🧵 What does Islamic tradition say about people with disabilities? Islam recognizes disabilities and other physical differences as part of human experience while calling believers towards compassion. However, interpretations have varied across classical scholarship. (1/27)
Early hadith collections describe individuals with bodily differences through specific stories, while later scholars developed the category dhawi al-ʿahat (“people with bodily afflictions”) to organize these reports. (2/27)

🧵 With the recent surge of interest in early Islamic epigraphy, Sean Anthony’s “Early Arabo-Islamic Epigraphy and the Positivist Fallacy” deserves some more attention. (1/16)
With the growth of Arabian epigraphy in the last 2 decades. New discoveries and digital archives have expanded the available evidence, while historians, philologists, linguists, and epigraphers continue the painstaking work of describing and contextualizing this material. (2/16)

🧵Was the Qur’an wrong in Q 71:23, when it attributes the worship of Wadd, Suwa, Yaghuth, Yaʿuq, and Nasr to the people of Noah, generating an exegetical problem concerning the presence of anachronistic Arabian deities within a primordial setting. (1/17)
The popular opinion is found with Ibn Kathir (d. 1373 CE) and many others, traces these figures through genealogies of religious memory in which idols associated with Arabian tribes are linked directly to the people of Noah. (2/17)

🧵 Sufi literature treats Jesus son of Mary as a strategic figure within Muslim-Christian political discourse. Many see this as a deliberate use of symbolism inside a wider field of religious competition and exchange. (1/25)
Islamic knowledge of Jesus is primarily Qur’anic, centered on Mary and the infancy narrative, while accounts of his adult life come through later prophetic stories. In Sufism Jesus is reworked as a literary and symbolic figure (2/25)

🧵 Modern YouTube apologetics increasingly resembles pro wrestling in the sense Roland Barthes describes in The World of Wrestling, where the point is to stage meaning so it can be seen immediately. Debate becomes a spectacle where truth appears to unfold in real time. (1/25)
Barthes describes wrestling as a world of “absolute intelligibility,” where everything must be instantly understood. There is no ambiguity, no slow unfolding, no need to interpret anything. You cheer for the good guy and boo the bad guy. (2/25)

🧵Why do animals suffer? In secular discourse, the problem of animal suffering centers on a specific ethical concern causing pain or harm to animals, especially in cases where it is could be avoided. Let’s explore the Islamic approach to the Problem of Evil for animals. (1/26)
The issue extends beyond theory into concrete systems
factory farming, animal testing, hunting, environmental destruction, and entertainment. Why does God allow Animals to suffer? This is a question of human obligation toward animals as living members of the world. (2/26)

🧵The first Hijra to Ethiopia is a beloved tale for many in the Islamic tradition: Muslims flee Mecca, reach a Christian king’s court, and move him to tears with the recitation of the Qur’an. @GabrielSaidR asks if the story is historical or an early Islamic construction. (1/23)
Karen Armstrong writes how Ja‘far ibn Abi Talib recited the Qur’an, moving the Negus and his advisors to tears so intense that their scrolls were soaked. The account is meant to emphasizes the Qur’an’s beauty and early interfaith harmony with Christians (2/23)

🧵 The mention of Solomon and birds points to a larger Qur’anic view of knowledge. Qur’an 27:15 states “We gave David and Solomon knowledge and they said Praise be to Allah…” Knowledge and power appears as something granted only by God. (An essay by @Kashmiri_Fire) (1/24)
Through intertextuality the Qur’an enters a theological conversation with Jewish and Christian traditions circulating in Late Antiquity. It takes familiar motifs and rearticulates them to assert its own claims about God and knowledge. (2/24)

The “Syriac dominance” thesis presupposes that the Qur’an’s theological lexicon is primarily derivative of Syriac Christian usage. Suleyman Dost argues that premise is unstable when South Arabian epigraphy is treated as primary comparative evidence (1/25) Its key religious terms were already circulating in Greek, Aramaic, and Ethiopic before Islam. Words like heaven, hell, sabbath, apostle, resurrection, and divine judgement appear as loanwords embedded in Qur’anic Arabic. (2/25)

🧵Holger Zellentin fundamentally reframes how the Qur’an views Jews and Christians. He tracks how three Qur’anic designations evolved: banū isrāʾīl, ahl al-kitāb, and al-yahūd wa-l-naṣārā. (1/25)
Scholarly consensus says ahl al-kitāb includes both Jews and Christians. Zellentin agrees bur adds two major correctives. First, banū isrāʾīl also designates contemporaneous Jews and Christians at the time of the Prophet. (2/35)

The Qur’an presents ʿUzayr as a figure called “Son of God” by Jews. Holger Zellentin and Hythem Sidky argue the Qur’an reframes Rabbi Eliʿezer ha-Gadol as ʿUzayr, meaning “little helper,” transforming him from “The Great” to a servant who received God’s Torah. (1/23)
The Qur’an primarily addresses Jews from Medina, Khaybar, and the Hijaz. Evidence about them is sparse (just inscriptions, archaeology, and early Islamic literature) but the Qur’an itself provides crucial insight into their beliefs and practices. (2/23)

🧵 Sidney Griffith views Surah al-Kahf (Q 18) within the narrative environment of Late Antiquity, arguing that the Quran participates in widely circulating Jewish and Christian stories while also refusing dependence on its fixed literary sources. (1/28)
In particular, the Quranic accounts of the Companions of the Cave and Dhu l-Qarnayn famously display clear structural and thematic affinities with Syriac Christian narratives of the Sleepers of Ephesus and Alexander the Great. (2/28)

🧵Unpopular opinion: after more than two years of closely following and reading Western academic studies of Islam, l've come to a blunt conclusion: Muslim apologists are SOCIALLY justified in their disdain toward the field. (1/19)


Whether one views Western academia as colonialist or not, the experience of being a Muslim in the academy still carries stark dualities. Borrowing a phrase from Frantz Fanon, it is a manichaean existence. (2/19)

🧵 What do inscriptions and other Late Antique evidence reveal about the Goddesses mentioned in the Quran? (1/20) There are many later Muslim sources naming dozens of idols, the Qurʾān itself mentions very few divine figures by name. That parsimony is deliberate and historically meaningful. (2/20)

🧵 Who were the prophets of pre-Islamic Arabia? Later Islamic sources preserve reports of individuals in the days of Jahiliyya who were regarded as prophets or who claimed prophethood, just before or alongside Prophet Muhammad. (1/ The standard narrative says Prophet Muhammad appears “out of the blue” in a pagan Arabia unfamiliar with prophecy. This picture does not survive close scrutiny of the sources. (2/

🧵is the Qur’an Historical? A major unresolved issue in Qur’anic studies is how to reconcile the Qur’an’s historical claims with its literary construction, polemical elements, and shifts between literal and symbolic language. It shapes the entire reading of the text (1/9) Traditionalists assume literalism, yet the text shows chronological compression, recast scenes across surahs, and clear Late Antique intertextuality. These are not small glitches. They form a pattern that challenges a simple literal frame. (2/9)

🧵I present a full thread compiling all my Twitter threads on academic Islamic papers, from Qur’anic studies to theology and philosophy. (1/?) Van Putten and questions on intertextuality. (2/?)

https://x.com/dmontetheno1/status/1958413009564352943?s=46

🧵 Was Islam from the beginning a universal movement open to all monotheists?
Or did the Qur’an initially imagine itself as rooted in a particular genealogy the children of Ishmael and Abraham? @MohsenGT ’s brilliant essay tackles this head-on. (1/15)
Scholars like Fred Donner argue early Islam was “The Believers’ Movement”: an ecumenical fellowship of Jews, Christians, and Muslims united by monotheism and righteous conduct. Universal from the start, not tied to ethnicity or genealogy. (2/15)

🧵 In Creation and Contemplation, Julien Decharneux examines Qur’anic teleology, showing that the text repeatedly emphasizes creation is purposeful. God did not create the universe in vain, and humans are meant to reflect and engage with it. (1/9)
Verses such as Q 23:115 ask: “Did you think We created you in vain?” Similarly, Q 3:190-191 affirms that creation is neither false nor meaningless. Decharneux highlights how these passages underscore a rejection of purposelessness. (2/9)

🧵 The Qur’an presents historical narratives not as conventional chronicles but often through typology: historical figures and events are structured as recurring patterns that illustrate moral, social, and political dynamics. (1/11) Typology refers to the representation of a figure or event as a type: a model whose actions, decisions, and outcomes exemplify patterns that recur across contexts. The emphasis is on the pattern, not just the individual case. (2/11)

🧵 The Qur’an’s account of Salih’s she-camel (nāqat Allāh) is not a simple miracle story. It is a ritual and linguistic polemic aimed at Quraysh’s control of water, sacred time, and access to the divine. A thread from my own upcoming work. (1/9)
The Qur’an does not merely say nāqa (“camel”). It says nāqat Allāh “God’s camel” (7:73, 11:64, 26:155, 91:13). This divine possession is unusual. The only consistent parallel is Bayt Allāh, the Kaʿbah. (2/9)