In my unpublished manuscript, Muslim Mechanics, I discuss marriage contracts as it relates to sharia. In the West, most people are unaccustomed and uncomfortable with the concept that marriage is a contract. For those readers, I will try to share the essential parts of such an arrangement. Sharia or Islamic law approaches legitimate sexual contact as being a quid pro quo arrangement. Understanding sharia is vital to understanding the outcome of the law in Islamic societies. S

Just recently, on March 11, 2021, a Muslim bureaucrat petitioned India's Supreme Court to delete 26 verses from the Qur'an. The petition says that these verses "promote terrorism, violence, jihad" and were not part of the original Qur'an but inserted at a later stage. Wasim Rizvi, former chief of the Shia Central Waqf Board, writes in his petition, "These verses were added to the Quran, by the first three Caliphs, to aid the expansion of Islam by war." I bring this incident u

As I discuss in my upcoming book, Muslim Mechanics, many Muslims from Africa were among the slaves brought into America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While this early introduction of Islam into the Western Hemisphere did not catch on, it opens up a topic discussing the Christian slave trade and the Islamic slave trade. The year 1619 is the year most people point to when discussing the beginnings of slavery in the United States. That is the year that 20 African

The Qur'an provides no specific guidelines for the use of images. The hadith – the traditions of the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad – do, in contrast, express an apparent antipathy towards figurative depictions. Some hadith make it clear that a person who tries to emulate God's creative force will be hard-pressed on the Day of Judgment. Most people think that the early caliphates did not put images on their coins. The purpose of a prohibition against images was initi