In all three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, marriage is part of God's plan for humanity, as illustrated in the Hebrew Scriptures, the New Testament, and the Koran as well as the religious literature of these three traditions. It is viewed as a sacred bond as well as a means to personal fulfilment. It is more than a legal contract, rather an institution with cosmic significance, legitimized through divine authority. In Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the purpose of marriage is to build a home, create a family and thereby perpetuate society. Yet, despite the similarity of perception in the great monotheistic faiths, there are important differences. In this book three scholars outline sex law, betrothal and marriage, family life and the understanding of divorce in these traditions and discuss the differences between them in a student-friendly and accessible way. -- Publisher

"Jews, Christians, and Muslims supposedly share a common religious heritage in the patriarch Abraham, and the idea that he should serve only as a source of unity among the three traditions has become widespread in both scholarly and popular circles. Inheriting Abraham boldly challenges this view, demonstrating Abraham's distinctive role in each tradition, while delineating the points of connection as well.

Islamic antisemitism is as old as Islam itself, and is not a mere borrowing from non-Muslim sources, as has been claimed. The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism provides comprehensive, meticulously documented evidence that a readily discernible, uniquely Islamic antisemitism—specific Muslim hatred of Jews—has been expressed continuously since the advent of Islam. Writing in 1971, S.D. Goitein, the pre-eminent scholar of Muslim-Jewish relations as revealed in the Geniza documentary record of the high Middle Ages (950-1250 C.E.), employed the term antisemitism, “…in order to differentiate animosity against Jews from the discrimination practiced by Islam against non-Muslims in general. Our scrutiny of the Geniza material has proved the existence of ‘antisemitism’ in the time and the area considered here…”. Goitein cited as concrete proof of his assertion that a unique strain of Islamic Jew hatred was extant at that time (i.e., up to a millennium ago)—exploding the common assumption of its absence—the fact that letters from the Geniza material, “…have a special word for it and, most significantly, one not found in the Bible or in Talmudic literature…but one much used and obviously coined in the Geniza period.” Important examples of antisemitic motifs in the foundational Muslim texts are presented: from the Koran and Koranic exegesis by the greatest classical and modern Muslim commentators; the hadith (words and deeds of the Muslim prophet Muhammad as recorded by pious Muslim transmitters), the sira (earliest Muslim biographies of Muhammad), as well as the writings of influential Muslim jurists, theologians, and scholars, from the Middle Ages through the contemporary era. These primary sources, and seminal secondary analyses translated here for the first time into English such as Hartwig Hirschfeld’s mid 1880s essays on Muhammad’s subjugation of the Jews of Medina, and George Vajda’s elegant, comprehensive 1937 study of the hadith—detail the sacralized rationale for Islam’s anti-Jewish bigotry. Numerous complementary historical accounts illustrate the resulting the plight of Jewish communities in the Muslim world across space and time, culminating in the genocidal threat posed to the Jews of Israel today. The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism debunks the conventional wisdom which continues to assert that Muslim Jew hatred is entirely a 20th century phenomenon, a loose amalgam of re-cycled medieval Christian Judeophobic motifs, calumnies from the Czarist Russia “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, and standard Nazi propaganda, that only arose after the advent of the Zionist movement and the protracted Arab-Jewish conflict over all of the lands comprising the original 1922 Mandate for historical Palestine. Scholars, educators, and interested lay readers will find this collection an invaluable resource for understanding the phenomenon of Muslim antisemitism, past and present. An updated Author’s Preface for this new edition—which includes materials through January 3, 2020—elucidates the current global pandemic of Muslim Antisemitism, and its resulting violent manifestations, in Israel, Western Europe, and the United States. Doctrinal drivers of this hatred, as espoused by iconic Muslim religious leaders representing the pinnacles of institutional Islamic religious education—both Sunni and Shiite—are introduced. This compendious, timely exposé rivets upon freshly translated samples of modern, seminal Koranic glosses—rife with Jew-hatred—which shape current understandings of Islam’s holy book, and Islam itself, by the Muslim masses. The new Preface concludes with a focused discussion about why non-Muslim religious leaders, especially Jews, must admonish institutional Islam to begin its own process, akin to Vatican II/Nostre Aetate, of expunging at least the most virulent Jew-hating motifs from Islam’s core theology.

Author Andrew G. Bostom expands upon his two previous groundbreaking compendia, The Legacy of Jihad and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism , with this collection of his own recent essays on Sharia - Islamic law. The book elucidates, unapologetically, Sharia's defining Islamic religious principles and the consequences of its application across space and time, focusing upon contemporary illustrations. A wealth of unambiguous evidence is marshaled, distilled, and analyzed, including: objective, erudite studies of Sharia by leading scholars of Islam; the acknowledgment of Sharia's global "resurgence," even by contemporary academic apologists for Islam; an abundance of recent polling data from Muslim nations and Muslim immigrant communities in the West confirming the ongoing, widespread adherence to Sharia's tenets; the plaintive warnings and admonitions of contemporary Muslim intellectuals - freethinkers and believers, alike - about the incompatibility of Sharia with modern, Western-derived conceptions of universal human rights; and the overt promulgation by authoritative, mainstream international and North American Islamic religious and political organizations of traditional, Sharia-based Muslim legal systems as an integrated whole (i.e., extending well beyond mere "family-law aspects" of Sharia). Johannes J. G. Jansen, Professor for Contemporary Islamic Thought Emeritus at Utrecht University, says this book "will prove sobering to even staunch optimists."

This is the first volume of Goldziher's Muslim Studies , which ranks highly among the classics of the scholarly literature on Islam. Indeed, the two volumes, originally published in German in 1889-1890, can justly be counted among those that laid the foundations of the modern study of Islam as a religion and a civilization. The first study deals with the reaction of Islam to the ideals of Arab tribal society, to the attitudes of early Islam to the various nationalities and more especially the Persians, and culminates in the chapter on the Shu'ubiya movement which represents the reaction of the newly converted peoples, and again more especially the Persians, to the idea of Arab superiority. The second essay is the famous study on the development of the Hadith, the "Traditions" ascribed to Muhammed, in which the Hadith is shown to reflect the various trends of early Islam: Goldziher's name is mainly associated with the critical study of the Hadith, of which this essay is the chief monument. The third essay is about the cult of saints, which, though contrary to the spirit and letter of the earliest Islam, played such an important part in its subsequent development. These essays, with the author's marvelous richness of information, profound historical sense, and sympathetic insight into the motive forces of religion and civilization, are today as fresh as at the time of their original publication and their reissue is indispensable for the growing number of students of Islam. Hamid Dabashi contributes a major eighty-five-page study of Goldziher's life and scholarship, situating both in the intellectual and political currents of his own time while evaluating his work in the context of the current debate over Orientalism. Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921) has been described as Europe's most influential student of the Middle East. He was born in Hungary into an Orthodox Jewish family. He was honored by universities and academies in many countries for his contribution to oriental studies and was hailed as a founder of the scholarship of Islam. S.M. Stern was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Hamid Dabashi is professor of Persian Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of, among other works, the acclaimed Authority in Islam: From the Rise of Muhammad to the Establishment of the Umayyads , issued by Transaction, which won the Association of American Publishers Award for most outstanding professional and scholarly publication in religion and philosophy.

Text: English, Chinese

"In Crossroads to Islam, Yehuda Nevo and Judith Koren offer a controversial exploration of the early history of Islam, presenting a revolutionary theory of the origins and development of the Islamic state and religion from the early 7th to the mid-8th century C.E. Many Western scholars recognize the difficulties of accepting the validity, as historical evidence, of the huge body of Muslim literature, with its detailed account of the rise of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula and the subsequent, religiously inspired invasion of the settled lands beyond; for this literature only started to be written 150 years after the period it purports to describe. But until now, there was little with which to replace it. Nevo and Koren examine in detail the available contemporary evidence, most of which has not been seriously taken into account by most historians of early Islam. It includes official documents and inscriptions of the early Arab State; archaeological excavations and artifacts; legends on coins; and hundreds of Arabic rock inscriptions." "Based on their analysis of this evidence. Nevo and Koren outline a rethinking of the early history of Islam. They argue that the Byzantine Empire withdrew before the Arab Takeover; that the resulting power vacuum led to competition among local Arab chiefs to widen their sphere of control; and that Mu'awiyah was the first historical caliph. They document the evidence that the Arabs were initially pagan and trace the development of Islam from a simple "Indeterminate Monotheism," adopted by Mu'awiyah, to the Muslim faith of the late 2nd century A.H. ("after the bijra": the Muslim era, which counts from 622 C.E., year Muhammad fled to Madinah according to the Muslim sources), in which period they also place the canonization of the Qur'an. The origin of the Arab Prophet, introduced by the caliph 'Abd al-Malik around 690 C.E., is another central issue addressed by the authors' new theory."--Jacket