47 Quotes by Lesley Hazleton

There was no god but God. There could be no partners with God, no daughters or sons. God was neither begotten nor begetter. What indeed had.

This is the basic insight of the Gnostics, the one known to the great mystical thinkers of all traditions: the divine spark is within each human being.

If you believe in Omens, the fact that Muhammad was born an orphan is not a good one.

How did the infant sent away from his family grow up to redefine the whole concept of family and tribe into something far larger: the umma, the people or the community of Islam?

In more metaphysical terms, it becomes a safe place in which one sleeps, dreams, and grows before emerging back into the world. Either way, it’s a place not merely of shelter, but of incubation.

In fact radically different versions of many of the biblical tales can still be heard today throughout the region, where what seems ‘wrong’ to Western ears is accepted as part of the lore of the Eastern churches.

The scriptures of all three of the great monotheisms show that they began similarly as popular movements in protest against the privilege and arrogance of power, whether that of kings as in the Hebrew bible, or the Roman Empire as in the Gospels, or a tribal elite as in the Quran. All three, that is, were originally driven by ideals of justice and egalitarianism, rejecting the inequities of human power in favor of a higher and more just one.

Muhammad now translated this concept into political terms. Blending idealism and pragmatism – a master politician’s skill if ever there was one – he drew up arbitration agreement that used the tribal principle to reach beyond tribe.

Why would a happily married man isolate himself this way, standing in meditation through the night?