A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

Chapter One: Islam and the Abrahamic
Faiths
Ira M. Lapidus’s fine study A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988) is a valuable resource on many aspects of
broader Islamic history, including the early Islamic conquests.
Good general books on the life of the Prophet Muhammad are Maxime
Rodinson’s Muhammad: Prophet of Islam (London: I. B. Taurus, 2002) and
Karen Armstrong’s Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet (New York:
HarperOne, 1993).
There are diverse positions about the role of Jesus in history among Jewish
scholars. For the section on Jewish perspectives on Jesus, I drew from Rabbi
Shraga Simmons’s article, “Why Jews Don’t Believe in Jesus,” which can be
found at
http://www.aish.com/jewishissues/jewishsociety/Why_Jews_Dont_Believe_In_Jesus.asp
The Maimonides quote is from Abraham S. Halkin, ed., and Boaz Cohen,
trans., Moses Maimonides’ Epistle to Yemen: The Arabic Original and the Three
Hebrew Versions (New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1952),
iii–iv.

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Chapter Two: Power, Heresy, and the
Evolution of Christianity
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill scholar Bart D. Ehrman’s Lost
Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2003) is a fascinating and groundbreaking study
of the problems of early documents in the evolution of Christianity.
For a discussion of texts that did or did not make it into the formal Christian
canon, see
http://gbgm-umc.org/umw/Bible/noncanon.html
.
For the discussion on Marcionism, I drew from
http://www.earlychurch.org.uk/article_marcion.html
.

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