Bøger af John Andrew Morrow

Hijab: Word of God or Word of Man? is the most comprehensive and exhaustive study of the subject of the Islamic veil to date. According to Muslim authorities, the Islamic veil is a religious obligation. For them, Muslim women who fail to wear the hijab commit a major sin that merits punishment in hell and even eternal damnation. Since the rise of Islamist movements in the twentieth century, some Muslims have gone as far as to mandate fines, imprisonment, physical punishment, rape, and even death for young girls and women who wear so-called "bad hijab," or who fail to veil. What does the Qur'an really say regarding women's dress? What does the hadith literature of Islam teach? How did Muslim women dress throughout history? What impact did culture have on the process? What moral and ethical conclusions can we draw regarding the rules governing women's clothing? These are the questions that are answered in this seminal study.

Some scholars of Islam have argued that slavery and concubinage are permissible according to the Qur'an and the teachings and practice of the Prophet Muhammad. When faced with dissenting views on the disputed subject of the legitimacy of slavery in Islam, they often respond with a loaded question and a theological trap: "Did the Prophet Muhammad commit a grave moral wrong?" Others advance moral relativism. Georgetown University's Jonathan Brown, for example, controversially maintained that "slavery is wrong," but added the disclaimer that "as a Muslim myself, I cannot condemn it as grossly, intrinsically immoral across space and time. To do so would be to condemn the Qur'an, the Prophet Muhammad and God's law as morally compromised." As Dr. John Andrew Morrow makes clear in Islam & Slavery, there is not a single verse in the Qur'an that commands slavery. Slavery is neither an article of faith nor is it a religious obligation. In fact, the Qur'an encourages and even requires Muslims to emancipate enslaved people. As far as the exponents of Islam's spiritual, moral, ethical, and egalitarian tradition are concerned, the Qur'an, the Prophet, and Islam introduced a system that would reform the practice of slavery and abolish it entirely and forever. As God asks in the Qur'an: "What will make you know what the steep path is? It is the freeing of a slave."

In this pivotal, courageous, and timely analysis, which works diligently and minutely to separate truth from falsehood, right from wrong, the moral from the immoral, and the ethical from the unethical, John Andrew Morrow provides an exhaustive study of the second part of the Quranic text, 4:34, the Wife Beating Verse.

These 24 studies on specific symbols, images and icons from the Muslim tradition are authored by scholars from around the world. Divided into four sections, the Divine, the Spiritual, the Physical, and the Societal, they examine theological issues, such as divine unity, creation, wrath, and justice, as well as spiritual subjects, such as the straight path, servitude, perfection, the jinn, intoxication, and the status of Fatimah, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad. Essays also explore the symbolism of physical elements such as water, trees, seas, ships, food, the male sexual organ, eyebrows, and camels; and the significance of more socially-centered subjects such as the center, ijtihad, governance, otherness, Ashura, and Arabic. Drawing from the Qur'an and Sunnah, the essays address these topics with tact and respect from a position that appreciates exegetical diversity while remaining within the realm of unity.

Suitable for those who are interested in herbal medicine, this book provides an insight into Prophetic phytotherapy, a branch of herbal medicine which relies exclusively on the herbal prescriptions of the prophet Muhammad.