Lesley Hazleton Quotes

Because prophetic it definitely was, placing itself explicitly in the tradition of previous prophets from Moses down through the ages to Jesus. "Say: 'We believe in God and in that which has been revealed to us; in what was revealed to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and the tribes of Israel; to Moses and Jesus and the other prophets.

If Muhammad weren't standing lonely vigil on the mountain, you might say that there was no sign of anything unusual about him.

All ancient polytheisms revered one high god above all others.

Female infanticide was as high in Mecca as in Constantinople, Athens, and Rome - a practice the Quran was to address directly and condemn repeatedly.

Caves have carried strong symbolic resonance for as long as there has been sacred legend. It might be tempting to say that it began with Plato's "allegory of the cave" in The Republic, which explores the interplay between shadows and reality (or in contemporary terms, perhaps, between virtual and actual reality).

Suffering, once accepted, loses its edge, for the terror of it lessens, and what remains is generally far more manageable than we had imagined.

We need many more intrepid women who set out to expand both their and our concepts of the world. We need them in writing just as we need them in politics. We need that sense of adventure, of reaching wider, delving deeper, pushing further afield, whether that field be geographical, intellectual, political, personal, or all of these and more. Enough with decorousness. Let us risk preconceptions and treasured philosophies, bodies and souls. Let us be big and bawdy and full of courage. Let's go.

I'm always asking questions - not to find 'answers,' but to see where the questions lead. Dead ends sometimes? That's fine. New directions? Interesting. Great insights? Over-ambitious. A glimpse here and there? Perfect.

Muhammad's is one of those rare lives that is more dramatic in reality than in legend. In fact the less one invokes the miraculous, the more extraordinary his life becomes. What emerges is something grander precisely because it is human, to the extent that his actual life reveals itself worthy of the word 'legendary'.

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.

Yet the greater the turmoil inside him, the more the revelations responded to it. It was as though the Quranic voice was able to see deep inside him and address questions he was barely aware he was asking.

If there was a single moment it all began, it was that of Muhammad's death. Even the Prophet was mortal. That was the problem. It was as though nobody had considered the possibility that he might die, not even Muhammad himself.

The word, 'cube', comes directly from the Arabic, Kaaba.

In a sense Muhammad was less the messenger than the translator, struggling to give human form -- words -- to the ineffable.

She soars with eagles and navigates by rainbows.

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.

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?

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.

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

Everything is paradox. The danger is one-dimensional thinking.

Machiavelli himself famously put it: "All armed prophets have conquered, and unarmed prophets have come to grief."9