Author: Rabbi Allen S Maller

In the Hebrew Bible, Prophet Abraham is the first person to be called a “Hebrew” (Genesis 14:13). The term Hebrew comes from the verb ‘to go over a boundary’— like the Euphrates or Jordan river— or ‘to be an immigrant.’ The first thing God told Prophet Abraham in…

Ignác/Ignaz [Yitzhaq Yehuda] Goldziher (June 22, 1850 – November 13, 1921), was a Hungarian scholar of Islam and is considered one of the three founders of modern Islamic studies in Europe. Goldziher was educated at the universities of Budapest, Berlin, Leipzig and…

People who attended religious services at least once a week were significantly less likely to die from deaths related to suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol poisoning, according to a May 2020 research report from the Harvard School of Public Health.  If this…

(Aljumuah offers our series of articles by Reform Jewish Rabbi, Allen S. Maller, as a bridge-building effort to promote good relations among Jewish and Muslim communities. We share much in common due to the same source of our prophets and the revelations they…

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S executive order banning refugees from entering the USA left much of the American Jewish community horrified — particularly as the announcement came on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the head of the American ‘Union of Reform Jews,’…

According to the Bible a false prophet is one who pretends to speak for God but in reality, speaks for himself and is moved by his own intentions, emotions and political commitments.  (Jeremiah 14:13–15; Jeremiah 23:30-33; Ezekiel 13:2, 3, 10, 11). Unlike…

The oppression of Judaism by Antiochus IV, the Syrian Greek king, was the first known attempt at suppressing a minority religion, but unfortunately not the last. Other well-known early attempts were the three-century long Roman persecution of Christianity, and the persecution of…

The Qur’an teaches: Say, [O believers], “We believed in Allah and what has been revealed to us [the Qur’an] and what has been revealed to Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and the Descendants [of Jacob] and what was given to…

In the Zabur of Prophet David it is written: “One thing God has spoken; two things have I heard.”  (Psalms 62:11/12). The rabbis in the Talmud (Sanhedrin 34a) asserted that this means there are multiple interpretations of each verse of Sacred Scripture…

According to the Muslim scholars Ibn Abbas and Suddi, after the death of Hagar [Hajar], her son Prophet Ishmael [Ismâ’îl] married, divorced and remarried again. Ibn Kathir says that Ishmael’s first wife was an inhospitable Amalekite woman who was rejected by her…