Month: October 2026

Between 661 and 1258 the caliphate went from a tribal chieftaincy in Damascus to a Sasanian-style monarchy in Baghdad, and then to a symbolic office over a mosaic of Turkish, Iranian and Arab military states. The library’s sources agree that…

The Shiat Ali, the “party of Ali”, began as a political faction in the civil wars described in the previous chapter. It became a religious tradition with its own sacred history, its own theory of authority and its own expectation…

Muhammad died in 632 without a successor who was also a prophet. The thirty years that followed (the age of the four rashidun, the “rightly guided” caliphs) were a time of conquest abroad and civil war at home. In Karen…

Islam rests on two textual pillars: the Quran, held to be the literal Word of God recited by Muhammad, and the sunna, the Prophet’s words and deeds transmitted as hadith. How each took shape, and how far either can serve…

The prophet who began as a “warner” to his own tribe died as the head of a confederacy covering almost all of Arabia. The library tells his story in sharply different registers: Karen Armstrong’s sympathetic history, Deepak Chopra’s novel, A.…

Islam did not arise in a vacuum. In the early seventh century Arabia lay between two exhausted empires, Sasanian Iran and Byzantium, each with an imperial church and each watching an apocalyptic horizon. Inside Arabia, a commercial boom at Mecca…

The magisterial Reformation put Scripture and doctrine in place of priest and sacrament. A second Protestant current then put experience in the place of doctrine. It runs from Puritanism and continental Pietism through Wesley’s and Whitefield’s revivals and the American…

When Constantinople fell in 1453, the Orthodox world lost the imperial centre it had had for a thousand years. Moscow claimed the succession. The following centuries saw a church bound closely to the throne, a schism over ritual, a Petrine…

Between the opening of the Council of Trent in 1545 and the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the Roman Catholic Church defined itself twice: first against the Protestant Reformation, then against, or towards, the modern world. The…

Within a generation of Luther, the Reformation had become a matter of state policy and of war. Kings decided the confession of their realms, confiscated church property, and fought one another and their own subjects for faith and for power…