Muhammad Atif Shah 
Karma and reincarnation are probably the two most widely recognized concepts that Hinduism has given to the world. They appear in everyday conversation, in self-help books, in pop music lyrics, and in news commentary. And yet for all their popularity, they are also two of the most consistently misunderstood ideas in global religious thought. Most … Read more
Ask most people what Judaism says about life after death and they will tell you one of two things: either that Judaism focuses on this world and does not really say much about the next one, or that it teaches the immortality of the soul. Both answers miss what is actually one of the most … Read more
No book in the Bible has been read more, argued over more, or misunderstood more than the Book of Revelation. It sits at the end of the Christian scriptures like a sealed door that everyone wants to open, and for two thousand years people have been trying to force that door with every tool available: … Read more
Few figures in the Islamic tradition generate as much hope, debate, and genuine curiosity as the Imam Mahdi. Across Muslim communities worldwide, from South Asia to sub-Saharan Africa, from the Persian Gulf to the diaspora communities of the West, the question of who is Imam Mahdi occupies a central place in religious imagination and in … Read more
Billions of people across Islam and Christianity believe a great deceiver will appear before the end of the world. Muslims call him the Dajjal. Christians call him the Antichrist. And more people than ever are asking whether these two figures are actually the same being described in different religious languages, or whether they are genuinely … Read more
There is a feeling that many people carry around without quite being able to name it. A sense that the world is not going in the right direction. That something has been lost. That human beings are capable of so much more than what they actually do, and yet the gap between that potential and … Read more
Every few generations, Jewish history produces a moment of collective holding of breath. A figure emerges, or rumor of one spreads, and for a brief and electric season, ordinary Jews from Portugal to Poland, from Yemen to New York, begin to ask the same question: could this be him? Could this be the Mashiach, the … Read more
Imagine the scene that has been described in tens of millions of copies of the Left Behind novels. Planes falling from the sky because pilots have vanished mid-flight. Highways full of driverless cars. Hospitals where surgeons have disappeared from operating theatres. Every Christian in the world suddenly and silently removed from the earth, leaving behind … Read more
The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, held up two fingers pressed close together and said: I and the Hour have been sent like this. That statement was made fourteen centuries ago. And yet every generation of Muslims that has lived since has looked at the world around them, read the hadith describing the signs … Read more
Two names. Three thousand years of interpretation. Three of the world’s major religions. And still, after all that time and all that scholarship, nobody agrees on who Gog and Magog actually are. They begin as a single man and the territory he rules, introduced in a prophetic vision by the biblical prophet Ezekiel sometime in … Read more