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Islam, Religion
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Within the Heart of Hearts is a journey into the mystical secrets of the heart. Designed to be read like…
a medieval book of hours, it uses prose, poetry and images as a series of meditations on the stages of love's mystical journey, from the initial experience of searching and the heart's longing, to the ecstatic union with God, the lover united with the Beloved. This simple but powerful description of the Sufi journey reminds us of this living tradition of divine love. Taking advantage of the format of an e-book, high quality images speak directly to the soul, as do the poems that touch the heart. Here is the poetry of Rumi, Hafiz, Ibn ‘Arabi, and other Sufi masters placed within the context of the stages of the heart's opening to God. Speaking the universal language of love, they allow each of us to feel the mystery, wonder and bliss that belongs to the heart of hearts, the mystical secret that is hidden within us. They draw the reader deep within their own heart, where this intoxicating relationship of lover and Beloved takes place.The popularity of Rumi has shown a thirst in the West for mystical love. This small book is a way to drink deeply of this wine of love, this tradition of lovers of God. Written by a contemporary Sufi it is based upon a lived experience of the Sufi path and the inner experiences of the heart.
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Asian history, Religion, Islam
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An insightful history of censorship, hate speech, and majoritarianism in post-partition South Asia.At the time of the India-Pakistan partition in…
1947, it was widely expected that India would be secular, home to members of different religious traditions and communities, whereas Pakistan would be a homeland for Muslims and an Islamic state. Seventy-five years later, India is on the precipice of declaring itself a Hindu state, and Pakistan has drawn ever narrower interpretations of what it means to be an Islamic republic. Bangladesh, the former eastern wing of Pakistan, has swung between professing secularism and Islam.Neeti Nair assesses landmark debates since partition—debates over the constitutional status of religious minorities and the meanings of secularism and Islam that have evolved to meet the demands of populist electoral majorities. She crosses political and territorial boundaries to bring together cases of censorship in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, each involving claims of “hurt sentiments” on the part of individuals and religious communities. Such cases, while debated in the subcontinent’s courts and parliaments, are increasingly decided on its streets in acts of vigilantism.Hurt Sentiments offers historical context to illuminate how claims of hurt religious sentiments have been weaponized by majorities. Disputes over hate speech and censorship, Nair argues, have materially influenced questions of minority representation and belonging that partition was supposed to have resolved. Meanwhile, growing legal recognition and political solicitation of religious sentiments have fueled a secular resistance.
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Historical biography, Asian history, Islam
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"Christopher de Bellaigue has a magic talent for writing history. It is as if we are there as the era…
of Suleyman the Magnificent unfolds." —Orhan Pamuk, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Narrated through the eyes of the intimates of Suleyman the Magnificent, the sixteenth-century sultan of the Ottoman Empire, The Lion House animates with stunning immediacy the fears and stratagems of those brought into orbit around him: the Greek slave who becomes his Grand Vizier, the Venetian jewel dealer who acts as his go-between, the Russian consort who becomes his most beloved wife.Within a decade and a half, Suleyman held dominion over twenty-five million souls, from Baghdad to the walls of Vienna, and with the help of his brilliant pirate commander Barbarossa placed more Christians than ever before or since under Muslim rule. And yet the real drama takes place in close-up: in small rooms and whispered conversations, behind the curtain of power, where the sultan sleeps head to toe with his best friend and eats from wooden spoons with his baby boy.In The Lion House, Christopher de Bellaigue tells not just the story of rival superpowers in an existential duel, nor of one of the most consequential lives in human history, but of what it means to live in a time when a few men get to decide the fate of the world.
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Politics and government, Christianity, Islam, Religion, General non-fiction
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Religion, Media and Conversion in Iran studies the reception of Farsi Christian television channels by Muslim audiences in Iran: their…
motivations in viewing the Christian message, their methods of interpretation and negotiation with different media texts and their process of changing or altering their religion. Rooted in empirical research, it analyses three hundred narratives drawn from the audiences of four Farsi Christian satellite television channels between 2010 and 2015, investigating their conversion to Christianity through that medium. The research examines factors that influenced both their interpretations of, and negotiations with, the religious media message, and their process of changing, adding to or modifying their belief system, including their understanding of religious conversion. Drawing on Reception Theory, the book investigates the negotiations between meaning making and mediation and the process of faith transformation against the background of the sociology of religion and culture in contemporary Iran. By offering a unique insight into the way in which media and religion influence each other, this book is a great resource for any scholar of Religious Studies, Media Studies and Middle East Studies and will also be useful for religious media practitioners.
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General non-fiction, Criticism, Islam
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Focusing on Rumi, the best-selling Persian mystical poet of the 13th century, this book investigates the reception of his work…
and thought in North America and Europe – and the phenomenon of ‘Rumimania’ – to elucidate the complexities of intercultural communication between the West and the Iranian and Islamic worlds. Presenting tens of examples from the original and translated texts, the book is a critical analysis of various dimensions of this reception, outlining the difficulties of translating the text but also exploring how translators of various times and languages have performed, and explaining why the quality of reception varies. Topics analysed include the linguistic and pragmatic issues of translation, comparative stylistics and poetics, and non-textual factors like the translator’s beliefs and the political and ideological aspects of translation. Using a broad theoretical framework, the author highlights the difficulties of intercultural communication from linguistic, semiotic, stylistic, poetic, ethical, and sociocultural perspectives. Ultimately, the author shares his reflections on the semiotic specificities of Rumi’s mystical discourse and the ethics of translation generally. The book will be valuable to scholars and students of Islamic philosophy, Iranian studies, and translation studies, but will appeal to anyone interested in the cultural dichotomies of the West and Islam.
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Criticism, Islam
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After the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), the poetics of incitement— found in texts originating in the West…
containing themes and representations of Islam hurtful to Muslims—became an accepted method of textual production in the West. Production of such texts intensified after the attacks of 9/11. Democratic Criticism: Poetics of Incitement and the Muslim Sacred by Masood Ashraf Raja urges a new mode of reading, one that permits Western readers to transcend local reading practices in order to, as best as one can, read from the point of view of the Other. Raja argues that the lack of understanding of Muslim responses to the poetics of incitement in the West is the result of a lack of cross-cultural knowledge. He claims metropolitan universities often do not teach the proper social, historical, and religious context required for effectively reading these texts with any form of cultural knowledge. To remedy this, Raja offers and theorizes “democratic reading practices” and new ways for students to engage with texts. A genealogy of the Muslim Sacred is included, thereby giving readers the history and specific knowledge that constitutes an average Muslim reader of these texts, a subject who should be imagined and empathized with when those in the West read works of the poetics of incitement. Democratic Criticism encourages Western readers to develop a deeper understanding of the meaning-making processes of the Islamic world while at the same time encouraging the Muslim readers to read representations of the Islamic world with a more expansive understanding. It will be a helpful tool in creating reading practices that allow both teachers and students of literature to transcend their mode of reading as universal and to read from the perspective of the Other, and allow readers to engage meaningfully with these texts. Students and scholars of world literature, history, and religious studies will find this book insightful and valuable.
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Islam, General non-fiction
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For Putin and for Sharia examines what it means to support sharia in twenty-first-century Dagestan, where calls for an Islamic…
state coexist with nostalgia for the days of Stalin's rule and Mecca calendars hang alongside portraits of Putin. Confronting existing narratives about sharia, terrorism, and anti-terrorism through ethnographic fieldwork, Iwona Kaliszewska looks at the beliefs and practices of Dagestani Muslims, revealing that the pursuit of sharia can assume a range of forms from sweeping visions of an Islamic state imposed through violence, to minor acts of everyday resistance against injustice, to attempts to restore the security and stability once afforded by the Soviet state. In For Putin and for Sharia, Kaliszewska challenges the official dichotomy of Muslims as supporting either the political underground or state authorities and deconstructs the Salafi/Sufi division between the so-called reformists and traditional Islam.
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Asian history, Politics and government, Islam, Religion
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A New York Times bestseller!This reference shows how to understand the history and tactics of the global terror group ISIS-and…
how to use that knowledge to defeat it.ISIS-the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria-has taken on the mantle of being the single most dangerous terrorist threat to global security since al-Qaeda. In Defeating ISIS, internationally renowned intelligence veteran, author, and counterterrorism expert Malcolm Nance gives an insider’s view to explain the origins of this occult group, its violent propaganda, and how it spreads its ideology throughout the Middle East and to disaffected youth deep in the heart of the Western world.Most importantly, Defeating ISIS gives an amply illustrated, step-by-step analysis of the street-level tactics the group has employed in assaults against fortified targets, in urban combat, and during terrorist operations such as those in Paris during the November 13 attacks. As much as ISIS is a threat to Western targets and regional stability in the Middle East, Nance describes not only its true danger as a heretical death cult that seeks to wrest control of Islam through young ideologues and redefine Islam as a fight to the death against all comers, but also how to defeat it. Defeating ISIS is the first highly detailed and fully illustrated look into the organization by one of the world’s foremost authorities in counterterrorism.100 color illustrations, 100 black-and-white illustrations, maps throughout
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Asian history, Politics and government, Islam
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A startling spotlight on the darkest corners of America’s "War on Terror,” where nothing is quite what it seems.The Convenient…
Terrorist is the definitive inside account of the capture, torture, and detention of Abu Zubaydah, the first "high-value target” captured by the CIA after 9/11. But was Abu Zubaydah, who is still being indefinitely held by the United States under shadowy circumstances, the blue-ribbon capture that the Bush White House claimed he was? Authors John Kiriakou, who led the capture of Zubaydah, and Joseph Hickman, who took custody of him at Guantanamo, draw a far more complex and intriguing portrait of the al-Qaeda "mastermind” who became a symbol of torture and the "dark side” of US security. From a one-time American collaborator to a poster boy for waterboarding, Abu Zubaydah became a "convenient terrorist” a way for US authorities to sell their "War on Terror” to the American people.
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Asian history, Politics and government, Islam, Religion, Law and crime
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The recruitment of ISIS terrorists may have begun as an extremist crusade in Iraq, but it has quickly become a…
global phenomenon that is taking hold of people from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and belief systems. The iconic image of a terrorist as an old, angry, middle-eastern man is long gone. It has since been replaced by young men and women of all races and religious upbringings, in tactical gear and ski masks, carrying heavy artillery. From the outside looking into the Islamic State, most people see these men and women as nothing more than evil terrorists with a psychotic penchant for violence. Internally, they perceive themselves as freedom fighters or mujahedeen, who violate the laws of men to protect their community according to the will of Allah. Ultimately, neither of these perceptions are based in reality. While some experts claim that terrorist recruitment is completely random, criminologist Kimberly Mehlman-Orozco has identified clear patterns which can be used to explain how regular people are being conscripted into terrorism. Using interviews with convicted terrorists, in-depth research and analysis of extremist propaganda, and case-specific details, Dr. Mehlman-Orozco provides nuanced theories into the methods of terrorist recruitment—methods which can be used to identify persons at high risk of being targeted.The Jihadi Next Door provides unprecedented information that can be used to actually combat terrorism. By laying bare the tactics used by ISIS to deceive and exploit new recruits and exposing the veneer these extremists operate under, Dr. Mehlman-Orozco hopes to empower readers with the knowledge needed to prevent future recruitment and thereby preventing acts of terrorism.
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Biography, Religious biography, Women biography, Laws and statutes, Politics and government, Islam, General non-fiction
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ONE OF BOOKLIST'S TOP TEN RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY BOOKS OF 2016ONE OF BOOKLIST'S TOP TEN DIVERSE NONFICTION BOOKS OF 2017Honorable…
Mention in the 2017 San Francisco Book Festival Awards, Spiritual CategoryThis enthralling story of the making of an American is also a timely meditation on being Muslim in America today.Threading My Prayer Rug is a richly textured reflection on what it is to be a Muslim in America today. It is also the luminous story of many journeys: from Pakistan to the United States in an arranged marriage that becomes a love match lasting forty years; from secular Muslim in an Islamic society to devout Muslim in a society ignorant of Islam, and from liberal to conservative to American Muslim; from student to bride and mother; and from an immigrant intending to stay two years to an American citizen, business executive, grandmother, and tireless advocate for interfaith understanding.Beginning with a sweetly funny, moving account of her arranged marriage, the author undercuts stereotypes and offers the refreshing view of an American life through Muslim eyes. In chapters leavened with humor, hope, and insight, she recounts an immigrant’s daily struggles balancing assimilation with preserving heritage, overcoming religious barriers from within and distortions of Islam from without, and confronting issues of raising her children as Muslims-while they lobby for a Christmas tree! Sabeeha Rehman was doing interfaith work for Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the driving force behind the Muslim community center at Ground Zero, when the backlash began. She discusses what that experience revealed about American society.
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Asian history, United States history, Politics and government, Islam, Religion
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The religious diplomacy of Saudi Arabia constitutes a strange black hole in the analysis of radicalism that affects Islam and…
the Middle East today. Why has Salafism, the most intolerant and sectarian movement of Islam, become so prevalent? Of all the religious radicalisms that rot the planet, it is the only one to enjoy the constant support of a country endowed with immense means: the Saudi kingdom. This study, whose collaborators wanted to remain anonymous, reveals how the two sides of the kingdom – the conciliatory one of the Saud dynasty and the more aggressive Salafism, propagandist of jihad – has for decades developed a religious strategy to conquer the Muslim community and the West without appearing as an enemy. One of the most striking examples is the absence of sanctions or even accusations by George W. Bush towards Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks even with fifteen identified Saudis among the terrorists. The kingdom's influence is largely unknown but undoubtedly acts as a key player throughout the Muslim world through their financing of conservative Koranic schools, universities and mosques, as well as other international public and private organizations. But after years of financing radical Islamists in foreign lands, Saudi Arabia now finds itself threatened in their own territory, the monster they have given birth to turned against them.
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Philosophy, Islam, General non-fiction
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“There is always an atheism to be extracted from a religion,” Deleuze and Guattari write in their final collaboration, What…
Is Philosophy? Their claim that Christianity “secretes” atheism “more than any other religion,” however, reflects the limits of their archive. Theological projects seeking to engage Deleuze remain embedded within Christian theologies and intellectual histories; whether they embrace, resist, or negotiate with Deleuze’s atheism, the atheism in question remains one extracted from Christian theology, a Christian atheism. In Sufi Deleuze, Michael Muhammad Knight offers an intervention, engaging Deleuzian questions and themes from within Islamic tradition. Even if Deleuze did not think of himself as a theologian, Knight argues, to place Deleuze in conversation with Islam is a project of comparative theology and faces the challenge of any comparative theology: It seemingly demands that complex, internally diverse traditions can speak as coherent, monolithic wholes. To start from such a place would not only defy Islam’s historical multiplicity but also betray Deleuze’s model of the assemblage, which requires attention to not only the organizing and stabilizing tendencies within a structure but also the points at which a structure resists organization, its internal heterogeneity, and unpredictable “lines of flight.”A Deleuzian approach to Islamic theology would first have to affirm that there is no such thing as a universal “Islamic theology” that can speak for all Muslims in all historical settings, but rather a multiplicity of power struggles between major and minor forces that contest each other over authenticity, authority, and the making of “orthodoxy.” The discussions in Sufi Deleuze thus highlight Islam’s extraordinary range of possibilities, not only making use of canonically privileged materials such as the Qur’an and major hadith collections, but also exploring a variety of marginalized resources found throughout Islam that challenge the notion of a singular “mainstream” interpretive tradition. To say it in Deleuze’s vocabulary, Islam is a rhizome.
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Islam, General non-fiction, Customs and cultures
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Do you like holidays? Learn all about how and why people celebrate different holidays. Carefully leveled text and fresh, vibrant…
photos engage young readers in learning about the holiday traditions and celebrations of Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr. Age-appropriate critical thinking questions and a photo glossary help build nonfiction learning skills
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Laws and statutes, Islam
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In February 2018, the ‘Independent Review on Sharia Law in England and Wales’ was published, headed by Professor Mona Siddiqui.…
The review focused on whether sharia law is being misused or applied in a way that is incompatible with the domestic law in England and Wales, and, in particular, whether there were discriminatory practices against women who use sharia councils. It came about after years of concerns raised by academics, lawyers and women’s activists. This timely collection of essays from experts, scholars and legal practitioners provides a critique and evaluation of the Inquiry findings as a starting point for analysis and debate on current British Muslim family law practices in the matters of marriage and divorce. At the heart of the collection lie key questions of state action and legal reform of religious practices that may operate ‘outside the sphere of law and legal relations’ but also in conjunction with state law mechanisms and processes. This cutting-edge book is a must read for those with an interest in Islamic law, family law, sociology of religion, human rights, multiculturalism, politics, anthropology of law and gender studies.
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Politics and government, Islam, Religion, General non-fiction
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This book combines sociological theorising with studies on the Middle East and Islam. The diversity of modernities that can be…
observed in our world is linked to the claim of living in a global modernity, in a world society. The book underpins this claim with numerous excursions into Islamic history. It criticises the view that modernisation can be equated with westernisation and considers different projects of specifically Islamic modernities as integral parts of world society. From this perspective, the study contributes to the "provincialisation" of European history in contemporary social scientific thought. Contrary to the theories of postcolonialism associated with the call for the provincialisation of Europe, however, this book adheres to essential traditions of classical sociology. It thus aims to make a contribution to the social theoretical discussion on modernity, which is empirically underpinned with the help of data from the history of the Middle East and Islam.
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Asian history, Islam
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In pieces drawn from over the course of his distinguished career, pre-eminent historian Roy Mottahedeh explores such diverse topics as…
the social bonds that connected people in the early Islamic Middle East, the transmission of learning in the Muslim world, religious and ethnic toleration in the past and in the present, and the theme of &‘wonders&’ in The Thousand and One Nights. His essays extend from the early Islamic period through the medieval era and on to modern times. A number concern Iran, the country of his father&’s birth, and again Mottahedeh&’s studies range widely, including Persian panegyric poetry, the origins of the city of Kashan, and Shi&‘ite political thought. Speaking to contemporary concerns, he also touches upon voting rights, academic freedom, and censorship. Intended not only for those in Islamic studies but for students of history and interested lay readers, there are introductions to each section written with the non-specialist in mind, and these sections progress from more general topics to those more specialized. In the Shadow of the Prophet thus reflects Mottahedeh&’s desire that the Islamic world and its history become better understood so that cooperation between Muslims and non-Muslims might become the order of the day.
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Anthologies, Islam
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Sufism through the eyes of a legal scholarIn The Requirements of the Sufi Path, the renowned North African historian and…
jurist Ibn Khaldūn applies his analytical powers to Sufism, which he deems a bona fide form of Islamic piety. Ibn Khaldūn is widely known for his groundbreaking work as a sociologist and historian, in particular for the Muqaddimah, the introduction to his massive universal history. In The Requirements of the Sufi Path, he writes from the perspective of an Islamic jurist and legal scholar. He characterizes Sufism and the stages along the Sufi path and takes up the the question of the need for a guide along that path. In doing so, he relies on the works of influential Sufi scholars, including al-Qushayrī, al-Ghazālī, and Ibn al-Khaṭīb. Even as Ibn Khaldūn warns of the extremes to which some Sufis go—including practicing magic—his work is essentially a legal opinion, a fatwa, asserting the inherent validity of the Sufi path.The Requirements of the Sufi Path incorporates the wisdom of three of Sufism’s greatest voices as well as Ibn Khaldūn’s own insights, acquired through his intellectual encounters with Sufism and his broad legal expertise. All this he brings to bear on the debate over Sufi practices in a remarkable work of synthesis and analysis.A bilingual Arabic-English edition.
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Anthologies, Islam
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A groundbreaking exposition of Islamic mysticismThe Essence of Reality was written over the course of just three days in 514/1120,…
by a scholar who was just twenty-four. The text, like its author ʿAyn al-Quḍāt, is remarkable for many reasons, not least of which that it is in all likelihood the earliest philosophical exposition of mysticism in the Islamic intellectual tradition. This important work would go on to exert significant influence on both classical Islamic philosophy and philosophical mysticism.Written in a terse yet beautiful style, The Essence of Reality consists of one hundred brief chapters interspersed with Qurʾanic verses, prophetic sayings, Sufi maxims, and poetry. In conversation with the work of the philosophers Avicenna and al-Ghazālī, the book takes readers on a philosophical journey, with lucid expositions of questions including the problem of the eternity of the world; the nature of God’s essence and attributes; the concepts of “before” and “after”; and the soul’s relationship to the body. All these discussions are seamlessly tied into ʿAyn al-Quḍāt’s foundational argument—that mystical knowledge lies beyond the realm of the intellect.A bilingual Arabic-English edition.
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Asian history, Islam, General non-fiction
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A controversial episode in the life of the Prophet Muhammad concerns an incident in which he allegedly mistook words suggested…
by Satan as divine revelation. Muslims now universally deny that the Satanic verses incident took place. But Muslims did not always hold this view. Shahab Ahmed uses this case to explore how religions establish truth.