Contradicting the views commonly held by westerners, many Muslim countries in fact engage in a wide spectrum of reform, with the status of women as a central dimension. This anthology counters the myth that Islam and feminism are always or necessaril...

This book is the record of a debate that took place in the early tenth century between the famous Ismaili missionary Abu Hatim al-Razi and the even more celebrated Abu Bakr al-Razi, a physician and philosopher who was known to medieval Europe as "Rha...

Over the course of his forty-year career, S. Kent Brown, professor of religious studies, has taught and inspired thousands of students at Brigham Young University and has produced over one hundred publications and several films in the fields of early...

This highly regarded volume was the first to explore the doctrine of prophetic revelation, a critical and definitive area of Islamic religious and political thought. In it, the esteemed Islamic scholar Fazlur Rahman traces the inception of this doctr...

In "Varieties of Muslim Experience", anthropologist Lawrence Rosen explores aspects of Arab Muslim life that are, at first glance, perplexing to Westerners. He ranges over such diverse topics as why Arabs eschew portraiture, why a Muslim scientist mi...

Fundamentally different from other more prominent, Jewish traditions and experiences, the Sephardic tradition has long served to bind together the various Jewish communities of the Mediterranean basin. In "The Sephardic Legacy", Henry Toledano immers...

Dismissing oversimplified and politically-charged views of the politics of Shi'ite Islam, Said Amir Arjomand offers a richly researched sociological and historical study of Shi'ism and the political order of premodern Iran that exposes the roots of w...

The relationship between Western democracies and Islam, rarely entirely comfortable, has in recent years become increasingly tense. A growing immigrant population and worries about cultural and political assimilation – exacerbated by terrorist attack...

In the Middle Ages, Muslim travelers embarked on a rihla, or world tour, as surveyors, emissaries, and educators. On these journeys, voyagers not only interacted with foreign cultures – touring Greek civilization, exploring the Middle East and North...

In the "Critique of Christian Origins" Abd al-Jabbar – the leading Muslim intellectual of the late tenth century – develops what might be considered the first Islamic history of Christianity, analyzing the Bible, church rituals, and miracles. Unlike...