God in the Quran, Jack Miles
God in the Quran, Jack Miles
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God in the Qur'an

Author: Jack Miles

Narrator: Peter Altschuler

Unabridged: 9 hr 57 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/13/2018


Synopsis

Who is Allah? What does He ask of those who submit to His teachings? Pulitzer Prize-winner Jacke Miles gives us a deeply probing, revelatory portrait of the world’s second largest, fastest-growing and perhaps most tragically misunderstood religion. In doing so, Miles illuminates what is unique about Allah, His teachings, and His resolutely merciful temperament, and he thereby reveals that which is false, distorted, or simply absent from the popular conception of the heart of Islam.

So, too, does Miles uncover the spiritual and scriptural continuity of the Islamic tradition with those of Judaism and Christianity, and the deep affinities among the three by setting passages from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur’an side by side. In the spirit of his two previous books, God and Christ, and with his characteristic sensitivity, perspicacity and prodigious command of the subject, Miles calls for us all to read another’s scriptures with the same understanding and accommodating eye that we turn upon our own.

About Jack Miles

Jack Miles is Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies with the University of California at Irvine and Senior Fellow for Religious Affairs with the Pacific Council on International Policy. He spent 1960-70 as a Jesuit seminarian, studying at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem before enrolling at Harvard University, where he completed a PhD in Near Eastern languages in 1971. His book God: A Biography won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996, and Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God led to his being named a MacArthur Fellow for 2003-07.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Edward on February 18, 2019

Miles, a committed Christian, is not interested in finding the God of the Qur'an better or worse, more or less truthful, than the God of the Bible; rather, as he writes in the foreword, he comes at them as a literary critic would and suspends his belief. As characters, or figures, Yahweh, or Jehovah......more

Goodreads review by John on May 10, 2021

God in the Qur'an, by Jack Miles; Alfred A. Knopf: New York; $26.95 hardback How do you understand someone whose beliefs are different from yours? Jack Miles poses this question to those of the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim faiths. Miles, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the renowned God: A Bio......more

Goodreads review by Fraser on August 10, 2019

This is definitely not the starting point for Qur’anic studies that I was hoping for (unlike Miles’s other God: A Biography, which I felt was very insightful on the Jewish Yhwh character). In spite of being about the Qur’an, Miles’s most insightful commentary is actually grounded in Christian and Je......more

Goodreads review by Rod on January 04, 2019

Jack Miles says he wrote this book--following the example of C.S. Lewis--because it was a book that he would want to read that no one had written yet. He (along with John Shelby Spong and Bart Ehrman) definitely writes books I would like to have written in another life where I was a writer of books......more

Goodreads review by John on June 22, 2019

I found this pretty interesting, Miles compares and contrast the Biblical stories that are also retold in the Koran. It is interesting to see how Mohammad cleaned some things up, sometimes painting a more positive portrait of God, providing some elements to show God is merciful where it wasn't depic......more


Quotes

“Mr. Miles’s account stands alone, both in its generous openness of mind and in its scrupulous yet lively scholarship.” —Eric Ormsby, The Wall Street Journal

“A highly readable, unbiasedly comparative and elegantly insightful study of the Quran . . . Miles gets to the core of the Abrahamic matrix.” —Mustafa Akyol, The New York Times Book Review

“[Miles’s] newest book represents the crowning achievement of his life’s work.” —Jonathan Kirsch, Jewish Journal

“[A] highly engaging and resourceful book.” —Patrick Ryan, Commonweal 

“Keenly interesting, incisive . . . [An] illuminating critique.” Booklist (starred review)
 
“Miles . . . show[s] his non-Muslim readers that, in many ways, the Islamic God that emerges will be more recognizable to them than Yahweh . . . What Miles inaugurated, the method of theography, remains a brilliant way to try to meet an inimitable protagonist.” —Anna Della Subin, Harper’s

“Miles’s unique talent for writing about religion won him a Pulitzer Prize for God: A Biography, and now the scholar has written a study of Allah . . . Miles’s book is a roadmap toward interfaith understanding.” The National Book Review
 
“Miles is still an engrossing storyteller and a very capable teacher, with the author taking up specific moments or characters or stories and giving them a solid shaking.” —Steve Donoghue, Christian Science Monitor

“Reading this book could be a crucial step out of ignorance at a time of rising Islamophobia.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“Literary and astute . . . Good reading and an excellent tool for interfaith dialogue.”Kirkus (starred review)

“A valuable and insightful perspective on Islam and the Qur’an.” Library Journal

“In its stunning scope, its forensic analysis, and its lofty message, God in the Qur’an has no predecessor and no competitor among books that scan the horizon of Abrahamic scriptures. At once accessible and challenging, the Biblical/Qur'anic narratives are recounted here with clarity and conviction. The reader—whether religious or non-religious, Jewish, Christian, Muslim or atheist—is offered a new vista into divine-human encounters evoked by one of their most skilled interpreters, Jack Miles. A milestone of literary and theological scholarship.” —Bruce Bennett Lawrence, author of The Koran in English – A Biography

“Jack Miles’ God in the Qur’an is the culmination of an extraordinary three-part biography—or theograpy, as he has termed it—of the central character in the sacred scriptures of Jews, the Christians, and now the Muslims. In this book, as in the previous books in the trilogy, Miles draws upon rich theological learning that he manages to wear lightly and gracefully. He draws too upon an extraordinary literary sensibility that enables him to illuminate brilliantly those scriptural places where the three monotheisms converge and where they strikingly differ. Above all, he draws upon unfailing moral intelligence, sympathetic imagination, and human decency, qualities that are sorely needed not only in this critically important interfaith project but also in the world whose shadows fall so darkly upon us all.” —Stephen Greenblatt, Author of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

“In this extraordinary, beautifully written book, Jack Miles continues his exploration of the nature of God in scripture by turning his trained eyes to the Qur’an. To put it simply, this is one of the finest books I have ever read on the Qur’an, and everyone who truly wants to understand Islam and Muslims should read it.” —Amir Hussain, author, Muslims and the Making of America

God in the Qur’an is not your typical ‘feel-good-we-are-all-brothers-and-sisters’ read but rather a careful, critical, loving and deeply perceptive examination of how God really appears in this sacred scripture. This is a remarkable contribution to a remarkable topic, and a book not to be missed.” —Reuven Firestone, author, An Introduction to Islam for Jews

“Jack Miles has done it again! In a fascinating and creative way, his latest book helps Jews and Christians understand the Qur’an, not by paraphrasing or summarizing its teachings, but by having Allah speak directly about key persons—Adam and his wife, Abraham and his sons, Jesus and his mother—who appear in the Tanakh and the Christian Bible. His brilliant comparative reading of selected passages of the Qur’an sheds an appreciative light on all three religions, noting both similarities and differences, but all the while increasing our much-needed understanding of the Qur’an.” —Father James L. Heft, author, Passing on the Faith

“With God in the Qur’an, Jack Miles completes the literary pilgrimage that gave us God: A Biography and Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God. This time Allah is the central character, and drawing on the Qur’an, but also the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, Miles puts him in play with the cross-over figures of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses and Jesus. As with his earlier books, Miles mines all three texts to strikingly original effect, generating new insights about the Qur’an but also about its sibling scriptures.” —Jane McAuliffe, editor, The Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an