Religion & Belief: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 2

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StillnessArt

Khachkars are Armenian memorial stones: upright slabs carved with a cross in the centre, framed by interlacing plants, geometric knots and sometimes figures. Each one is carved individually, so no two are alike.

The name joins the Armenian words khach, 'cross', and kar, 'stone'. Khachkars appear from the ninth century, and about 40,000 survive across Armenia and historic Armenian lands. They were raised to remember the dead, to mark a victory or the building of a church or bridge, or to ask for protection and salvation. Carvers work local stone, often tuff, a soft volcanic rock, or basalt, with chisels and fine points, and many set the cross above a rosette or sun disc. Some of the finest were carved around 1300 by masters such as Momik. The skills still pass from master to apprentice, and UNESCO listed khachkar art and craftsmanship as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2010.

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StillnessReligion & Belief

The Camino de Santiago, the network of pilgrim routes to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain, now draws hundreds of thousands of registered walkers a year. In October 2025 the city's Pilgrim Office issued that year's 500,000th Compostela, the certificate for completing the route.

Pilgrims have walked to Santiago since the Middle Ages, drawn by the tradition that the apostle James is buried in the cathedral. To earn a Compostela, walkers must cover at least the last 100 kilometres, or 200 by bicycle or on horseback, and collect stamps along the way. The modern revival has been dramatic: in 1985 only 690 people received the certificate; in 2024, 499,239 did. The Camino became the Council of Europe's first Cultural Route in 1987; the French Way became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993, and the northern routes were added in 2015. Guidebooks, waymarks and films such as 'The Way' (2010) spread the word. Today's walkers come for faith, culture, sport or simply time to think.

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WonderHistory

Ise Grand Shrine, the holiest site of Shinto, Japan's native religion, takes down its main sanctuaries every 20 years and rebuilds them exactly on the plot next door. The custom began in 690 and, despite some long interruptions, continues today; the next rebuilding is due in 2033.

The rebuilding is called Shikinen Sengū. Along with the buildings, the shrine's furnishings and sacred objects are made anew, and the wooden Uji Bridge at the entrance is rebuilt too. The timber is hinoki, a Japanese cypress. Power tools are not allowed within the shrine grounds, so the work falls to miyadaiku, carpenters trained in traditional shrine building; less experienced carpenters usually learn on the bridge before they work on the sanctuaries. Shinto calls the idea tokowaka, 'ever young': renewing a sacred building keeps it fresh and passes the skills from one generation to the next. The present buildings, from 2013, are the 62nd set. Wars have delayed the cycle more than once, most notably for over a century during Japan's civil wars of the 15th and 16th centuries.

Ise Shikinen SenguRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

To study the Buddha way is to study oneself. To study oneself is to forget oneself.

Dōgen, the thirteenth-century monk who brought Sōtō Zen from China to Japan, sailed to China in 1223 with a question that, according to traditional accounts, no teacher at home could answer: if we are enlightened by nature, why practise at all? He came back with an answer that refuses the split: sitting meditation is not the road to enlightenment; it is enlightenment itself. 'Forgetting the self' is not erasure. It is what happens when you stop measuring every experience against yourself, which is only possible after you have looked at yourself very carefully. The lines appear in his essay 'Genjōkōan' (1233), later part of his major work, the Shōbōgenzō.

Dōgen, 'Genjōkōan', Shōbōgenzō (1233)Read card

StillnessReligion & Belief

When Alamut surrendered to the Mongols in 1256, the Persian historian Ata-Malik Juvayni was allowed to inspect its famous library. By his own account, he saved a selection of books and scientific instruments and burned the Ismaili works he considered heretical.

Ata-Malik Juvayni (1226–1283) was a Persian official in Mongol service who later governed Baghdad for them from 1259 until his death. He travelled with Hülegü, a grandson of Genghis Khan, on the campaign against the Nizari Ismailis, a branch of Shia Islam, and described it in his History of the World Conqueror (Tarikh-i Jahangushay). That makes him both an eyewitness and a hostile one: his choices about what to keep and what to burn limit what historians can know of Nizari learning. Some Nizari writings survived anyway, including works that Nasir al-Din al-Tusi wrote during his years with them.

Ata-Malik JuvayniRead card

WonderReligion & Belief

The English word 'assassin' comes from hashishi, a medieval Arabic insult for the Nizari Ismailis, a Shia Muslim group known for killing political enemies. No surviving source shows that their agents actually took hashish before their missions.

Hashishi literally meant 'hashish user', but as an insult it meant something closer to 'riff-raff'. Its earliest known use is in a polemic issued around 1122 by the Fatimid caliph al-Amir in Cairo, whose own Ismaili branch had split from the Nizaris; Sunni writers used similar terms. Crusaders in Syria picked the word up, and by the fourteenth century Italian assassino meant a hired killer. In 1809 the French scholar Silvestre de Sacy traced the word to hashish and assumed the drug had been used, which helped fix the story in popular belief.

EtymologyRead card

WonderReligion & Belief

Marco Polo spread the story that the Nizari Ismailis, a Shia Muslim group famous for political killings, drugged young recruits and woke them in a lavish garden they took for paradise. No Muslim source of the time supports it, and Polo passed through Persia years after their stronghold of Alamut had fallen.

The legend grew in Crusader Syria, where Europeans called the local Nizari leader Rashid al-Din Sinan (died 1193) the 'Old Man of the Mountain' and told of followers who would die at his command. Marco Polo, travelling through Persia in the early 1270s, set the story there and gave it its most famous form, with a hidden garden, a drug and a staged awakening. Neither the Nizaris' own writings nor the Muslim authors hostile to them describe anything like it. The tale says a great deal about how medieval Europe imagined the Nizaris, and very little about Alamut.

Marco PoloRead card

WonderReligion & Belief

Yunus Emre, an Anatolian poet of Sufism, Islam's mystical tradition, lived in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. He wrote about divine love, humility and death in the plain Turkish of ordinary people, when learned poets in Anatolia mostly wrote in Persian. Many of his poems became hymns still sung today.

Almost everything known about his life comes from legend: he is said to have served the dervish Tapduk Emre for many years before becoming a poet. His dates are usually given as about 1238 to 1320, and his only dated work, a long poem of moral advice called Risaletü'n-Nushiyye, was finished in 1307. Most of his poems use the syllable-counting metre of Turkish folk song, which made them easy to sing; a few use aruz, the Arabic and Persian metre of long and short syllables. Seven places claim his tomb. UNESCO marked the 750th anniversary of his birth by declaring 1991 International Yunus Emre Year.

Yunus EmreRead card

WonderReligion & Belief

Bernini hid a window above his Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in Rome. Daylight falls through it onto gilded rays behind the marble figures.

The sculpture stands in the Cornaro Chapel of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, finished in 1652; Bernini's marble angel stands over Teresa, holding a gilded arrow. Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) was a Spanish nun and mystic who reformed the Carmelite order. In her autobiography she described a vision in which an angel drove a golden spear into her heart, leaving a pain she called both intense and sweet. She was declared a saint in 1622, and in 1970 became the first woman named a Doctor of the Church, a title the Catholic Church gives to saints whose writings it especially values. The Venetian cardinal Federico Cornaro commissioned the chapel as his family's burial chapel. Bernini combined sculpture, coloured marble, a painted ceiling and hidden light to stage a single moment for anyone who walks in, and reportedly called it the least bad thing he ever made.

Gian Lorenzo BerniniRead card

WonderPhilosophy

The Muslim scholar al-Ghazali (c. 1058–1111) described in Deliverance from Error how he lost trust in both his senses and his reasoning. A shadow looks still, yet it moves; might reason, too, have limits it cannot see? Certainty returned, he wrote, only through a light that God cast into his heart.

Al-Ghazali was a theologian, jurist and Sufi mystic from Tus, in Persia. In 1095, while a celebrated professor at the Nizamiyya college in Baghdad, he went through the crisis he later described: he could barely speak, could not teach, and left his post to spend years travelling as a Sufi, a follower of Islam's mystical path. Deliverance from Error, written in his last years, tells that story. He is also known for The Incoherence of the Philosophers, which argued that thinkers such as Ibn Sina could not prove some of their key claims, including that the world has always existed. About seventy years after his death, Ibn Rushd answered it in The Incoherence of the Incoherence.

Al-GhazaliRead card

WonderPhilosophy

Ibn Rushd, a 12th-century philosopher and judge in Muslim Spain, argued in The Decisive Treatise that Islamic law did not merely allow philosophy: for those able to reason rigorously, it could make it a duty. Truth cannot contradict truth, he held, so where proof and the literal words of scripture clash, the passage must be interpreted.

Ibn Rushd (1126–1198), known in medieval Europe as Averroes, served as a judge in Seville and Córdoba and later as court physician to the Almohad rulers of Muslim Spain and North Africa. His detailed commentaries on Aristotle were translated into Latin and Hebrew, and Christian and Jewish scholars called him simply 'the Commentator'; Thomas Aquinas argued with his views directly. In The Incoherence of the Incoherence he replied point by point to al-Ghazali, who had attacked the philosophers nearly a century earlier. The Decisive Treatise makes the case in a shorter form, as a legal opinion: it asks, as a judge would, whether the law forbids, allows or requires the study of philosophy.

Ibn Rushd (Averroes)Read card

StillnessPhilosophy

The Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna, who lived in India around the 2nd century AD, taught that everything is 'empty': not that nothing exists, but that nothing exists entirely on its own. Things arise from causes, conditions and relationships, so none has a fixed nature independent of everything else.

Nāgārjuna is regarded as the founder of the Madhyamaka, or 'Middle Way', school of Buddhism, which he set out in his Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way. The Sanskrit word for emptiness is śūnyatā. He tied it to dependent origination, the Buddhist teaching that everything comes into being through other things. His middle way avoids two extremes: believing that things have permanent essences, and believing that nothing exists at all. A table is real, but only as wood, a maker and a use coming together.

Nāgārjuna / MadhyamakaRead card

WonderReligion & Belief

Cārvāka, also called Lokāyata, was an ancient Indian school of materialism: it trusted only what the senses show and rejected the authority of the Vedas, the oldest Hindu scriptures, along with rebirth and life after death. Almost none of its own writings survive, so we know it mainly from rivals who wrote to refute it.

Materialism here means the view that only the physical world exists: a person is the body, and death is the end. Tradition names a legendary teacher, Brihaspati, as the school's founder, but the sayings attributed to him survive only as fragments quoted by others. Cārvāka thinkers held that perception is the only reliable source of knowledge, so neither reasoning nor scripture could prove gods or karma, the idea that deeds bring reward or punishment in later lives. Critics summed the school up as advice to enjoy this life rather than give up pleasures for a promised next one. The fullest account is the first chapter of the Sarva-darshana-samgraha, a 14th-century survey of Indian philosophies by the Vedanta scholar Madhava, written to rank rival schools below his own, so how fair the picture is remains hard to judge.

Charvaka (Lokayata) schoolRead card

WonderPhilosophy

Neti neti, Sanskrit for 'not this, not this', comes from the Upanishads, ancient Hindu philosophical texts. It says that Brahman, the ultimate reality in this tradition, fits no description: whatever name you give it, it is more than that. The 8th-century philosopher Śaṅkara made it central to his Advaita, or 'non-dual', teaching.

The phrase appears in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, one of the oldest Upanishads, in teachings given by the sage Yajnavalkya. Śaṅkara, often called Adi Shankara, used it as a method: since Brahman has no parts, qualities or edges the way ordinary things do, every positive description falls short, and setting each one aside brings the seeker closer. For Śaṅkara, Brahman was also the same as atman, a person's innermost self, so the method answered 'what am I?' as much as 'what is ultimate reality?'. Many religious traditions have used a similar approach, known in Christian and Jewish thought as negative theology: describing the divine only by what it is not.

Upanishads / Adi ShankaraRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

The Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza wrote 'God, or Nature' in his Ethics, published in 1677, soon after his death. He argued for one infinite reality that contains everything that exists. On this view, God is not a separate being outside nature, choosing how to direct it. The word 'God' stays, but its meaning changes.

Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632 into a Portuguese Jewish family and was expelled from the city's Jewish community in 1656 for views its leaders judged heretical. He earned part of his living grinding lenses. He held back the Ethics for fear of the reaction, and friends published it after his death. It is set out like a geometry book, with definitions, axioms and proofs, and argues that everything follows from the nature of God, or Nature, as necessarily as a theorem follows from its axioms. Many contemporaries read this as atheism in disguise, since it leaves no room for a God who chooses or intervenes; Spinoza saw it as the most consistent way to think about the divine.

Baruch SpinozaRead card

WonderReligion & Belief

The philosopher Gottfried Leibniz argued that a perfectly good God must have made the best of all possible worlds, suffering included. Voltaire's Candide (1759) tests this optimism against war, an earthquake and ruin, as the tutor Pangloss keeps insisting all is for the best. The satire asks what such comfort is worth to those who suffer.

Leibniz set out the argument in his Theodicy of 1710. The word, which he coined, means a defence of God's justice in the face of evil. He reasoned that an all-knowing, all-good God must have compared every possible world and created the best one, even though it still contains some suffering. After the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 killed tens of thousands, Voltaire attacked the idea, first in a poem and then in Candide. Pangloss, the tutor who repeats Leibniz's optimism after every catastrophe, gave English the word 'Panglossian', for someone who insists all is well whatever the evidence.

Gottfried Leibniz / VoltaireRead card

WonderHistory

Tradition says Fatima al-Fihri spent a large inheritance on the mosque of al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, begun on the first day of Ramadan in 859. She is said to have used only earth, stone and sand from its own plot, so nothing of doubtful origin went into the walls, and to have fasted until it was finished. The story comes from a chronicle of about 1326.

The account comes from Rawd al-Qirtas, a history of Morocco by Ibn Abi Zar', written around 1326, some 470 years after the events, so historians treat its details with caution. It says Fatima also had a well dug on the plot. Al-Qarawiyyin is named after its quarter, settled by families from Kairouan in today's Tunisia, Fatima's among them. The chronicle adds that her sister Maryam built the Andalusians' mosque across the river. Anyone who came could sit in on the scholars' lessons, and shops used to close at a set hour so people could listen. A royal decree in 1963 reorganised the centuries-old mosque school as a modern university.

Foundation tradition as told in Ibn Abi Zar‘, Rawd al-Qirtas (c. 1326; French tr. A. Beaumier, 1860); TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, “Karaviyyîn Camii”; Al-Qarawiyyin University official history (uaq.ma)Read card

StillnessReligion & Belief

The patient dervish reached what he wished for.

“Sabreden derviş muradına ermiş” is one of the best-known Turkish proverbs. A dervish is a member of a Sufi order, Sufism being the mystical tradition of Islam; the Mevlevi order, famous for its whirling ceremony, is one example. Dervishes were known for patience and simple living, so here the dervish stands for anyone who can wait calmly. The Arabic saying “patience is the key to relief” carries the same idea, as does the English “everything comes to those who wait”.

Traditional Turkish sayingRead card