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Touraj Daryaee on Zoroastrianism in the Seventh Century and Beyond
With the Arab conquest of Sasanian Persia, a new religion enters the west. Once the great religious Other to the Græco-Roman world, the Zoroastrians are now part of the story of western esotericism. …
Published on 9 hours ago
Ahab Bdaiwi on the Rise of Shī‘ī Esotericism
In Part I we looked at the political events leading up to the formation of the Shi'a. In Part II we see that it did not take long for things to get very esoteric. Come for the programmatic esoteric h…
Published on 1 month, 2 weeks ago
Ahab Bdaiwi on ‘Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib, his Family, and the Origins of Shī‘ī Islam
We pick up from our last episode, where geopolitics and esotericism met in the crucible of Roman, Sassanian, and Arab political struggles. Ahab Bdaiwi threads the labyrinth of the earliest historical…
Published on 1 month, 3 weeks ago
Seventh-Century History for Students of Western Esotericism
We return to the history of late antiquity in the eastern Mediterranean and central Asia. Momentous events occur, empires rise and fall, and Jews, Christians, and Muslims all suddenly develop new apo…
Published on 4 months ago
Introducing the Qur’an Part III: Qur’ānic Texts vs. the Qur’ān
We discuss some of the history of how the Qur'ān came to be ‘the Book’: it started in the oral milieu of the high-octane early Believers' movement, and ended up in written form as something called th…
Published on 4 months, 1 week ago
Introducing the Qur’ān, Part II: Ambiguity and Esoteric Themes
We begin to explore the esoteric side of the Qur'ān, examining several case-studies in terms of ambiguity and esoteric themes. It turns out that every letter of the Qur'ān is an esoteric text.
Published on 4 months, 3 weeks ago
Introducing the Qur’ān, Part I: Revelation, Text, and History
We cover some basic territory in introducing the Qur'ān, the holiest text of Islām. We introduce the text, discuss the traditional story of the Qur'ān's revelation, the modern text-critical enterpris…
Published on 5 months, 4 weeks ago
Fred Donner on the History of Early Islām
We discuss what little we know and how much we don't know about the nature of the early ‘Believers' movement’, the nature and origins of the Qur'ān, the curious case of the so-called Constitution of …
Published on 7 months ago
Matthew Melvin-Koushki on Islam, ‘the West’, and Western Esotericism
We welcome Matthew Melvin-Koushki back to the show to discuss how we might improve our historical picture of western esotericism by including the vast majority of the surviving historical dossier of …
Published on 7 months, 3 weeks ago
Introducing Islām
With Episode 200 the SHWEP has reached a milestone of sorts. We are in the seventh century, and the world-order suddenly changes irrevocably as a new political force arises from Arabia: the Believers…
Published on 8 months, 1 week ago