Jesus’ command, nor for fear of their lives. They are struck silent because they are asked to do something that no one had ever done before. Their moment brings to mind the scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the ape throws a bone — the first tool — and the shot transitions into a spaceship thousands of years later. The women at the tomb, those closest to Jesus’ death, cannot wrap their heads around this cosmic encounter, and a hush falls over them. As they stand at the edge of tomorrow, glimpsing darkly at the future, gMark says they are seized by “terror and amazement.”

The Greek word we translate here as terror is tromos. It denotes physical trembling, not just a state of mind. And the word here rendered as amazement is ekstasis. It is the root of our word “ecstasy.” In Greek, it literally means to stand (stasis) outside (ek) of yourself. This is not an emotion, like joy or sadness. It’s less definable than that. You feel ecstasy when you experience transcendent moments beyond rational measure. You can feel it gazing at a field of stars or witnessing the birth of a child. I could spill a lifetime of ink in an attempt to explain what it is to be a mother, and I would fail. It is simply beyond the mind’s ability to measure. Instead, you experience it. The ecstasy of a swift ocean current carrying your boat, of seeing the first flight in the sky, or gliding through a light field of burning stars. This is the state of amazed silence that the bravest of Jesus’ followers found themselves in at the empty tomb.

They simply did not have the words. And gMark ends the passage with the Greek “gar.” Because. Then nothing.

So here’s what we have so far: after every man debating titles and thrones had run, the women saw Jesus, understood what he was doing, and stayed with him through his violent and tragic end. A discussion last week with a close friend emphasized this point for me: the cross was always going to be Jesus’ end. Rome would have it no other way. Then the resurrection comes, and the gospel ends with trembling, ekstasis, and finally, gar.

This word, “because,” ends gMark with a sentence fragment. The question I pose today is whether “gar” is the gospel writer’s mistake, or maybe — just maybe — it’s the point.

Part Two · The Broken Sentence

Now, your first instinct, and it would be a reasonable one, may be that something must be wrong with this text. No story can end on “because.” Maybe a page got lost. The last leaf of the scroll tore off. The Gospel writer died before they finished. Surely the real ending is missing and what we have is an accident. Right? Well, I want to take that instinct seriously, because for 200 years, serious scholars have argued exactly that. But to weigh that idea, you have to see what's actually printed in the back of your own Bible. If you have a Bible with you now, look at the last page of gMark — or do so when you get home.

But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. MARK 16:6-8

[And all that had been commanded them they told briefly to those around Peter. And afterward Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation. Amen.] Intermediate Ending

At the end of modern copies of the Gospel of Mark, there are brackets. Maybe a line across the page. A footnote, in small type, that says something like: the most ancient authorities bring the book to a close at the end of verse 8. The scholarship is printed clearly. The editors knew exactly what I’m about to tell you, and they flagged it — and who reads the footnotes? Listen, class, read the footnotes! They’re where honest scholars leave the truth.

So what are those footnotes flagging? Well, it turns out we have two great treasures, worthy of an Indiana Jones movie — the two oldest manuscripts that preserve the complete Gospels: both from the 4th century. One is called the Codex Sinaiticus; the other, Codex Vaticanus. Got that so far? The Sinai (because that’s where it was written) and the Vatican (because we have no idea where that one was written, but it ended up in the Vatican). Both of these manuscripts, independently, end the Gospel of Mark at chapter 16, verse 8. For they were afraid. The twelve verses that follow in some Bibles — the resurrection appearances, the snake-handling, the going into all the world — those twelve verses are not in the oldest copies. They were added later.

And let me show you one of my favorite details in Markan scholarship. In Codex Vaticanus, the scribe finishes gMark at verse 8, writes the closing flourish that indicates the end of a book… and then leaves the rest of that column, and the entire next column, blank. Empty. Ok, you may say, what’s the big deal? Well, nowhere else in this manuscript’s entire New Testament corpus does the scribe waste writing space on expensive, hand-made, animal skin parchment like this. The scholarly consensus is that this scribe had heard other endings, but didn’t have a copy whose provenance they trusted, and thus couldn’t bring themselves to invent the verses or pretend they didn’t exist. So — as the women witnesses did four centuries before him — the scribe left the tomb in respectful silence.

Ok, that’s a nice explanation of the Vatican manuscript, but it doesn’t answer where the longer, later ending of gMark came from. Well, the longer ending is still ancient. Scholars date it to the Church Father Irenaeus quoting it in 180 CE. But the evidence that it isn’t part of the original text is strong.

A few key points:

• The longer ending was a known issue, even in the ancient world. In the early 300s, Eusebius wrote that accurate copies of gMark end at “for they were afraid,” and Jerome, the Latin translator of the official Greek New Testament, agreed.

• The literary seam between verses 8 and 9 doesn’t knit: verse 9 restarts with an out-of-place “he” pronoun, then re-introduces Mary Magdalene (as if she hadn’t been named 3 verses earlier), and the other women of verses 1–8 vanish.

• The 12 verses of the longer ending use 17 words not found anywhere else in gMark

• It’s missing all of gMark’s usual tics, for example the overuse of the word “immediately” (euthys). In the 16 brief chapters of gMark, there are 41 immediately’s. Here, there are none, and no other Markan tells or tics.

• The longer ending is a digest of scenes from later gospels: Mary in the garden (gJohn 20), the Emmaus road (gLuke 24), the great commission (gMatthew 28), the ascension (gLuke 24). This patch simply gathers what the Church already knew.

• Lastly, the patches don’t even agree with each other: beyond the shorter and longer endings, the Codex Washingtonianus (5th c.) carries a third expansion stuffed inside verse 14.

So, who were the people writing the longer ending of gMark? In a word, they were part of the Ancient Church. They were people who loved the Gospel of Mark — loved it enough to copy it by hand, word by word, for years — and who got to verse 8, to three trembling women and a sentence fragment that ended on “because,” and could not bear it. It was too abrupt, too different from the later gospels. It left them standing at an open grave with no risen Lord in sight. So they completed the story with the ending they were sure it deserved. They supplied the appearances gMark withheld. They wrote in the reunion. They let you finally see Jesus. The longer ending is the Ancient Church smiling knowingly, with other gospel writings sitting next to them. So, please understand. The longer ending isn’t a scandal in your Bible; it’s a fingerprint of the Ancient Church’s love and affirmation of the faith.

Having said that, as a fellow traveller on the Way, I want to offer an alternative for the modern reader. Maybe the open sentence at the close of gMark isn’t a flaw or an omission needing a tidy fix. Maybe it was left open for us. Maybe it’s a gift.

Part Three · You Are the Ending

So, scholarship tells us the original ending of gMark ends at verse 8 with the word “because,” and the women trembling in “ekstasis.” And we’ve watched the gospel writer, these past six weeks, using brilliant literary tools and devices to bring their story of Jesus to vivid reality. Irony. Intercalation. Intertextual quoting. This text is clearly the author’s magnum opus. This gospel has 661 verses, 600 of which were later copied in gMatthew and 350 copied in gLuke. Of the copied verses, roughly half of gMark’s verses are repeated verbatim — each phrase and Greek conjugation held firm.

So, what can we possibly make of the broken sentence at the book’s end?

Let’s read it one more time in modern English.

So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror (tromos) and amazement (ekstasis) had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for (gar) they were afraid.
MARK 16:8

I posit that the unclosed sentence at the end of gMark is not a problem for theology. Instead, I propose that the unclosed sentence is theology.

Six weeks ago, we started with a violent tear in the world. gMark’s schizō happens in two moments: When the heavens are torn open at the baptism (at the beginning), and when the Temple curtain is torn in two at Jesus’ death (when it all seemed to end).

Now pay attention to precisely when the Temple curtain tears. It tears the instant Jesus feels most abandoned by God. “Why have you forsaken me?” God hears, then rips the veil apart. Why? The holy room behind the veil stood empty. The famous Ark of the Covenant: gone for at least 600 years. When the Roman generals forced their way into the Beit HaMikdash, they were astonished to find no idol, no carving, nothing. The Holy of Holies was God’s vestibule for Israel. But it did not ‘contain’ God. The Israelites knew no room could contain the uncarved, unfathomable Infinite. God was not shut in, so the ripping of the veil had nothing to do with letting God out.

So, why? Well, remember back at the beginning of gMark, the “torn open” sky? The text never repairs it. Where gMark says the heavens were ripped open, the text leaves the sky unsealed above us. Unfinished. And at the close of the story, the Temple veil between God and the people is likewise ripped open and left unrepaired. God doesn’t close that either.

And finally, here, at the very end, gMark tears its own story wide open, leaving the final sentence ending in an unrepaired rip. Unfinished. Do you see it?

I therefore claim that the form of the Gospel is the key to this earliest Gospel.

The heavens above us, the veil between us, and the story in front of us are torn open. Grace has flowed out, from above, in between, and ahead of us — and gMark refuses to seal it back in. The last word of this Greek text, “gar” — “because” — is a word that reaches forward. It demands something of the reader! It is the most perfect unfinished word with which this gospel could end. No “Amen.” No “The End.” The writer ends on a word leaning toward a sentence not found on the page. Because the next sentence wasn’t theirs to write.

Think about it. The first person to carry this news was not Peter; he ran. It was not the men; they hid. The Gospel’s final word entrusts the story of Jesus to the women who stayed. The Church has argued for two thousand years about the place of women. But the Gospel of Mark is quite clear.

Now put these three beats together.

• The heavens and holy veil are ripped open and never closed

• The last word of the text reaches for a sentence not yet written

• The people trusted to carry the good news forward are the women who stayed

And there the text stops. The next sentence isn’t written down. Why?

Because, my friends, you are the ending to the Gospel of Mark.

The first word of the Gospel is archē — beginning. “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ” (1:1). This text represents some of the earliest chapters of the Church. But you are also writing a chapter of the Church, aren’t you? To follow the Way of Jesus is to take up the pen and craft the next sentence. Because… why?

And this is no easy task. Those closest to Jesus’ death — the brave women at the end — they became lost in “terror and amazement.” They lost their nerve. The Way leads through the cross, a burden these women knew all too well. And they went silent. The text is handed to you anyway. Across two thousand years of men refusing to be their brother’s keepers, choosing instead to exalt the steel, flag, and coin of empire.

What will you choose when offered power and position over your brother and sister? If you turn away from Caesar and toward the Kingdom, how will you respond if confronted? Will you run? Will you deny that you’ve heard the words? Or, with pen in hand, will you choose hope and grace?

In closing this series, I am reminded of something the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once said. Rabbi Sacks was a tzadik — a master teacher of the spiritual. He said:

Optimism is the belief that things will get better. Hope is the faith that — together — we can make things better. It takes no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to have hope. The Dignity of Difference, 2002

I’m not asking you to go home and imagine that “justice will come rolling down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24). I’m no optimist, and I don’t truck with those who shrug away our troubled world and say, “No, this is just fine. I’m sure everything will work out on its own.” Similarly, gMark gives us no reason to be optimistic. The text offers no reunion scene to assuage our doubts — no guarantees for the future of the Kingdom of God. No, the Gospel of Mark has a far more honest ending. With its last broken word, gMark invites you into the Kingdom to come and make it true. You hold the pen now. In answer to our fifth and final question — Why doesn’t gMark end the story? It is an unfinished story because the Gospel of Mark is holding the door open for you. I invite you to walk through it, in the shared hope that together we can bring forth the justice, righteousness, and the kingdom the prophets promised long ago.

Thank you.

The Gospel of Mark · 5th of 5 Sundays: Terror, Amazement, and the Ending of Mark. This concludes our five Sundays together in the earliest Gospel. The whole series lives right here. Thank you.

Pictured: Allat, Pre-Islamic Goddess of Arabia (2nd century)

Overview

This section introduces the world into which Muhammad ﷺ was born and the first thirteen years of his prophetic career. We situate the Ka'ba and the town of Mecca within the religious landscape of pre-Islamic Arabia (the Jahiliyyah) and trace the monotheistic currents already moving through the peninsula: Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and the Arab seekers called hanifs. We then trace Muhammad's early life, his wife Khadija, the revelation of 610 CE, the earliest Qur'anic verses, and the conflict with the Quraysh elite that ends with the Companions’ flight from Mecca.

Assigned Reading
Reza Aslan, No god but God, chapters 1–2

Key Terms for this Section
Ka'ba · Jahiliyyah · Allah · Jinn · Quraysh · Adam · Abraham (Ibrahim) · Jesus (Isa)
Zayd ibn Amr · Muhammad · Abu Talib · Khadija · Waraqa · Ali · Abu Bakr
The Shahadah · The Companions (Sahabah) · Mecca

2.1 | The Ka’ba & the Age of Jahiliyyah

The Sanctuary City

1400 years ago, the Arabian town of Mecca was an ancient, dusty settlement in the desert interior — its value marked less by what it produced than by what it protected. At its center stood a single cube of stone, the Ka’ba, the only masonry structure in a town of mud and straw. The shrine housed a copy of every idol worshipped across Arabia — some 360 of them, a god for every tribe that came to trade. Among the images, Aslan notes, were figures of Jesus and his mother Mary, standing next to the gods of the Arabian desert.

Pilgrims came from across the peninsula to walk the tawaf — the sevenfold circling of the shrine, a rite whose rhythm some scholars connect to the wheeling of the stars overhead. The Meccan leadership could boast that each visitor to their town could find, somewhere in that crowd of idols, the god of his own tribe, and so each had reason to come and safely trade. Beside the Ka'ba lay the well of Zamzam, whose waters Islamic tradition binds to the Jewish story of Hagar and her son Ismail (the Ishmael of Genesis), who were cast into the wilderness, the boy near death from thirst, until, as Genesis tells it, God opened Hagar's eyes to a well of water that saved them both (Gen. 21:19). The well made Mecca livable. Its shrine made it sacred. Together, these two pillars provided the inner circle of Mecca with tremendous wealth. Tradition held that the Ka’ba’s foundations reached back to the very beginning of the Genesis narrative. In Islamic tradition, Adam raised the Ka’ba first, Noah knew of it, and Abraham rebuilt it with Ishmael at his side. Now, a word of scholarly caution: these are stories meant to convey what the Ka’ba means, not a historical record of where it came from — the sacred biography of a place is not its archaeology. As scholars, we can describe what the tradition holds without passing judgment on whether it happened.

What is certain, however, is that custody of 7th-century Mecca was the most valuable office in all of Arabia.

Tradition credits a figure named Qusayy with gathering the scattered clans of the region, seizing the guardianship of the shrine, and settling his people around it, becoming the “Keeper of the Keys” — the one who held the right to open the Ka’ba, water the pilgrims, and take a share of the trade that flowed through the sacred precinct. His descendants would inherit that right, and one branch of that group would become the Quraysh. The whole arrangement rested on a fragile and ingenious custom: the sacred months. For part of each year, raiding and blood feud were suspended by common agreement, so that caravans could move in safety and old enemies could meet at the pilgrimage fairs without violence. In a land governed by feuds, those months of truce were the closest thing to desert law. They allowed a great market to gather in the shadow of the shrine — and whoever controlled the shrine controlled the market. That is how a well and a stone cube in a barren valley became a town worth protecting and fighting for.

The Jahiliyyah

The word Jahiliyyah is usually translated as the “Age of Ignorance” in Arab and Islamicate history. It is not a neutral historical label but the tradition's own retrospective theological name for the pre-Muhammadan era. It does not mean the pre-Islamic Arabs were uncultured or stupid — they had poetry, genealogy, law, and a rich spiritual imagination. In the Islamic reading, what their forebears lacked was divine guidance: they were living in the time before Muhammad’s message came.

Religious life in the Jahiliyyah was split along the same line that divided Arabian society itself: on one side was a barren desert, on the other side were the scattered Arabian towns. For the nomadic Bedouin, religion traveled light. What mattered was the tribe, its ancestors, and the code that kept both alive; the gods were local, portable, and consulted as needed. The settled tribes of the towns and oases lived differently — anchored to shrines, sacred stones, and fixed holy places, with cults that could accumulate wealth, custodians, and prestige. Mecca, built around the most successful shrine of them all, was the settled pattern at its logical zenith.

Running through both worlds of desert and civilization were the Jinn — unseen spirits woven through the landscape, inhabiting the sandy wastes, the ruins, and whirlwinds. Aslan compares the Jinn to the nymphs and fairies of Greek and British lore, and the comparison is useful: like those figures, the Jinn occupied the space between gods and demons — powers to be respected, occasionally bargained with, and blamed when things went wrong. Poets were said to draw their verses from them; madness was attributed to their touch. They made the Arabian landscape a crowded spiritual place long before any theology organized it.

The whole pre-Muhammadan situation followed what the 19th-century scholar Max Müller coined henotheism: where one highest god presides over a pantheon of lesser gods beneath him. Note: this is not monotheism, which denies that other gods exist. Instead, early Arabia had a hierarchy with one figure unmistakably at the summit. This was the religious architecture of the Jahiliyyah. Allah sat at the top, remote and rarely addressed directly, while the tribal gods and the “daughters of Allah” handled the daily traffic of petition and offering. When Muhammad (Persian: Mohammed) begins to preach, the high god is already installed. His work will be clearing out everything beneath him.

1400 years ago, there was no single “Arab religion” in any organized sense — no scripture, no priesthood, no creed binding the tribes together, and no institution to enforce belief. Instead, we find a kind of pluralist ‘pagan’ society: a scattering of local cults, each tribe with its own idols, its own sacred stones and trees and springs, and its own bargains struck with unseen powers. In the Jahiliyyah, piety was largely transactional. One made an offering and expected a return; one honored the gods of the shrine one happened to be visiting, and thought little about the gods of anyone else. This is part of why the Ka’ba could hold hundreds of idols without contradiction.

In a world with many gods, one more shrine simply meant more gods to bargain with.

What held a person’s life together, then, was not doctrine but a code — muruwah, the ideal of manliness and tribal virtue. Aslan lists the demands of Arab muruwah:

• bravery in battle
• loyalty and honor
• hospitality to the stranger
• the justice owed to one’s own kin

In the ancient, harsh world of the open desert, muruwah did real work. It bound the tribe together against a merciless environment and obliged the strong to protect the weak within it, because the survival of each depended on the survival of all. But the ancient muruwah code assumed a world of scarcity and shared fate — and an ever-growing Mecca was no longer part of that world. As caravan wealth pooled in a handful of powerful clans, the old obligations began to fray. Honor thinned into the privileges of the rich; hospitality became display; and the protection once owed to every member of the tribe narrowed quietly to those who could pay for it. The widow, the orphan, and the debtor fell through the gaps. It is precisely this erosion — a proud code hollowed out by cynical greed — that Muhammad’s earliest preaching will name and condemn.

2.2 | Monotheism in Seventh-Century Arabia

God & His Daughters

Today, the holy Arabic name Allah (used by Muslims as well as millions of Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews) is a contraction of al-ilah, and it means, simply, “the God.” Where gods like Zeus and Marduk use personal names, Allah is a title — the definite article (al/the) fused to the common Arabic noun for deity. Interestingly, the name Allah did not arrive with Muhammad. It was already in the air of pre-Islamic Arabia. Rather, Allah had been the title of the remote high god of the Arabian pantheon who, in the Jahiliyyah, held court over the lesser Arabian gods who scurried about the daily business of local Arab shrines.

But a god at the summit is still a god far away.

The high god of the Jahiliyyah was understood to be too exalted and distant to be approached directly by ordinary worshippers — a creator acknowledged in principle but bypassed in practice. When an Arab needed rain, a safe journey, or a son, he did not petition Allah, the god at the summit. Instead, he went through channels. And the most important of those channels were three goddesses remembered as the banat Allah — the “daughters of Allah.”

Now, when these goddesses are called Allah’s “daughters,” it was primarily to rank them as derived from the high god, beneath the high god, and belonging to the high god. The powers of the Arabian goddess-daughters flowed downward from the top as they stood below. Each had her own cult, her own sanctuary, and her own tribal following. There was Allat, whose name is the feminine of the divine title itself — al-ilat, “the Goddess” to her father’s “the God” — venerated especially southeast of Mecca. There was al-Uzza, “the Mighty,” who commanded particular devotion from the Qurayshi tribe. And there was Manat, the goddess of fate and eldest of the sister-goddesses by most accounts, whose sanctuary lay north of Mecca. For centuries, their images were among the most honored in the peninsula, and their names appear in the Qur’an itself, which asks the Meccans directly, “Have you considered Allat, al-Uzza, and Manat, the third, the other?” (Qur’an 53:19–20). For 7th-century Meccans, this was a rhetorical question posed precisely because everyone listening knew exactly who these three Arabian goddesses were.

So let’s try to unpack what’s going on here. One did not choose the daughters over Allah. Rather, one prayed to them as divine intermediaries, sending a message up the chain toward a god presumed too high to be reached on one’s own, the way a petitioner approaches a king through the members of his court. When Muhammad’s message eventually declares that God needs no intermediaries and has no daughters (Qur’an 53:21–23 presses this point immediately after naming them), it severs the channel through which most of Arabia did its praying — and with it the intercessory system on which shrines like the Ka'ba, and the fortunes built on them, depended.

Jews & Christians in Arabia

But let's not imagine ancient Arabia (ie. the Jahiliyyah) as a world sealed off from the rest of what the Afghan-American writer Tamim Ansary calls the “Middle World” (ie. the lands between the Mediterranean and India, knit together by overland trade). Competing religious identities surrounded 7th-century Arabia and the Middle World. The most ancient of these communities had long been the Jews. Jewish life in the Arabian Peninsula reached back at least to the Babylonian Exile of 587 BCE — more than a thousand years before Muhammad. By the time of the Jahiliyyah, the biblical patriarchs had deep roots in Arabian imagination; Aslan writes:

“Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Aaron were all in one way or another associated with the Ka’ba long before the rise of Islam.”
Reza Aslan, No god but God

Jewish presence in the Arabian Peninsula only deepened after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, as new waves of settlement pushed south. Jewish tribes put down roots at oasis towns like Yathrib (see Sec. 3) and at Khaybar, where they farmed the date palms, worked as smiths and jewelers, and took a share of the caravan trade. Over many generations, their Judean Aramaic shifted into Arabic as Jews assimilated to the customs of their Arab neighbors. These ancient Arabized Jews organized into tribes, made alliances, and took part in blood feuds just like all the Arab tribes around them. But the social pillar that remained untouched was Biblical monotheism — it was definitive, old, and long settled for Jews. Jewish monotheism stood firmly apart from Arab henotheism. This will matter greatly in the next section (Sec. 3.1), when Muhammad arrives in a Yathrib whose population includes several powerful Jewish clans.

Christianity was also present in pre-Islamic Arabia,
though within that umbrella term were a variety of rival theological positions.

South of Mecca, the city of Najran and parts of Yemen held long-established ancient Christian communities with their own churches and bishops. To the north, the Ghassanid Arabs served as a client kingdom of the Byzantine Empire: Arabic-speaking Christians allied to Constantinople (the capital of Eastern Christendom), along the desert frontier. But the Christianity the Arabs encountered was not a single, unified Church. Across the desert lay a variety of rival theological camps.

Those rivalries deserve a moment, because they represent what an Arab trader would have identified as ‘Christian.’ Christian orthodoxy — from the Greek ortho (right) and doxa (belief) — was a relatively recent construction. For Christianity’s first three centuries there was no single scriptural canon and no institution strong enough to enforce one; each region curated its own scriptures and its own account of who Jesus was and what Jesus taught. The imperial Roman Church settled the question of orthodoxy at Nicaea in 325: Jesus as fully human and fully divine. But many 4th-century Christians did not accept Rome’s Nicene Creed. Arian Christians (followers of Arius; no relation to “Aryans”) held that the Son was a created being, subordinate to the Father. Miaphysite Christians taught that Christ’s divine and human natures were united as one (their opponents called them “Monophysites,” a label their heirs in the Coptic, Syriac, and Armenian churches reject today). Nestorian Christians kept the two natures of Christ so distinct that critics accused them of preaching two persons. And these disputes mapped onto the politics of the age. The Ghassanids, Constantinople’s own Arab allies, leaned Miaphysite against the imperial creed. They compare well to the Lakhmid Arabs of al-Hira: eastern clients of the Persian shahs, whose capital grew into a major center of the Church of the East, the tradition outsiders called “Nestorian,” and whose last king converted to it.

An Arab caravan could pass through three rival Christianities in a single season’s trade. And make no mistake: each of these rival positions thought itself the true heir of Christ’s teachings.

However, while European Christianity (eg. Rome and Constantinople) was heir to the teachings of St. Paul (ie. the Pauline epistles of the New Testament), the oldest Christian tradition in the Arab world came from the remnants of the original Jewish-Christian movement once led by St. James, the brother of Jesus. From St. James’ Jerusalem church came a Christian group historians call the Ebionites (from Heb. evyonim, “the Poor Ones”), who were scattered across the Near East. Ebionite Christianity remained closer to Judaism and was strictly monotheistic. They kept the Sabbath, circumcised their sons, and, while they honored Jesus as Christians, they denied that Jesus was God. Some earlier scholars, struck by how closely this resembles the Qur’an’s own portrait of Jesus, argued that such communities reached Arabia and prepared its hearing. More recent scholarship is skeptical — there is (as yet) no firm evidence of Ebionites in the peninsula, and the Qur’an’s account of Jesus is now widely read as engaging with European Nicene Christianity. For our purposes, the dispute matters less than the solid fact beneath it. In the Middle World, there was a long-standing monotheistic reverence for Jesus (as prophet rather than God), and Arabia’s traders and herdsmen would have been familiar with this position centuries before the Qur’an.

Other Monotheists: Zoroastrians & Hanifs

From Persia came the Zoroastrians, and with them a set of concepts and ideas that would echo through the Middle World: a heaven and a hell awaiting the soul, a universal savior yet to come, and history bending toward a final cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil. If we place these neighboring traditions side-by-side, a clear picture emerges: centuries before Islam, the Arabian peninsula was already thick with discussion of one God, of moral judgment, and of a life beyond this one. The materials of monotheism were everywhere in Muhammad’s Arabia. What was missing was an Arab prophet to gather them together.

Lastly, against this background of Persian Zoroastrians, Arabized Jews, and competing Christian sects stood a much smaller group called the hanifs — Arab seekers who had turned away from their traditional idols while not attaching themselves to any established religion as they reached toward a single God on their own. They were not Jews or Christians, but they had absorbed much of these worldviews, and from the memory of Abraham that all Christians and Jews shared. The figure to remember here is Zayd ibn Amr, whom the Islamic tradition recalls as a kind of forerunner to Muhammad. Zayd renounced the worship of the goddesses outright, declaring that he would serve neither Allat nor al-Uzza but only the one God (Allah), and he took to leaning against the wall of the Ka’ba and calling openly on the God of Abraham — a public rebuke to the idols all around him. There were other hanifs, too, like the poet Umayya ibn Abi as-Salt who longed for a “religion of Abraham,” and Waraqa, a cousin of the woman Muhammad would marry, who had studied Christian scripture, who moved in these same circles of seekers.

All of this to say: when Muhammad began preaching about one God, called Allah, he was not introducing a wholly foreign idea into a peninsula that had never heard it. He was stepping into a centuries-old conversation Arabia had been having, restlessly and inconclusively, for a very long time.

2.3 | 610 CE: Muhammad, Khadija, & the Call

The Stratified City

Picking back up from Lesson 2.1, 7th-century Mecca was a thriving center of trade, built of concentric circles of mud and straw dwellings. The closer one’s home was to the center of the city — to the Ka’ba, the only structure made of stone — the more social power and prestige one had. The most powerful tribe in Muhammad’s youth was the Quraysh, known as the “Tribe of God.” They controlled the Ka’ba, and therefore trade in the city of Mecca.

The Quraysh were the ‘Keepers of the Keys.’

Merchants running the caravan route between Yemen and Syria often went out of their way to visit Mecca. (Earlier scholarship assumed they came because Mecca sat at a crossroads of international trade; the historian Patricia Crone dismantled that assumption in the 1980s, and we follow her lead on this.) The merchants came for the shrine. The Ka’ba was a uniquely universal sanctuary in ancient Arabia as it housed a copy of every Arab idol — all 360 of them — giving Mecca a universally recognized religious prestige, which led to an economic supremacy that rivaled anyone else on the peninsula.

The #2 religious spot in the Middle World was a great cathedral, al-Qalis, commissioned by the Christian ruler, Abraha. It sat south of Mecca in Sana’a (Yemen), and it was built in the hopes of drawing the pilgrim economy south. The economic rivalry between Christian Sana’a and pagan Mecca came to a head in the Year of the Elephant, when Abraha marched on Mecca in a failed attempt to destroy the Ka’ba. That year was 570 CE. Islamic tradition holds this as the year of Muhammad’s birth.

The Mecca that Muhammad grows up in is an intensely stratified city.

Over the generations, the powerful Quraysh took every economic advantage they could and made themselves excessively wealthy. In traditional Arab culture, the Shaykh, the elder of one’s clan, maintained order by ensuring each member of the tribe was protected. His most useful tool was the ancient Law of Retribution: an eye for an eye. If a man’s goat was stolen, he was owed another goat. A slain pregnant camel was worth two camels. And a man’s life was worth roughly a hundred camels. This was frontier justice, without a fixed law code, and it carried two immediate problems. First, there was no such thing as a crime outside one’s tribe. Killing or stealing from someone beyond the tribe did not concern the Shaykh, so long as it did not affect the tribe. Second, there is no real justice left when wealthy tribesmen can simply pay their way out of their crimes. The result was that the Quraysh grew so rich as to be untouchable by anyone else in Mecca. They did what they wanted. They taxed the Ka’ba’s pilgrims while the city’s Shaykhs prospered and stopped caring about the poor, the widow, and the orphan.

An Orphan in Mecca

This is Muhammad’s reality, and he enters it already at its margins.

Muhammad’s father died before he was born. His mother died when he was 6. His grandfather, who took him in, died soon after. He was raised, finally, by his uncle Abu Talib, the Shaykh of his clan, the Hashemites (Banu Hashim). It was an upbringing on the edge of a wealthy world, close enough to see its comforts and dependent for protection on the goodwill of family and friends.

When he was old enough, Muhammad eventually found work in the caravan trade. In his early adult years, he set his sights on a woman he hoped to marry, but she declined. Muhammad persevered, and his reputation as an honest and reliable caravaneer grew. He earned the nickname al-Amin in Mecca, “the Trusted One.” Over time, he moved from the back of the caravan to the front, operating as a Caravan Master for the Meccan wealthy. One such patroness — an older, self-made woman named Khadija — proposed marriage to him.

Their marriage would last about 25 years, until her death in 619.

Marriage to Khadija brought Muhammad into the highest levels of Meccan society. But creature comforts could not settle him. Muhammad spent the next fifteen years struggling with his own complicity in an economic system that enriched the powerful on the backs of the poor. He took to leaving the city for the desert hills and kept to a practice of solitary retreat the sources call tahannuth: nights of vigil and reflection in a cave on Mount Hira, above Mecca. He did not like the Qurayshi system. As Aslan reads him, social injustice clearly weighed heavily on his mind.

God Calls Muhammad

Islamic sources recount that in 610 CE, on one of those nights at Hira, something overwhelming comes upon him. A presence presses against a 40-year-old Muhammad in the dark (this was later understood to be the angel Gabriel), and a Voice commands him to “Recite!” (Iqra’ [اقْرَأْ] – this can be rendered “recite” or “read aloud” in English). Muhammad — terrified — asks what he should recite. The Voice comes again, and again, the pressure tightening until he thought he could bear no more. And then, the Islamic sources say, the words were pressed upon his heart.

Recite! In the name of your Lord who created:
Created humanity from a clot of blood.
Recite, for your Lord is the Most Generous One
Who has taught by the pen;
Taught humanity that which it did not know. QUR’AN 96:1–5

Muhammad flees the cave, shaking. The tradition recounts that he feared he had gone mad or been seized by an evil spirit, and that in his terror he came close to ending his own life on the mountain before the vision returned to steady him. He comes down to Khadija trembling and asks her to cover him with a cloak. It is Khadija who calms him, and Khadija who first believes him. To settle her husband’s doubts, she brings him to her cousin Waraqa (the Christian seeker we met earlier, among the hanifs) who listens and confirms that Muhammad had indeed received a true revelation, calling him “a prophet of this people.” And so it was that in 610 CE, Muhammad understood himself to be called as a nabi (prophet) and as Rasul Allah: the Messenger of God.

A long silence followed the first revelation. Islamic sources call it the fatra, the pause, and it fed Muhammad’s self-doubt and the doubts of those around him. Finally, at his lowest, he was called again to be the Messenger of God.

You are not, by God’s grace, a madman: you will have a never-ending reward — truly you have a strong character — and soon you will see, as will they, which of you is afflicted with madness. QUR’AN 68:2–6

Muhammad then began to recite the Qur’anic verses to his closest friends.

The Early Verses

The verses of this earliest period fall into one of two themes: religious verses and social verses. The earliest religious verses speak of the power and glory of God, but they do not yet press an authoritative case for monotheism against the reigning polytheism and henotheism of the day — that confrontation comes later. And monotheism, in any case, is hardly news to the Meccans. The Jews, Christians, and hanifs have spoken of one God among them for generations, and a caravan city hears every creed that passes through it. So Muhammad's earliest focus lies elsewhere, on ground where the Quraysh are genuinely vulnerable: the mistreatment of the weaker and forgotten members of Meccan society.

So do not be harsh with the orphan and do not chide the one who asks for help.
QUR’AN 93:9–10

And he warns the powerful about their greed.

Woe to every fault-finding backbiter who amasses riches, counting them over, thinking they will make them live forever. QUR’AN 104:1–2

Such teachings were a direct threat against the Meccan elite. Live with compassion, free those you have enslaved with debts, and feed those who cannot feed themselves, or you will burn in the holy fire. (Paraphrase of Qur’an 90:13–20).

2.4 | The First Muslims & the Eve of the Hijra

The First Muslims

Khadija, Muhammad’s wife and most loyal companion, is the first person to accept his message. The first child to accept it is Ali (the son of Muhammad’s uncle Abu Talib, who grew up in the same house with Muhammad). Ali will one day marry Muhammad’s daughter and, in time, inspire a new branch of Islam: Shia Islam. Muhammad’s slave, Zayd, soon accepts Muhammad’s message and is freed. Abu Bakr, a powerful Qurayshi merchant, follows, and his story is a striking one — after his conversion, he makes himself poor by spending his fortune to buy the freedom of enslaved believers. Muhammad continues to draw followers from the wealthy elite and, surprisingly for the time, from among women as well. Altogether, the early Companions (Sahabah) of Muhammad number about 30-40.

Those without the shield of a powerful clan pay the highest price for their conversion. In the tribal order, a person’s safety rests on the certainty that harming them will bring retribution from their kin. But converts from the lower ranks of Meccan society — the enslaved, the poor, the clanless — have no Shaykh to avenge them, and as the movement grows and the Quraysh grow angrier, that makes them easy targets. The elite cannot touch Muhammad himself so long as Abu Talib (his Shaykh) lives and the Hashemites stand behind him; so the pressure falls instead on the followers who have no such protection: in beatings, in economic ruin, and worse.

The persecution grows heavy enough that, by 615 CE, Muhammad sends a group of his most vulnerable followers out of the city altogether: across the Red Sea to the Christian kingdom of Abyssinia (today: Ethiopia). There, the Christian king grants Muhammad’s followers refuge and, tradition recounts, refuses Qurayshi demands to hand them back. The scene is worth pausing on: Muhammad’s early followers found shelter under a Christian king, in the very years the two faiths are first taking each other’s measure. This crossing is remembered as the first hijra, the first flight of the believers from persecution, and it foreshadows the far greater flight that will one day reshape the whole movement.

The Break with the Mighty Quraysh

Three years into Muhammad’s ministry, in 613 CE, his message becomes more religiously focused. We find that focus in the Shahadah, the Islamic profession of faith.

Strict monotheism is now fundamental to the movement, and it’s spreading across Mecca and beyond. What enrages the powerful Quraysh is not the claim that there is only one God — they do enough business every day with Jews, Christians, and hanifs to have heard that claim many times before. What the Quraysh cannot abide is that Muhammad claims to be God’s Messenger. While the other monotheists preach about Abraham (a man most Meccans honor), Muhammad claims to be a prophet equal to Abraham! He is the new Abraham! Muhammad is not asking the Quraysh for their blessing or their permission. He claims to be without equal, answerable only to God! This goes against all ancient and (seemingly) eternal Arab tradition, and it is a direct challenge to the power of the Qurayshi elite.

Muhammad’s first target is the very source of Qurayshi economic power: the Ka’ba.

The story goes like this. Merchants go out of their way to visit the Ka’ba in Mecca because it houses every Arab idol, which makes it safe and sacred ground for all Arabs, which in turn makes Mecca the most lucrative center for peaceful trade in the region. Forget your long-standing blood feuds — come to Mecca and trade with enemies and friends alike! All one has to do is pay a tax to the powerful Quraysh, who run the city at the expense of the Meccan poor. So how does Muhammad turn this upside down? Well, if there is only one God, and Muhammad is His Messenger, then all the idols are worthless, which makes the Qurayshi-run Ka’ba worthless, which strips every bit of power, money, and influence from the abusive Qurayshi elite!

But wait, were the Quraysh actually pagan believers? Tellingly, the Qur’an never quotes the Quraysh as professing belief in their expensive idols. It seems, rather cynically, that idol worship was simply good for business.

Muhammad upends Mecca’s status quo by preaching his message directly before the Ka’ba at the next pilgrimage fair, and from there it spreads throughout Arabia. Unable to silence him while his clan protects him, the Quraysh answer with a decisive boycott of Muhammad’s entire clan (the Hashemites), most of whom make their living by trade. No Meccan is to buy from them, sell to them, or intermarry with them. For roughly three years the ban grinds on, and it devastates the clan. Families go hungry, businesses collapse, and the innocent are punished alongside the believers. Yet the boycott fails: the sheer cruelty of it turns popular sympathy toward the struggling Companions rather than against them, and in time it is shamed into collapse and lifted.

Then comes the hardest year.

Just as the boycott ends, in 619 CE, Muhammad loses the two people who anchor his life. He loses his wife Khadija, his first believer, the one who covered him with a cloak and steadied him after the first night at Hira, his partner and his refuge for a quarter century. He also loses his uncle Abu Talib, who, as Shaykh of the Hashemites, has shielded Muhammad from the worst the Quraysh can do. Islamic tradition remembers this as the Year of Sorrow. The losses are deeply personal for Muhammad. Central to our study, they are also strategic: the new Hashemite Shaykh despises Muhammad for the boycott his preaching provoked, and he withdraws all clan protection from him. Devastated and legally unprotected, Muhammad is now a man anyone can attack without fear of retribution. His position in Mecca has become impossible. And so, at last, he and about 70 of his growing number of ‘Companions’ withdraw from the city under cover of night and set out for Yathrib (today: Medina), a remote cluster of villages hundreds of dangerous miles to the north. Muhammad is now a wanted man, hunted by the rich and powerful who fear his message.

Little do they realize that he will one day return to Mecca
with an army of 10,000 followers.

Last Section: A Primer of Method
This Section: Pre-Islamic Arabia & the Prophet
Next Section: Jihad & the Holy City of Medina

The Gospel of Mark | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

λῃστής lēstēs • from leia, “plunder”: one who takes by force

Modern Bibles often translate this to “robber,” “bandit,” or “thief,” which can be misleading. Rome used lēstēs the way empires still use the word insurgent: not a pickpocket, but a man who defies the imperial order. The Jewish historian Josephus, writing after the war, calls the revolutionaries lēstai. It is the empire’s word for those who rebel. Freedom fighters. Rome did not crucify mere shoplifters…

Central Question for Part 4
Why did Rome kill Jesus?

We are now three Sundays into gMark, with two Sundays to go.

On our first Sunday, we picked a fight with gMark’s plagiarized promise of “good news,” lifted from Caesar’s monuments. On our second Sunday, we watched the Kingdom arrive: without manger or star, we found a man irrupting out of the Judean desert. And in our last lesson, we followed a Gospel obsessed with seeing Jesus, until a blind beggar saw him clearly and followed the Messiah on the Way.

I told you then where the Way goes: it goes to Jerusalem. Well, today, we arrive.
At the Temple. During the Last Week of Jesus’ life.

Now, recall at the beginning when we pointed toward the Gospel’s dual use of schizō — to rip — the Greek verb used to describe the heavens torn open at the baptism and the curtain torn open at Jesus’ death. Today, in our penultimate Markan lesson, we will bear witness to that closing tear. I also asked you last time to consider how the Gospel writer cuts the various narrative threads together. Today, we will see how that skillset pays off theologically.

Finally, from our last lesson together, recall that for a first-century Jew, a crucified Messiah was a contradiction in terms — and that we said we would pick that thread back up when we reached the machinery of the crucifixion. Well, today we have reached it. This will be the heaviest of our five Sundays for this series. Today, you will see a single Greek word, lēstēs, bring the final Week of Jesus’ life to a remarkable and dramatic conclusion.

First, we begin with a tree. And I warn you: this story will seem to make no sense…

Part One · Where They Hide

It’s a Monday. Jesus is on his way into the city, and he’s hungry. He sees a fig tree with leaves and approaches it looking for fruit. Yet he finds only leaves. So he curses it!? “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” This poor tree, condemned for being empty of fruit...

And if that were all there were to the story, we might just shrug and move on. I mean, prophets do strange things, right? But the gospel writer adds a small explanatory note, the kind a careful author includes when he wants to be certain you catch it — it was not the season for figs.

Let’s think about why the gospel writer tells us this. gMark did not have to include it. In fact, when gMatthew retells this scene a generation later, the line about the season is gone, and the omission makes sense: it can make Jesus look unreasonable. But gMark leaves this detail in there, because the author wants it to bother you. A detail that fits the narrative can too easily slide right past us; but a detail that troubles you is worth coming back to. So let’s look closer. Because, as you may have guessed, this story isn’t really about trees.

On the following day, when they came from Bethany, [Jesus] was hungry. Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see whether perhaps he would find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. He said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard it.

Then they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves, and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. He was teaching and saying, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.”

And when the chief priests and the scribes heard it, they kept looking for a way to kill him, for they were afraid of him because the whole crowd was spellbound by his teaching. And when evening came, Jesus and his disciples went out of the city.

In the morning as they passed by, they saw the fig tree withered away to its roots. Then Peter remembered and said to him, “Rabbi, look! The fig tree that you cursed has withered.” Jesus answered them, “Have faithfulness toward God. Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and if you do not doubt in your heart but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you. So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.

“Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses.” MARK 11:12-25

Now notice the cut here that I alluded to at the beginning; the editor’s hand is hard at work from our last lesson. The effort is quite bold here. The gospel writer starts the fig tree story: fruitless. He interrupts it, mid-action, for a completely different story: Jesus in the Temple. Then the story resumes: cut to Tuesday morning and the tree is withered to its roots. Scholars call this an intercalation — one story sandwiched inside another — and by now you know this gospel writer never builds one idly. The two halves interpret each other. Whatever is in the middle explains what’s on either side.

And what’s in the middle? The Temple.

Here, the editor’s hand has done real theological work: the fig tree is the Temple. The barrenness, the curse, the withering. To read either story by itself empties the narrative of its theological gravity.

Now, before we go on, I want to make sure we’re not guilty of a shallow or problematic reading of a passage deserving of nuance. The easy reading would be that: the Temple was corrupt, greedy priests were fleecing the faithful, and then Jesus storms in to shut it down. Good riddance. Now we have something better!

This reading is not only bad history but problematic theology, insofar as it has been a jumping-off point for centuries of antisemitic accusation and stereotyping.

Here is what the Temple was to Jesus’ circle: the Beit HaMikdash, the Holy House of God, the beating heart of the Jewish people. The one place on earth where heaven and earth met, where prayer and sacrifice and memory and identity lived together in one house of stone. So if the scene is not about Jesus condemning mismanaged money, then what is it? It’s something older, darker, and far more Jewish in its native context.

Listen again to the line the writer gives Jesus, because it is in fact a quotation, and the source changes everything. “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations.” That’s from Isaiah 56, a verse that gathers foreigners to the Holy House in Jerusalem. “But you have made it a den of robbers,” Jesus proclaims. A den of lēstai. But that phrase originally came from the prophet Jeremiah, who stood at the gates of the Jewish Temple six centuries earlier and similarly wept over its state.

Where gMark uses the Greek in his “den of lēstai,” Jeremiah, of course, uses the Hebrew “den of paritsim.” The word parits comes from a Hebrew root meaning to break through. So, the parits of Jeremiah that Jesus is quoting is a breaker — a violent man who smashes what is lawful. When Jeremiah was translated into Greek, this word was rendered into our Greek key term for this lesson: lēstēs. What’s critical to our reading today is that neither parits nor lēstēs means anything like ‘a petty thief.’ And, importantly, a “den” is not where men do their breaking. A den is where such men run and hide after they’ve broken things. So, Jesus’ charge here was not “this Jewish House of God is worthless.” It was quite the opposite: this house is holy, but you are treating it like a common hideout! You wrong the widow and the orphan out in the world, then duck inside God’s house, put on your prayer robes, and think yourselves protected from judgment!

Jeremiah said all this long before Jesus. He called his people breakers (paritsim), and did so from within the tradition and cadence of the Jewish Temple.

In Jesus’ time, the money changers were not some fraud needing to be overturned; they were necessary to the Temple’s operation. Pilgrims arrived carrying every possible coinage, while the Temple tax was payable in one standard of silver; in this way, the changers turned the empire’s money into money the Temple could accept.

For those who could not afford to buy a sheep with their exchanged money, the Torah had long authorized doves or pigeons as affordable alternatives (Lev. 5:7; 12:8). According to gLuke, the dove alternative was, in fact, the offering Mary made after giving birth to Jesus (2:24). This whole endeavor of the money exchanged for Temple sacrifices had been a cultural norm for centuries. Again, following Jeremiah’s logic, when Jesus calls the Temple a “den of robbers,” the “den” is not where the crime happens. The “den” is where the breakers hide after the crime. When we see Jesus overturn the tables, he is not cleverly exposing a Jewish financial scam; he is staging Jeremiah’s prophetic warning inside the House of God by stopping the Temple’s operation to shine a powerful and righteous light on where the breakers chose to hide.

So, no. Jesus is not hungrily yelling at random trees and cursing Jewish price-gouging.

Instead, we find Jesus quoting Jeremiah as his way to Biblically grieve how ‘fruitless’ the Temple leadership had grown. The fig tree was a prophetic sign, one of the oldest idioms of Jewish wisdom. What makes this moment prophetic? Remember that this scene is set around the year 30, while gMark is written around the year 70, and by then the Holy Temple is gone — burned and desecrated by the Roman state. So when gMark’s community reads Jesus quoting Jeremiah in those same courts, they heard a warning they knew had come true, and it echoed their own grief. Let me say that a different way: the story resonated with those presently agonizing over the destruction of their families, homes, and Temple from Imperial Rome. The gospel does not say that God was finished with the Jewish People. The Temple in Jeremiah’s time also fell — and the Jewish People grieved then, and endured, and live on today.

Read carefully, the Gospel of Mark is a lament in parallel. While Jesus (ca. 30 CE) mourns what the house’s keepers had become, gMark’s reader (ca. 70 CE) similarly mourns that the House of God now lay in ashes.

Thus, the imperial violence in Roman Judea comes to the modern reader in two guises: their destruction of the Jewish Temple, and their torture and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. So let us zoom in on Jesus’ arrival to the Holy City the previous day. Because, little known to most armchair historians today, there was not one procession into Jerusalem that day.

There were two.

Part Two · Two Processions, One City

You already know the first procession. Many of you as kids, dressed in your best pastel outfits, gathered together to wave palm fronds on a beautiful Sunday in spring.

This, of course, is in glorious commemoration of Jesus’ Final Week, when he rides down the Mount of Olives, from the east, on a borrowed donkey, while people spread cloaks on the road and shout about the coming kingdom of their ancestor, David. Palm Sunday. The Church has celebrated that scene for two thousand years. But most modern readers remain ignorant of the second procession, which is attested to by Josephus (Jewish War 2.223–224; Antiquities 20.106–107). The following is what Easter pageants generally miss, but what any pilgrim arriving for Passover would have seen in the context of Jesus’ arrival.

That same day, on the west side of the city, came a second procession: Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, riding up from the coast at the head of a column of deadly imperial cavalry. He made that ride every Passover. This was Roman policy. As Passover celebrates a people God freed from an earlier empire, Pilate knew this was the week Jerusalem was most likely to foment an insurrection, led by Jews singing about peace, freedom from tyranny, and the freedom to worship and honor their God.

So Pilate wanted his soldiers seen. Let’s picture his imperial strategy. Roman steel, gallant warhorses, and the ruby red Roman banners of eagles signaling the power of the West. While from the east, a Galilean peasant rode atop a borrowed donkey. Two kingdoms, in one city, on the same afternoon. The entirety of Jesus’ Last Week is the collision between these two worldviews.

In contradistinction to Roman West, from the east we see a staged performance that quotes Zechariah: a king “humble and riding on a donkey,” who cuts off the chariot and commands peace to the nations. A different kind of king, and a procession built to say so. The authorities sense the ideological danger immediately.

They come to Jesus in the Temple with the blunt instrument first: “By what authority are you doing these things?” There is our word from Week 2, exousia, and the question is a trap: if he claims God’s authority, it’s blasphemy; if he claims none, the palm-waving crowd melts away. So he answers with a question about John’s baptism that they cannot afford to answer either way, and they retreat with “we do not know.” Beaten in their own arena, in one move.

However, their next line of questioning is sharper…

Then they sent to him some Pharisees and some Herodians to trap him in what he said. And they came and said to him, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere and show deference to no one, for you do not regard people with partiality but teach the way of God in accordance with truth. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not? Should we pay them, or should we not?” But knowing their hypocrisy, he said to them, “Why are you putting me to the test? Bring me a denarius and let me see it.” And they brought one. Then he said to them, “Whose head is this and whose title?” They answered, “Caesar’s.” Jesus said to them, “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” And they were amazed at him.
MARK 12:13-17

Notice who springs this one: the Pharisees and the Herodians, together.

The same strange pairing that first plotted against him back in Mark chapter 3. Religious authority, hand in hand with Rome’s puppet kings. Take note that this pairing is the machinery of the Last Week — not “the Jews,” an old slander this series has refused from the first Sunday and refuses still, but an alliance of the powerful, the preacher and the politician, each with its own reason to want Jesus gone.

“Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?”
Say yes: Jesus is a Roman collaborator.
Say no: Jesus is a rebel zealot, and taken to Pilate by sundown.

So Jesus flips the coin over. Whose image is this? Whose inscription? Caesar’s, of course. And the inscription on that denarius named Tiberius, son of the divine Augustus. A self-proclaimed Son of God. The very title gMark stole in his opening line, jingling around in everybody’s pocket. As sure as you know Washington is on the dollar, Jesus’ audience knows the inscription on a denarius. “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

The crowd is amazed; Jesus has slipped through their trap again.

But what, exactly, belongs to God? The coin bears Caesar’s image, so give it to Caesar. But everyone in that courtyard was raised on the first page of Genesis, and knew whose image they bore. He is not dodging the question of allegiance. He is detonating it. Caesar can keep his silver. But the people — all the beautiful tribes and folkways of this marvelous, good world — never belonged to Caesar, or to potentates or politicians, and never will.

So the preachers can’t trap him, and the politicians can’t buy him. And Rome cannot abide a man drawing crowds singing of Passover freedom who teaches that, like Pharaoh, Caesar has no claim on them, their children, or their scripture.

From an imperial standpoint, something had to change this course of events before a full-on insurrection was at hand.

So, again, here is what the armchair historian often misses: Crucifixion was never Rome’s preferred method of execution. Rome had faster, simpler ways to kill. Rather, crucifixion was Rome’s most successful method of communication. A message, or rather a warning, written in human flesh and displayed beside a public road — where the greatest number of people would be forced to walk past and read it.

The body was stripped naked: shame was part of the warning.
Left to suffocate slowly, often for days: duration was part of the warning.
Denied a grave, left to the birds and wild animals: erasure was part of the warning.

This time-consuming procedure was deliberately reserved for slaves and rebels and lēstai. Empires are deliberate teachers. And this was their lesson: for anyone who imagines a king other than Caesar — Look. Learn. And go home and tell them what you saw.

This. From our third Sunday together, this is why Peter choked on the concept of a “crucified Messiah.” For the Jews living under this terrible European occupation, Messiah meant God’s triumph over imperial violence. It meant united families. It meant everlasting hope. While the Roman cross was the empire’s tool for erasing hope.

This Last Week, two parades came to Jerusalem on a collision course.
One had weapons of steel, flags, and coin; the other had women, fishermen, and a rabbi on a borrowed donkey.

Part Three · King of the Judeans

It’s now Wednesday night, two days since Jesus cursed the fig tree.

Jesus is at a dinner in Bethany, and a woman approaches him with an alabaster jar of perfume worth most of a year’s wages. She breaks it open and pours all of it over Jesus’ head. The room is appalled: what a waste; it could have been sold and given to the poor! Jesus stops them cold. Leave her alone. She’s done a beautiful thing. She has anointed my body before its burial.

Listen closely for the wisdom in Jesus’ response. She knows. All the male disciples have been told three times, plainly, and cannot absorb it. While this unnamed woman has understood it completely, and answers in the purest way that love speaks: extravagantly and without shame. And Jesus says of her what he says of no one else in the Gospel of Mark — wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told, in memory of her. Now count the cuts. Before her: the plot to kill Jesus. After her: Judas leaves to sell him out. Another literary sandwich. Another intercalation. With betrayal on both sides, this woman’s faithfulness glows in the middle. The woman who saw gets a monument built out of the Gospel itself.

It’s now the following night, Thursday evening. And Jesus shares a Last Supper with his friends.

While they were eating, he took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to them, and said, “Take; this is my body.” Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, and all of them drank from it. He said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. Truly I tell you, I will never again drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.” MARK 14:22-25

You all know this meal.

This congregation gathers around it every Sunday; the chalice is the emblem of your church. So look closely at the night where its iconography began. Jesus is not presiding in a sanctuary. He’s at supper with the same flawed, half-seeing friends who have misunderstood him at every turn — one of whom has already taken money to turn on him. Still, Jesus hands them the bread and the cup. The open table of this Gospel, the one that seated tax collectors, and the working poor, and sinners, and turncoats remains open. But listen to the rest of his message, “I will never again drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.” This is Jesus reserving a table for a future date. The Last Supper does not stop at the cross; it passes through it to the Kingdom waiting on the other side of righteousness.

Late that Thursday night, between the open table and the cross, lies a garden.

In the garden, the Gospel of Mark presents us with a very human Jesus who does not want to die. He throws himself on the ground, distressed and agitated, and begs: Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me. I see here a young man, holy and true, but still frightened and honest about his fear of imperial violence — what Rome — what steel, flag, and coin — were about to do to his human flesh. He asks God for it to pass. Then Jesus sets that ask down. Because it’s not about what Jesus wants in that moment but what God requires. I imagine Jesus wants to laugh with his friends; he wants to continue to wrestle with scripture, to stand at the shore and watch the sunrise over the Galilee. He wants to visit with his mother; maybe start a family of his own.

But he sets all that aside to return to the disciples, his half-blind friends, who still cannot truly see what is happening or why. Of course, they're asleep.

Then, in the dark, the soldiers come for him. Jesus calls out, “Have you come out with swords and clubs to arrest me, as though I were a lēstēs?” See now whose mouth owns this word. It’s no longer Jeremiah’s. It’s not Rome’s. This is Jesus’ word now.

Peter, the Rock, follows Jesus as they take him away. Brave at first, closer than the other disciples, but as night bleeds into Friday morning, he denies even knowing Jesus. The faithful know he will deny him three times. It is then that Peter breaks down and weeps. But remember the proverb we read together: the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn.

They compelled a passer-by, who was coming in from the country, to carry his cross; it was Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus. Then they brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha (which means Place of the Skull). And they offered him wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it. And they crucified him and divided his clothes among them, casting lots to decide what each should take.

It was nine o’clock in the morning when they crucified him. The inscription of the charge against him read, “The King of the Judeans.” And with him they crucified two rebels, one on his right and one on his left. Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, “Aha! You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross!” In the same way the chief priests, along with the scribes, were also mocking him among themselves and saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe.” Those who were crucified with him also taunted him.

When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, “Listen, he is calling for Elijah.” And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink, saying, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.” Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. Now when the centurion who stood facing him saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, “Truly this man was God’s Son!” MARK 15:21-39

It’s Friday morning, and Rome is openly mocking Jesus.

They mock him with a purple robe (like Caesar).
They mock him with a kingly crown, made of twisted thorns.
And they mock with salutes: Hail, King of the Judeans!

This is their joke, and if you’re a Roman, it’s hilarious. This Jewish peasant from nowhere pretends to the throne of our great master of steel, flag, and coin!

Then, they make it ‘official,’ in writing. On a placard above Jesus’ head, the titulus which ‘communicates the warning’ for everyone forced to walk by.

What is the warning? Messiah? False prophet? No. “King of the Judeans” (the Greek is Ioudaioi — which can be rendered “Judeans” or “Jews” in English). The Romans did not crucify Jesus for religion. They crucified him for sedition. The Empire of Caesar killed Jesus because the Kingdom of God is a rival kingdom — and Jesus is a rival king to the empire of steel, flag, and coin.

As he hung on the Roman cross, a dying testament to Roman authority, two others were crucified beside him. The term gMark uses for these men is, again, lēstai. Shouted in the Temple, taken up in the garden, now hanging on two crosses framing the murder of Jesus. It is the thread that binds the third act of gMark to completion. Whatever Jesus was to Rome, the Romans had a category for it: he was the kind of threat you kill publicly and brutally, between two others just like him, so that no one ever dares to defy Caesar or his empire.

And it gets even darker.

Go back to when James and John asked for seats at the left and right hand of Jesus. He responded with great concern, “You do not know what you are asking” (10:38). It turns out, the left and right seats next to Jesus are crosses. The road to the Kingdom was always thus.

And it gets even darker.

Near the end, Jesus screams in raw, untranslated Aramaic. Words from the deepest reservoir of his feeling: Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani? “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” To the Jewish ear listening that horrible day, these are the words that open the 22nd Psalm — poetry that begins in the pit and climbs, line by aching line, until all the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to Adonai. A dying Jew, praying his ancestors’ prayer, cries out the opening line of a psalm that knows the way through. The forsakenness is real. But so is the psalm that does not end in forsakenness.

Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about Adonai and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying he has done it. PSALM 22:30-31

And then, at three o’clock on Friday afternoon, Jesus dies.

In that moment, gMark describes the schizō — the second rip — of the veil of the Temple from top to bottom. As we explored in our first lesson together, the gospel writer reserves this verb for two uses: the baptism and the Temple veil. What that finally means I will cover on our final Sunday together. For now, notice again who proclaims Jesus as the Son of God — our Roman centurion from that same Sunday. Jesus may have been sentenced to death, but the executioner’s own verdict proclaims the victory of a tortured Galilean over his own imperial flag.

So, why did Rome kill Jesus?

The fig tree was never about the tree. The “out of season” detail explains the Temple scene afterward: this is prophetic judgment from within a beloved tradition, under imperial pressure. It was Jeremiah’s grief, not Judaism’s repeal. And both powers read Jesus’ threat with clever acumen. That is why the cross follows. Jesus is not killed for being kind, or wise, or inspiring. He is killed because the Kingdom Jesus announces threatens the world of steel, flag, and coin. Rome’s problem wasn’t that they didn’t understand Jesus. I am confident that Rome understood him better than most nations ever will. Rome’s problem was that it was Rome — built on the backs of the poor, the widows, and the orphans of power and prestige.

Caesar’s image was on the silver, so the silver went back to Caesar. But God’s image — the tselem elohim of Genesis — is found in the face of your mother, in the face of your child, in the face of the other you wish to conquer and the enemy you refuse to acknowledge. And God’s image is found in your beautiful face as well.

The Gospel of Mark asks: whose image do you bear? Whom do you serve? The widow answered with her last two coins. The woman at Bethany answered with a broken jar. And for those who dare to leave the glitz and distraction of Caesar’s palace, the eucharist you share each Sunday likewise points you, through the cross, to the Kingdom of God — where all things are made new.

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The Gospel of Mark · 4th of 5 Sundays: Jerusalem, Temple, Empire & the Last Week.
We gather one last time next Sunday, August 9: Terror, Amazement, & the Ending

Intro

Good evening. Thank you to the Alliance, and to all of you, for sharing an evening with a philosopher. It’s a generous invite, especially on a weeknight. So, here is what I was asked to do — I was asked to speak about modern fascism: its history and its qualities. Now, first and foremost, I distrust the word fascism. Not because it has no meaning, but because that word is used with unabated surety. We all seem certain we know fascism when we see it.

And that certainty can be a problem.

That certainty is, in fact, my focus tonight. Because the words we are most certain of are often the ones we stop thinking about. And that lack of concern, that lack of creative suspicion, can later be used against us if we’re not careful.

So, tonight I’m not going to hand you an easy definition and a list of villains you can denounce over social media. Here, tonight, I’m going to do something slower and more useful… I’m going to take one of the most overused and misunderstood words in our political language and render it strange again — and then, having made it strange, we can understand and see it more honestly, as one of the genuinely great and terrible achievements of the modern age.

I suspect I know why a room like this gathers together in a public library to hear a philosophy professor talk about fascism. You probably came suspecting that fascism is not bound up safely in the past. You may want a name for something you think you see, right now, out there. But as a scholar, I’m going to ask you to hold that desire, just for tonight. Because if I point at the world here tonight, you can argue with my finger, while missing what I’m pointing at. So, tonight I’m not pointing fingers. Instead, I aim to leave you with something far more valuable as you enter the fray. I’m going to fashion a lens (as carefully as our hour and my skill set will allow), and when you go home tonight, you may take that lens and perceive and report on the world with a depth that cannot be easily dismissed.

Tonight, I will cover three basic questions, each descending deeper than the last.

1. What are we even talking about when we say fascism?

2. Where did the thing come from, and why then?

3. And the last one, the one that matters most — why does it work? What is promised to the man who says yes to fascism?

Part I: What are we talking about when we say Fascism?

1.1 A Worn-Out Word

Our story begins in the ancient Roman forum, where it was unlawful to carry proper weapons next to politicians. So, what guards would do instead is tie a bundle of wooden rods together and carry that bundle while protecting government officials. This Roman bundle was called a fascis, the Latin word for bundle. So, you knew someone important was walking in or out of the forum when you saw a man carrying a fascis before him. Over time, the fascis came to have a kind of political meaning: Romans pointed out the symbolism of the many rods bound as one. In this way, the fascis became a totem of Roman power and authority.

Today, a similar bundle or fascis is carved into the arms of the great stone chair that President Lincoln sits in, forever watching over our most sacred civic plot of land in DC. The fascis was also on the back of the American dime until 1945. Some of you probably have one in a jar at home. However, it was the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini who took that Italian word — fasci, the bundle — and named his Italian political movement after it. So, how does the Roman symbol of the ‘many-bound’ become synonymous with the death of freedom? What happened?

Well, part of what happened with this word is what happens with all words eventually — it evolved from its ancient origins. In the midst of World War II, the author George Orwell (of 1984 fame) was already exasperated with its overuse. He noticed that “fascist” had become almost purely a term of abuse: people flung it across every dispute. One man’s fascist was another man’s patriot — until the word had been rendered, for Orwell, “almost entirely meaningless.” The word fascist had become a kind of noise. A bellow you make in the general direction of one’s political enemy.

Today, fascist is one of the most damning words of our political landscape — the one we keep in the glass case marked break in case of political emergency. So the first point to be made tonight is this: today, the word fascism holds two jobs at once: it is both a rhetorical insult and the name of a movement — with the insult having long ago outmoded the name. Which, of course, leaves us a choice: we can keep using it as a kind of definition-less snarl — or we can investigate whether there’s still a real thing underneath the noise. I vote we investigate!

1.2 The Experts Can’t Agree

You would think (I certainly thought, as a young grad student) that the historians and political theorists would be able to hand us a nice, clean definition. You know: a paragraph — here is what fascism is, here are its features, let’s check them off! But that’s not what one finds in such an investigation. I know! I looked!

Instead, what you’ll find at the university library is not a definition but a running argument — decades long, that more or less falls into 3 camps. The first camp uses the checklist. Its most famous version is by the novelist Umberto Eco, who grew up under Mussolini, in an essay he called “Ur-Fascism.” Herein, Eco lists 14 features: the cult of tradition, the worship of action for its own sake, an obsession with enemies both too strong and too weak. Etc. But here’s the punchline: Eco concludes that his checklist can’t be made into a system; any one of his 14 features can be present without fascism forming. They have what the philosopher Wittgenstein called a family resemblance — the way cousins look related without sharing any particular feature in common.

That’s somewhat useful to us. But a family resemblance is not a definition.
That’s just us squinting at politics.

A second camp says: stop cataloguing symptoms, and instead name the core. The historian Roger Griffin does this in one phrase when he names the core of fascism “palingenetic ultranationalism.” Palingenesis is from the Greek for palin, again; and genesis, birth. So: it’s a Rebirth. Griffin claims that at the mythic heart of every fascism sits one story — the nation has fallen from greatness into decadence, and through struggle and purification it will be born again.

For Griffin, at the core of fascism is the death and resurrection of a people.

And yet a third camp says both of those attempts are too abstract. The historian Robert Paxton argues that fascism has no fixed doctrine. Rather, you understand it better by what it does than what fascism says, and fascist movements will often contradict their own stated principles the moment power is near, because the doctrine was never the point. Watch what the fascist does, Paxton says, not what the fascist says.

And then there’s a response I personally trust over all three, from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, which exists largely as a result of the fascist activities of the European mid-20th century. I invite you to walk its halls. You will leave changed. Fascism, it says, is an ultranationalist, authoritarian political philosophy — fixated on national decline (real or perceived) and drawn to violence as something redemptive and purifying. Here, our national Holocaust Museum compresses the argument in tandem with the second camp. And yet, there’s still a fundamental problem lurking under all four responses: is the word “fascism” even naming a single, particular thing?

Mussolini’s Italy may have given the movement its name — but was Hitler’s Germany the same animal, or a darker cousin the one word only smudges together? We will discuss Germany more in a few minutes, but here is what I want us to focus on: our second point. Even the museum’s definition describes the thing from the outside — and the experts still can’t close the argument. Not because fascism is inexplicable. It’s because fascism is not a set of propositions you can discuss on a whiteboard.

No, pinning down fascism seems difficult because it was never a set of propositions to begin with. It’s operating on a completely different register.

1.3 Argument vs. Experience

In 1932 the Italian Fascist regime finally produced something like an official statement of belief, “The Doctrine of Fascism,” signed by Mussolini himself, though its philosophical spine was written by an actual scholar, Giovanni Gentile. And Gentile was no philosophical lightweight: his “actualism” was a real and demanding system of thought — ‘proof’ (if you wanted it) that fascism could attract a first-rate mind. But watch when the scholar was called in. Not before the movement to write a founding document. No, Gentile was called after the death squads, after the marches, after Mussolini had gained unmitigated power — to compose a doctrine for a thing that had already won without a central text. And the revealing thing about that document — the closest thing fascism has to scripture — is that it half-confesses it has no scripture. It says, more or less, that fascism was not born of a doctrine worked out in advance; rather, it was born of a need to act, and the doctrine came afterward, to explain away what the action had already done.

Consider some of the alternatives.

Political Liberalism has a well-worn scripture: John Locke. Mill’s 19th-century On Liberty. Marxism has Das Kapital, with a thousand pages you can attack premise by premise. America’s founding has the Federalist Papers. Every serious modern movement left a book — a case, made in rational, logical claims that the careful reader can argue with. Now, fascism was not wordless; I want to be fair. It did leave a jailhouse memoir called Mein Kampf, My Struggle, swollen with Hitler’s self-congratulatory drivel — shallow on poetry, history, or common decency. Or, in Winston Churchill’s more apt words, it was a text “turgid, verbose, [and] shapeless.”

No one was ever reasoned into fascism by reading Mein Kampf.

While other political forms were developed with particular arguments, Fascism developed in a particular atmosphere. By design, fascism is as thin on argument as it is overwhelming in experience — it never tries to persuade your intellect.

Instead, it aims for something subconscious: a feeling of belonging to something deathless and sublime. Something that offers a beautiful death. You have invited a philosopher tonight to discuss fascism, when, in fact, fascism isn’t a philosophy at all. It is a mythology.

You cannot refute the sublime experience of fascism with a librarian’s footnote. Throw your accusations and definitions at it; they will simply bounce off. The knowing youth will simply laugh and shake his head. So, what are we talking about when we talk about fascism? It isn’t a text-bound philosophy like Liberalism or Conservatism. It is an atmospheric experience that persuades one’s heart toward militant service to the state and its leaders.

Part II: Where & When did it Come From?

2.1 The Tinderbox

Now, a myth doesn’t just fall from the sky. This myth certainly didn’t.

A century of European thinking laid the tinder: three pieces of it, and you can’t understand how it lit modern Europe on fire without knowing how it began.

I want to take us back to the European Enlightenment, an area of which I have had some interest over the years. Voltaire, Kant, the whole 18th-century project bet everything on something called Universal Reason — one human nature, everywhere the same, sharing in one set of human rights. That claim built the modern world, including the great American Experiment. But that idea also had enemies, called the Counter-Enlightenment. To those authors, there was no such thing as a “man” in the general sense — only the Frenchman, the German, the Russian, each formed by a particular soil and a particular past. And what some called Universal Reason was just one tribe’s customs proclaimed from a powdered wig.

So, let’s not fall to sophistry and abstractions, they intoned. Trust the blood. Trust the soil that binds that blood. For therein lies one’s definition and belonging. Now, an idea was loosed upon modern Europe — that men are defined by blood and soil. This is the first piece of the puzzle.

The second piece is a name handled rather carelessly by many undergrads: Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche was no fascist; he was, in fact, contemptuous of German nationalism, laughed at antisemitic claims, and at one point burned his passport. However, in his last years, he was rendered bedridden and speechless, and his sister Elisabeth — an antisemite and later admirer of Hitler — took control of her brother’s manuscripts, edited them, and sold a Nietzsche that suited Nazis. Hitler’s regime loved this edited version. The will to power, the scorn for herd morality, the overman beyond good and evil. In Nietzsche’s hands, these were necessary provocations; but handed to a nationalist movement, his edited text became a permission slip for cruelty.

The third piece comes from a French engineer named Georges Sorel. In 1908, in Reflections on Violence, he asked what actually moves masses of people to act, to sacrifice, and to fight. Not arguments, he decided. Not social programs. It’s myths that move man — filled with galvanizing images of a shared struggle. This gives us more clarity on how to see fascism. Because you don’t judge a myth true or false, Sorel argued. You judge a myth by what it does. Now here’s the irony: Sorel meant his text for the revolutionary French Left, but within a decade the men building fascism picked it up, and, like Nietzsche, used Sorel’s work for their own ends. Mussolini certainly did.

All this to say that some of Europe’s most powerful minds had been assembling the case that the nation runs deeper than reason, that great men forge their own morality, and that politics is moved by national myth. This was the set of rhetorical tools waiting for someone in the 20th century to use.

2.2 The Crucible

The hinge of our story is the First World War. Ten million dead. A generation of young men fed into machine guns and industrial artillery, for years, over a few miles of poisoned mud. And later, the ‘survivors’ came home into societies that could not absorb what had happened to them — or to language, or to even meaning itself.

The historian George Mosse called what the war did the ‘brutalization of politics.’ Something in the trenches broke the old horror of violence — four years where killing happened daily, where the nation demanded death and called it holy, where the man in the opposite trench was an enemy in the most total sense, his very existence a threat to yours. Most who came home wanted nothing but an ordinary life. But a scarce minority did not want to put his weapon down. After all, he had been someone in the trench — part of a band, a purpose, an intensity — and peacetime, with its shops and parliaments and endless compromises, felt like a betrayal.

A kind of grey humiliation of the spirit.

A line drawn between neighbors — you belong, you do not, and your ‘not-belonging’ is an existential threat — does not stay long on paper. As a combat veteran, I watched what speeches brought to a war-torn Sarajevo, where neighbors hated neighbors for the way his neighbor acknowledged God. It was a horror beyond words. It is, in part, why I address you this evening.

Well, after the First World War came the reactive movements — and notice, this is Paxton’s point returning. They came for a feeling, not an argument. In Italy, before Mussolini, came the Futurists: artists led by the poet Marinetti, whose 1909 manifesto glorified speed, technology, youth — and war, which he once referred to as “the world’s only hygiene.”

Then another poet, D’Annunzio, seized the city of Fiume in 1919, and ran it for over a year as a proto-fascist pageant: with loud balcony speeches, call-and-responses from the crowd, matching black shirts, and the famous Roman salute. Just about the whole choreography of fascism was invented there, by a poet, as a kind of theater, three years before Mussolini took power.

Not surprisingly, fascism was an aesthetic before it was a movement.

Then Mussolini gathered it up. His movement took the name — the fasci, the bundle held together with a nod to Ancient Rome. His squads carried the trench violence of the Great War into domestic politics, beating and burning Italians. And in 1922, Benito Mussolini came to power. But here’s the part most people get wrong. His march on modern Rome was mostly theater; the king could very likely have stopped it with the army, but chose not to try. Mussolini was invited — handed the government by the respectable Italian élites, as they were frightened of the left and thought they could use him and control him.

In other words, those in power thought Mussolini to be a kind of useful, popular ornament for their own backroom agendas. Here, I want to point out that both Italian Fascism and German Nazism share the myth we’ve been tracing: the fallen nation, the ache for rebirth, the enemy who must be purged so the body can be clean. But watch who the enemy is. For Mussolini, the enemy was mostly political — the liberal, the leftist, the soft modern man who would not help Italy regain her former glory. However, for Hitler, the enemy was not merely ideological but biological. Nazism took the rebirth-myth and fused it to a doctrine of race — the nation was not a shared story one joins, but blood that had to be kept pure. And once you have defined your enemy by blood instead of belief— a conclusion follows with the cold logic of a proof. A political enemy can recant, convert, be argued down, be outvoted. But a racial enemy can do none of these things. She cannot stop being what she is. She can only be removed from the land.

That single step — from the enemy you argue with to the enemy you must eliminate — is the path from a bombastic figure on a balcony to a railway platform at Auschwitz.

Of course, 11 years after Mussolini, the German conservatives made the exact same bet in Berlin, with precisely the same confidence — that they could use this man as an ornament of their own designs. One of them said it aloud, “We’ve hired him.” But they had not hired him.

Fascism did not break down the door. Respectable, frightened people opened it — which is the single most uncomfortable fact in this whole talk. Please remember it.

Now, it would be a comfort to file all this under history — a century’s-old European fever of the twenties and thirties, burned out and safely behind us. I want to take that comfort away, because one more thinker saw, even as it was happening, that this was not a one-time accident.

2.3 The Door in the Floor

His name was Ernst Cassirer, and his last book is the one I find difficult to teach — because it burdens the story every teacher lives by. Cassirer was a scholar of the Enlightenment, a believer in reason and culture — and a Jew, who fled Germany when the Nazis came, taught in exile, and died in 1945, in America, as the war was ending. The book, published after his death, is called The Myth of the State.

In it he makes sense of what he has just watched consume his world. We told ourselves a story about progress, he says — that humanity climbed up out of the darkness of myth into the daylight of reason, and that the climb was permanent. That story was false. Myth was never defeated by reason. It was suppressed — and suppressed is not defeated. Defeated is gone. Suppressed is underground, dormant, waiting. And in times of extremity — collapse, humiliation, fear, the sense that the ordinary world has failed — the old mythical thinking comes back up, with all its ancient force, now armed with modern technology and the modern state.

Reason, Cassirer is telling us, is not our natural resting place. It is an achievement — thin, recent, and reversible. Under enough pressure, human beings do not default to argument. We default to myth: the tribe, the strong man, the cleansing of the enemy, the promise of rebirth.

Fascism, in that light, is not an aberration. It is what a frightened, humiliated modern society reaches for when reason seems to have failed it. A door in the floor — always there, under the carpet, waiting in every single one of us.

So here it is: Fascism is not a European disease from a distant decade. It is the shape the human animal takes under enough fear — and that shape is available in every generation, because the door in the floor is built into the architecture of the mind, not into the history of the Italian peninsula.

So finally, I ask: what does fascism offer the human heart that makes us, again and again, willingly open to it? That’s the last question of our evening.

Part III: Why Does Fascism Seem to Work?

3.1 The Pull

Everything so far has been, in a sense, from the outside — the word, the history, the ideas. Now I want to reach inside.

Most people who’ve lived under fascism never embraced it. They complied. Out of fear, out of habit, out of the ordinary wish to keep their job and their family safe. That machinery — the secret police, the informer, the boot — is real; whole books are written about it, and it is not my subject tonight. My subject is stranger. Not why people obeyed — obedience is easy to explain; fear explains it. I want to investigate why some believed — why did some weep with joy, why did they give everything? Because it is the believers, not the frightened, who tell us what the thing actually offers the heart.

We first have to acknowledge that the believers were not a separate species. They were the ones who said yes to a pull that millions more felt in those same years and finally refused. It is the pull I am after tonight — not the surrender. The surrender is rare. The pull is not.

Many will ask why fascism is wrong. That’s the easy question. The hard one is why it is so attractive. Knowing the horror, why do human beings keep saying yes to fascism?

The best answer I know comes from Hannah Arendt, who did not write about fascism in general. She wrote about its most extreme form, totalitarianism — the kind of fascism that wants not your obedience but your soul. The kind Nazi Germany built and Italy, for all its cruelty, never quite achieved. And she traces it through the hatred of the Jew, and the reach of empire, down to the taproot — the quietest thing she found, and the most universal: loneliness.

Not solitude — solitude can be rich and deeply beneficial. Loneliness hits different. If you’ve ever felt unnecessary in a crowded room, you already know the difference. It is the experience of not belonging to the world at all, of having no place among others, of lacking the confirmation of others — of being, in the deepest sense, unnecessary to a world. Modern society manufactures this loneliness at a grand scale: it uproots people from village and church and craft and class, from the whole web that used to tell them who they were and that they counted, and leaves millions atomized, each alone in the crowd, each privately suspecting they are no one.

Fascism makes an offer no liberal society thinks to make. It says: you are not ‘no one.’ You are a son of an eternal people, a cell in an immortal body. You were never alone — you had only forgotten who you were. Come home! To someone with an aching, nameless hole where belonging should be, that is water in the desert — the thing they have wanted their whole life and could never name. Powerful is the man who promises this.

But belonging alone doesn’t explain the intensity — the tears, the ecstasy, the grown men weeping at Nazi rallies. Belonging is warm; this was more than warm. It was transcendent…

3.2 A Religion for a Disenchanted Age

To see its transcendent, sublime nature, you must stop thinking of fascism as politics and start thinking of it as a kind of religion. The historian Emilio Gentile (no relation to the earlier philosopher) saw it like this: he calls fascism a political religion. Not every historian buys that frame, but I find it a useful heuristic.

Fascism took the whole apparatus of religion, which Europe was rapidly losing in an age Max Weber called the disenchantment of the world, and moved it onto the nation. Here, fascism made the nation sacred: its saints, who were the movement’s martyrs; its holy days and processions; its rituals of blood and sacrifice. To a God-emptied modern person, it offered the one thing modernity had taken away — the sense that a life, and a death, might mean something eternal.

The philosopher who saw this most clearly was Walter Benjamin, another German Jew. In 1935, thinking about how mass reproduction was changing art and aesthetic value, Benjamin wrote a sentence I have never been able to shake. He said that fascism doesn’t offer the masses what they need, but a chance to express themselves— a role in a magnificent spectacle. Expression is being seen. Justice is being served. Fascism understood that you can starve a people of the second so long as you drown them in the first. In this way, fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into modern political life. And with it, politics became a means of expression rather than debate.

Think on it. One hundred thousand human beings in perfect ranks in a great square at night. Pillars of light — searchlights fired straight up into the dark, a cathedral of light with no ceiling. Ten thousand torches. Banners the height of buildings. Every face turned the same way, every voice in one chant — and the terrible relief of it: the individual, that lonely, anxious, unnecessary little self, dissolving into something vast and deathless and eternal and sublime.

It is indeed transcendent. That is the honest word, and I use it here on purpose. We may flatter ourselves that fascism is ugly — that we’d see it coming, because it would repel us. But the aesthetic of fascism was never ugly. It was sublime. It gave people the most beautiful and moving experience of their lives.

So, perhaps now you can see why every fact we throw at fascism bounces off. You cannot argue a person out of a religious experience — you cannot refute a cathedral of light with a policy paper. Benjamin understood that the enemy of fascism is not a better argument, because fascism was never standing on the plane of rational discourse. Strip everything else away: fascism works by giving lonely, disenchanted people belonging, and beauty, and the feeling of eternal meaning — a religion for an age that had lost its religion — which is why you can never defeat it with facts alone.

3.3 The Ever-Present Temptation

So, with everything I’ve described tonight — the longing to belong, the hunger for meaning, the exhaustion with the burden of freedom, the pull toward a strong, simple story that makes all our other stories make sense — none of that is German. None of it is Italian. None of it belongs to the 1930s. Every one of those needs is permanent, because they are not the needs of a nation. They are the needs of a human being.

The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm — another refugee from Hitler’s Germany — not only understood this, but used it as a title: Escape from Freedom. His argument begins when the modern individual was cut loose from the fixed medieval world, the village and guild and church that had once assigned him a place and a meaning, and found himself free, and terrified, in the same instant. And Fromm’s thesis is almost unbearable in its honesty: that freedom, which we all say we want, is also our great modern burden. It is heavy. It is lonely. It throws you back on yourself, makes you responsible, and leaves you exposed.

And so there lives in us — in all of us — a permanent temptation to escape from freedom: to hand the weight of our own selfhood to a knowing leader, a movement, an effervescent crowd, and feel the sweet relief of no longer having to be a separate, responsible, solitary self. Fascism is the most complete offer of that escape ever devised. And it stands open in every generation, because the burden it relieves is the permanent burden of simply being a modern person.

Now look back at the guides who’ve walked us through this. Hannah Arendt, who taught us about loneliness — fled the Gestapo, was interned in a French camp, escaped, and got out through Lisbon. Ernst Cassirer, who taught us that myth is only sleeping — died in exile, the war not yet won. Erich Fromm — driven out. And Walter Benjamin ran for the border in 1940 with the Gestapo closing behind him, was turned back at the frontier, and took his own life that night rather than be handed over. These were not scholars safe in a library. Every one of these people theorized the fire as they were running from it. They dragged these insights out of the wreckage of their own world, at the cost of their homes, and for some of them their very lives. And they’ve handed their stories to us. So that we would be able to recognize the shape of the thing, if it ever came for us.

So I will end where I began: with a caution.

The word we started with — fascism — is too important to waste as an insult, and too real to lock safely away in the past. Hold it with care. If you cheapen it and throw it at everyone you disagree with, you will wear it out— and it will not serve you later, with its deft sharpness, on the day you truly need it.

But, then again, tell yourself that fascism is only history, that it could never happen here, and you will not see it coming — because you will be scanning the horizon for jackboots and torches. And you will miss how it actually arrives: in the ordinary clothes of one’s own time, speaking of rebirth, and belonging, and enemies not of our blood and land, in a voice that sounds like home.

I was asked to give you a philosopher’s view of fascism. What I hope I have done is given you a lens — grounded by a century of the hardest experience human beings have ever had to endure, and by the exiles who paid for it with everything they had. I have deliberately not told you where to point that lens. That is not my work tonight. But the lens is yours now nonetheless.

What you build with it, out there, together, with other people, by the slow argument of fellow citizens — is your work, and it is the real work, and it is not mine to script. All I ask is that when you raise the lens I have offered you, that you dare to look through it honestly. Not only outward, at the people you already fear. But inward — at the pull you may feel in your own chest, toward the warm and the simple and the call to belong. Because that pull is where it always begins.

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless the United States.

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Shared with the East Texas Invisible Alliance at the Longview Library

The Gospel of Mark | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

βλέπω blepō / ὁράω horaō • the two ordinary Greek verbs for seeing
Blepō is the seeing your eyes do: to look, to watch. Horaō reaches further: to see and to perceive, to take in what a thing means. Greek keeps two verbs where English has one.

Central Question for Part 3
What does it mean to see Jesus?

On our first Sunday, we picked a fight with gMark’s opening.

The “Good News” was lifted from Caesar’s monuments and hung on an executed Jew from the Galilee. Last Sunday, we watched the Kingdom arrive: without manger, cradle, or star. Instead, we saw a man irrupting out of the desert, with an authority one witnessed rather than debated. Because his exousia came from doing: from healing communities and breaking bread with the stranger.

Then came a parable about soils, because the Kingdom, once broken through, must still be received. And not every ground is open to parting with the ways of Caesar — of thrones, and banners, and riches. That lesson ended on a promise: that the gap between hearing and understanding runs all the way down to a blind beggar outside of Jericho who, of everyone in this Gospel, finally sees. This Sunday, we pay him a visit.

Now, if you have been following this series, you may have noticed a curious pattern: every part opens with something strange. If you caught that, I’m glad. I wanted you to notice, actually, because I took that tactic directly from gMark. That is to say, when we read gMark closely and invest ourselves in the text, we begin to notice not just the story itself but the way it’s edited together. This entire Gospel is built out of puzzles. And the deepest ones, the writer refuses to solve until the very end — like bookending the text with the torn (schizō) verb — which we’ll tie off on our last Sunday. This week, however, I want to hand you another Markan puzzle, one that the writer set at the dead center of the Gospel, and then walked away from without a word of explanation.

What it reveals is that this is a Gospel about perception: who sees, who’s blind, who half-sees, and who hears everything and understands none of it. And the puzzle at the center is a story of a man who needed to be healed of blindness, not once but twice.

With this puzzle in mind, today we will wrestle with what it means to see Jesus well.

Lesson One · The Name without the Meaning

So here’s yet another strange thing about gMark.

There is exactly one healing in all four Gospels that happens in two stages. One. Everywhere else, Jesus heals with the grand authority we’re used to witnessing: a word, a touch, and it’s done, usually instantly, and certainly completely.
Except this one time…

Once, in gMark, Jesus takes a blind man by the hand, leads him out of the village, puts saliva on his eyes, lays hands on him, and then does something he does nowhere else. He asks: Can you see anything? As if Jesus is checking. And the man looks up, and I love this line, he says, “I can see people, but they look like trees, walking.”

The man is half-healed. Blurred. He can see shapes moving, but cannot tell a man from a tree. (There’s a Lord of the Rings joke in there, somewhere.) So Jesus lays hands on him a second time, and only then does he see clearly. It is the only healing told this way in the entire Gospel tradition. And the writer didn’t bury this odd occurrence. They set it at the dead center of the Gospel, right at the hinge where the whole story turns. The entire Gospel of Mark frames this healing. So here is the question gMark is daring you to ask: why would Jesus, who heals instantly, need two turns — and why would the writer put that odd healing at the very center of the text?

So, picture that in your mind: a man who sees people as walking trees. Because, to understand why it sits at the center of gMark, you have to look at what sits right next to it — six verses later…

Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi, and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.” And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes and be killed and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

He called the crowd with his disciples and said to them, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”
MARK 8:27-38

Now think about what just happened, because this is the hinge of the entire book.

Jesus asks the disciples the question that the whole Gospel has been circling: “Who do you say that I am?” And Peter, the first called, the Rock, gets it right. “You are the Messiah.” The anointed one. The Christos. After eight chapters of crowds guessing, and demons whispering, and disciples scratching their heads, somebody finally says the word out loud, and he’s correct! Bully for Peter.

But this isn’t the mountaintop. This isn’t the end. Because in the space of three verses, it falls completely apart. How?

Because the moment Peter names the title, Jesus starts explaining what the title actually means — and it’s not at all what Peter is prepared to hear. The Son of Man, Jesus says, must undergo great suffering — be rejected, killed, and after three days rise again. And Peter, who two breaths ago said exactly the right thing, takes Jesus aside and rebukes him!

Peter corrects Jesus!

That’s not what Messiah means, Jesus. And so Jesus turns to Peter and says the hardest thing he ever says to a friend: “Get behind me, Satan!” Why the insult? Jesus explains his harsh words with the next line, “For you, [Peter] are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

Now, I ask you to resist the easy reading here, because it won’t hold up.

The easy reading is that Peter is simply a fool. He’s not. If we put ourselves in Peter’s first-century Jewish sandals for a moment, we’ll quickly see that, for him, “Messiah” did not mean a man on a Roman cross. For first-century Jews, the “Anointed One” was a king — Judean kings’ heads were anointed with oil to proclaim their kingship. To a simple fisherman reading the terrain in front of him, the expectation was that all these Roman soldiers taxing us into starvation and hurting our families would be thrown into the sea by a new Jewish king. This king would then unite the scattered Jewish diaspora and restore the throne of David. Israel had not had independence since Rome’s brutal conquest a century before. Peter and the rest of the disciples are hoping for the return of the good old days of independence and unity.

Peter knew about the Roman cross. The violence of crucifixion had been common for centuries in the region, and would continue there for centuries more. The Jewish Messiah, on the other hand, stood for triumph and glory! How could Jesus combine Messiah, Israel’s great triumph, with crucifixion — the lowest, slowest, and most humiliating death Rome imposed? A crucified messiah was not merely a difficult idea for Peter. For first-century Jews, to talk of a crucified messiah was a logical contradiction in terms. One could call it blasphemy if it actually made any sense! At our next meeting, we will pick up on this thread. For now, let’s say only that Peter has the right name, but the wrong story about what that name Messiah actually means for Jesus.

The Gospel of Mark redefines the Messiah around the very thing that would make a Messianic leader impossible in first-century Judea. And notice (because this is the detail people often skate past) that the very first thing Jesus does after Peter names him is order them to tell no one. We mentioned that last Sunday, so let’s pick it back up here: throughout the Gospel of Mark, the truth gets spoken and Jesus shushes it. The demons knew his name, and he muzzled them. Now Peter knows the title and is told to keep quiet, because, as we all know by the end of the story, the title without the cross is not good news. The Messiah Peter had in mind was a political design in theological clothes. Another war. Another few years of bloodshed. Then peace — the peace that every leader promises, following the death of its country’s youth and promise.

But let’s continue reading where many readers stop. Having told Peter that the Messiah will be killed, Jesus turns from Peter to the whole crowd and makes the cross theirs too: If any of you want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. Let’s think about how strange that comment really is.

Jesus is not only saying I will be crucified. He is saying that following a crucified Messiah willingly invites a certain kind of death — not a hero’s valiant death on a holy battlefield with the wind whipping across your sword and banners, but a martyr’s undignified murder under a gleeful imperial boot. What Peter is hearing, much to his astonishment, is that the shape of following Jesus is the cross. By the end of this lesson, in contradiction to Peter’s response, we will see someone who hears that message and walks the cross-road that Jesus lays before us.

So here is what I want you to carry out of this first lesson: Peter has the right name, but the wrong story. Notice now, who fails to see. It’s not the crowd. It’s not “the Jews” in a corporate accusation as we find in the Gospel of John. The one who cannot see Jesus is in the inner circle. The man with the keys. The Rock. Here, the writer is warning us that those closest to Jesus, by calling and occupation, do not see him. Proximity is not seeing. You can be the Rock and still be staring at trees.

Lesson Two · The Half-Healing & the Woman Who Saw

So Peter can see, but only halfway. Now, at the start of today’s lesson, I invited you to pay close attention to the way the gospel writer puts all of these stories together. Notice now not just the story but the way it’s cut together.

Let’s look again, back at the puzzle six verses before Peter…

Remember the singular healing that takes two touches — the man who looks up mid-miracle and sees people “like trees, walking.” I asked why Jesus, who heals instantly, would need two tries. Here is the answer: he didn’t. The two-stage healing was never about the limits of Jesus’ power. They are about the limits of Peter’s willingness to see.

At first glance, Peter saw real shapes with the wrong focus: a Messiah without a cross. A man like a tree, walking. The writer placed these two scenes together, the strange two-part healing and Peter’s blurred confession, side-by-side at the dead center of the Gospel, so that each could explain the other. Read them apart, and you have a curiosity and a quarrel. Read them together, the way they were actually placed in the text, and the healing becomes a map for understanding Peter’s shortsightedness.

Now look at what sits right before it, because the writer is handing you the caption first. In the boat, the disciples are fretting that they forgot to bring bread, and Jesus rounds on them: Do you have eyes, and fail to see? Do you have ears and fail to hear? Do you not yet understand? He calls out their condition — spiritual blindness — and then, in the very next scene, gMark sets before you a literal blind man.

They came to Bethsaida. Some people brought a blind man to him and begged him to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village, and when he had put saliva on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, “Can you see anything?” And the man looked up and said, “I can see people, but they look like trees, walking.” Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again, and he looked intently, and his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. Then he sent him away to his home, saying, “Do not even go into the village.”
MARK 8:22-26

Let’s look at what the healing actually shows, because it was written with great care.

The first touch is partial. The man sees, but everything’s blurred: people look like trees, there’s motion without clarity. The right shapes in the wrong focus. Then the second touch: wholeness. Fulfilment. Now look again, just six verses later. At first touch, Peter sees. He names Jesus correctly; the shape is right. But it’s blurred. He gets “Messiah” right, but it’s without the cross. Too worldly a viewpoint. The rest of the Gospel is waiting for the second touch, which happens in the Last Week of Jesus’ life.

This is where I want to borrow a line from Marcus Borg, who taught us to take the Bible seriously without taking it literally, and this healing is a perfect case of why that distinction is a gift to gMark’s deeper meaning. Read literally, this healing is a peculiar medical anecdote: a miracle that needed a do-over. Read seriously, in the context of the rest of the Gospel, this healing is gMark’s most carefully constructed metaphor. The two stages of the healing are the two stages of discipleship. Any philosophy professor will tell you: seeing comes in stages. At first read, you have a general direction, maybe a key term, but the point is still a blur. A ‘first-glance’ grasp of the Gospel is not a failed read or a failed miracle. It is the very road St. Peter took to finally see Jesus rightly.

Here, I want to remind you of the Proverb:

The path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day. Proverb 4:18

That is the mercy found throughout this Gospel’s portrait of the disciples: their initial blindness is the dark before the light of a new day. But gMark also shows us another kind of seeing, even more strange and audacious. In the chapter before Peter’s blurred confession, the text shows us someone who needed no second touch. She (yes, she) sees the whole shape from the beginning! And she is everything someone like Peter would not expect: she’s not a disciple, not a fellow Jew, she’s not even in Israel. Alone in pagan territory, with a sick child and no social standing, she walks straight into the most theologically uncomfortable scene in the Gospel.

I want to give some credit here. When our very own Rev. Dr. Chris Pulliam preached this same scene last year, he was honest about how hard it lands. He said he could not fully tame it, and I trust a preacher who’s willing to tell you that. He has my deep respect, and said something in that sermon that I want to repeat here: we’re not worthy, but ask anyway. What I want to show you now is how far this non-Jewish woman takes her fearless “ask anyway…”

From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go — the demon has left your daughter.” And when she went home, she found the child lying on the bed and the demon gone.
MARK 7:24-30

Let me be honest about how uncomfortable this story is, because the discomfort is part of the point, and the moment you sand it down (and many have tried), you have thrown away the whole story.

The woman’s daughter has an unclean spirit. She comes and falls at Jesus’ feet and begs. And Jesus — and there is no softening this — says no. Worse than no. He says, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” Dogs. Now, I know there is a long theological tradition of trying to rescue Jesus here. St. Augustine in the 5th century points to her humility: “the Lord called her a dog,” he marvels in his 77th Sermon, “and she did not say I am not; she said I am, and was rewarded for it.” The Reformation founder Martin Luther cast the scene as a trial of faith — God's “no” concealing a “yes” for the woman who would not relent. And in the 1950s, William Barclay points out that gMark’s Greek uses the diminutive, little dogs. So, Jesus is really saying puppies, here. Right? He calls her a puppy?

But such a position is special pleading, and it drains the message of its weight. “Dog” or “kalba” was a genuine insult in Israel. In that Aramaic-speaking world, dogs were a sign of being shameless and unclean. Today, in Arabic, dog or “kalb” is still an insult with similar ancient reasoning: if a dog licks you before prayer, most Islamic schools require you to wash its saliva off before kneeling toward God.

So this non-Jewish woman is facing a real insult from Jesus. I’m not going to deny that. The theological wall she faces is real, and her victory over that wall is equally real. In fact, I think it’s the whole point.

The woman does not flinch, does not retreat, and does not weep. She argues.

“Even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” She takes Jesus’ metaphor and uses it against him. Dogs need to eat, too, Jesus. And listen to what changes his mind here: because of this argument, “you may go; the demon has left your daughter.” This is the only time in the entire Gospel of Mark that someone changes Jesus’ mind. She does not move him with tears. She moves him with a better argument. She is an agent in her own healing, and Jesus becomes the one who is moved!

My mentor, John Dominic Crossan, reads this scene as the radical openness of the historical Jesus: the brokerless kingdom, the open table, the mercy refusing to stop at the border. It is a beautiful reading, and I honor him for it. But it carries a hidden cost: If the point is that Jesus opens the door, then the unspoken premise is that Jewish life was the thing ending behind it. Amy-Jill Levine supplies the needed correction here: Gentile inclusion is not something Jesus invents against Jewish tradition; it is already written into the scripture. Look where the Gentile woman is from. Tyre and Sidon — Lebanon today — where the prophet Elijah famously fed a widow, another desperate mother with no bread (1 Kings 17:7-16). And that scripture has marvelous company: Ruth the Moabite [from a people the Torah bars from the Assembly] walks into Israel with nothing and becomes the great-grandmother of King David. So a Phoenician woman arguing with a Jewish prophet about bread and crumbs is not breaking through a closed tradition. That reading ignores the Book of Kings. Instead, we see a woman standing where Zarephath's widow and Ruth already stood, invoking one of the Bible’s oldest moral claims: that we are called to wrestle with God.

And the Gentile woman is winning.

So, watch what her argument does in the story, because it’s not some charming detour the writer could have cut. Rather, it sets the scene to come. Immediately, Jesus heals a deaf man in the Decapolis, again in Gentile country. Then he feeds thousands in Gentile territory. Amazingly, the Gentile mission of the Gospel of Mark begins here, at the moment a non-Jewish woman wins an argument over crumbs.

The Gospel is never the same afterward. It is the moment that the door opens to Jesus’ entire Gentile ministry. The disciples are the half-healed man. The last question for today is whether anyone in this Gospel ever fully sees Jesus.

Lesson Three · Bartimaeus, Who Sees and Follows

So the Gentile woman saw, and then went home. She picked up her healed child and walked back into her own life, and we never see her again. So, let’s ask: does anyone who walks the road with Jesus, anyone who’s actually trying to follow, ever get the second, clarifying touch?

As the road Jesus walks is revealed to you, the reader, it does not look promising. Between that blind man at the center of the story and Jerusalem at the end, Jesus tells his friends plainly, on three separate occasions, that he is going to be killed. And every time, they show us they cannot see what he’s talking about.

Count them with me.

First, Peter rebuked him in Mark 8. Then, six days later, three of them are taken up a mountain and shown the clearest vision of who Jesus is in the whole Gospel: in blazing white, Jesus stands next to Moses and Elijah. And Peter's response? He babbles about building three tents, because the text says flatly that he did not know what to say, and was terrified. The disciples see him in glory, the curtain pulled back, and still reach for the wrong thing. Then comes the second prediction, plainer than the first — and the disciples respond by arguing over which of them is the greatest. Then the third, in the most detail yet, and James and John walk up and ask for the two best seats in the kingdom, one at Jesus' right hand and one at his left. When Jesus talks about the cross, his disciples ask for thrones.

All the way to Jericho — men like walking trees... And then, at the very last stop before Jerusalem, sitting at the dusty edge of the road: a blind beggar. The one I pointed out last Sunday.

They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher, let me see again.” Jesus said to him, “Go; your faithfulness has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him. MARK 10:46-52

Look who gets the last word here:
Not Peter, expecting banners and trumpets.
Not James or John, angling for the thrones and VIP treatment.
A blind beggar.

The Gospel writer rarely names the people Jesus heals, but this one is named: Bartimaeus, son of Timaeus, sitting by the roadside with a cloak spread out for coin. The lowest-status person in the scene. An outsider. And he is the one who sees!

He cries out: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Son of David. That’s a messianic title, a royal title, and the beggar shouts it openly in the street. And the difference here is everything: this time, the crowd tries to shut him up. The same instinct that muzzled demons, the same holy order that hushed Peter. Be quiet! But here, for once, watch what does not happen. Jesus does not silence the beggar. The man shouts louder, “Son of David, have mercy,” and Jesus stops the whole procession and calls him over.

The Gospel’s constant shushing is finally broken by a blind man who will not stop proclaiming the truth.

What does the beggar do? He throws off his cloak: his sole possession. It is his bed and his shelter from the heat. It is the table he sets out to catch the alms on which he lives. And he throws it away to come to Jesus empty-handed. By now, you can see that gMark loves to work in contrasts and ironies. Now look a few verses back: the rich man who came to Jesus and could not let go of his wealth, went away grieving. But the beggar has just one thing — and he flings it down without a thought.

Now, focus on the question Jesus asks him, because the writer has rigged it for maximum irony. Jesus asks, “What do you want me to do for you?”

Those are the exact words Jesus said to James and John just a few verses earlier. Word for word. The same question to the inner circle. James and John, with their working eyesight and their three-year theological résumé, heard that question and said: Give us glory, Jesus! Give us the best seats. Make your treasures shower down on me. The blind beggar hears the identical question and says, “My Rabbi, let me see again.” The men who can see ask for thrones. The blind man asks for sight so that he might follow Jesus.

And then: “Go! Your faithfulness has made you well.” And the man receives his sight, and here is the line the whole lesson has been driving toward, the second touch made visible — he followed Jesus on the Way.

En tē hodō. “The Way,” by this point in gMark, it’s not a vague metaphor about life choices. The Way is a road — and the road goes up to Jerusalem, and ends at the cross.

So the blind beggar names Jesus with a royal title and, unlike Peter, turns and walks the cross-bound road behind him. That is exactly what Jesus told the crowd that following him would cost, back at Caesarea Philippi: take up your cross and follow! Peter cannot hear it, while the blind beggar does it. The first and second touch in one motion. The outsider does what the inner circle could not: he sees, and he follows.

So, in closing, let’s think now about how boundaries work in gMark.

We opened with a blind man healed: the two-stage healing at the center of the Gospel. And we finish now with a blind man fully healed: Bartimaeus, at the gate of Jesus’ Last Week. Two healings of blindness frame the disciple’s own road to the cross. Men who, despite their proximity, failed to see. Three predictions, and three times blind to the truth. The Gospel writer wrapped the disciples’ blindness inside two stories about blind men receiving sight, so that we might finally understand that the people who needed their sight healed were not the blind but Jesus’ inner circle.

In gMark, it is the outsiders who see Jesus clearly, the Gentile woman and the blind beggar, while the insiders squint and ask for riches and status.

Seeing Jesus rightly was never about naming names or titles. It wasn’t about text-proofing with chapter and verse what the Messiah means to you, your purse, or the throne you desire. The Gospel of Mark shows us that we know we are seeing Jesus rightly when that sight puts us on the road with him.

The Epistle of James describes this road well.

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but does not have works? Surely that faith cannot save, can it? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. JAMES 2:14-17

The half-healing in gMark was never a failure. It was an ancient portrait of discipleship. At first, you may get the name right, but you often miss the meaning. You think you’re on the path, but the truth is, you can’t tell the men from the trees. When you’ve hit that moment in life, you need a second touch.

The blind beggar finally sees — and the seeing is the following.
In this way, you will recognize your healing when you find yourself on the road with Jesus — not asking for a throne like John or worldly things like Peter, but feeding the hungry, hearing the holy rebuke of women and strangers, and healing others eager for their place in the Kingdom.

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The Gospel of Mark · 3rd of 5 Sundays: Bread, Boundaries, Misunderstanding & the Way of the Cross. We gather again on August 2: Jerusalem, Temple, Empire & the Last Week.

MODULE I – The Rebirth (1454-1603)

Sec 1 • Defining the Modern

1.1 Modus & Modo: The Method & the Way
1.2 Optimism & the Promise of Progress
1.3 Reason, Secularism, & the Individual
1.4 Mapping the Modern: 4 Ages in 15 Weeks

Read: Jervis, Exploring the Modern
Art: Duccio's Madonna & Dürer's Self-Portrait
Listen: Hildegard's chant & Josquin's polyphony

Sec 2 • Renaissance & the Printing Press

2.1 Rebirth: The Medici, Humanism, & the Dignity of Man
2.2 Genius: Leonardo, Michelangelo, & Raphael
2.3 1454: Gutenberg & the First Information Age
2.4 Machiavelli: Politics without Heaven

Culture & Values chs. 12–13
Read: Machiavelli, The Prince (sel.)
Art: Botticelli, Birth of Venus & Raphael, School of Athens
Listen: Josquin, Ave Maria… Virgo serena

Sec 3 • Reformation & the New Heavens

3.1 Luther & the Fracturing of Christendom
3.2 Trent & the Counter-Reformation
3.3 1543: Copernicus & the De-Centered Cosmos
3.4 Elizabeth & Shakespeare: Halmet’s Modern Mind

Culture & Values ch. 14
Read: Luther, Reformation Writings (sel.)
Read²: Shakespeare, Hamlet (sel.)
Art: Dürer's prints; Holbein, The Ambassadors
Listen: Dowland, “Come Again” & Luther, “Ein feste Burg”

MODULE II – Early Modern Philosophy (1604-1775)

Sec 4 • Baroque & the New Science

4.1 Splendor & Shadow: Bernini, Caravaggio, & Rome
4.2 The Dutch Golden Age: Rembrandt, Vermeer, & the Market
4.3 1633: Galileo & the New Science on Trial
4.4 Newton’s Clockwork: The Mechanical Cosmos

Culture & Values ch. 15
Read: Galileo, Starry Messenger (sel.)
Art: Caravaggio, The Calling of St. Matthew & Bernini, Ecstasy of St. Teresa
Art²: Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson & Vermeer, The Astronomer
Listen: Bach & Handel

Sec 5 • Leviathan: The State & Social Contract

5.1 Hobbes after the Civil War
5.2 Locke: Property, Toleration, & the Blank Slate
5.3 Versailles: Absolutism as Theatre
5.4 Rousseau & the General Will

Culture & Values ch. 15 (cont.)
Read: Hobbes, Leviathan (sel.), & Locke, Second Treatise (sel.)
Art: the Leviathan frontispiece & Rigaud, Louis XIV
Listen: Lully at the Sun King's court & Purcell

Sec 6 • The Enlightenment & Its Shadows

6.1 Sapere Aude: Philosophes, Salons, & the Encyclopédie
6.2 Candide: Voltaire Against Optimism
6.3 First Nations: The Americas & Enlightenment's Others
6.4 The Classical Style: Mozart, Haydn, & the Age of Elegance

Culture & Values chs. 16 & 19
Read: Voltaire, Candide (sel.); Kant, "What Is Enlightenment?";
Read²: Waters, American Indian Thought (sel.); Stannard, American Holocaust (sel.)
Art: Fragonard, The Swing; the Templo Mayor & the codices
Listen: Mozart, The Marriage of Figaro (sel.)

MODULE III – Nationalism & Industry (1776-1913)

Sec 7 • The Age of Revolutions

7.1 1776: Common Sense & the Rights of Man
7.2 1789: Paris, the Terror, & the Marseillaise
7.3 Athens on the Potomac: Neoclassicism & the New Republics
7.4 Goya & Napoleon: The Birth of Nationalism

Culture & Values chs. 19-20
Read: Paine, Common Sense (sel.); Hutchinson & Smith, Nationalism (sel.)
Art: David, Oath of the Horatii & Death of Marat; Goya, The Third of May 1808
Listen: “La Marseillaise” & Beethoven, Eroica (and the torn dedication)

Sec 8 • Romanticism & Modern Science

8.1 Sturm und Drang: Goethe & the Sorrows of the Self
8.2 The Sublime: Friedrich, Turner, & Beethoven
8.3 Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus
8.4 Questioning Progress: Romanticism Against the Machine

Culture & Values ch. 20
Read: Shelley, Frankenstein (novel #1) & Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (sel.)
Art: Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog & Turner's storms; Fuseli, The Nightmare
Listen: Schubert, Erlkönig; Beethoven’s No. 5; Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique

Sec 9 • Industry & Empire

9.1 The Machine Age: Coal, Rail, & the Crystal Palace
9.2 Metropolis: Picturing the Industrial City
9.3 Europeans Seize the World: Africa & the Colonizer's Model
9.4 Uncle Tom's Cabin: Abolition & the Sentimental Weapon

Culture & Values chs. 17-18, 20
Read: Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (sel.) & Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (sel.)
Read²: Dickens, Hard Times (rec.)
Art: the Crystal Palace; Turner, The Slave Ship; the camera goes to the colonies
Listen: spirituals — “Go Down Moses”
Screen (first film): Metropolis

Sec 10 • Marx & the Age of Oil

10.1 1848: The Manifesto & the Specter of Revolution
10.2 Alienation: The Self on the Assembly Line
10.3 The Prize: Rockefeller & the Age of Oil
10.4 Realism: Courbet, Daumier, & Painting the Poor

Culture & Values chs. 20-21
Read: Marx, The Communist Manifesto (sel.); Yergin, The Prize (sel.)
Read²: Economides, The Color of Oil (sel.); Huxley, Brave New World (sel. — "Our Ford")
Art: Courbet, The Stone Breakers & Daumier, Third-Class Carriage;
Art²: Millet, The Gleaners & Menzel, The Iron Rolling Mill
Listen: Joplin's ragtime — music for a mass age
Screen (brief selection): Modern Times

Sec 11 • Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, & the Fin de Siècle

11.1 The Present Age: Kierkegaard Against the Crowd
11.2 Zarathustra: Nietzsche & the Death of God
11.3 The Painted Moment: Impressionism & Its Rebels
11.4 The Nervous Age: Darwin, Freud, & Mahler's Hammer

Culture & Values ch. 21
Read: Kierkegaard, The Present Age (sel.); Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (sel.)
Art: Monet, Impression, Sunrise; Van Gogh, The Starry Night
Art²: Cézanne & Hokusai & Japonisme
Listen: Debussy, Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
Listen²: Mahler, Symphony No. 6 in A Minor (1906) and its hammer blows!

MODULE IV – The End of Modernity (1914-1960s)

Sec 12 • The World at War

12.1 1914: Machine Guns, Mustard Gas, & All Quiet
12.2 The Modernist Rupture: Dada, Duchamp, & The Rite
12.3 The Grapes of Wrath: Depression & the New Deal
12.4 Night: The Holocaust & the Break in Civilization

Culture & Values ch. 22
Read: Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (sel.) & Wiesel, Night (sel.)
Read²: Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (sel.) & Freud, Civilization & Its Discontents (sel.)
Art: Otto Dix's war prints; Duchamp, Fountain; Dalí;
Art²: Lange, Migrant Mother; Picasso, Guernica
Listen: Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring; Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5 in D Minor
Screen (sel.): All Quiet on the Western Front (1930); Night and Fog

Sec 13 • Aftermath: The Bomb & the Absurd

13.1 By the Bomb's Early Light: Hiroshima & the Atomic Imagination
13.2 Existentialism: Sartre, Beauvoir, & Freedom After Auschwitz
13.3 The Stranger: Camus & the Colonial Absurd
13.4 New York Steals Modern Art: Pollock, Rothko, & Bebop

Culture & Values ch. 23
Read: Camus, The Stranger (novel #2) & Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light (sel.)
Read²: Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (sel.) & Beauvoir, The Second Sex (sel.)
Art: Pollock's drips & Rothko's fields
Listen: Parker's bebop; Cage, 4′33″

Sec 14 • The Culture Industry & the Cold War

14.1 Manipulation: Adorno & the Culture Industry
14.2 One-Dimensional Man: Marcuse, Madison Avenue, & Suburbia
14.3 Strange Fruit to Selma: Civil Rights & the Counterculture
14.4 Dr. Strangelove: The Binary World

Culture & Values ch. 23
Read: Adorno & Horkheimer, The Culture Industry (sel.) & Marcuse, 1-Dem. Man (sel.)
Read²: Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture (sel.) & MLK, Ltr from Birmingham Jail
Art: Warhol's soup cans, Lichtenstein’s pop art, & Levittown through the lens
Listen: Holiday, Strange Fruit, Bob Dylan, & Hendrix's Star-Spangled Banner
Screen (sel.): Dr. Strangelove

Sec 15 • The Postmodern Critique

15.1 The Postmodern Condition: Lyotard & the End of Grand Narratives
15.2 Simulacra: Baudrillard, Warhol, & Hyperreality
15.3 The 21st Century & Its Discontents
15.4 Do Androids Dream?: Blade Runner, AI, & the Inhuman

Culture & Values ch. 23
Read: Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (sel.) & The Inhuman (sel.)
Read²: Baudrillard, Sim & Simul. (sel.) & Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (sel.)
Art: Venturi & Gehry — architecture after modernism
Art²: Nam June Paik's screens & the machine-made image (2020s)
Listen: Glass & Reich's minimalism; Kraftwerk, Computer World; sampling as pastiche
Screen (film #2): Blade Runner

as taught at Tyler Junior College

MODULE I – Early Civilizations

Sec 1 • In the Beginning

1.1 What is Civilization?
1.2 A Revolution in Food
1.3 The Bronze & Iron Ages

Sec 2 • Ancient Mesopotamia

2.1 Intro • Context • Timeline
2.2 Politics • Religion • Wisdom
2.3 Texts • Arts • Contributions

Sec 3 • Ancient Egypt

3.1 Intro • Context • Timeline
3.2 Politics • Religion • Wisdom
3.3 Texts • Arts • Contributions

Sec 4 • Ancient India

4.1 Intro • Context • Timeline
4.2 Politics • Religion • Wisdom
4.3 Texts • Arts • Contributions

Sec 5 • Ancient China

5.1 Intro • Context • Timeline
5.2 Politics • Religion • Wisdom
5.3 Texts • Arts • Contributions

MODULE II – The Greco-Roman Traditions

Sec 6 • Early Greece

6.1 Intro • Context • Timeline
6.2 Politics • Religion • Wisdom
6.3 Texts • Arts • Contributions

Sec 7 • Hellenistic Greece

7.1 Intro • Context • Timeline
7.2 Politics • Religion • Wisdom
7.3 Texts • Arts • Contributions

Sec 8 • The Romans

8.1 Intro • Context • Timeline
8.2 Politics • Religion • Wisdom
8.3 Texts • Arts • Contributions

MODULE III – The Abrahamic Traditions

Sec 9 • Ancient Israel

9.1 Intro • Context • Timeline
9.2 Politics • Religion • Wisdom
9.3 Texts • Arts • Contributions

Sec 10 • Early Christendom

10.1 Intro • Context • Timeline
10.2 Politics • Religion • Wisdom
10.3 Texts • Arts • Contributions

Sec 11 • Early Islam

11.1 Intro • Context • Timeline
11.2 Politics • Religion • Wisdom
11.3 Texts • Arts • Contributions

MODULE IV – The Rise of Europe

Sec 12 • The Holy Roman Empire

12.1 Intro • Context • Timeline
12.2 Politics • Religion • Wisdom
12.3 Texts • Arts • Contributions

Sec 13 • The High Middle Ages

13.1 Intro • Context • Timeline
13.2 Politics • Religion • Wisdom
13.3 Texts • Arts • Contributions

Sec 14 • The Late Middle Ages

14.1 Intro • Context • Timeline
14.2 Politics • Religion • Wisdom
14.3 Texts • Arts • Contributions

Sec 15 • The Renaissance

15.1 Intro • Context • Timeline
15.2 Politics • Religion • Wisdom
15.3 Texts • Arts • Contributions

MODERN HUMANITIES

as taught at Florida State University

MODULE I – The Rebirth (1454-1603)

Sec 1 • Defining the Modern

1.1 Modus & Modo: The Method & the Way
1.2 Optimism & the Promise of Progress
1.3 Reason, Secularism, & the Individual
1.4 Mapping the Modern: 4 Ages in 15 Weeks

Read: Jervis, Exploring the Modern
Art: Duccio’s Madonna & Dürer’s Self-Portrait
Listen: Hildegard’s chant & Josquin’s polyphony

Sec 2 • Renaissance & the Printing Press

2.1 Rebirth: The Medici, Humanism, & the Dignity of Man
2.2 Genius: Leonardo, Michelangelo, & Raphael
2.3 1454: Gutenberg & the First Information Age
2.4 Machiavelli: Politics without Heaven

Culture & Values chs. 12–13
Read: Machiavelli, The Prince (sel.)
Art: Botticelli, Birth of Venus & Raphael, School of Athens
Listen: Josquin, Ave Maria… Virgo serena

Sec 3 • Reformation & the New Heavens

3.1 Luther & the Fracturing of Christendom
3.2 Trent & the Counter-Reformation
3.3 1543: Copernicus & the De-Centered Cosmos
3.4 Elizabeth & Shakespeare: Halmet’s Modern Mind

Culture & Values ch. 14
Read: Luther, Reformation Writings (sel.)
Read²: Shakespeare, Hamlet (sel.)
Art: Dürer’s prints; Holbein, The Ambassadors
Listen: Dowland, “Come Again” & Luther, “Ein feste Burg”

MODULE II – Early Modern Philosophy (1604-1775)

Sec 4 • Baroque & the New Science

4.1 Splendor & Shadow: Bernini, Caravaggio, & Rome
4.2 The Dutch Golden Age: Rembrandt, Vermeer, & the Market
4.3 1633: Galileo & the New Science on Trial
4.4 Newton’s Clockwork: The Mechanical Cosmos

Culture & Values ch. 15
Read: Galileo, Starry Messenger (sel.)
Art: Caravaggio, The Calling of St. Matthew & Bernini, Ecstasy of St. Teresa
Art²: Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson & Vermeer, The Astronomer
Listen: Bach & Handel

Sec 5 • Leviathan: The State & Social Contract

5.1 Hobbes after the Civil War
5.2 Locke: Property, Toleration, & the Blank Slate
5.3 Versailles: Absolutism as Theatre
5.4 Rousseau & the General Will

Culture & Values ch. 15 (cont.)
Read: Hobbes, Leviathan (sel.), & Locke, Second Treatise (sel.)
Art: the Leviathan frontispiece & Rigaud, Louis XIV
Listen: Lully at the Sun King’s court & Purcell

Sec 6 • The Enlightenment & Its Shadows

6.1 Sapere Aude: Philosophes, Salons, & the Encyclopédie
6.2 Candide: Voltaire Against Optimism
6.3 First Nations: The Americas & Enlightenment’s Others
6.4 The Classical Style: Mozart, Haydn, & the Age of Elegance

Culture & Values chs. 16 & 19
Read: Voltaire, Candide (sel.); Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?”;
Read²: Waters, American Indian Thought (sel.); Stannard, American Holocaust (sel.)
Art: Fragonard, The Swing; the Templo Mayor & the codices
Listen: Mozart, The Marriage of Figaro (sel.)

MODULE III – Nationalism & Industry (1776-1913)

Sec 7 • The Age of Revolutions

7.1 1776: Common Sense & the Rights of Man
7.2 1789: Paris, the Terror, & the Marseillaise
7.3 Athens on the Potomac: Neoclassicism & the New Republics
7.4 Goya & Napoleon: The Birth of Nationalism

Culture & Values chs. 19-20
Read: Paine, Common Sense (sel.); Hutchinson & Smith, Nationalism (sel.)
Art: David, Oath of the Horatii & Death of Marat; Goya, The Third of May 1808
Listen: “La Marseillaise” & Beethoven, Eroica (and the torn dedication)

Sec 8 • Romanticism & Modern Science

8.1 Sturm und Drang: Goethe & the Sorrows of the Self
8.2 The Sublime: Friedrich, Turner, & Beethoven
8.3 Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus
8.4 Questioning Progress: Romanticism Against the Machine

Culture & Values ch. 20
Read: Shelley, Frankenstein (novel #1) & Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (sel.)
Art: Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog & Turner’s storms; Fuseli, The Nightmare
Listen: Schubert, Erlkönig; Beethoven’s No. 5; Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique

Sec 9 • Industry & Empire

9.1 The Machine Age: Coal, Rail, & the Crystal Palace
9.2 Metropolis: Picturing the Industrial City
9.3 Europeans Seize the World: Africa & the Colonizer’s Model
9.4 Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Abolition & the Sentimental Weapon

Culture & Values chs. 17-18, 20
Read: Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (sel.) & Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (sel.)
Read²: Dickens, Hard Times (rec.)
Art: the Crystal Palace; Turner, The Slave Ship; the camera goes to the colonies
Listen: spirituals — “Go Down Moses”
Screen (first film): Metropolis

Sec 10 • Marx & the Age of Oil

10.1 1848: The Manifesto & the Specter of Revolution
10.2 Alienation: The Self on the Assembly Line
10.3 The Prize: Rockefeller & the Age of Oil
10.4 Realism: Courbet, Daumier, & Painting the Poor

Culture & Values chs. 20-21
Read: Marx, The Communist Manifesto (sel.); Yergin, The Prize (sel.)
Read²: Economides, The Color of Oil (sel.); Huxley, Brave New World (sel. — “Our Ford”)
Art: Courbet, The Stone Breakers & Daumier, Third-Class Carriage;
Art²: Millet, The Gleaners & Menzel, The Iron Rolling Mill
Listen: Joplin’s ragtime — music for a mass age
Screen (brief selection): Modern Times

Sec 11 • Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, & the Fin de Siècle

11.1 The Present Age: Kierkegaard Against the Crowd
11.2 Zarathustra: Nietzsche & the Death of God
11.3 The Painted Moment: Impressionism & Its Rebels
11.4 The Nervous Age: Darwin, Freud, & Mahler’s Hammer

Culture & Values ch. 21
Read: Kierkegaard, The Present Age (sel.); Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (sel.)
Art: Monet, Impression, Sunrise; Van Gogh, The Starry Night
Art²: Cézanne & Hokusai & Japonisme
Listen: Debussy, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
Listen²: Mahler, Symphony No. 6 in A Minor (1906) and its hammer blows!

MODULE IV – The End of Modernity (1914-1960s)

Sec 12 • The World at War

12.1 1914: Machine Guns, Mustard Gas, & All Quiet
12.2 The Modernist Rupture: Dada, Duchamp, & The Rite
12.3 The Grapes of Wrath: Depression & the New Deal
12.4 Night: The Holocaust & the Break in Civilization

Culture & Values ch. 22
Read: Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (sel.) & Wiesel, Night (sel.)
Read²: Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (sel.) & Freud, Civilization & Its Discontents (sel.)
Art: Otto Dix’s war prints; Duchamp, Fountain; Dalí;
Art²: Lange, Migrant Mother; Picasso, Guernica
Listen: Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring; Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5 in D Minor
Screen (sel.): All Quiet on the Western Front (1930); Night and Fog

Sec 13 • Aftermath: The Bomb & the Absurd

13.1 By the Bomb’s Early Light: Hiroshima & the Atomic Imagination
13.2 Existentialism: Sartre, Beauvoir, & Freedom After Auschwitz
13.3 The Stranger: Camus & the Colonial Absurd
13.4 New York Steals Modern Art: Pollock, Rothko, & Bebop

Culture & Values ch. 23
Read: Camus, The Stranger (novel #2) & Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light (sel.)
Read²: Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (sel.) & Beauvoir, The Second Sex (sel.)
Art: Pollock’s drips & Rothko’s fields
Listen: Parker’s bebop; Cage, 4′33″

Sec 14 • The Culture Industry & the Cold War

14.1 Manipulation: Adorno & the Culture Industry
14.2 One-Dimensional Man: Marcuse, Madison Avenue, & Suburbia
14.3 Strange Fruit to Selma: Civil Rights & the Counterculture
14.4 Dr. Strangelove: The Binary World

Culture & Values ch. 23
Read: Adorno & Horkheimer, The Culture Industry (sel.) & Marcuse, 1-Dem. Man (sel.)
Read²: Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture (sel.) & MLK, Ltr from Birmingham Jail
Art: Warhol’s soup cans, Lichtenstein’s pop art, & Levittown through the lens
Listen: Holiday, Strange Fruit, Bob Dylan, & Hendrix’s Star-Spangled Banner
Screen (sel.): Dr. Strangelove

Sec 15 • The Postmodern Critique

15.1 The Postmodern Condition: Lyotard & the End of Grand Narratives
15.2 Simulacra: Baudrillard, Warhol, & Hyperreality
15.3 The 21st Century & Its Discontents
15.4 Do Androids Dream?: Blade Runner, AI, & the Inhuman

Culture & Values ch. 23
Read: Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (sel.) & The Inhuman (sel.)
Read²: Baudrillard, Sim & Simul. (sel.) & Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (sel.)
Art: Venturi & Gehry — architecture after modernism
Art²: Nam June Paik’s screens & the machine-made image (2020s)
Listen: Glass & Reich’s minimalism; Kraftwerk, Computer World; sampling as pastiche
Screen (film #2): Blade Runner

MODULE I – What Can We Know?

Sec 1 • Why Philosophy?

1.1 What is Critical Thinking?
1.2 The 3 Stages of Critical Thinking
1.3 Thales • Ad Hoc Stories
1.4 Pythagoras • What is Philosophy?

Sec 2 • Classical Thinking

2.1 Heraclitus • The Same River Twice
2.2 Socrates • Know Thyself
2.3 Plato • Leaving the Cave
2.4 St. Augustine • The City of God
2.5 St. Aquinas • On Scholastic Faith
2.6 Ockham’s Razor • Let’s Cut to the Chase

Sec 3 • Scientific Thinking

3.1 Avicenna & Maimonides • Rational Thinking
3.2 The Birth of Modernity
3.3 Descartes • Self-Evident Truth
3.4 Locke • Empirical Thinking
3.5 Popper • Science & Falsifibility
3.6 Hawking • Philosophy & Science

Sec 4 • Thinking Today

4.1 Kant • Early Phenomenology
4.2 Merleau-Ponty • Late Phenomenology
4.3 Wittgenstein • Language Games
4.4 Arendt • Post-Truth World

MODULE II – What Should We Do?

Sec 5 • Character Ethics

5.1 What is Ethics?
5.2 Aristotle • What is Virtue?
5.3 MacIntyre • Virtue Today
5.4 Socrates • Euthyphro’s Dilemma
5.5 St. Aquinas • Natural Law Theory
5.6 MLK • Natural Law & Civil Rights

Sec 6 • Contractarian Ethics

6.1 Our Natural Rights
6.2 Hobbes • Social Contract Theory
6.3 Locke • Negative Liberty
6.4 Rousseau • Positive Liberty
6.5 The Political Philosophy Horseshoe
6.6 Haidt • Against Authoritarianism

Sec 7 • Deontological Ethics

7.1 Spinoza • Universal Ethics
7.2 Ethics after Hobbes
7.3 Kant • Maxims & Reason
7.4 Kant • Deontological Principles
7.5 Ross • Prima Facie Duties
7.6 Autonomy & Consent

Sec 8 • Consequentialist Ethics

8.1 Aristippus & Bentham • On Hedonism
8.2 Machiavelli • On Consequentialism
8.3 Mill • On Utilitarianism
8.4 Revisiting Kant & Mill

MODULE III – What is Our Purpose?

Sec 9 • The Personal Struggle

9.1 What Would Epicurus Buy?
9.2 Epicurus • The 3 Things You Actually Need
9.3 Lucretius • How to Live Without Fear
9.4 Heraclitus • Nature & Self-Control
9.5 Zeno • How to Be Happy (ie. Stoicism)
9.6 Pigliucci • Grit & the Modern Stoic

Sec 10 • The Modern Struggle

10.1 Hegel • The Goal of Modernity
10.2 Marx • Dialectical Materialism
10.3 Marx • The Lonely Worker
10.4 Dilthey & Habermas • Why Marxism Failed
10.5 Gadamer • Modernity & Interpretation
10.6 Heidegger • Modernity & Technology

Sec 11 • Against Nihilism

11.1 The Existentialists
11.2 Kierkegaard • The Crowd of Untruth
11.3 Heidegger & Camus • How to Smile Authentically
11.4 Nietzsche • Apollo vs. Dionysus
11.5 Nietzsche • The Übermensch
11.6 Levinas • The Irreducibility of the Other

Sec 12 • Toward Self-Affirmation

12.1 Sartre • The True Self
12.2 Beauvoir • Self & Partner
12.3 Arendt • Self & the Unreflective Other
12.4 Rorty & West • Self Affirmation & Shared Purpose

MODULE IV – On Art & Representation

Sec 13 • On Truth & Art

13.1 Plato • Art & Philosophy
13.2 Schopenhauer • Art & Purpose
13.3 Bell • Art & Form
13.4 Heidegger • Art & Truth
13.5 Barthes • Art & Intention
13.6 Derrida • Artist & Audience

Sec 14 • Truth & Culture

14.1 Gadamer • Truth & Representation
14.2 Kant • Truth & the Transcendent
14.3 Nietzsche • Truth & the Avant-Garde
14.4 Lyotard • Culture & Institutions
14.5 Eagleton • Culture & Value
14.6 Foucault • Culture & Hierarchy

Sec 15 • Habitus & the Hyppereal

15.1 Latour • Art & Social Truth
15.2 Bordieu • Art & Habitus
15.3 Benjamin • Art & Aura
15.4 Baudrilliard • Art & the Hyperreal

MODULE I – Grounding Our Ethics

Sec 1 • What is Morality?

1.1 Defining Ethics
1.2 The Critical Thinker

Sec 2 • Key Concepts in Ethics

2.1 “Proving” Ethics
2.2 Moral Nihilism
2.3 Moral Relativism
2.4 Moral Objectivism

Sec 3 • Applied Ethics I: The Environment

3.1 Natural Law Theory
3.2 St. Aquinas’ Seven Basic Goods
3.3 Natural Law & the Environment
3.4 Sustainability & Biodiversity

MODULE II – Personal Character & Virtue

Sec 4 • On Character

4.1 Personal Character
4.2 Finding Our Purpose
4.3 Golden Mean
4.4 The Four Kinds of People You Meet

Sec 5 • Western Virtue

5.1 On Pleasure
5.2 What Would Epicurus Buy?
5.3 The Stoic View
5.4 Tranquility in the West

Sec 6 • Eastern Virtue

6.1 Confucian Relationships
6.2 Confucian Values
6.3 Buddhist Ethics
6.4 Tranquility in the East

Sec 7 • Applied Ethics II: The Ethics of Giving

7.1 Is Greed Good?
7.2 The Problem of Egoism
7.3 Altruism & Religious Motivation
7.4 Altruism & Science

MODULE III – Contract, Duty, & Autonomy

Sec 8 • The Social Contract

8.1 Modernity & Secular Ethics
8.2 The State of Nature
8.3 Social Contract Theory
8.4 The Value of a Good Will

Sec 9 • What is Our Duty?

9.1 Our Duties
9.2 Our Maxims
9.3 The Principle of Universality
9.4 The Principle of Humanity

Sec 10 • Autonomy & Pluralism

10.1 Acting with Autonomy
10.2 Respect & Consent
10.3 Why Pluralism?
10.4 Prima Facie Duties

Sec 11 • Applied Ethics III: Ethics in the Workplace

11.1 Equal Respect in the Workplace
11.2 Why Have Workplace Protections?
11.3 Care Ethics in the Workplace
11.4 Leadership Ethics

MODULE IV – Consequentialism & Future Tech

Sec 12 • The Happy Society

12.1 The Happy Society
12.2 Consequentialism
12.3 Utilitarianism: A Primer
12.4 Expected vs. Actual Utility

Sec 13 • Deontology vs. Utilitarianism

13.1 Kant: Duty-Based Ethics (A Review)
13.2 Mill: Teleological-Based Ethics (A Review)
13.3 Rules vs. Acts
13.4 The Trolley Problem

Sec 14 • Applied Ethics IV: Ethics & Technology

14.1 Digital Surveillance
14.2 Ethics & A.I.
14.3 Bioethics & Healthcare
14.4 Ethics & Social Media

MODULE I – The Rise of Islam

Sec 1 • Normativity & Religion: A Primer on Method

1.1 Islam in a Public College
1.2 The Scholar’s Toolkit: the Nonsectarian Method
1.3 Knowledge, Belief, & the Insider/Outsider Problem
1.4 Descriptive vs. Normative Claims

Sec 2 • Pre-Islamic Arabia & Muhammad ﷺ

2.1 The Ka’ba & the Age of Jahiliyyah
2.2 Monotheism in 7th-century Arabia
2.3 610 CE: Muhammad ﷺ, Khadija, & the Call
2.4 The First Muslims & the Eve of the Hijra

Sec 3 • Jihad & the Holy City of Medina

3.1 The Hijra & the Constitution of Medina
3.2 The Medina Reforms: Women & Hadith
3.3 Jihad & the War with Mecca
3.4 Jews, Christians, & the Return

Sec 4 • After Muhammad ﷺ

4.1 The Succession Crisis
4.2 Omar’s Conquests & Uthman’s Codex
4.3 The First Fitnah
4.4 The Umayyad Turn

Sec 5 • Kalam & Shia Islam

5.1 Karbala
5.2 The Imams
5.3 Orthopraxy & the Five Pillars
5.4 Salat: the Tent Pole of Islam

MODULE II – The Noble Qur’an

Sec 6 • Philosophy & the Qur’an

6.1 The Qur’an as Text: From Recitation to Codex
6.2 Al-Fatiha & the Divine Face
6.3 Rationalists & Traditionalists: Reading the Qur’an
6.4 Sharia & Fiqh: The Law & Its Making

Sec 7 • Qur’anic Ethics: War & Tolerance

7.1 The S-L-M Root & the Norm of Peace
7.2 Just War & the Sword Verse in Context
7.3 Tasamuh vs. Tolerance
7.4 People of the Book & the Five Injunctions

Sec 8 • Qur’anic Ontology: Evil & the Afterlife

8.1 Evil, Shaytan, & Divine Mercy
8.2 Al-Dunya & al-Akhirah: Resurrection & Judgment
8.3 Al-Jannah: The Hidden Garden
8.4 Jahannam, Gehinnom, & the Limits of Language

MODULE III – The Golden Age

Sec 9 • Umayyads & Abbasids

9.1 From Ummah to Empire: The Umayyads
9.2 The Conquest Map: Jerusalem to Tours
9.3 The Abbasid Revolution
9.4 Baghdad: The Crown Jewel of the Age

Sec 10 • Islamic Intellectualism & Mysticism

10.1 Falsafa: Reason Meets Revelation
10.2 Baghdad’s Loanwords: from Algebra to Coffee
10.3 The Sufi Way: Rabia of Basra
10.4 The Conference of the Birds: Fana & Rumi

Sec 11 • Invasions East & West

11.1 The Coming of the Turks
11.2 1099: The Crusades
11.3 Saladin & Richard
11.4 1258: The Mongol Storm & Baghdad

MODULE IV – Islam & Modernity

Sec 12 • Europe & the Three Empires (1300–1850)

12.1 Europe Reborn: Banks, Ships, & the Age of Discovery
12.2 The Ottomans: The Sick Man of Europe
12.3 Safavid Iran & Mughal India
12.4 The East India Company & the Great Game

Sec 13 • Philosophical Responses to Modernity

13.1 All Figured Out: Islam Meets Modernity
13.2 3 Responses: Salafism, Secularism, & Islamic Modernism
13.3 Constitutionalism & the Majlis
13.4 Nationalism, the Great War, & Sykes-Picot

Sec 14 • The Islamic World Today

14.1 New Nations: Atatürk, Pan-Arabism, & Oil
14.2 Israel & Palestine: A Tale of Two Peoples
14.3 Nasser, Qutb, & the Six-Day War
14.4 On Histories Talking Past Each Other