Issue 3 - Relationships of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism

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The Great Awakenings: Coffee Has Been in Theological Hot Water for Centuries
Coffee was first banned in 1511 by the Pasha of Mecca, Kha'ir Bey, who assembled a group of learned men to discuss the effects of coffee on the minds and bodies of men, and to debate whether coffeehouse were dens of promiscuity and sedition…

China: Hungry Ghosts Without Souls
In traditional Chinese cosmology, everyone has to venture through purgatory, which is envisioned as consisting of ten levels of hell. If a person's moral state (their thoughts and actions in life) is outweighed by sins, he or she will be reborn as an animal, hungry ghost, or hell being…

Mysticism in Islam
Just as the descent of the Koran from God demonstrates to Muslim's the divine origin of the book and the truth of the message, so also Muhammad's ascent to God verifies the goal of the message and shows the fruit of putting its guidelines into practice…

Is the Dome of the Rock a Mosque?
For over a millennium, Jews, Christians and Muslims appropriated Jerusalem to develop, legitimize, interpret, and contest ideas about political legitimacy in the Holy Land…

Sayings of Jesus in Islamic Literature
In the Qur'an, the sacred book of Islam, and other Islamic texts, Jesus—‘Isa in Arabic—is revered as a prophet and holy man. According to the Qur'an, Jesus was born of the virgin Maryam under a palm tree, and he grew up to be known as the son of Mary (ibn Maryam), the Messiah (al-Masih), and a prophet (Nabi) in the line of prophets…

Captain Sir Richard Burton: International Man of Adventure
Burton's accomplishments range from infiltrating the sacred Muslim cities of Mecca and Harrar—disguised as a devout Muslims, he was the most famous Englishman to visit the former and the only white man to survive a trip to the latter—to uncovering the source of the Nile River…

Arabs and Pre-Islamic Arab Beliefs
A specific kind of jinn was the companion jinn (called a qarin), who is born when its human partner is born, dies when they die, remains with them at all times, and exerts great influence, for better or for worse, on their behavior, condition and accomplishments…

The Role of Women in Islam
Progressive Muslims hold that the woman is endowed by God with intellectual, moral, and spiritual gifts and should be given the opportunity to develop them…

The Golden Age of Medieval Spain China: Hungry Ghosts Without Souls
What developed in Muslim Spain was “a Judaeo-Islamic tradition parallel to the Judaeo- Christian tradition of which we are accustomed to speak in the modern world.” While it lasted, this period of Jewish-Muslim symbiosis was remarkable for the degree or cooperation that existed in business, education, medicine and literature…

Jesus in Islam: Christianity in Medieval Islamic Literature
Ibn Taymiyya's views on Christian beliefs in regards to their doctrine and views on the nature of Jesus, Jesus' crucifixion, and his resurrection are still relevant and, it must be added, are even axiomatic for any inter-religious discussions because of the recent emphasis of his views by certain Muslim groups…

Be My Lupercalia
The first recognized instance of a written valentine is often attributed to Charles, the Duke of Orleans, who wrote his wife from prison in 1415…

Peter the Venerable: A Medieval Christian's Polemical Writings
Amidst Western Christendom's Holy War to wrest Palestine from the uslims and armed with all the expected rhetoric maintaining the Latin divine right to impose the sword over both lands and venerated shrines of the Bible—once faraway places upon stain-glassed windows in austere Romanesque churches—arose a man believing these crusades neglected one of the most crucial Christian objectives: the conversion of the Muslims…

Aristotle: Champion of Theism?
A person in the Middle Ages was initially shocked by the powerful and integrated picture of the world that Aristotle presented. The shock was generated by Aristotle's natural explanations and laws that appeared to replace or conflict with God's respective role in the world. This conflict, often characterized as a battle between faith and reason, might be more precisely represented as a struggle between philosophy and religion…