This isn’t a complete guide to Muslim prayer—that would require several books. Instead, here are five things my non-Muslim students are often surprised to learn.

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Before we get started, here are the absolute basics:

Salat is a formal ritual prayer, not simply “talking to God” in your own words or thoughts. It combines a prescribed sequence of movements—standing, bowing, and prostrating in the direction of Mecca—interspersed with Quran recitation and other Arabic prayers. A typical Salat takes about five to ten minutes.

Muslims pray five times a day: before sunrise, at midday, in the afternoon, just after sunset, and after dark. They can pray almost anywhere that’s clean, whether that’s at home, in an airport, behind the counter at work, or in a mosque. The prayer rug is like a little bit of portable clean earth that Muslims can use to pray pretty much wherever.

Friday’s midday prayer is the weekly communal service, somewhat analogous to Sunday worship in Christianity or Shabbat services in Judaism.

Those are the basics. Now for the fun part!

1. Prayer times are determined by the sun and shadows—not the clock

Long before smartphones, calendar apps, and even mechanical clocks, Muslims were organizing their days around the movement of the sun. The five prayer times were traditionally determined by watching the horizon and a sundial:

1. The dawn prayer begins when the first light appears on the horizon but before the sun itself rises.

2. The midday prayer begins just after the sun passes its highest point and the shadows begin lengthening again.

3. The afternoon prayer begins when a shadow reaches the same length as the object casting it (or, in some traditions, twice its length).

4. The sunset prayer begins at the moment the sun’s disk disappears below the horizon.

5. And the night prayer begins after the last hint of twilight has fully faded and the sky is genuinely dark.

Here’s a fun question: what if you live somewhere where the sun doesn’t rise or set for a long time in certain seasons, like, say, Antarctica or Uranus?

Early Muslim scholars never had to worry about prayer times in places above the Arctic Circle (or Uranus). But today, there is literally a mosque in Inuvik, Canada, called the Midnight Sun Mosque. Contemporary Muslim scholars’ solutions are practical rather than rigid: follow the prayer times in Mecca, or use the nearest city with a normal day-night cycle.

This example of the Midnight Sun Mosque also illustrates my point about Islamic Law from a few weeks ago: it’s not just a list of fixed rules, but an ongoing tradition of reasoning through new situations.

The point is to worship God, not to get stymied by extreme latitudes.

2. The call to prayer might be familiar, even if you didn’t know its name

If you’ve seen American movies set in the Middle East, you’ve almost certainly heard the adhan, the call to prayer. Hollywood often uses it as a cinematic shorthand for “You are now in the Muslim world.” (I could say more about the hackneyed and stereotyped portrayals of the Middle East in Hollywood movies, but I’ll save that rant for another day.)

The call to prayer announces that the prayer window has begun. While there are a few variations between Sunnis and Shiis, the basic format is the same: It proclaims God’s greatness, affirms that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is God’s messenger (the shahada), invites listeners to “come to prayer” and “come to success,” (and for Shia, to “come to the best action,”) and ends with a final reminder of God’s oneness.

You can find beautifully elaborate recordings online, but the everyday call to prayer is often simpler—more like an announcement than a concert performance. In cities with several mosques, you will likely hear multiple calls overlapping, each beginning a minute or two apart.

Oh boy, more nerdy fun:

The tower where the call is traditionally given is called a minaret in English. But the Arabic word for the tower is actually mi’dhana—literally, the place from which the adhan is made. The word minara or minaret originally meant “lighthouse” (related to the Hebrew word menorah, i.e. something that gives off light). Somewhere along the way, Europeans mixed up the names for the two different types of tower, and the wrong name stuck.

3. Washing before prayer isn’t about hygiene

Before praying, Muslims must be ritually pure. Ritual purification kind of looks like washing, but its purpose isn’t simply to get physically clean, but to prepare oneself to stand before God.

The most common form of purification, called wudu, involves washing the hands, face, mouth, nose, arms, and feet. Mosques often have special washing areas for this purpose, but observant Muslims can also perform wudu in a regular ol’ restroom. (Hence the title of one of my favorite poems, by Syrian-American poet Mohja Kahf: “My Grandmother Washes her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears.”)

Some situations—such as after sexual intercourse or after menstruation has ended—require a full ritual bath or shower, called ghusl. (Whereas the more usual wudu is required after more “minor” and commonplace impurifications, such as using the restroom, passing gas, or falling asleep).

The emphasis on ritual preparation reminds me a bit of Jewish traditions surrounding immersion in the mikveh (ritual bath). I think it’s so cool how different religions approach similar ritual questions! But then again, I believe we have established that I am a nerd.

4. Islamic prayer accommodates physical differences

Non-Muslims sometimes imagine Islam as relentlessly strict and punitive. In reality, the Islamic tradition is often quite flexible and accommodating.

For example, someone who cannot stand may pray sitting down. Someone unable to bow fully may incline their head instead. Years ago, I watched an elderly woman pray in an airport while seated at the gate, gently lowering her forehead onto the handle of her rolling suitcase during prostration.

The point is to worship God, not to show off your gymnastic virtuosity.

Traditional Islamic law also exempts menstruating women from ritual prayer and fasting. Some Muslims understand this as a compassionate accommodation, while others argue that it unnecessarily excludes women from important devotional practices. As a non-Muslim, I don’t think it’s my place to weigh in on that debate.

However, as a historian, I’m once again fascinated by how Judaism and Islam approached the same issue differently. For example, Orthodox Jewish women may not touch their husbands at all during menstruation (not even to hold hands), while observant Muslim women may do so; on the other hand, Orthodox Jewish women may pray during menstruation, while observant Muslim women may not. Isn’t it so fascinating to consider the religious differences implied by restricting physical intimacy vs. restricting ritual obligation??? I sure think so.

5. Mosques are designed around prayer

Not every mosque looks the same. There are huge congregational mosques that can house an entire neighborhood on a Friday afternoon, and there are tiny mosques that can only hold a handful of people. And the insides of mosques can be quite plain, or they can be adorned with stained glass windows, perfumed with incense, and decorated with colorful mosaics.

But no matter the “look” of the mosque, the central purpose is always the same: to provide a clean, dedicated space for Muslims to gather for prayer. Therefore, purpose-built mosques around the world often share certain features that facilitate prayer.

For instance, outside you’ll often find a courtyard and a place for ritual washing (wudu) before entering the prayer hall. There’s a place to put your shoes (which are not worn for prayer or inside a mosque). Many mosques also have a minaret, the tall tower traditionally associated with the call to prayer.

Inside, the prayer hall itself is usually a large open space with carpet rather than pews. Since everyone prays standing, bowing, and prostrating on the floor, there’s no need for benches. Worshippers line up shoulder to shoulder in neat rows, all facing the same direction.

How does everyone know which way to face? One wall contains a decorated niche called the mihrab, which marks the direction of Mecca. The prayer leader, or imam, stands at the front near the mihrab to lead the congregation. Here’s one of my favorite mihrabs, from the 14th-century Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad mosque in Cairo:

Worlds of Meaning

In the end, “Muslims pray five times a day” is easy enough for beginners to memorize. But behind that simple sentence lies astronomy, ritual, architecture, anatomy, law, language, and community.

That’s one of the reasons I never get tired of teaching about religion: even the most familiar practices turn out to contain whole worlds of meaning.

Starting this week, we’re going to learn about something less political and perhaps a bit more accessible, but still absolutely foundational: the Five Pillars of Islam.

While non-Muslim students sometimes respond to topics such as Sharia with skepticism or even fear, I find that they usually approach the Five Pillars with curiosity and enthusiasm.

So let’s talk about them, shall we?

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First, the bare-bones basics:

The Five Pillars of Islam are the major ritual obligations for Muslims:

1) Profession of Faith (Shahada)

2) Ritual Prayer (Salat)

3) Obligatory Almsgiving (Zakat)

4) Fasting during Ramadan (Sawm or Siyam)

5) The Pilgrimage to Mecca (Hajj)

Historian’s Hat

But! There’s a small complication with the seemingly simple list I just provided.

“Five Pillars” is Sunni terminology, though Shia Muslims also observe these same five practices. The language comes from a hadith found in the canonical Sunni collections:

“Islam has been built on five: professing that there is no god but God, performing the prayers, paying the alms, fasting Ramadan, and making the Hajj pilgrimage to the Ka’ba.”

Notice that the word pillars (arkān in Arabic) does not actually appear in this hadith. It just says “five.”

That’s because the language of “pillars”—along with their ordering and the process of deciding exactly what they were and how they should be practiced—developed later. The canonization of the Five Pillars likely occurred several centuries after Muhammad’s death.

The Shia tradition uses a somewhat different framework. For example, rather than “pillars,” Twelver Shi’ism speaks of the roots (usul) of religion: the deep, internal foundations from which religion grows. These roots are primarily doctrinal: belief in the Oneness of God, Divine Justice, Prophethood, Imamate, and the Day of Judgment.

The ritual obligations, meanwhile, are called the branches (furu‘) of religion—the outward practices that grow from those roots. These include prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and pilgrimage, but also practices such as the khums tax and maintaining bonds with fellow Shia.

Long story short, Sunnis and Shia alike believe in God, pray, give alms, fast during Ramadan, and perform the Hajj. What differs somewhat is how these practices are categorized, ranked, and conceptualized.

I don’t mention these distinctions to confuse you. Rather, I want to highlight the diversity of the Islamic tradition. Islam is not a monolith. It is a dynamic religious tradition: rich, complex, and worthy of serious study.

Pillar #1: The Profession of Faith

We’ll begin with the most fundamental expression of what it means to be a Muslim: the profession of faith.

The classical Sunni declaration is:

“I testify that there is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.”

In Arabic, this is called the shahadatayn, the “double testimony,” because it contains two affirmations: 1) God’s oneness and 2) Muhammad’s prophethood.

The classical Shi’i declaration adds a third element:

“I testify that there is no god but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God, and Ali is the friend (or guardian) of God.”

You might think of this as a “triple shahada.”

A non-Muslim entering Islam recites the profession of faith sincerely and with intention. The shahada is also woven throughout Muslim devotional life. It forms part of the call to prayer, appears repeatedly within the daily ritual prayers, and is traditionally recited at the moment of death (if possible).

When I ask my mostly non-Muslim students what feels familiar about the shahada, Jewish students often compare it to the Shema, which observant Jews also recite daily:

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord is One.”

Christian students, meanwhile, often notice the shahada’s simplicity. Compared to the Nicene Creed, the Apostles’ Creed, or the Athanasian Creed—which articulate doctrines concerning Christ, the Trinity, the Church, salvation, and the afterlife—the shahada is quite concise.

Historian’s Hat, Again

As a historian of the early Islamic period, I’m interested not only in the shahada as Muslims recite it today, but also in how it came to take its current form.

The classical formulations of the Five Pillars, Islamic law, and the canonical hadith collections did not emerge fully formed the day after Muhammad’s death, even if the seeds of these traditions were already present. Early Muslims debated what Islam meant, what shape it should take, who counted as a Muslim, and what beliefs and practices were most essential.

So, how did the shahada take shape?

Its roots are deeply Quranic. The Quran repeatedly emphasizes God’s oneness; phrases such as “there is no god but God” (or close variations) appear dozens of times.

Sura (chapter) 112 may even have functioned as an early confession of faith:

God is One.
God is Eternal.
He neither begets nor is begotten.
And there is none comparable to Him.

Likewise, while the exact phrase “Muhammad is the messenger of God” appears only once, Muhammad is described throughout the Quran as God’s messenger. The Quran also frequently uses the term wali (”friend,” “guardian,” or “protector”), which is the term the Shia use in their statement about Ali.

In other words, the building blocks of both the Sunni and Shi’i formulations are all present in the Quran, even if the exact phrasing is not set.

But when did the more standardized versions emerge? Were there alternative shahadas that later disappeared?

The evidence suggests that there might have been.

Consider again the aforementioned hadith that says, “Islam is built upon five.” The latter four pillars remain relatively stable across different versions of this hadith: prayer, almsgiving, fasting, and pilgrimage.

The first pillar is more fluid.

Some versions of this hadith say that the first element is “maintaining the Oneness of God.” Others say, “that no god should be worshipped except God, and all others should be disavowed.” Still others say, “proclaiming that there is no god but God.” While some include the familiar expanded form: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.”

The underlying idea remains constant, but the exact wording appears not to have been fully fixed in the earliest period.

Early Islamic coinage tells a similar story.

Coins struck within decades of Muhammad’s death often contain simple pious formulas such as bismillah (”In the name of God”) or lillahi al-hamd (”Praise belongs to God”).

Other coins separate the two parts of what later became the classical shahada. One side may read, “There is no god but God alone,” while the reverse says, “Muhammad is His messenger.”

Still others contain much longer confessions. Coins issued under ‘Abd al-Malik (r. 685–705), for example, combine statements about God’s uniqueness, quotations from Sura 112, and extended declarations about Muhammad drawn from Quranic language.

In short, these late seventh-century coins contain something very much like the shahada, but not yet in its later standardized form.

According to the scholar Suleiman A. Mourad, the familiar shahada emerged during the eighth century, i.e. about a century after the Prophet Muhammad’s death. He thinks that these diverse earlier formulations were combined and streamlined into a short, memorable declaration that could function both as a marker of Muslim identity and as a concise statement of core belief.

The longer theological affirmations didn’t disappear; they simply migrated elsewhere in Islamic doctrine and practice. The shahada became a kind of shorthand: brief enough to repeat throughout the day, yet rich enough to encapsulate the heart of Muslim faith.

So What?

If you’re simply trying to understand the basics of Islam today, here’s the takeaway:

The first pillar of Islam is the declaration, “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.” (And the Shia include, “and Ali is the friend of God.”)

It’s a short, simple statement that observant Muslims repeat many times each day. And while its exact wording developed over time, the core ideas it expresses—God’s oneness, Muhammad’s prophetic role, and communal religious identity—have been central to Islam from the very beginning.

I think he meant: did anyone threaten to kill me because I’m a non-Muslim? But honestly, I wasn’t sure, because from my perspective, the question was basically nonsensical.

And just yesterday, my parents told me that some representatives for the Texas state senate are promising not to let Sharia law come to Texas.

Sigh.

Every few years, it seems like there’s another round of mass hysteria about “Sharia law coming to America.” But the conversation is almost always deeply misinformed. People talk about Sharia as though it’s a single, simple, harsh, inflexible law code. Meanwhile, many of the same people couldn’t explain the difference between constitutional law, statutory law, and case law.

The practice of Islamic law is just as complex and debated as any other legal tradition: it contains questions about principle vs. precedent, original intent vs. textual content, interpretation vs. application.

So, for all you non-legal scholars out there: what is Sharia, exactly?

1. Sharia is NOT a written law code—it is an ideal

Sharia is not a stable set of written laws. It’s an ideal: the concept of God’s path for humanity, leading people toward righteousness and salvation. That means, every observant Muslim trying to live a godly life is, in some sense, following Sharia. Wearing the headscarf, abstaining from pork and alcohol, and praying five times a day—these are all examples of following Sharia.

In many ways, Sharia resembles religious law in other traditions. Christian canon law addresses things like marriage, birth control, burial, sin, and penance. Jewish law includes observing the Sabbath and keeping kosher, among many other things. Sharia is a lot like that, too. (Fun fact: the Hebrew word for Jewish law, halakha, and the Arabic word for Islamic law, sharia, both simply mean “the path.”)

Now, religious ideas can influence state law in some Muslim-majority countries, just as many conservative Christians would like to see Christian morality reflected in American law. But fundamentally, at its deepest level, Sharia is not about imposing laws through the state. It is about Muslims trying to lead pious lives so that they can get into heaven.

Ultimately, American Muslims who want to follow Sharia are not generally trying to rewrite the Constitution. They mostly just want the freedom to practice their religion. When politicians say, “We won’t let Sharia law come to Texas,” what many Muslim listeners hear is, “We won’t let you pray or eat halal meat in Texas.” I’m not sure that’s what these politicians mean (or…is it?), but it’s what they’re saying.

2. A fatwa is NOT a death sentence—it is a non-binding legal opinion

Like any ideal, Sharia requires interpretation. Think about democracy: even if we agree that democracy is good, we might disagree on what it actually entails. Electoral colleges? Direct voting? Universal suffrage? Representative government?

Likewise, Muslims may agree that the Quran and Sunna (example of Muhammad) are primary sources of Sharia, while disagreeing sharply about what those sources actually mean. Is Sharia about the spirit of the law or the letter? What should be handled by the state versus communities or religious courts? How should judges weigh precedent, evidence, or extenuating circumstances?

In short, God alone knows the true Sharia. For the people who want to follow the Sharia as best they can, they must engage in the fallible, flawed, entirely human process of trying to figure out what it is.

Hence, there is enormous diversity within Islamic law—multiple legal schools, endless internal debates, and wide variation in observance. Some Muslims follow their law school very strictly; others focus more broadly on ethical themes like generosity and compassion. Some are conservative; others progressive. Some are militant; some are conciliatory. It’s a mixed bag.

The people trained to engage in these conversations are called fuqaha—religious legal scholars or lawyers. Scholars debate everything from legal principles and methodologies to textual ambiguities and logical flaws. They are experts who undergo years of study. They are not simply reading from a fixed codex.

That brings us to the concept of a fatwa. When they hear this word, many Americans imagine the fatwa that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini pronounced in 1989 regarding the author Salman Rushdie, urging Muslims worldwide to kill the author and those associated with the publication of his book, The Satanic Verses.*

(* Thank you to reader Richard Pinch for pushing me to be more accurate and more serious about the contents and effects of this fatwa).

Or else, they imagine Osama bin Laden’s fatwa declaring war against America. They think, “Aha, a fatwa must be a kind of death sentence.”

It’s not. A fatwa is an authoritative but non-binding legal opinion, delivered by an expert in answer to a question. Imagine calling the country’s top expert on a legal issue and asking her a question about it. Her answer to your question? That’s basically what a fatwa is.

Now, observant Muslims might have questions about everything from major ethical conundrums to mundane questions, like, “Can I gargle with Listerine, knowing that it contains alcohol?” A legal expert (a mufti) has the authority to answer such questions by issuing a fatwa. In this case, a fatwa might look something like, “It’s preferable to gargle with non-alcoholic Listerine.”

Ooooooh, scary!

And yes, “kill everyone involved with the Satanic Verses” was also a fatwa. But one notorious fatwa does not define the category any more than one controversial Supreme Court case defines all American law.

And as for Osama bin Laden’s infamous fatwa, most Muslims did not recognize it as a legitimate fatwa because bin Laden was not a qualified mufti. It would be a little bit like if I penned an opinion on a Supreme Court case. I mean, I could do it, but what reasonable person would care what I have to say, much less consider it authoritative?

So, going back to that copy machine repairman who asked whether someone “put a fatwa on me” while I was in Syria, it would be kind of like asking a visitor to America, “Did they consult the Dean of Harvard Law School about you?”

The answer is: um…no.

3. Medieval Islamic law was NOT especially harsh—but modernity often made it more so

Colonialism dramatically reshaped the Islamic world and the practice of Islamic law. In the medieval period, Islamic law was flexible, local, and highly interpretive. Different law schools emphasized different methods, and scholars also valued things like consensus, avoiding harm, fostering public welfare, and leniency in cases of doubt.

As for hadd punishments—those strict, Quranic punishments people often think of— evidentiary standards were extremely high. In adultery cases, for example, four witnesses had to directly observe “the mascara wand going into the mascara tube,” if you catch my drift. This isn’t my euphemism—this is the actual language used in the legal texts (well, really it’s a kohl wand and a kohl tube, but…you get it.)

The point is, this evidentiary standard was so high that hadd punishments were quite rare in practice. Much more common was the application of ta‘zir, or discretionary punishment—a judge or other official weighed various considerations to decide what punishment was appropriate, from admonition to fine to imprisonment to corporal punishment. It’s somewhat similar to the ways judges today determine sentences, by weighing a variety of factors, guidelines, and limitations.

Overall, medieval Islamic law was case-based and pragmatic. It aimed to preserve social harmony while generally avoiding intrusion into private life. And importantly, medieval jurists often lacked a strong, centralized state apparatus to enforce their rulings.

But everything changed under colonial modernity. European powers—especially the British—pushed for centralized, bureaucratized states with written constitutions and codified law. “What do you mean you don’t have a written legal code that is enforced by the state?” became the colonial attitude.

Tasked with expressing Islamic law as a single legal code, colonial-era states began to write things like, “In cases of adultery, the punishment is death.” That is, codification made Islamic law much more rigid and simplified than it had previously been in practice. This codification process helped create the modern misconception that Sharia is a single, static, state-enforced code.

But from my perspective, that’s not “Islamic law.” That’s colonialism, misunderstanding how Islamic law worked, forcing it into a distorted new form, and then criticizing it for those very distortions. Rude!

Today, some states, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, base portions of their legal systems on a conservative reading of Sharia principles. Personally, I’m not a fan of blending state power and religious law—whether Islamic, Christian, or Jewish. But discussions about Sharia often ignore how deeply religion has shaped Western legal systems, too. “Sodomy laws” existed in the United States within living memory, and many Americans would still like to see Christian morality reflected in public law.

So, when people act horrified that Saudi Arabia’s legal system draws on religious morality or metes out capital punishment, I sometimes think: pot, meet kettle. If you care deeply about secular law or about building a just and non-discriminatory legal system, maybe focus that energy here at home? Just a thought.

And finally, just in case you needed a reminder, many Muslim-majority countries do not base their legal systems primarily on Sharia. Countries like Tunisia, Albania, Niger, and many Central Asian states have largely secular legal codes. Türkiye also has a long history of secular governance, though that has shifted somewhat in recent decades. Sharia is not the inevitable source of law for Muslim-majority countries.

Snappy Questions for Stupid Statements

The next time someone says, “I don’t want Sharia in America,” here are some potential follow-up questions, depending on your spice level:

• “Which legal school do you have a problem with? Maliki, Shafii, Hanbali, Hanafi, Ja’fari…?”

• “Do your concerns involve the legal principles (usul al-fiqh) or the practical applications (furu‘ al-fiqh)?”

• “Are you saying you think halal meat should be illegal? What about kosher meat?”

• “Should Muslims be barred from wearing headscarves? Should Jews be barred from wearing kippot?”

• “Do you really think ⅔ of Congress and ¾ of the states are about to ratify Sharia amendments to the Constitution?” (At present, 4 of 435 House members are Muslim, and there have never been any Muslim U.S. senators).

• “Can you give me an example of a current or recent bill on the docket that advocates for Sharia law?”

• “What do you think about X, Y, and Z issues that are actual problems?”

• “Maybe instead of fearmongering and sloganeering, you should focus on improving the lives of your constituents?”

• “Have you ever considered getting a clue?”

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Between 632 and 750 CE (i.e., just a little over a century), the political power of the Islamic caliphate expanded from Spain to India. This is the period many non-Muslims point to when arguing that Islam is a uniquely violent, imperialistic, “spread by the sword,” “convert or die” kind of religion—especially in comparison to Christianity.

And this is precisely the period of my academic expertise, so buckle up, buckaroos!

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Caution: Dove Crossing

A caveat before we begin. In earlier installments, I mentioned that I am not Muslim (still true). But this time, I want to offer a different caveat about my positionality: I am a pacifist. A serious dove. Some might call me the doviest dove who ever doved.

I fully understand that hardcore pacifism is not especially practical and has real flaws as a political philosophy. That’s fine by me. I’m not a policymaker. I’m a historian, spiritual seeker, and generally gentle soul. I don’t like killing bugs or pulling weeds, much less watching human beings suffer on a mass scale.

And as a pacifist, one thing I genuinely struggle to understand is why so many people associate Islam and the Middle East with violence more so than other religions, civilizations, or regions. Violence is a pervasive human problem, not something unique to one people or tradition. And when these claims come from Americans—citizens of a country deeply shaped by military conflict and violence—I admit I find the double standard difficult to follow.

Anyone want to explain it to me? I’m all ears.

What Is Empire?

Before we can understand the early Islamic conquests, we need to talk about what an empire is.

Most of my students can’t define “empire,” but they know it’s BAD NEWS. They think of the Evil Empire, Darth Vader, Adolf Hitler. But from a historian’s perspective, an empire is simply a particular form of political and economic organization.

An empire has a core: the central land of the emperor and the ruling elites. And it has a periphery: the conquered lands and peoples. Empires expand to acquire more territory and therefore more resources that benefit the core/elite. Their primary goal is wealth extraction: taxes, crops, raw materials, luxury goods, and labor.

Empires often care little about the day-to-day lives of conquered populations, as long as those populations remain productive and manageable. In fact, empires generally prefer local populations to remain relatively stable and content, because unrest disrupts extraction.

Here’s a very simplified schematic of the pros and cons of empire:

Cons: wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a small elite; most people are disenfranchised subjects rather than citizens.

Pros: empires often tolerate considerable ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity. Local communities are frequently left alone as long as they remain politically quiet.

(If they are not politically quiet, please refer back to the “cons” section above. See, for example, Roman treatment of the Jews in the province of Palestine.)

This model differs substantially from the political system more familiar to many people today: nationalism. Nationalism often offers broader political participation while also pressuring populations toward cultural and linguistic conformity. But that’s a topic for another day.

Late Antiquity

Islam emerged during a period historians often call Late Antiquity (around 200–600CE, depending on who you ask). To the west stood the late Roman Empire, which historians often call the Byzantine Empire. To the east stood another great imperial power, the Sasanian Persian Empire. These two empires didn’t exactly get along.

Why am I telling you all these nerdy history facts? Because context matters!

Without historical context, everything about the emergence of Islam can appear strange or unprecedented: women covering their hair, religion-based law, imperial expansion, and so forth.

But in context, none of these things were unusual. In fact, both the Byzantine and Sasanian empires shared several features that would also come to characterize the early Islamic empire:

1. Both had official state religions with legal privileges and state support. For Byzantium this was Orthodox Christianity; for the Sasanians, it was Zoroastrianism.

2. Both emperors saw themselves as the protectors and defenders of their respective religions; they did not create religious laws, but they enforced them.

3. Both empires governed highly diverse populations. Minority religions were generally tolerated and taxed unless they threatened imperial authority. Likewise, while elite languages (Greek and Persian) carried prestige and political advantage, conquered peoples were not forced to abandon their own languages.

4. Both functioned economically as empires do: through military expansion and resource extraction.

5. Both fought frequent wars and portrayed their own violence as justified while depicting their enemies’ violence as dangerous and illegitimate.

The early Islamic empire inherited and reproduced many of these same structures. None of these things would have appeared especially radical or unusual to people living at the time. In short, even if the early Islamic empire seems unfamiliar or alarming to many people today, it made perfect sense in its historical context.

Comparing Apples to Oranges

One argument I hear frequently from students is that Christianity is inherently peaceful while Islam is inherently violent, and that one can supposedly “prove” this assertion by comparing Jesus and Muhammad.

Jesus appears as a celibate preacher of peace and nonviolent resistance. Muhammad appears as a political and military leader living in a violent tribal context. It therefore follows that Christianity is peaceful and Islam is violent.

But of course, there are several problems with this argument.

First, it cherry-picks only the most appealing aspects of Christianity/Jesus and the least appealing aspects of Islam/Muhammad. (“Appealing” by Christian standards).

Second, it assumes that a religion’s origins reveal the essential truth of that religion, ignoring the fact that religions develop across centuries of interpretation.

Third—and most importantly—it compares two entirely different historical contexts separated by more than 600 years.

Jesus preached in Judea during the early expansion of Roman imperial rule into the region. Roman domination was still relatively new and destabilizing, causing Judaism itself to undergo a profound transformation.

Muhammad, by contrast, preached in a world where the Roman Empire had already existed for centuries and had been officially Christian for roughly 300 years. Imperial religion was no longer new. It was simply how politics worked.

In other words, we should not be surprised that Muhammad’s movement reflected the realities of its own context more than it resembled the teachings of a Jewish preacher living under early Roman occupation six centuries earlier.

How Historians Approach This Topic

So how do historians study the period commonly called the Islamic Conquests (or sometimes the Arab Conquests)?

As with the life of Muhammad, historians begin with sources from the time period.

This is challenging because relatively few contemporary Arabic historical accounts survive from the period itself. Historians therefore work carefully through contemporary non-Muslim writings, archaeology, inscriptions, early Islamic state documents (mostly on papyri), and later Muslim traditions.

What do these sources suggest?

1. Many of the military elites involved in the conquests were probably what we would now call Muslims, but some were Arab Christians. This is one reason historians debate whether the conquests were primarily “Islamic” or “Arab”—that is, were the conquerors unified by religion or ethnicity (or both)?

2. The conquests were violent, as conquests generally are, but not unusually so by the standards of the period. Some resisting cities were destroyed, but many populations were simply taxed and left largely alone.

3. Christian churches were not systematically destroyed. Many early mosques even shared worship spaces with churches.

4. Some Christian communities may actually have preferred Muslim rule to Byzantine rule, since the Byzantines sometimes persecuted non-Orthodox Christian groups such as Copts and Nestorians.

5. Early Muslim rulers were not uniquely hostile toward Jews. In fact, after the Byzantines had barred Jews from Jerusalem, Muslim rulers allowed Jewish communities to return.

6. Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians were generally not faced with “convert or die.” The reality was closer to “convert or pay taxes.”

7. Non-Muslims often continued working within the Islamic state bureaucracy. In some cases, governments even discouraged mass conversion because tax revenue depended on non-Muslim populations.

8. Most people in the Middle East remained non-Muslim for centuries after the conquests. The early Arab-Muslim ruling class was a relatively small military elite, much like ruling elites in other empires.

9. Conversion to Islam generally happened gradually over generations, for many reasons: taxation, social mobility, political incentives, marriage, genuine spiritual conviction, and everything in between.

10. Islam later spread far beyond the original Islamic empire—into places like Sub-Saharan Africa and Indonesia—primarily through trade, migration, and missionary activity rather than military conquest.

So What Does All This Add Up To?

A complicated picture of imperial expansion—not a simplistic “convert or die” narrative.

A complicated picture of religion and empire developing together in ways that are difficult to untangle neatly.

A reminder that people often weaponize history selectively, demonizing the violence of others while minimizing violence closer to home.

An easy way to dismiss groups like ISIS when they claim to be reviving the “pure” earliest Islamic state. The earliest Muslim conquerors did not destroy the Bamyan Buddhas or demolish Palmyra. Modern militants who did those things are clearly not reproducing seventh-century precedent.

A final call to action

Go hug a dove in your life.

The world is not what many of us wish it could be.

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The new logo combines two of my favorite things: the 11^th/12^th-century Arabic literary romp, Maqamat al-Hariri, and retro video games like Final Fantasy III. My cute lil’ sprites are modeled after this panel from the Maqamat, where the fictional trickster Abu Zayd and his wife argue a case before a judge.

Thinking Like a Historian

Anyway—back to my series on Islam for non-Muslims. (Check out last week’s article on the Quran if you missed it.) Today, we’re going to think about how to approach Muhammad as a professional historian would.

Let’s start with the concept of disciplinary thinking.

Different academic fields—like biology, economics, history, sociology—approach the world differently. They ask different questions and use different methods. No discipline is inherently better than another, and ideally they work together (though academia doesn’t always make that easy).

So, what sets history apart from the other disciplines?

Historians study the past. Duh.

But the bigger question is, how do we study the past?

The answer: we locate and interpret sources from the past—everything from ruins and clay tablets to photographs and oral testimonies—so that we can try to discover “what actually happened.” (We can never reconstruct the past with 100% accuracy or 100% certainty, which is why “what actually happened” is in scare quotes).

That is to say, we don’t just memorize names and dates. Bo-ring!

Rather, we ask where those names and dates come from in the first place. We compare multiple sources, representing multiple perspectives; we ask whose versions of the past have been preserved and whose have been forgotten; we seek to fill in the gaps as best we can.

And like many scholars, historians are trained to be skeptical. We are unwilling to take things on faith, and we don’t accept simple answers based on incomplete evidence. We subject all our sources to intense inquiry. We constantly ask: how do you know that? Whose version is it? What are we missing?

In short, you have to convince us that your version of the past is well supported.

As you might suspect, that skepticism can put historians at odds with communities built on belief, tradition, or other allegiances. It’s not that historians and believers always disagree on the past, so much as that we often disagree on the methodologies involved in uncovering it.

Believers take things on faith. Historians say, “prove it.” We are not necessarily trying to be hostile to believers (though some historians definitely have been and still are). Mostly, we are just being nerds.

Bare Bones Basics

With that background in mind, here are a few basics about what Muslims believe about Muhammad (and what historians also broadly accept as a plausible outline):

• Muhammad lived in western Arabia, c. 570–632 CE.

• He grew up as an orphan in Mecca.

• He worked as a merchant and had a good reputation for honesty and fairness.

• He was married to Khadija for 25 years; they had several children together.

• Muhammad was a girl dad—he had four daughters who survived into adulthood.

• At age 40, he began receiving divine revelation and started preaching in Mecca.

• His message: one God, impending judgment, piety, and social justice.

• When Muhammad’s wife and uncle died, his followers faced growing harassment.

• In 622, they emigrated from Mecca to the more hospitable town of Medina.

• This emigration in 622 marks year 1 of the Islamic calendar. (Right now it’s 1447).

• In Medina, Muhammad married several wives; none bore him children.

• Medina became the political center of the early Muslim community. Mecca remained the ritual center (site of pilgrimage).

• The Muslims eventually gained control of Mecca and most of Arabia.

• Muhammad died and was buried in Medina in 632.

History Lesson #1: Start with Contemporary Sources

How does a professional historian approach Muhammad?

The historian’s concern about the above list isn’t that it’s completely inaccurate—it’s that it’s built on shaky foundations. It relies predominantly on later sources written by Muslim elites. But historians prefer evidence from the time itself, and we like to have sources representing a wide variety of perspectives.

Just imagine if all accounts of the American Civil War were first written down in 2020, based on oral stories tracing back to a handful of Union generals. It’s not that we would think those accounts were downright worthless, but we’d be pretty skeptical that they’re capturing the entire picture, right?

So, what sources do we have that date back to Muhammad’s lifetime? Not many. We have the Quran, some non-Muslim writings (Syriac, Greek, Coptic), and a few material traces.

From these, we can safely say that Muhammad did the following things:

• He led a military group in Arabia (though, what this group was called is up for debate)

• His opponents called him a poet, soothsayer, and a madman; his supporters called him a prophet

• He held religious, political, and military authority in his community

These sources also give us fleeting glimpses into issues such as Muhammad’s marriages, lifeways, and living conditions, but most of the details come from later sources that claim to preserve earlier material. Historians, predictably, want more than claims.

History Lesson #2: Read Later Sources Critically

The most detailed accounts of Muhammad’s life were written a century or more after his death. That doesn’t necessarily make them inaccurate, but it does mean we can’t easily verify their accuracy.

Take Hadiths, for instance—reports of Muhammad’s sayings and actions. For practicing Muslims, Hadiths are a central source of guidance. There are thousands and thousands of these hadiths, reporting on everything from major ethical imperatives (kindness, fairness, generosity) to nitty-gritty details of daily life.

But for historians, the historicity of Hadiths is an open question because they weren’t written down until the 8^th, 9^th, and 10^th centuries. Before that, they were passed down orally. (I won’t bore you with the sheer lengths some historians have gone through to analyze these oral transmissions. Suffice it to say that Hadiths are difficult to assess historically, though AI models may offer new insights.)

There are several other types of sources—Quranic exegesis, biographies, and historical accounts—that expand on the details of Muhammad’s life. But again, these sources were all written down well after the fact, and they all have a vested interest in telling a particular version of events. From a historian’s perspective, they reveal more about what later authors and communities believed than “what actually happened” in Muhammad’s day.

History Lesson #3: Facts Don’t Determine Meaning

Finally, there’s the thorny question of interpreting the meaning of the past.

Sometimes, my students say they wish they could get in a time machine and witness pivotal historical moments so that they could learn the truth.

The problem is, even if they could go back and witness an event for themselves, they wouldn’t have a complete or objective understanding of the event, much less a monopoly on its importance or implications. Even when people agree on “what actually happened” (which is rare), they often disagree on its meaning.

Let’s take an example from Muhammad’s biography:

In his early life, Muhammad was monogamously married to Khadija for 25 years. In his later life, after Khadija’s death, Muhammad was married to many different women simultaneously, including Aisha, who was very young by modern standards (around 9 to 12 years old).

For many Muslims, who take Muhammad as an ethical exemplar, these marriages pose a challenge. What, exactly, is the example that is being set here: monogamy or polygamy, adult marriage or child marriage?

The interpretations differ. Polygamy is allowed in some Muslim societies, but many Muslims prefer monogamy as the ethical and spiritual norm. Polygamy is quite rare in practice.

As for the trickier question of child marriage, some Muslims argue that it is permissible for adult men to marry young girls once they have reached puberty: if Muhammad did it, his example can be followed to the letter. Child marriage is particularly prevalent in Southeast Asia and Subsaharan Africa today.

Others counter that Muhammad was acting within the norms of his time; what mattered was that his actions were considered ethical in that context. By that logic, Muhammad’s example should be followed in spirit rather than literally, and Muslims today should follow what is ethically acceptable in their own time.

What does an academic historian have to say about all this? On the one hand, we hesitate to condemn any past person for failing to meet our modern standards, which they could not possibly have known about. On the other, we resist the conclusion that “it was normal then, so it’s fine.”

The goal is neither to judge nor to excuse, but to understand. From a historian’s perspective, cases like this help us ask how and why norms change.

In Muhammad’s time, his marriage to Aisha was not controversial or even remarkable. Her parents arranged it; no one objected to it. By contrast, another of his marriages—to a previously married, fully adult woman—did provoke controversy.

In fact, Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha would not have been considered a “child marriage” at all, in its own context. Across the premodern world, a “child” was prepubescent; a “woman” was someone capable of bearing children.

This conception of adulthood no longer makes sense to us. But the question is: why not? It’s because our ideas of adulthood have been reshaped by centuries of demographic, intellectual, and social change—from Enlightenment thought to industrialization to feminism to modern psychology and neuroscience.

Rather than pushing us to blame or absolve Muhammad, his marriage to Aisha invites us to examine our own assumptions about what defines a “girl” or a “woman” (assumptions that are a hot topic today, in light of the Epstein files.)

Conclusions & Further Thoughts

So, what is the value of taking a historical approach to figures like Muhammad, Jesus, or the Buddha—figures whose significance extends far beyond academic historical study?

First, I don’t think we should overstate the value of academic historical study in this case. I would argue that it’s more pressing for non-Muslims to understand the nuances and complexities of what diverse Muslims believe about Muhammad than to nerd out in the historical archives.

That said, I contend that deeper historical inquiry—done not to judge or excuse, but simply to understand—can sharpen our understanding of both the past and the present. It can help us understand our own societies better, including how we all tell stories about the past to articulate our identities and to make sense of the world we inhabit.

Ultimately, historical study is most valuable not as a window onto other times and places, but as a mirror onto our own.

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I’m starting a short series on foundational ideas in Islam—things most non-Muslims are still surprisingly hazy about, including the Quran, Muhammad, and Islamic law.

Caveat: I am not a Muslim. If you want a Muslim take, there’s plenty out there. That said, I am a serious scholar with deep respect for the Quran as a historical, literary, and religious text. I’m not here to defend or attack it, but to introduce its content, style, and themes; to situate it historically and in relation to Jewish and Christian texts; and to show that it’s a capacious document whose meaning has been debated for centuries.

Simple vs. Complex Ignorance

Let’s start with a concept from Classical Islamic thought that I find useful: simple ignorance vs. complex ignorance.

Simple ignorance is a blank slate—“I don’t know anything about this topic.” It’s fairly easy to educate someone who is starting from absolute zero.

Complex ignorance is trickier. It’s when someone thinks they already know something about a topic, but that knowledge is wrong, partial, or skewed. The perception that they already “know” about this topic can prevent some people from being curious or open-minded.

In my experience, most people have complex ignorance when it comes to Islam. Very few say, “What is this religion? I’ve never heard of it before!” Instead, they associate Islam with misogyny, terrorism, backwardness, fundamentalism, harsh law—impressions drawn from selective Western media coverage and then projected onto 1,500 years of diverse history.

When it comes to the Quran, complex ignorance often leads people to focus on (and sometimes misconstrue) only those verses that are problematic to modern, Western, liberal readers, such as those encouraging certain forms of violence or hierarchy.

Other goofy claims I’ve heard:

• “You can be executed for translating the Quran.”

• “The Quran’s meaning is fixed and obvious—no room for interpretation.”

• “The Quran tells Muslims exactly how to behave in all situations.”

These are all wrong.

Bare-Bones Basics

Before I suggest ways of reading the Quran more thoughtfully, let’s cover some basics for all the noobs out there:

• Quran means “recitation” in Arabic—it’s meant to be recited aloud. The term is linguistically related to the Hebrew k’riat (recitation of the Torah).

• Muslims believe God is the author of the Quran; Muhammad received ongoing revelations via Gabriel from around 610–632 CE.

• It’s about 78,000 words long—i.e., quite a bit shorter than the Hebrew Bible (~300k) and New Testament (~140k). It contains 114 chapters (suras), which vary in length from just a few verses to several hundred.

• It assumes familiarity with biblical material and retells or reframes stories of Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Mary, and others.

How to Read the Quran Thoughtfully

Okay, now that you know some basics, how can you approach the Quran like a thoughtful, culturally literate, critically thinking smarty pants?

1. Start with hermeneutics

Hermeneutics is just a fancy-schmancy word that means “reading strategy.”

People often read familiar texts charitably and unfamiliar texts uncharitably. For instance, they might treat the Bible as rich and nuanced but the Quran as literal and harsh. That’s inconsistent hermeneutics—i.e., reading different texts with different reading strategies. And it’s intellectually unfair, y’all!

It’s better to apply the same reading strategy across texts. Just for a perhaps more familiar example, consider three different strategies for reading the U.S. Constitution: originalism (the founders’ intent), textualism (the text itself), and pragmatism (practical effects). A rigorous justice should apply the same approach across all cases, right? It would be frustrating if the same justice gave a textualist reading to the Second Amendment but an originalist reading to the Fourteenth. Choose a lane!

I help my students practice using consistent reading strategies across different texts. We might read a series of texts as uncharitably as possible, and then as charitably as possible. We might then read them all allegorically/spiritually, or historically/contextually, or in several other different ways.

For instance, take Method Man’s famous pronouncement: “Cash Rules Everything Around Me / C. R. E. A. M. Get the money—dollar, dollar bill y’all.”

Possible readings:

• Uncharitable: Method Man is greedy and will do anything for a buck

• Charitable: Method Man is critiquing a system that is harming his community

• Spiritually: Money has become a false idol; this is what happens when material wealth displaces moral or spiritual purpose.

• Historically: Staten Island in 1994 was a difficult place for a young Black man to grow up

We can then apply the same reading strategies to a famous Quranic verse, such as 4:59: “Obey God, His Messenger, and those in authority among you.”

Possible readings:

• Uncharitable: Islam is inherently theocratic/authoritarian and has no room for democracy

• Charitable: “Those in authority among you” can encompass ideas such as popular sovereignty and include democratically elected officials

• Spiritually: The soul should have authority over the base desires of the flesh

• Historically: Muhammad’s community in 7th century Arabia vested political authority in religious leaders

The point: texts don’t interpret themselves. Readers do.

2. Compare with other religious texts

The Quran draws upon—and enters into conversation with—Jewish and Christian scriptures. Here are just a few of the very many parallels between the Quran and other Abrahamic texts (paraphrased):

• Deut. 6:4: The Lord is One.
  Quran 2:163: Your God is one God.

• Psalm 121:4: God neither slumbers nor sleeps.
  Quran 2:255: Neither drowsiness overtakes Him nor sleep.

• James 4:7: Submit to God and resist the devil.
  Quran 2:208: Submit yourselves completely to God and don’t follow Satan.

• Romans 13:1: Obey those who rule over you, for God chooses who is in authority.
  Quran 4:59: Obey God, Muhammad, and those in authority.

To emphasize how similar these scriptures can be, I do an activity in my classes called “Guess That Scripture.” I give my students decontextualized snippets from the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Quran and ask them to identify which is which. We look at verses relating to women, veiling practices, war, peace, enslavement, and equality.

Most students do quite badly at this game, and they are surprised at how little they know about their own traditions. Those students who do know their own religious traditions sometimes think this game is meant to be flippant or even disrespectful. They protest, “But the veiling verse in Corinthians had reasons X, Y, and Z.”

I promise I’m not trying to be flippant, but only mildly entertaining. My response to such students is always: “I’m not asking you to strip context away, but to notice how readily you supply it for your own texts and not for others. The Quranic verses on veiling have reasons too. Why aren’t you curious about those?”

Want to try one? Which of these snippets on slavery do you think is from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Quran?*

1) Anyone who beats their male or female slave must be punished if the slave dies as a result, but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property.

2) If any of your slaves ask for a contract to earn their freedom, give them such a contract if you know any good in them. Indeed, give them some of your wealth [to help fund such a contract.]

3) Slaves, be obedient to your worldly masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, just as [you are obedient] to God; do not serve with lip-service or brown-nosing, but as the slaves of God, doing the will of God from the heart

*Answers at the bottom.

3. Read passages, not isolated verses

Yes, the Quran contains violence. So do the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Don’t trust anyone who tries to tell you otherwise. However, these passages are not so simple as some would have you believe.

For example, take the infamous “sword verse” (9:5): “And when the sacred months have passed, kill the polytheists wherever you find them and capture them and besiege them and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush…”

Critics often quote the first half of this verse and stop there.

But, first of all, the verse actually continues: “…But if they should repent, establish prayer, and give charity, let them on their way. Indeed, Allah is Forgiving and Merciful.”

And second, this “sword verse” is sandwiched between other verses about honoring treaties with unbelievers (9:4) and granting protection and safe passage to unbelievers (9:6). Long story short, to quote 9:5 partially and out of context is to distort the passage. I’m not denying the violence of 9:5, so much as I am encouraging people to take it as a jumping-off point for considering what forms of violence any society (including contemporary American society) might consider acceptable and why.

More broadly, critics of the Quran and/or Islam who love to cite the “sword verse” often ignore the many Quranic verses that encourage peace, pluralism, equality, interfaith cooperation, charity, kindness, etc., etc., etc.

The fact is, the Quran is a complex document that contains elements of violence and peace, hierarchy and egalitarianism, constraint and emancipation. If you cherry-pick the document to suit your own ends, you’re missing an opportunity to grapple with the richness of the text—and of the human condition.

4. Read multiple interpretations

Like the Bible, the Quran has always been interpreted by its readers. Even if the text of the Quran is generally agreed upon, its meaning and implications are not.

Take 2:256, for example: “There is no compulsion in religion” (lā ikrāha fī al-dīn).

What does this mean, exactly? Different interpreters in different contexts had different ideas:

• Some thought this verse was not intended to be applied broadly but instead referred to a specific historical case: a Jewish couple in Medina had converted to Islam, but were not allowed to coerce their children to also adopt Islam.

• Others thought it meant that only God knows a person’s deep belief, which cannot be forced by human action; however, it is permissible to force someone to conform outwardly to the trappings of belief.

• Yet others understand this verse to show that freedom of religion is a foundational principle of Islam; that more than a millennium before the U.S. Bill of Rights, the Quran upheld a broad notion of religious freedom.

Same verse, radically different implications.

There are also feminist readings and re-readings of Quranic verses, just as there are in Jewish and Christian traditions. You may or may not find them convincing, but their very existence pushes back on the idea that Islam is inherently patriarchal or monolithic. If you’re progressive, I urge you not to treat fundamentalist interpretations of the Quran as the default or the baseline. Why not amplify the more progressive ones instead?

TL;DR

If you pay attention, you’ll see that almost everything about the Quran—from word meanings to historical context to modern application—is debated in Islamic tradition. Its meaning is not obvious, and no group or individual has a monopoly on its interpretation. What can you do in the absence of certainty about the meaning of the Quran?

• Practice humility: reading a verse or two doesn’t make you an expert.

• Stay curious: consider many possible readings and their implications.

• Build literacy: put the Quran in conversation with other religious texts.

If you can do those things, you’re already doing better than most.

*Answer Key:

1 Hebrew Bible

2 Quran

3 New Testament

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The two most important examples of historical revolutions are the agricultural revolution (ballpark: 12,000 to 8000 BCE) and the industrial revolution (1700 to 1850 CE-ish).

These two periods changed just about everything about being human: what we eat, how we work, our relationship with the natural world, our ideas about family, society, politics, and morality. These revolutions were so—well, revolutionary—that the people living after them (that’s you!) can scarcely conceive of life before them.

But what about people who didn’t live before or after these revolutions, but during them?

If you asked a thousand people during the industrial revolution how things would turn out, you’d get a thousand different answers. The cigar-chomping factory owners would say, “Bully!” and the mangled orphan children would cry, “Help!” But neither would really know the future—they would only know the reality of their own lives, limited by their own experiences. In other words: the selfsame situation we find ourselves in today.

So, let’s see how history can help us gain some perspective, shall we?

Lesson 1: These things take time

I hate to break it to you, but revolutions take a long time to play out. The prehistoric person who first cross-bred the biggest, tastiest teosinte seeds to create—uh, slightly bigger, tastier teosinte seeds—could not possibly have conceived of this glorious thing called corn, much less Monsanto Corn Variety CV102577. The French physicist Denis Papin could have had no idea that his modest pressure cooker from 1679 would inspire the first commercially successful steam engine in 1712, the first steam locomotive prototype in 1784, or the first full-sized, functional steam locomotive in 1804.

(On the other hand, poor Baron Charles Louis Heurteloup probably thought he had changed history forever in 1840 when he invented the artificial leech, but alas, here we are, living in a bereft world.)

What about our own AI revolution? Well, it’s only been going on for about 75 years, tops, if you count all the way back to 1948, when Alan Turing published “Intelligent Machinery,” or perhaps to 1950, when he asked “Can machines think?” Which means we’re still right in the thick of it—and that’s good news, because it means we can still shape it.

Lesson 2: Revolutions have pros and cons

Revolutions always have pros and cons for humanity, generally speaking. Take the agricultural revolution, which is often treated as the net-positive foundation of human civilization—and if you own a sofa, enjoy eating Twinkies, or devote your time to anything other than locating wild food, you might be inclined to agree. Buy your groceries from a store? Agricultural revolution. Work as a doctor, lawyer, kindergarten teacher, rabbi, or optician? Agricultural revolution. Able to read this essay (because writing exists at all)? Agricultural revolution.

But then again, some scholars also credit the agricultural revolution with a whole host of social ills, not to mention widespread ecological destruction. Pandemic diseases likely came from living in close proximity to domesticated animals—hence the names swine flu and bird flu (naughty chicken).

And while agriculture allowed more people to consume enough calories to stay alive, those people mostly ate bread and drank beer, all day, every day. Sounds nice at first, maybe. But all day, every day—forever? We’re talking major vitamin deficiency, not to mention serious gastronomic tedium.

Most importantly, from my perspective as a historian, many scholars associate the agricultural revolution with intense inequality, including slavery and the seclusion of women. You don’t get agricultural slavery without—well, agriculture.

And it’s both difficult and impractical to seclude women when they are central to finding food, and when people don’t really own property. But move to a city with permanent dwellings and property that gets passed down from father to son, and suddenly urban women can be kept inside, closely monitored, their chastity strictly guarded. In ancient Mesopotamia, a woman could be thrown into the Euphrates for “neglecting her husband” or for simply being suspected of having an affair. Women in post-agricultural societies had better watch themselves—and had better learn how to swim.

As for the AI revolution, the pros and cons are already becoming apparent.

Pros: the near-instantaneous translation services of every Trekkie’s dreams; no more writing annoying emails to your boss.

Cons: increasing overwork; gender, race, and class disparities; water depletion; robot overlords doing all the creative jobs while we mangy fleshbags perform the manual labor.

Meaning, both the pixel-eyed tech bros and the hell-in-a-harddrive doomsayers are somehow right about the future of the AI revolution—and they’re somehow wrong. Revolutions are always a mixed bag. How much of a mixed bag, well—that’s up to us.

Lesson 3: Humans make choices

Which brings me to my final and favorite point about the whole purpose of studying history. As a professional historian, I think history’s greatest lesson is that human beings have agency. Our agency may be limited—by the environment, technology, or economic systems—but it’s still there. People make choices.

For every industrial-era fat cat feeding immigrant children to the threshing machine, there was an opportunity to be more like Robert Owen, a textile manufacturer who championed workers’ rights and children’s education. For every enslaver, kidnapper, and trader in human flesh, there was an opportunity to be a humanist, an emancipator, an abolitionist.

The robber barons and imperialists may have gotten rich quick, but you know what else? They sucked. And today, they are best remembered for how much they sucked.

The choice is yours: you can be the CEO who lays off half your workers to employ more GPTs, or who pushes their workers to sacrifice their brains and morals in order to maximize workstream efficiency (just like how those industrial-era workers sacrificed their fingers to the spinning jenny). Or you can be the CEO who integrates AI humanely and sustainably, with an eye toward mitigating the next civilizational collapse.

To do the latter, you have to envision the future you want. What are the values that guide you? To keep employing human beings? To help the world remain a livable place in 50 years? To create a better and brighter world, not for the robot overlords or the tech bros, but for, you know, everybody? Because history is full of examples of people who managed to embrace economic and technological change while also having a soul.

Take Mahatma Gandhi, for example, who had opinions: “What I object to is the craze for machinery, not machinery as such. I want to save time and labour, not for a fraction of mankind, but for all; I want the concentration of wealth, not in the hands of a few, but in the hands of all. Today machinery merely helps a few to ride on the back of millions.” Gandhi’s problem was not with industrialization, per se—it was with greed.

We can learn from previous revolutions and choose a wiser middle ground between rejecting revolutionary change and embracing it whole hog. Those who reject the change risk becoming obsolete, like the hunter gatherers who were displaced by agricultural communities, or like the West Texas ghost towns left behind by the railroad.

(Though, to be fair, industrialization caused its own fair share of ghost towns: the 1962 coal fire underneath Centralia, Pennsylvania still burns to this day.)

But those who embrace it without wisdom—they are the exploiters. They are the ones whose short-term thinking leads them to deplete their own resources, ruin their own laborers, extinguish their own food supplies, and disenfranchise their own grandchildren because they snatched too much into their grubby hands.

Don’t be that guy.

Ultimately, we can’t know how things are going to shake out. It’s the nature of our human condition. But what we can do is act with integrity. And we can hope that, 2,000 years from now—if things still, you know, exist—some nerdy historians will be studying us, saying, “Wow, look at this thinker who helped shape the ethics of AI,” or, “That leader, who integrated AI into a strong humanity-based values system.”

Those future historians will know better than we do how it all unfolds—though, of course, they’ll also be in the middle of their own lives, dealing with their own shit.

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“My conservative in-laws think the U.S. is liberating Iranian women through war. They’re asking how I can be a feminist and oppose that. I don’t feel informed enough to respond. Can you help?”

This post is for her—and for any progressive non-Muslim American trying to talk about Iranian or Muslim women in a way that opens conversation rather than shutting it down.

Note: I’m not trying to speak for Muslim women here, but rather to take some of the burden off them because many of them are dang tired of talking about this topic. They are often exhausted by having to defend themselves against the same old narrative: that they are passive, oppressed, and in need of Western saving. That narrative has a long history—and it’s often been used to justify intervention, not solidarity.

So here’s a practical guide with the following components:

1) a few key points for grounding the conversation,

2) some slightly more detailed information about Iran

3) a few basic principles of critical thinking

4) some specific strategies for starting this conversation

5) some resources for further learning

I’ve used these strategies in my classrooms for more than a decade—on this exact topic and many others. I hope you find them useful!

A few super simple key points:

When conversations go off the rails, it’s often because of oversimplification. These help reintroduce complexity quickly:

1. Islam didn’t invent patriarchy or veiling.
Both existed long before Islam, across many societies (Christian, Jewish, Mesopotamian, Hellenistic). Islam developed within patriarchal systems, sometimes reinforcing them, sometimes challenging them.

2. Religious texts don’t map neatly onto real life.
People love to selectively quote the Quran, as if it explains everything. Just imagine thinking that selectively quoting the Bible and/or the Constitution would tell you everything you need to know about women in America today. It’s a silly proposition.

3. Muslim women are not a monolith.
Some are conservative, some progressive, many are somewhere in between. Any sentence that starts with “Iranian women are…” or “Muslim women are…” or is going to be just as much of a generalization as “American women are…” or “Christian women are…”. Whenever possible, specify exactly who you are talking about.

4. There’s a long history of “saving women” as a justification for power.
Colonial regimes regularly framed intervention as protection—“saving brown women from brown men.” That doesn’t mean the problems for women aren’t real. It means we should be wary of the solutions being offered when they involve domination or violence.

5. Listen to actual women from the community.
If someone claims to care about Muslim or Iranian women but doesn’t read, follow, or listen to any of them—that’s a red flag. There are lots of Muslim and Iranian feminist/womanist activists to learn from. I have some suggestions for you below, in the resources section.

6. Two things can be true at once.
Many Iranian feminists oppose the current regime and oppose being bombed. Those positions are not mutually exclusive..

Slightly more detailed context:

1. Iranian women are not merely passive victims.
They are also active agents navigating complex systems—just like everyone else. As historian Judith Bennett puts it, “Women have always been both victims and agents. To emphasize one without the other creates an unbalanced history.” Framing Iranian and/or Muslim women as helpless victims in need of saving is a distortion.

For instance, women face real constraints under the current Iranian regime and remain underrepresented in government. At the same time, they are highly educated—around 60% of Iranian university students are women (or were, before universities themselves became sites of violence). Iranian women work as doctors, scientists, lawyers, university professors, and politicians; for examples, look up Masoumeh Ebtekar and Farzaneh Sadegh.

Focusing only on oppression erases these achievements; focusing only on success ignores the barriers they face. Both are part of the story.

2. Clothing is often a distraction.
Yes, state-enforced dress codes are a problem. But an obsessive focus on clothing distorts the conversation.

Veiling and modest dress exist globally: Pentecostal Christians, Orthodox Jews, brides, nuns, Tuareg men, Amish communities. Yet, public outrage overwhelmingly targets Muslim women, even in societies where those women freely choose their clothing. That imbalance narrows the conversation instead of opening broader questions about clothing, symbolism, and control.

Many Muslim women who wear religious dress do so through a mix of choice and constraint—shaped by personal taste, social norms, family pressure, fashion, and belief. In other words, the same messy mix that shapes how everyone dresses.

States regulate clothing everywhere. The U.S. has public decency laws; schools often enforce gendered dress codes. If the chador in Iran is your line in the sand, it’s worth asking how far you’re willing to challenge restrictive norms closer to home.

3. The deeper issues are structural and intersectional.
They include education, employment, legal rights, marriage, and gender-based violence—and they are shaped by more than gender alone. Age, class, and geography matter. Rural women often have less access to education than urban women; wealth dramatically expands opportunity; practices like FGM (female genital mutilation) are not widespread in Iran but do exist in isolated southern regions. These are systemic problems that will not be easily solved by regime change in Tehran.

4. Religion is not the only source of oppression.
Secular regimes can be deeply oppressive. Before the Iranian Revolution in 1978–79, Iran under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was marked by censorship, secret police, and stark wealth inequality. Many women participated in the revolution that toppled that regime—even if they did not envision or endorse the clerical state that followed.

In short, “they could wear jeans” is not a serious metric of women’s liberation.

Some critical thinking basics:

Deeply flawed thinking makes it difficult to have a meaningful conversation about any topic. Here are some ways to steer the conversation back to evidence rather than ideology.

1. Watch out for confirmation bias.
We humans love to latch onto the handful of stories that support our point (and ignore those that don’t). Armed with these stories, we think we have found good, solid proof for our beliefs, when really, we haven’t tested out our beliefs at all—we haven’t subjected them to inquiry or scrutiny. Confirmation bias causes people to feel like they are right, without actually being right. How to combat this universal tendency?

Try saying:

• “Do you think that’s representative, or just one example?”

• “Can you think of any evidence that might challenge that idea?”

2. Distinguish anecdotes from broad-based evidence.
A single story cannot capture the full picture of any social trend or phenomenon. Anecdotal evidence is good for understanding one person’s subjective experience—it’s terrible evidence for what’s happening in the wider world.

Try saying:

• “That’s one person’s experience—what do broader studies show?”

3. Name the double standards (carefully).
Critiques of Islam often mirror dynamics within conservative Christianity. You might try helping your conversation partner identify these resonances.

Try saying (lightly):

• “Some of those concerns—like modesty, gender roles, wives obeying their husbands—exist in a lot of religious communities, right?”

Practical conversation strategies

Here’s the part you can use at the dinner table. (Note: I don’t recommend using these strategies on the Internet, because that forum is not conducive to real conversations.)

1. Identify shared values

One way to smooth over any potentially fraught conversation is to identify shared values and acknowledge good intentions on the part of both parties. This strategy can lower defenses and get on the same page of problem-solving rather than arguing.

• “It sounds like you care about Iranian women. So do I. But I disagree that war is the best way to demonstrate that care.”

2. Start with questions, not counterarguments

Studies show that hitting people with loads of data doesn’t change their minds—in fact, it backs them further into their positions. Instead, focus on asking questions:

• “What makes you say that?”

• “Where did you hear that?”

• “What plan for a democratic Iran do you envision?”

3. Use analogy to activate empathy

• “If another country said the U.S. was bad for women (for instance, because of abortion restrictions) and decided to bomb us in order to ‘save’ us—how would that feel?”

• “Many public schools have strict dress codes for girls—would you endorse using violence to liberate those girls, or would you recommend other strategies?”

4. Collapse the “us vs. them” divide

Use the phrase: “just like we do.”

• “Women face harassment in Iran—just like we do.”

• “There are limits on women’s bodily autonomy—just like we have here.”

This reframes the issue from their problem to a shared human problem.

5. Gently challenge the “saving” narrative

• “Who gets to decide what liberation looks like?”

• “If someone assumed you were helpless and insisted on ‘saving’ you, would that feel empowering or condescending?”

6. Walk through simple thought exercises

• “What’s the best-case outcome of this war? What’s the worst-case?”

• “How might this war benefit women? How might it harm them?”

This can get people to at least consider possibilities beyond what they had previously imagined.

7. Keep the bottom line clear

If the conversation gets muddled, return to this:

“I can oppose the Iranian regime and oppose war. Supporting women doesn’t require bombing them.”

A simple script (if you need one)

If you’re put on the spot, something like this might help:

“I absolutely care about women’s rights in Iran. From what I understand, many Iranian women oppose the regime—but they also don’t want foreign military intervention. War tends to make conditions worse, not better. So for me, supporting women there means listening to them and amplifying their voices, not assuming we can ‘save’ them through violence.”

A few resources

Instagram:

Samira Mohyeddin @smohyeddin

Iran’s Feminist Liberation @irans.feminist.liberation

Scholarship:

Nayereh Tohidi, “Women’s rights and feminist movements in Iran,” 2016

Lila Abu Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” 2002 (A classic!)

Literature:

Marjan Kamali, The Lion Women of Tehran

Shahrnush Parsipur, Women without Men

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In response, I wrote this article, so that you’ll have some information to pull out of your back pocket if you’re ever confronted by such nonsense.

Let’s start things off with a little ditty I wrote, shall we?

Tommy Tuberville went to Loserville, for to find some hate.

“Oh goody, I found some, I’ll use it on Islam!” He just couldn’t wait.

“Go home,” he jeered. They said, “We’ve been here since 1528.”

Stop acting the fool ‘n’ go get you some schoolin’—bigotry’s not your fate.

The Spanish Exploration of the Americas

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the slipperiness of the term “the Middle East” and its uneasy overlap with other terms, such as the Arab world and the Islamic world.

Case in point: Spain. While people probably think of Spain as being in “Europe” today, throughout the Middle Ages, southern Spain (al-Andalus) was part of the Arab & Islamic world, closely tied to North Africa.

In the later Middle Ages—just when the Crusades were happening in the Holy Land—Spain experienced the Reconquista, a long military campaign in which northern Christian kingdoms pushed south into al-Andalus. The last Muslim polity of Spain, the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada, fell in 1492.

(Fun fact: A noblewoman from Granada, al-Sayyida al-Hurra (“The Free Lady”), fled to North Africa and became a pirate queen. Iconic.)

Now, I’m not saying that medieval Spain was some interfaith utopia where Jews, Christians, and Muslim were clasped in a perpetual group hug. But I am saying that Christians and Jews were allowed to exist in Islamic Spain. After the Reconquista, that pluralism ended.

You might know the rhyme: In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

You probably don’t know this one (because I made it up). It’s less catchy, but equally true: In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Spain expelled Jews, then Muslims, too.*

*Technically, the 1492 Alhambra decree only expelled Jews from Spain, thought it also put restrictions on Muslims. Muslims weren’t officially expelled from Spain until 1614.

That’s right—Ferdinand and Isabella, the same monarchs who funded Christopher Columbus’s voyages, also issued that Alhambra decree. Spain’s expansion into the Americas was an extension of Reconquista-era triumphal Catholicism.

Enter Pánfilo de Narváez, who led an expedition to the Americas in 1527. Among his crew was an enslaved North African Muslim, Mustafa Zemmouri—better known as Estevanico. The expedition was an unmitigated disaster, and only four of roughly 600 men survived. Estevanico was one of them, becoming one of the first non-Indigenous people to traverse what is now Texas and the American Southwest.

In other words: as long as there have been non-Native people in Texas, there have been Muslims in Texas.

Enslaved Africans

Many of the earliest Muslims in the Americas were enslaved Africans. Historians estimate that 10–20% of the 12.5 million West Africans who were kidnapped and forcibly transported across the Atlantic were Muslims. While most of these enslaved Africans were taken to South America—only about 5% came to North America—that still comes out to around 50,000 African Muslims entering North America from the 16th–19th centuries.

We don’t know much about these enslaved African Muslims, due to the violent erasures of slavery. But we do know about a few of them—because they were literate in Arabic and left historical records of their own. One of the most famous enslaved Muslim scholars in America was Omar ibn Said, who in 1831 wrote his autobiography, ““The life of Omar ben Saeed, called Morro, a Fullah Slave in Fayetteville, N.C. Owned by Governor Owen.”

Another, earlier example is Mamadou Yarrow (aka Yarrow Mamout), who was born in Guinea, enslaved in 1752, and brought to North America. After he was freed in 1796, he became a property owner and entrepreneur in Georgetown. His portrait was painted in 1819 by Charles Willson Peale—the same artist who painted Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson himself owned an English translation of the Qur’an (still held at the Library of Congress), which he studied in law school. And in his draft of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Jefferson argued that “neither Pagan nor Mahomedan nor Jew” should be excluded from civil rights.

To be fair, figures like Jefferson often treated Islam as a hypothetical test case—“we’ll know we have religious freedom when even Muslims have it”—while overlooking the fact that Muslims were already present among the enslaved. And, of course, they showed little interest in extending religious freedom to enslaved people.

Rediscovering Black Muslim Roots

In the 20th century, many Black Americans began reclaiming connections to African Islam—especially after Malcolm X’s 1964 pilgrimage to Mecca, his subsequent conversion to Sunni Islam, and the publication of Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X in 1965. Today, African Americans make up roughly 20% of the Muslim population in the United States.

Malcolm X had earlier taken the “X” to mark the loss of his ancestral name, severed by slavery; after his pilgrimage, he became El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, reclaiming an African Muslim lineage. He argued that “America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem.” While his view is a bit idealistic—the broader Islamic world, like any human society, has its own histories of racism and hierarchy—his travels across Africa and the Middle East nevertheless reshaped his understanding of potential race relations.

And while Malcolm X gets most of the attention, his wife, Betty Shabazz was formidable in her own right: after his assassination, she performed the hajj, earned a doctorate, became a professor and administrator, and remained a public intellectual and activist. That is to say, don’t forget about badass American Muslim women!

Ottoman-Era Immigration

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Muslims arrived as part of broader waves of global migration. Between 1870 and 1924, around 25 million immigrants came to the United States from across the globe. Many of these immigrants came from places like England, Ireland, Germany, and Italy. But some also came from the Ottoman Empire—including Arab Muslims and Christians—who came seeking economic opportunity or fleeing political instability, especially around the time of WWI.

In the early 20th century, Henry Ford’s Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan offered relatively high wages ($5/day) for all workers regardless of race. This offer attracted many southern Black Americans, who were fleeing the Jim Crow south during the Great Migration. It also attracted many Arab immigrants to Dearborn, which remains a major center of Arab American life today.

Conclusion

Muslims have been in the Americas for as long as any “Old World” people have—whether as enslaved Africans or as immigrants arriving alongside other well-known waves of newcomers.

Now, this is not intended to discount more recent Muslim immigrants to America. As far as I’m concerned, anyone living in America is an American, period. But it does push back against familiar strains of bigotry with a bit of historical perspective.

And finally—because I love a good map—I’ll end with a 2020 map of Muslim population distribution in the U.S.

Yes, you can see concentrations in places like Detroit/Dearborn, as well as major cities like Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago. But you can also find Muslim communities in less expected places, like Amarillo (my hometown), northern New Mexico, and Salt Lake City.

These American Muslims are friends, neighbors, parents, workers—human beings. They belong here.

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Well, early medieval Arabic texts do something similar. If someone is described as wearing an ornate, Persian-style qalansuwa (conical hat), you know the bad guy just rode into town. The good guy, by contrast, is usually in a simple Arabian-style turban. Again, the hat tells you everything you need to know.

What’s the story behind the headgear symbolism? A full-blown medieval cultural beef between Arabs and Persians in the 9th and 10th centuries—called the Shuʿubiyya, loosely translated as “ethnocentrisms” or “culture wars.”

By this point, Islam had spread to both groups, and Arab and Persian elites were deeply intertwined in the cosmopolitan world of Abbasid Baghdad. They cooperated, mingled, and built a shared intellectual culture. But they also clashed.

“Your Mom Eats Lizards”

At its core, the tension had a political edge. Persians had been conquered by Arab-Muslims in the 7th century, and as a result they had lost much of their former imperial power. One way of reclaiming pride was by claiming cultural superiority.

Accordingly, some Persian writers apparently accused Arabs of being uncouth, uncivilized desert bumpkins—hence the “lizard-eating” thing, which today might be like saying someone eats roadkill or fried squirrel. It’s pretty country.

Meanwhile, Persians cast themselves as the cultured ones: we have ancient kings (Darius! Xerxes!), monumental architecture, and a literary tradition stretching back centuries. Oh—and we invented wine, so just jot that down.

“At Least We Don’t Pearls into Battle”

The Arabs responded in kind. They said: we are strong, free, and pious—desert life made us tough, honest, and morally upright. Also, we brought you Islam, so, you’re welcome.

You Persians, on the other hand? You’re soft, materialistic, bougie. When you ride into battle, you show up dripping in silks and jewelry—gold bracelets, pearl-studded hats, the whole look. And are you really going to brag about inventing wine, you boozehounds?

A Quick Reality Check

Of course, these are stereotypes.

Most Arabs in Baghdad were not out here casually snacking on lizards, and most Persians were not wealthy enough to wear pearl hats on the daily. But when people start building and defending identities like this, stereotypes have a way of overtaking reality.

You can sometimes see the same dynamic in the modern world. Case in point: Saddam Hussein called the Iran–Iraq War (1980–88) “Saddam’s Qadisiyya,” invoking a 7th-century battle in which Arab-Muslims defeated the non-Muslim Sasanian Persians. To rally support, he framed the war as a continuation of an ancient struggle between Arabs and Persians (and between Muslims and non-Muslims).

Saddam himself wasn’t particularly religious—his Baʿath regime was secularist/socialist. But it’s funny how leaders with little personal investment in religion are often perfectly willing to deploy it for political gain, huh?

Arabic and Persian Languages

Today, Arabic and Persian are both written in the Arabic script—but don’t let that fool you. They are completely different languages, with different historical and cultural traditions.

Persian is much more closely related to English than to Arabic. That’s because it’s an Indo-European language, like Hindi, Greek, Latin, German, and Russian.

There’s a whole deep history here involving the Indo-European migrations. The Indo-European people, who originated somewhere in the Ukraine area, spread across much of Europe and Asia around 3000–1000 BCE. As they traveled, they brought with them their languages, technologies, and, apparently, their fondness for beef.

These migrants referred to themselves as “Aryans”—a term that has…um, not aged well. In its original context, though, it was simply the self-designation of the Indo-Europeans.

(Fun fact: there are two modern countries whose names mean “land of the Aryans,” i.e. the Indo-Europeans. One is Iran. The other? Keep reading to find out!)

Anyway, you can see family resemblance among the Indo-European languages in basic vocabulary words for “mother” and “two”

• English: mother | two

• Latin: mater | duo

• Greek: metera | duo

• Russian: mat' | dva

• Persian: madar | doh

• Hindi: matta | doh

These aren’t borrowings, they’re cognates—they share the same deep roots.

Persian has other cognates with English, too: pedar (father), baradar (brother), dokhtar (daughter), now (new), mush (mouse), and bad (bad), and many more.

Compare that list with the same words in Arabic—umm, ithnan, ab, akh, bint, jadid, faʾr, sayyiʾ—and you can see that one of these languages is not like the others.

That’s because Arabic belongs to the Semitic language family, alongside Hebrew and Aramaic. You can see the family resemblance when you compare some Hebrew and Arabic terms.

• navi / nabi (prophet)

• melech / malik (king)

• olam / ʿalam (world)

And like Hebrew, Arabic is built on a triconsonantal root system. This is totally unlike anything we have in English. It means that most words come from a three-consonant base—like K-T-B, the root that has to do with writing. You can create dozens of writing-related words by playing around with this root:

• kitaba = writing

• kitab = book

• katib = author

• maktab = office or desk

• maktaba = library

It’s an elegant, highly generative system. Once you get the hang of it, you can create any word you can imagine. I love it. (Yes, I am a nerd.)

Pronunciation, though, can be a challenge for English speakers, since some sounds come from deep in the throat. Try this: say the letter “k” and notice how the middle of your tongue touches the middle of your palate. Now push that same “k” sound further back, touching the back of your tongue to your soft palate—kind of like you’re trying to dislodge a popcorn kernel from your tonsils.

Congratulations, you just approximated qāf, the letter usually transliterated as “q”!

So Why the Same Script?

If the languages are so different, why do they share a script? It’s this little thing called history.

Persian was written long before Arabic—first in cuneiform, then in Pahlavi (derived from Aramaic). It only adopted the Arabic script after the Arab-Islamic conquests of the 7th century. The Arabs changed the script and influenced the vocabulary, but they didn’t wipe out the language or culture. Persian adapted.

By the 9th–10th centuries, Persian literature experienced a major revival, now written in the Arabic script. This is when we get the famous Shahnameh (Book of Kings), the great Persian national epic poem. From that point on, Persian remained a major language of poetry, philosophy, and courtly life across much of the Islamic world.

Clash and Coexistence

Despite all the trash talk of the Shuubiyya movement, this isn’t just a story of conflict. There has also been deep exchange: translation, intermarriage, bilingualism, and shared intellectual life.

For instance, Persian scholars helped transmit Indian knowledge into the Arabic-speaking world. You know those “Arabic numerals” we all rely on? They originally come from India. Persian intermediaries introduced them into the Arabic-speaking world, which later introduced them to Europe. (You’re welcome, because no one wants to calculate XXIV × MCM.)

Several familiar food words also traveled across these languages:

• vatingana (Sanskrit) → badinjan (Persian) → al-badhinjan (Arabic) → aubergine (French/English)

• khanda (Sanskrit) → qand (Persian) → qandi (Arabic) → candy (English)

• naranga (Sanskrit) → narang (Persian) → naranja (Arabic/Spanish) → (n)orange (French/English)

Fun fact: orange was originally norange. But it’s really hard to tell whether someone is saying “a norange” or “an orange,” isn’t it? It began as the former, but since it was a new word and people didn’t really know what they were doing, they eventually transitioned to the latter. Language is messy like that.

Your Reward for Reading to the End

The other country whose name means “land of the Aryans”?

It’s Ireland!

Erin = Iran.

Those Indo-Europeans really got around, didn’t they?

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On the first day of class, I have my students play a map game: I show them several maps and ask which one shows the “Middle East.”

It’s a trick question—and perhaps a slightly diabolical stunt for the first day of class. The goal is to dismantle what they think they know about the Middle East, and then rebuild that understanding from the ground up over the semester, armed with new knowledge and sharper critical thinking.

Substack doesn’t easily allow quizzes or games like that. But I can show you a few maps, explain the differences between them, and use them to demonstrate how the term “Middle East” actually functions.

Our central question: Why do so many Americans associate this region with conflict—and what might we see if we challenged ourselves to look beyond that stereotype?

Geography

The Middle East can perhaps best be described as a central crossroads connecting three continents, the place where Africa, Asia, and Europe meet. And it’s not just the land that forms a trans-continental crossroads—it is also the four major seas that border the region: the Mediterranean, Red Sea, Black Sea, and Persian Gulf.

If we wanted a purely geographic label, we might call the region Southeast Europe, Southwest Asia, and North Africa (SESWANA). But that’s a bit of a mouthful, isn’t it? Some scholars use SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) because they dislike the term “Middle East,” for reasons we’ll get to shortly. But I don’t use SWANA, either. Only scholars know what it means, and I prefer talking to the other 99%.

Still, the geography tells us something important. A region sitting at the crossroads of three continents is bound to see a lot of movement: people traveling, trading, migrating, conquering, exchanging ideas. For millennia, this region has produced sought-after commodities such as wheat, wine, cotton, and iron. Control these crossroads, and you control trade and movement across three continents. And just wait until oil is discovered in the early 20th century!

So, that’s part of the reason the region has seen its share of conflict—it’s a highly strategic location.

Challenge 1

Look at that map above (which, oddly, doesn’t include Egypt as part of the Middle East—as we’ll see, the actual borders of the region are somewhat arbitrary).

Don’t worry about memorizing country names. Contrary to popular belief, historians don’t spend most of their time memorizing dates and places. We spend our time asking what they mean.

So, put your finger on the Black Sea. Which countries might have a vested interest in protecting shipping lanes there? What about the Red Sea? The Persian Gulf? The eastern Mediterranean?

Now imagine that British merchants are trying to move goods across this region on their way from Europe to East Asia. Which regions would they have to cross?

Suddenly you can see how geography pulls this region into strategic and economic struggles.

Imperialism

Even more importantly, the Middle East is associated with conflict by design. “The Middle East” is a made-up term. Technically all words are made up, of course—but this term is particularly slippery. It was created with imperial interests in mind, and its boundaries have shifted ever since to suit imperial perspectives.

That’s why there is no stable, universally agreed-upon definition of the Middle East. Don’t believe me? Google “Middle East Map” and look at the veritable smorgasbord of options.

Where does one draw the line? If Egypt counts as the Middle East (and does it?), why not include Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco? If Turkey counts, why not Bulgaria, Armenia, or Georgia? If Iran counts—and especially if Afghanistan counts—why not Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan?

Here’s my suspicion: if war broke out in Kazakhstan tomorrow, there’s a decent chance people would suddenly start calling it part of the “Middle East.” When I was in graduate school, Afghanistan was treated as part of Central Asia, not the Middle East. But after being entangled in U.S. military action for decades, my students now almost universally think of it as being part of the Middle East.

That is to say, the term expands to fit our preconceived notions, including our notion that conflict and the Middle East go hand-in-hand. The term is ever-shifting, self-fulfilling.

And if you know anything about global history, you might guess who coined the term.

That’s right: the British, in the mid-1800s, at the height of their imperial power (Americans later popularized the term in the early 1900s). At that time, Britain controlled roughly a quarter of the world’s land and people. One of its biggest priorities was maintaining access to its lucrative Asian colonies—Singapore, Hong Kong, and especially India.

Now, before the invention of airplanes, how would someone travel from Britain to India? (Remember the map challenge you did above? Maps are your friends!) There were essentially two options: 1) overland through Anatolia, Iraq, and Iran, or 2) by sea around the entire continent of Africa.

Unless, of course, you could carve a convenient canal through the narrowest part of the Sinai peninsula in Egypt—a “Suez Canal” you might call it—allowing ships to sail directly between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. And once you build that canal, you’ll probably want to control it. That’s exactly what the British did (check out the blue route below).

You’ll also want trade agreements with the Ottoman Empire and Persia to keep land routes open. And if rival empires—say, the Russians or the French—try to interfere with your grand plans, well… perhaps a nice war or two will sort things out.

To be clear: wars existed in this region long before the British arrived. But European imperial expansion in the 19th and early 20th centuries—exactly when the term “Middle East” was coined—intensified and reshaped many of those conflicts, tying them to global trade and imperial rivalry.

So why does the region seem so conflict-ridden? I don’t know, why don’t you ask Lord Palmerston?

Challenge 2

Go online and identify at least five present-day countries in the Middle East that were once British colonies, protectorates, or mandates before World War I.

Think about how British influence might have involved those countries in global affairs and international conflicts that went beyond local interests.

Bias

Another reason people associate the Middle East with conflict is confirmation bias.

People don’t know what they don’t know, so they mistake partial knowledge for complete knowledge. We only see what we are primed to see, what fits with our preconceived notions. If the only time we hear about a place is when something terrible happens there, we start to assume that only terrible things happen there, all the time.

Western news coverage tends to focus on the issues that intersect directly with American politics—war, terrorism, and oil. As a result, vastly different societies get flattened into a single fraught image. The Middle East becomes one big desert full of camels, oil wells, bombs, wealthy princes, terrifying militants, and starving children.

Don’t get me wrong: some parts of the region are facing devastating crises. Gaza and Yemen face humanitarian catastrophes. Iran is engulfed in war. Syria remains politically unstable. These are real tragedies costing real lives.

But they don’t define everyday life across an entire region any more than America’s own wars and political dysfunction define every American’s daily experience.

Whenever I’ve brought students to the Middle East, they’ve always been a little nervous—and their parents have always been very nervous. But once we arrive, the students are always surprised by how normal everything feels.

We stroll down the street, stop at the fruit vendor, take an Uber to the bank, visit a rooftop bar in a posh neighborhood, buy sunglasses at H&M in the mall, eat shawarma from a fast-food stand, nibble cheeses at an international food festival, wander through a modern art museum, have dinner and Arabic coffee with a family, play soccer with some kids in the street.

It’s not all conflict. Sometimes, it’s just life.

Challenge 3

Pick something you love: music, movies, art, TV, comics, food, speculative fiction—whatever your thing is.

Now find an example of it from a Middle Eastern country.

Iran produces phenomenal films. Turkey makes wildly popular soap operas. Find a video of Naseer Shamma shredding on the oud. Browse the website of the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts. Read an award-winning novel by Jokha Alharthi.

In other words: challenge yourself to see the beauty and humanity beyond the headlines.

Politics, Not Culture

Finally, it’s important to remember that “the Middle East” is not a culturally unified region. Some might argue that the region is indeed defined by its religion (Islam) and its language (Arabic), but I would say, Not so fast, buckaroo!

First, it’s true that most (not all) people in the Middle East are Muslim. However, the Islamic world—regions where Muslims make up more than 50% of the population—stretches well beyond the Middle East. The majority of the world’s Muslims are in Southeast Asia, in places such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia. And yet, those regions are not often in the news, not associated with the “Middle East,” and not strongly associated with conflict, oil, or camels.

In other words, “Islam” is not a sufficient unifying factor for understanding what distinguishes the Middle East.

Second, the Middle East is not the same thing as the Arab world, where Arabic is an official language (green below) or co-official language (blue below). Many of my students do not know this—they assume everyone in the Middle East is an Arab—and it distorts their understanding of the region.

But as you can see, the Arab world does not include places like Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan, where most people do not speak Arabic and do not participate in Arab culture.

Next week I’ll write about Persian and Arabic languages and cultures (major language nerd here), because those two languages alone contain centuries of distinct literary and intellectual traditions. For now, suffice it to say: Arabic and Persian (aka Farsi) are not the same language, nor are they even remotely related.

Challenge 4

Go online and learn about two holidays that are coming up, one religious, one cultural.

Eid al-Fitr (Religious)
Celebrated by Muslims worldwide—not just in the Middle East—at the end of Ramadan.

Nowruz (Cultural)
A Persian cultural holiday celebrated in Iran, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Tajikistan, and Persian communities around the world. Look up the haft-seen (“seven S’es”) table. Learn about the tradition of chahar-shanbe suri (jumping over fire). It’s cool!

Once you’ve completed the four challenges here, keep challenging yourself to go further. Learn more. Open your mind. Curiosity is the best antidote to stereotypes.

Ultimately, I hope you’ve learned that “the Middle East” is a geopolitical term that reflects Western strategic interests more than some static reality, and certainly more than some truth that the people of this region are destined to experience conflict.

It feels like every ten years or so there’s a news flareup about Sunnis and Shia. Right now, people are talking about the “fanatical religion” of the Shii clerics in Iran—laughable coming from certain quarters. I mean, talk about glass houses and black pots.

But who exactly are the Shia? Sure, you can look it up on Wikipedia or read a quick explainer. But how do you remember it? How do you contextualize it? That’s where I can help.

Here are five things to remember about Shiism, packaged in my cute lil’ shrew style to help you process, internalize, and engage.

Bonus: each section comes with a handy mnemonic device invented by yours truly.

Islam 101

First, some bare-bones basics for all you beginners out there. All practicing Muslims share some central beliefs and practices.

Belief in One God. “Allah” simply means “God” in Arabic, cognate with the Hebrew Elohim. Muslims worship the same God as Jews and Christians: the God of Abraham.

Belief in Prophecy. Muhammad is the final prophet of Islam, not the only one. Muslims revere many prophets familiar from the Judeo-Christian tradition, including Abraham, Moses, John the Baptist, and Jesus.

Belief in Scripture. Muslims believe the Quran is the literal word of God, delivered to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel. Muhammad didn’t write it—God did.

The Five Pillars. 1. Affirmation of faith; 2. ritual prayer; 3. almsgiving; 4. fasting during Ramadan; and 5. pilgrimage (Hajj) to Mecca.

Both Sunnis and Shia believe all of this. So what sets them apart?

1. The split goes back to the very beginning

The seeds of the Sunni-Shia split were planted right after the death of the Prophet Muhammad—and the divide continued to evolve over centuries.

One of my pet peeves with intro textbooks is that they often present the Sunni view as the default and the Shia as a dubious add-on. But historically speaking: we don’t actually know what happened when Muhammad died. There are two equally early, divergent traditions.

According to the Shia, Muhammad did designate a successor: his cousin, son-in-law, and close companion Ali. On the return from Muhammad’s Farewell Pilgrimage in 632, the group stopped at a place called Ghadir Khumm. There, Muhammad reportedly said:

“Whoever accepts me as his mawla, Ali is also his mawla.”

The whole controversy hinges on that slippery Arabic word mawla—which can mean leader, protector, patron, or friend. (Want to read a whole dissertation about this word? You’re in luck—I wrote one!)

Shia interpret the statement as a clear designation of Ali as successor.

Sunnis generally agree Muhammad said something like this, but they argue it meant honoring Ali, not appointing him leader. After all, Sunnis like Ali, too—they just don’t elevate him head and shoulders above other early Muslims.

In the Sunni telling, Muhammad did not explicitly name a successor. After his death, there was a brief power scramble, and the person who emerged as leader was Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s close friend and father-in-law.

So the early divide wasn’t exactly “Team Ali vs. Team Abu Bakr.” It was more like:

Shia: Ali is the rightful, divinely designated leader.
Others: Let’s pick a capable leader who can keep things together.

Ali did eventually become caliph—but only after Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman had ruled before him. Sunnis call these four men the Rightly Guided Caliphs. The Shia say: yeah, right. Those first three were usurpers blocking Ali from his rightful position.

And that disagreement—who should rule, and why—opened the door to deeper differences about authority, interpretation, and religious leadership that would continue to grow over time.

Mnemonic device

The word “Sunni” has a U in it—and so do the first three caliphs recognized by the SUnnis: Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman.

The word “ShIA” has no U. Only an A and an I—just like Ali.

Also, a little song to the tune of Mary Had a Little Lamb:

Muhammad died and who should rule,
Who should rule, who should rule?
Muhammad died and who should rule?
The group could not decide.

The Shia said he named Ali,
Named Ali, named Ali—
The Shia said he named Ali,
Who stood right by his side.

The Sunnis said we just don’t know,
Just don’t know, just don’t know—
The Sunnis said we just don’t know,
Let’s choose an able guy.

2. Shiism tends to be minoritarian

Today about 90% of Muslims are Sunni and 10% are Shia. But the difference isn’t just numbers.

Sunni traditions historically place weight on consensus—the idea that the community collectively preserves the truth. Muhammad famously said (according to the Sunnis): “My community will not agree on an error.” When disagreements arise, Sunnis have often tolerated a high degree of diversity in order to keep the community unified.

Shia traditions lean the other way. They tend to assume that the majority can be disastrously wrong. Majority rule tends toward dubious, “might makes right” morality. Truth resides instead with a small group of rightly guided believers, led by a divinely inspired figure: the Imam.

Quick note on the word imam (leader):
An imam (lowercase i) can simply mean a prayer leader.
The Imam (capital I) in Shiism is something else entirely: a unique, divinely guided authority. The Leader.

Mnemonic devices:

Sunni = 5 letters long | Shia = 4 letters long | More letters = more adherents.

Another one I like (my students hate it):
“Sunni” almost contains the skeleton of Unity and Community—if you spell it Suni. I can see it clearly. My students complain about the spelling (which strikes me as strange moment to suddenly care about spelling). But to me, it’s an easy reminder that Sunnis value unity and community.

3. Shiism tends to be more top-down

Scholars often avoid comparing Islam to Christianity. The traditions are different enough that comparisons can mislead, and they often take Christianity as the model and Islam as the deviation. But pedagogically, students often find the following helpful:

Sunni Islam is somewhat like Protestantism. There is no centralized church structure. Religious scholars train at different institutions, work in different communities, and authority is relatively decentralized.

Shiism is somewhat like Catholicism. Historically, the Imam functions a bit like the Pope: a divinely guided authority whose interpretations carry enormous weight. The Imam historically had deputies and representatives who transmitted his teachings to the broader community. So the structure is more hierarchical: religious knowledge flows from the Imam through trusted intermediaries to the broader population.

Mnemonic device

Imam sounds like Mama.
Pope comes from Papa.

The Mamas and the Papas—these two groups have a more centralized, top-down structure.

4. Shiism tends to be sectarian

“Sectarian” here doesn’t mean violent or fanatical. It simply means a tendency to split into distinct sects, marked not only by doctrine but also social cohesion—Shia often practice something called wala’a wa-bara’a, loosely translated as “love your friends, shun your enemies.”

Because leadership revolves around the Imam, disputes about who the rightful Imam is often creates new sects. (Just like in the medieval period, when Catholics fought over which Pope or Anti-Pope they followed). That’s why there are multiple branches of Shiism today. The largest group—especially in Iran and Lebanon—is the Twelver Shia. When people say “Shia” they’re usually thinking of Twelvers. Guess how many Imams they recognize?

That’s right, it’s twelve. Look at you, smarty pants!

The twelfth Imam disappeared in the 9th century and is believed to be in “occultation”—waiting in heaven to return at the End of Time, somewhat like Elijah in the Jewish tradition. Twelvers await his return to usher in a messianic age of justice (more on that, later).

The clerics who govern Iran today are not Imams. They see themselves as scholars preserving the tradition until the Imam returns.

The other major Shia group is the Ismailis, found in places like India, Pakistan, and East Africa. They split from the Twelvers at the time of the seventh Imam (in the 8th century CE). The sixth imam, Jaʿfar, had two sons: Musa and Ismail. Guess which one the Ismaili’s followed?

Two for two, smarty pants—it’s Ismail!

Unlike Twelvers, some Ismailis believe the line of Imams continues to the present day. The current Imam of the Nizari Ismaili branch is His Holiness Aga Khan V, who recently became leader after the death of his father in 2025. He’s a Geneva-based, Brown-educated philanthropist who supports environmental and social justice initiatives. His family also supports educational institutions like The Aga Khan University in Pakistan, and the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto. So, anytime you hear people being like “the Shia are such fundamentalists!” I hope you can provide them some gentle correction.

Mnemonic device:

“My Imam’s way or the highway.”

When Shia disagree about who the rightful Imam should be, they often split.

5. Shiism often emphasizes persecution and injustice

Partly because they have historically been a minority, Shia traditions place strong emphasis on persecution and martyrdom. Ali was assassinated. Shia tradition holds that the other Imams were also killed, usually by Sunni enemies.

The most important martyr is Hussein, the third Imam—the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson—who was killed in battle against forces loyal to the Sunni caliph. His death is commemorated annually on the holiday of Ashura, and its remains one of the central emotional events in Shia memory. There are even dramatic reenactments of his martyrdom—taʿziyeh plays—similar to Christian passion plays.

These stories reinforce a powerful narrative: the world is unjust, and even the Prophet’s family was not spared. Shia will be persecuted by the powers-that-be. It’s why Shia are allowed to practice something called taqiyya, often translated as “dissimulation” (though in Jordanian Arabic, it just means “hat.”) It means, you can pretend to be a Sunni in order to protect yourself, you fear that telling the truth about your Shiism will get you hurt. It’s not lying in the sense of trying to trick someone or pull the wool over their eyes—it’s about a persecuted minority doing their best to survive.

But the story doesn’t end there. Twelver Shia believe that one day, the truth will shine forth:

“The earth will be filled with justice as it has been filled with injustice.”

This will happen when the Twelfth Imam returns, preparing the way for the second coming of Jesus.

Yes—another little-known fact: Muslims believe Jesus did not die on the cross but was raised to heaven and will return at the end of time. The Twelfth Imam isn’t the Messiah himself (that’s Jesus), but he ushers in the messianic age.

Some commentators overplay this messianic expectation. After all, Jews and Christians also await the Messiah. Some believers expect it soon (like the anonymous person who scrawled “Jesus will return in 1996” on the blackboard of my middle school English classroom). Some think it’s far in the future. Some see it symbolically, or as a call for humans to work toward a better world. And many are too busy thinking about the laundry—or, lately, how to stay alive—to dwell on eschatology.

Mnemonic Device

The Shia Panacea. It rhymes! When the Twelfth Imam returns, all the ills and injustices of the world will be wiped away, like a perfect panacea.

A final note

There is an enormous range of belief and practice among Shia—just like in any religion. Some are strict, some lax, some mystical, some secular. Some left-wing, some right-wing. Some treat Shiism primarily as a religious identity; others as a cultural one.

Take Nowruz, the Persian New Year celebrated on the spring equinox (coming up soon). It includes eggs, flowers, greenery, candles, and even jumping over fire—imagery that traces back to pre-Islamic Iranian traditions. When Iran’s clerical government first came to power, some leaders tried to suppress Nowruz as a pagan relic. The Iranian people basically responded: absolutely not. This tradition is deeply woven into Shia cultural life—much like how Christmas and Easter incorporate older, pagan traditions in the Christian world.

That’s why every heading in this article says “tends to be.” Why can’t scholars just give simple facts? Because reality isn’t simple, folks. Shiism has patterns and tendencies—but every culture also produces countercultures. So while this article may make things clearer, don’t let them become too clear. Because that way lies closed minds and intellectual stagnation. And remember, my lil’ shrew crew—we are supposed to use our sharp lil’ teeth to cut through the bonds of ignorance, not to become ensnared in them.

For more than a decade, I was a professor of Middle East and Islamic history at a regional public university. On the first day of my “Introduction to the Islamic World” class—before I had taught the students a single fact—I would ask them a deceptively simple question: Who is qualified to teach this class?

What makes someone an “expert”? An advanced degree? Fluency in Arabic, Persian, and/or Turkish? Extensive travel? Personal experience? Religious commitment? And what might different professors bring to the table? What are the strengths and weaknesses of, say, a Muslim professor and a non-Muslim professor?

That first-day exercise feels more relevant than ever as the internet collectively loses its mind about Iran. Some of the loudest voices are Iranian (in Iran or in diaspora); some are not. Some are Muslim; some are not. Some are experts; some are just overly confident.

So how do you sort through it all?

Here are three tips I’ve learned from my years teaching and learning.

Tip 1: Figure out whether someone has academic expertise or personal experience (or both).

Expertise and experience are both important—they just do different things. If you want expert political analysis, look for someone with serious training in political science, ideally someone who has spent years studying Iran and speaks fluent Persian. They could be Iranian or not, Muslim or not, white, brown, Black—what matters is whether they’ve done the work. Likewise, if you want to understand the history of U.S. intervention in Iranian politics, you probably want a trained historian.

If you want to know what it felt like to live through the 1979 Revolution? Or how it feels right now to have family in Tehran? Then academic credentials are beside the point. It’s all about the personal stories.

I think a lot of the online conflict I’m seeing right now stems from people collapsing these categories. Iranians bristle when non-Iranians “tell them how to feel” about the war, the bombs, the death of Khamanei. Non-Iranian experts bristle when someone implies that their years of academic training count for nothing. They are both talking past each other. It reminds me of the common miscommunication, when one person wants to give advice and the other person simply wants a listening ear. Academics and other experts often want to share knowledge and analysis, but sometimes that’s not what’s warranted. If someone is telling you their story—crying out in suffering or shouting with joy—you should not say “Actually, I know more about this than you.”

At the same time, no one person speaks for all Iranians. Iranians are not a monolith. Fierce debates are happening within families, within communities, within friend groups. An individual can tell you what they and their loved ones are experiencing, but they cannot tell you what all Iranians think—or what you should think as a result.

And by the way, that’s why I’m not telling you any substantive content about the Iran war in this article. I don’t know enough about it. I’m not an expert in this topic. I know enough Persian to understand the world’s best movie, ever—A Separation—but that’s about it.

Tip 2: Remember that no one is truly objective, but everyone has an objective.

When I ask my students about Muslim versus non-Muslim professors of Islamic Studies, they almost always say something like this:

“A Muslim professor will know the tradition really well, but they’ll be biased. A non-Muslim professor will be more objective.”

Wrong.

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I understand the instinct; in a college classroom, you don’t want to be preached at. But—news flash!—Muslim professors of Islamic studies are not secretly running conversion campaigns between lectures on medieval theology. They have rigorous training in specific texts and methodologies, just as all professors do. They might also be able to tell you what fasting during Ramadan feels like, while a non-Muslim professor might not. But they also don’t have a personal monopoly on the experience or meaning of Ramadan. Both Muslim and non-Muslim professors regularly assign readings and other content from a range Muslim voices for this simple reason: no single Muslim speaks for all Muslims.

Even more to the point, academia has a loooooong history of presenting itself as objective, but don’t believe the hype! It is most certainly not objective. In reality, it is a particular intellectual tradition—shaped historically by European, landholding, white men—that learned to call its own perspective “objectivity.” Western-trained scholars have studied, classified, dissected, and theorized about the Middle East for centuries. That scholarship has produced extraordinary knowledge, but it has also produced distortions. Inquiry always reflects the position of the inquirer.

I’m not here to bash academia—I’m a product of it. It’s just that we shouldn’t pretend it’s objective, in the sense of having a godlike grasp on the true nature of reality. Certainly, good academics follow some best practices: they can ask open-ended questions and let the evidence (rather than their beliefs) lead them to the answers. But the very questions they ask, and the very methodologies they use, are shaped by their own contexts. No person or system of inquiry stands outside culture, history, or power.

So, when you read something about Iran, ask: Where is this author coming from—literally and metaphorically? What are they trying to do? Educate? Persuade? Provoke? Grieve? Rally support? And hey—if someone is sharing grief or suffering, that might not be your cue to debate them. It might be your cue to listen.

Tip 3: Get more than one perspective—including some you disagree with.

If no one is objective, what do we do? Give up the search for knowledge altogether? Go live in a remote mountain cabin with only the woodland critters for company?

Tempting, but no. You don’t get off that easily.

The leftist historian Howard Zinn once wrote, “Perhaps the closest we can get to objectivity is a free and honest marketplace of subjectivities.” (The Use and Abuse of History) It’s a bit ironic that a lifelong critic of capitalism invoked a marketplace metaphor, but the point stands: if we can’t escape perspective, we can embrace it.

That doesn’t mean reading authors whose views you find morally abhorrent just to prove your open-mindedness. It does mean resisting the urge to read one article or post and declare, “I know everything.” A well-known cognitive bias called the Dunning-Kruger effect shows that when a person knows very little about a topic, they tend to overestimate their understanding. When a person knows very much about a topic, they tend to underestimate their understanding. It’s why first-year students often seem overconfident, while professors tend to hem and haw, saying annoying things like, “On the one hand… but on the other hand…” The more brashly confident a person seems, the more likely they are to be spewing uninformed nonsense.

So, read enough to realize you don’t know everything. Read enough to feel a little less certain. And then consider this radical possibility: maybe you don’t need to form an expert opinion on this topic. Maybe you don’t need a hot take. Maybe it’s not your job to solve the crisis of the day. Maybe your job is simply to sit with the fact that many Iranians—inside Iran and in diaspora—are feeling a complicated mix of fear, anger, hope, pride, grief, and exhaustion. Maybe you can hold some of that weight.

Not every moment calls for commentary. Sometimes, the most responsible thing you can do is witness. To that end, throughout this article, I have interspersed pictures taken by my Iranian-American graduate school friend, Myriam (with her permission of course), so that you can witness scenes from the Iran she knows and loves.

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For the past 1450-ish years, Muslims have flocked to the holy city of Mecca to perform the pilgrimage. But did you know that the medieval Muslim mystic and poet, Rabia of Basra, reportedly made Mecca come to her? We’re talking major spiritual badass.

Even though Rabia is one of my very favorite women from medieval Islamic history, I hesitated before including her in this series. She’s this close to being off-limits on this Substack. I’m staying away from the most important women of the Islamic religious tradition, simply out of respect. (I said out of respect, not fear, you weirdos.)

That means you won’t read here about some truly legit badass women—like the Prophet Muhammad’s wives Khadija and Aisha, or his daughter Fatima or granddaughter Zaynab. These women remain paragons of virtue and piety for many Muslims today, and if you insist on learning about them from a Well-Meaning White Lady (dubious insistence), I can point you to Barbara Stowasser’s Women in the Quran, Traditions, and Interpretation.

As for Rabia—she’s beloved, but she’s not in the top tier of founding mothers of the tradition. She’s most famous for her poetry of love and longing for the Divine, which may have influenced later Christian love-mystics such as Teresa of Avila. For instance, the following poem is attributed to Rabia:

Eyes are at rest, the stars are setting.
Hushed are the stirrings of birds in their nests,
Of monsters in the ocean.
…
My Lord,
Each love is now alone with his beloved.
And I am alone with You.

In addition to writing breathtaking poetry, here are three ways Rabia bucked the system—and three lessons we can learn from her, fourteen hundred years after her death.

1. Rabia (Maybe) Escaped Slavery

I say maybe because I have my doubts that she was ever actually enslaved. We have little historical evidence from Rabia’s life, but the usual account goes like this: Rabia’s family was reduced to slavery—or she herself was sold because her family was impoverished. While enslaved, she experienced a series of miracles, including a mystical light that allowed her to see in the dark. One night, her enslaver witnessed this light hovering over her as she prayed, and he freed her on the spot.

I’m skeptical of this story—not just the miracles, but the entire slavery framework. That’s because Sufi writing is thick with allegory. Slavery can be a powerful metaphor for the human condition: in Arabic, ʿabd means both “slave” and “worshipper” (just its Hebrew cognate, ʿeved). The common Arabic name Abdullah simply means Muslim (literally, “slave/worshipper of God”). Alternatively, slavery can stand for ignorance, freedom for enlightenment. Spirituality as the road to liberation.

But even if Rabia wasn’t actually enslaved (who knows—maybe she was?), the story still teaches us something about history: we all tell ourselves stories to make sense of the past. It’s easier to turn someone into a hero (Rabia) or a villain (Khayzuran, from last time) than to sit with their messy human complexity.

We tell ourselves stories about who is with us and who is against us. We ascribe good intentions to those like us and ill intentions to those unlike us. We narrate people into tidy roles so we don’t have to do the harder work of really knowing them.

Time has robbed us of the opportunity to ask Rabia who she actually was—not the pedestal version, not the paragon, just the person. But I hope we don’t let that opportunity slip by with the people in our lives. We can ask ourselves: am I telling myself a story about this person so that I can make sense of my world? Or am I asking them to tell me about their life so I can enter into relationship with them—beyond the story, toward the deep reality underneath?

Try it today! Ask a loved one about their hopes, their fears, their weird little dreams. Use Storyworth prompts if you have to, it’s okay, you don’t have to be original. You just have to listen. Let their answers pass through you—maybe even transform you.

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2. Rabia Never Got Married. Gasp!

Even in today’s ostensibly postmodern world, many people still feel social pressure to get married. And in the medieval world, not getting married was downright strange. Marriage and childbearing were widely expected of men and women alike.

So, for Rabia to refuse her suitors, never marry, never have children, and renounce the script of settling down—that took grit. And it came at a cost. Unlike the Catholic Church’s monastic system, Islam has no monks and nuns. So, Rabia couldn’t simply “get thee to a nunnery” and secure a socially recognized alternative as a Bride of Christ. She had no institutional safety net.

Which means that Rabia was unhoused. She lived in the wilderness, using a brick for a pillow and begging for her food. Even if many medieval Muslim women (and men) might not have truly wanted marriage, they probably preferred it to snuggling a rock every night. I know I would.

The lesson? Medieval Muslim women had agency—something not enough people know. But exercising that agency carried real consequences. It still does, not just for Muslim women, but for all of us. Every choice we make closes off other possibilities. There is no perfect life, no perfect system. The best we can do is follow our values where they may lead us, even into the (hopefully metaphorical) wilderness.

3. Rabia Was a Woman Who…Couldn’t Be Called a Woman?

Here’s what her later biographer, Farid al-Din Attar, reportedly said when asked why he included a woman in his compendium of Sufi saints: “When a woman walks in the way of God like a man, she cannot be called a woman.”

Let’s unpack that.

There are (at least) two ways to read this:

1. Rabia transcended gender altogether. Gender belongs to the body; she was pure spirit.

2. She was too good to be a “woman,” so she became an honorary man.

I lean toward the second reading because Attar explicitly says she walks “like a man.” He was trying to compliment her—but I’m not convinced he succeeded. A woman can only be great by transcending womanhood? That’s some impressive mental gymnastics. It also shows how fragile and malleable our gender categories have always been—not just in the last century, but for many centuries.

And let’s not single out Attar as the villain of our story, either. He didn’t invent the idea of praising women for “not being like other girls,” and he certainly wasn’t the last to invoke it. Decades of social science research show that American women are often rewarded for performing masculinity in male-dominated spaces—politics, corporate workplaces, academia. “Oh, I’m just one of the guys.”

And Joan C. Williams writes about how working women today must still walk the tightrope: just feminine enough to be unthreatening, just masculine enough to be taken seriously. Unlike Rabia, most of us aren’t ready or willing to escape the tightrope by escaping material society altogether. But we can work toward a world where women don’t have to walk the tightrope in order to be considered worthy.

Ultimately, if it burns your britches that Attar thought Rabia couldn’t quite count as a woman because she was just too good a person, let’s redirect that heat. It’s easy to be mad at people in the past. It’s harder—and more useful—to examine the structures we inhabit now. Instead of using medieval Islamic history as a foil against which to congratulate ourselves, let’s turn that measuring stick on our own world. Let’s consider the costs and benefits of the choices we make—we all make. Let’s interrogate the stories we tell ourselves about who has authority, who is worth listening to.

Rabia may have made Mecca come to her. But we’re the ones who have to decide what we’ll do with the stories we inherit.

Before we begin, let’s get one thing straight: her name’s not that hard. If you can say “Kaiser on,” you can say Khayzuran. As in, there’s a kaiser (roll) on my plate, or there’s a Kaiser (Wilhelm) on my mind. There’s a Khayzuran… uh, allegedly murdering her own son. But we’ll get to that.

Who was Khayzuran?

Khayzuran was an 8th-century Arabian woman whose entire family was reduced to slavery. She became a courtesan and concubine—trained for the entertainment and pleasure of elite men. Talented and savvy, she caught the eye of the young caliph. He freed her, married her, had children with her, and by all accounts was utterly besotted with her. And in that society, if the caliph was besotted with you, you had power. She secured political appointments for her favorites. She threw money at the most famous artists of the day. She was the most commanding voice in the realm.

In other words: a complete badass.

Khayzuran was the OG queen-regent—the first formerly enslaved woman to seize the reins of imperial power in Islamic history. Later Islamic history is full of Cersei Lannister–style regents who ruled in the names of their minor sons. These regents bore names like Dawn, Temptation, and Joy—but those beautiful names mask an ugly truth: most began their lives in slavery. These were not their birth names (lost to history), but “slave names” given by enslavers. Khayzuran is no exception. Her name means Bamboo, likely a nod to her slender grace. But this bamboo stick packed a mighty wallop. As Moroccan feminist scholar Fatima Mernissi puts it, Khayzuran began the “Revolution in the harem.” Perhaps the baddest ass of all time?

The Source of her Power

Like every great “first,” Khayzuran had predecessors. Just as Blowfly and Lightnin’ Rod paved the way for Run-DMC, lesser-known concubines paved the way for Khayzuran. There were Hababa (Beloved) and Sallama (Tranquility), who accompanied the caliph everywhere. Or there was Nawwar (“Luminous”—though today the word means trashy), who reportedly led the Friday prayer when the caliph was too drunk to do so. Imagine a president partying too hard to deliver the State of the Union address, so he sends his sex worker girlfriend to deliver it instead. Wild times.

But Khayzuran wasn’t merely a “favorite” entertainer or sex worker. She was a mother. And that’s where her real authority lay.

As much as people like to imagine that medieval Muslim women had no power, it wasn’t that simple. In this society, the most powerful people held multiple privileged identities: adult man (the older, the better), parent, free, Muslim, Arab, wealthy, aristocratic. Any deviation from that ideal was a social liability—a step down the ladder. But deviations came in many forms, not just sex or gender. A rich, aristocratic grandmother with many offspring might wield more power than a young, single peasant man. A free woman could hold authority over an enslaved man. A mother could wield power over a son.

And that’s where things got tricky for Khayzuran.

When her husband died, her eldest son took the throne—and by most accounts, he was a real turd. He resented her influence and tried to cut her out of politics: “Stay out of my meetings, mother. Go and play with your pretty dresses, or whatever it is you women do.” This young caliph soon died under… mysterious circumstances. Later sources blamed Khayzuran. Maybe she had sent him a flagon of poisoned wine. Maybe she had sent a servant to seduce him and suffocate him with a pillow. Or maybe—just maybe—those stories were gossip meant to slander a powerful woman.

Because, as delicious as medieval hot goss can be, we have to take it with a grain of salt. Accounts about Khayzuran were written by men who thought she was a bad influence. Authors love to blame women as disruptive harlots or mean old battle-axes, rather than interrogating the systems in which they live. This isn’t a novel take: the essayist al-Jahiz skewered this double standard way back in the 9th century. (Or maybe he endorsed it—it’s hard to tell with a satirist. But if I saw an Onion headline reading, “‘Silly sluts are stealing all my money,’ says guy getting a lap dance,” I’d assume the joke was on the guy and not the sex workers. Is that just me?)

I know it’s not easy to interrogate systems. Our brains are wired for stories. We personalize; we dramatize. It’s easier to blame a woman than to critique a system. But that’s exactly what historical thinking teaches us to do. (It’s part of why fascists don’t want us to learn how to do history). Historians learn to ask critical questions: Who wrote this? What did they want? Is it possible that this “chaotic evil psychopath” was just a woman trying to win a rigged game? How can we hear her side of the story?

And that’s ultimately what our Bamboo Badass teaches us: that it takes curiosity, skepticism, sharp shrewish teeth, and a bit of harpyish moxie to dig beneath the surface of things—then, and now.

For more on Khayzuran, see:

• Taef El-Azhari, Queens, Eunuchs, and Concubines in Islamic History

• Fatima Mernissi, The Forgotten Queens of Islam

“Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.” Ephesians 5:22–24.

The first time I heard this verse, I was 17, playing viola at a wedding in Amarillo, Texas. My precious little instrument and I were shocked to hear it read with such pride—such delight, even—but no one else in the church seemed to mind. At the next wedding, there it was again: wives must submit, obey, respect, but not love. Love, in this particular cluster of verses, is for husbands alone to feel. In fact, husbands are specifically reminded to love and not hate their wives, just as people should love and not hate their own bodies. Because we all know how easy it is to love our bodies—and not to look down at our sagging, recalcitrant flesh and sigh, “Oh great, you again?”

So, imagine my surprise when, the very next week at school, I heard someone say, “But Islam is so bad for women!” A new girl had joined our high school—a Muslim girl, no less—and my friends were very concerned. The poor, oppressed thing! (For she was a thing and not a person.) They worried about her life, her future, her father, her mosque, her clothing. But do you know what they didn’t worry about?

Their own dang business.

That was my first inkling that people loved to talk trash about Islam without knowing a single thing about it. They couldn’t quote a single Qur’an verse, but they could assure you it was bad. They couldn’t name a single prominent Muslim woman—I mean, surely there aren’t any of those?—and that was proof enough of their absence. They could tell you the Prophet Muhammad had been married to a child, but not that some U.S. states still allowed child marriage then (and still do now). They knew what they knew because they knew it. It was dogma, plain and simple.

Being the sweet lil’ contrarian that I am, when I went off to college, I majored in Religious Studies. I studied Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, witchcraft, mysticism, and “North American New Religions” (aka cults). But my two great loves were premodern Islamic history and German Jewish Enlightenment thought. So, what tipped me toward Harun al-Rashid instead of Martin Buber?

1. I fell in love with Arabic. It is an astonishingly beautiful language, built on patterns—repeating, blossoming patterns—almost mathematical in feel, like a Mamluk star or an arabesque. In college, I kept a journal called the “Happiness Book,” and it is filled with Arabic grammar charts. If that doesn’t tell you about me, I don’t know what does.

2. My friends reacted very differently to my two loves. My beloved German Jewish Enlightenment philosophers elicited, “Never heard of that guy,” and “snooooore.” Islam, though—that got questions. Follow-ups. Curiosity. Even the skeptics—what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?—were at least engaged.

3. Most importantly, 9/11 happened during my sophomore year. While some of my classmates (literally) signed up to fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I (figuratively) signed up to be a cultural ambassador of sorts. A disarming, Well-Meaning White Lady who could help spread some peace, love, and understanding in a fractured world.

I’ve learned and unlearned a great deal since those earnest, indignant college years. I’ve reckoned with my own complicity in harmful systems, my own status as a Well-Meaning White Lady, my own easy moral postures. Yet, I still believe what I believed then, maybe even more fiercely now: that we should learn about people before we judge them; that we should remove the log from our own eye before going speck-hunting in someone else’s; that curiosity plus empathy is not naïve, it’s necessary.

It may not fix the world. But it’s a start.

What about you? Where have you been more convinced than curious? What would it look like to choose curiosity instead? You can tell me—I may be a Shrew, but I promise I don’t bite.

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Welcome to Harpy & The Shrew

Hi, I’m Elizabeth—writer, editor, historian, spiritual seeker.

Here’s what I bring to the table:

A PhD in Middle East history and a BA in religious studies. I know how to find reliable information, separate propaganda from reality, and honor the richness of human experience. I’m a globetrotter, polyglot, and walking resource library.

Expertise in race, slavery, women, gender, and empire—subjects that sound historical but are very much alive. I’ve spent years translating social science research on racial and gender equity into accessible writing for mission-driven organizations. I care about what actually works in classrooms, workplaces, and communities.

Radical global feminism and humanism in a disarming little package, like the mouse that gnaws through fetters with razor sharp teeth. Down with sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia, fatphobia, xenophobia, ethno-nationalism, and all their cousins. Up with people. Up with community.

Sagittarius + Aquarius energy. Often trying new things and making it weird. Rarely content with conventional wisdom or convinced by specious arguments.

This Substack is where all of that converges.

What You Can Expect

1. History Lessons for the Modern Age

Short explainers and listicles on revolutions, nationalism, empire, feminism, race, and slavery. The goal isn’t trivia—it’s clarity.

2. The Well-Meaning White Lady’s Guide to the Islamic World

Mini-lectures from an award-winning professor on the study of Islam, history of the so-called “Middle East,” and culture of the Arabic- and Persian-speaking worlds.

3. Best Practices for Would-Be Radicals

Not aimed at converting haters but at equipping progressives with the strongest research and best practices for building an inclusive world.

4. The Human Constellation Project

Interviews with everyday badasses—each one connected to the next. I’ll map the connections as they grow, showing that we’re far more connected than we think.

Why This Newsletter, Why Now?

Because we are living through arguments about history, religion, nationalism, gender, and power—and most of those arguments are under-informed.

History without action is just trivia.
Feminism without rigor is just vibes.
Conviction without curiosity is just ego.

If any of this resonates—if you believe even the smallest voice can shift the story—subscribe. Expect regular posts, sharp takes, and a deliberate mix of rigor and whimsy.

Welcome. 🐭🔪

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