The House of Islam

Probably the most prominent and highly venerated female saint of early Islam was Rabia Adawiyya (d. 801) from the Iraqi city of Basra. One night she was walking with a burning torch of fire in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When people asked her where she was going, Rabia replied: ‘I want to set heaven aflame and extinguish the fire of hell.’ She wanted believers to worship Allah for and through love, not out of considerations of reward and punishment.

‘Knowledge and wisdom are the lost properties of the believer,’ taught Imam Ali, ‘so seek them even if they be with infidels.’

His entire twenty-three-year career as a prophet calling people to God added up to 8,142 days. Of these, he spent seventy days, or 0.9 per cent, on military expeditions, and of those seventy days, only ten days were spent in actual fighting, representing just 0.1 per cent of his entire life’s work in God’s service.1

How can reason ever win in the face of brute force combined with claims of godly validation?

‘O Lord, I know you as much as is possible for me; forgive me, for my knowledge of you is my way of reaching you’

Come, come, whoever you are.
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times.
Come, yet again, come, come.

Muslims have lost the courage to question hadiths that do not align with the Quran.

The Quran, Muslims believe, was the result of the miracle sent from God to the Prophet Mohamed and a society absorbed in the art of playing with words and poetry. Just as Moses surpassed pharaoh’s magicians and Jesus outperformed the healers of Jerusalem, Mohamed outshone the poets of Mecca.