the Quran

How dangerous is the Sunni-Shia schism?

6 January 2024 9:00 am

What unites the two groups is more fundamental than what divides them, says Barnaby Rogerson, and the more serious conflict among Muslims concerns ethnicity and language

jake auchincloss

Jake Auchincloss and incendiary rhetoric

23 August 2020 12:46 am

I can’t claim to know what Jake Auchincloss was thinking when he asked, 10 years ago, why it was acceptable…

Reza Aslan: personable, charismatic and a keen self-publicist. He could be wearing togas and flying around in a private jet in five years’ time

Reza Aslan doesn’t fear God. But should he fear his fellow Muslims?

4 November 2017 9:00 am

Eating human brains, burying one’s face in dead people’s ashes and publicly deriding the president of the United States as…

‘Isfandiyar Slays Arjasp and Takes the Brazen Hold’. From Shah Tahmasp’s Shahnama (Tabriz, 1520s-1530s)

The art of the arabesque

2 September 2017 9:00 am

The title of this book, By the Pen and What They Write, is a quotation from the Qur’an and comes…

St George as depicted in The Golden Legend

St George: patron saint of England, patronised by all

25 April 2015 9:00 am

What did St George do? Killed a dragon, as everyone knows. And yet, as Samantha Riches points out, no mention…