The Bilal Papers

Editions

History & Anthropology Origins Five surveys of the human past, each taken at a greater remove in time — from the first farmers who broke the earth to the oldest question that can be asked of it. Reading backwards from settled history toward the origin of our kind, the edition weighs what the deep past reveals against what scripture holds, and marks where the two meet. It ends at the frontier between what we know and what we do not — and finds there not a quarrel between reason and revelation, but a concord. Collected edition · Five essays · 2026 Read the edition → Eschatology Reflections on Islamic Eschatology & the Divine Plan Why did God destroy the army of Abrahah to defend His House, yet permit the Qaramitah to wrench the Black Stone from its corner? Moving from the fracture of a single stone to the whole arc of the end of days — the Mahdi, the Dajjal, the descent of ʿIsa, and the gentle wind that takes the last believing soul — this essay traces the classical Sunni distinction between what God permits and what He loves. It finds, woven through a tradition that foretells decline, an architecture of mercy in which the believer who holds fast amid corruption may attain a rank the easier ages never offered. The Quarterly Review · 2026 Read the essay → Philosophy Not in Vain The young man who rejects a cruel God, this essay argues, is often refusing the right thing for the right reason — for the deity he has renounced was never the God of classical Islam. Beginning not with dogma but with an invitation to reason, it follows the Qurʾan's own argument from the contingency of the world to a Necessary Being, and from there to a God whose mercy is prior to His wrath. It meets the hardest question honestly — why a just God permits suffering — and answers that a world made for trial is not made in vain, and that its accounts are settled in full beyond it. The Quarterly Review · 2026 Read the essay →