Hejaz
Modern-day: Saudi Arabia
The Hejaz is the historical region along the Red Sea coast of the Arabian Peninsula containing Mecca and Medina, the two cities central to the Prophetic Era. It remained the political center of the Muslim community through the Rashidun period before the capital moved to Kufa and later Damascus.
Content set in this region
- Research Paper
Islam: History, Authority and the Development of Islamic Tradition
A historical-critical review of the Qur'an and Hadith as sources of religious authority in Islam, distinguishing established fact, scholarly consensus, majority and minority opinion, disputed claims, and theological interpretation at every step.
- Research Paper
Islam or Muslim Culture? Measuring the Distance Between Revelation and Practice
How do you tell Islam itself apart from the cultures that grew up around it? This essay tests inheritance law, national governance, elder care, and charitable giving against the Qur'an's own text, and asks a harder question too: can a country call itself Islamic on population alone, or should it also be judged by how well it reflects the Qur'an's own ethical demands?
- Research Paper
Women in Mainstream Islam: Protection, Restriction, and the Historical Development of Religious Practice
A historical-critical review testing whether practices commonly described as Islamic requirements for women — segregation, face-veiling, travel guardianship, exclusion from mosques and public office — rest on the Qur'an itself or on later hadith, jurisprudence, dynastic custom, and regional practice.
- Article
Can Hadith Explain the Qur'an?
A verse-by-verse, source-by-source investigation into whether the Qur'an itself assigns the Prophet an explanatory role beyond the recited text, and what the historical record shows about when the classical doctrine of Sunna's authority actually took shape. Reader's Edition: written for anyone, with every technical term and named scholar introduced as it appears.
- Article
The Constitution of Medina: A Primary Source Overview
A short guide to the document known as the 'Constitution of Medina': what it says, where it comes from, and why historians treat it as unusually old despite surviving only in a much later text.
- Article
Islam: A Reader's Guide to the Qur'an, Hadith and Early Islamic History
A plain-language companion to Revert Way's academic review of the Qur'an and Hadith: the same evidence, sources, and arguments, with every technical term and historical figure introduced on first use.
- Evidence Library
The Constitution of Medina
A set of clauses, preserved in Ibn Ishaq's biography of Muhammad, establishing relations between the Emigrants, the Medinan Muslims, and Medina's Jewish tribes shortly after the hijra.