The fall of Jerusalem was the price paid by the Muslims for the continued civil wars brought on by competing Sunni and Shi’a visions of Islamic history. The Crusades, declared in 996, were an intercontinental invasion across a front line extending more than 3,000 miles from Spain to Palestine. At the time, the house of Islam was divided into three households. The Turks championed the...

Imam Ja’afar as Sadiq (700-765 CE) was a giant among Islamic sages. He was the Shaykh of great Shaykhs, the teacher of Imam Abu Haneefa, Imam Malik, Abu Yazid al Bastami and Wasim ibn Atta. His scholarship embraced the esoteric as well as the exoteric, ilm ul ishara as well as ilm ul ibara, the sciences of kalam as well as the sciences of hadith, sunnah, the natural...

Islam liberated men and women from the shackles of slavery and made them masters of the world. The history of the Mamlukes illustrates this observation. In the 9th and 10th centuries, there was a brisk slave trade down the Volga River, near the Caspian Sea. The Vikings raided Europe with unrelenting ferocity in search of booty and slaves. Eastern Europe, fossilized as it was between...

The Qur’an bestows upon humankind the keys to the heavens and the earth (“Do you not see that God has made subject to thee all that is between the heavens and the earth”, Qur’an, 31:20). In the golden age of their history, Muslims used these keys to unlock the secrets of nature and they created a civilization that was the marvel of the world. Then, they overreached...