The courage to speak truth to power is a difficult thing for most to muster, but it is even more difficult when the power that you are confronting holds your very life in its hands.

Shiʿi Muslims believe that the Prophet Muhammad designated his cousin and son-in-law ʿAli ibn Abi Talib to succeed him as leader of the Muslim community, or umma.

Maximus is one of Christianity’s most prolific theologians and seeing that he lived during the birth of Islam and the early Arab conquests, I have always regretted that he never wrote some sort of treatise on the Muslim faith.

I remember years ago stumbling upon an astonishing quote from the eighth-century Sufi mystic Rabiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya, also known as Rabiʿa of Basra: