University of Southern California

Religious Texts

The Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement has compiled these searchable Jewish and Islamic religious texts to assist religious and lay leaders as they create sermons and curricula around Jewish-Muslim themes, to facilitate scholarship on Islam and Judaism by academics and students alike, and to allow quick and easy viewing of various issues from the perspectives of the sacred texts of each faith. Each religious text will be provided with a range of acceptable translations in order to facilitate scholarly study, debate, and religious text study on a variety of topics. We will continue to work on this compendium in order to provide an excellent and user-friendly resource for scholarship and general educational purposes.

Islamic Text

The hadith used in the compendium were compiled by the Muslim Students Association at the University of Southern California. The Compendium of Muslim Texts (now available at www.msawest.net/islam) has been one of the most frequently cited sources of hadith and is the most complete compilation of hadith available to the public.

Methodologies for the study of hadith have been developed over centuries by Islamic scholars and jurists and are commonly referred to as the science of hadith study. Verification of hadith as reliable, and the use of hadith to verify or disavow Islamic practice, is left to Ulama, or Islamic scholars, with a deep understanding of Islamic jurisprudence and history. Articles on the science of hadith study, the history of the creation of the Compendium of Muslim texts, and other topics including approaches to the interpretation of difficult texts, viewing scripture as historical as well as religious documents, and other topics, are forthcoming.

Muslim Texts

Other Resources

Jewish Text

The TaNaKh is the Hebrew acronym which refers to the Jewish Bible. The Jewish Bible consists of three parts: Torah (sometimes called the Five Books of Moses), Nevi’im (the books of the Prophets), and Ketuvim (or "Writings"). Various translations of the TaNaKh are provided for comparison. Just as there are a variety of ways to translate the Tanakh, so are there a variety of approaches or methodologies to read and study it. Some Jews believe the text of the Torah, for instance, is a fully divine document, handed down from God on Mount Sinai. Others believe that the text was inspired by God but written over time by a single or even multiple authors. The Talmud and Midrash found in the compendium are post-biblical literatures that function as "tradition literature" in Judaism. They reflect the ideas, beliefs and traditions handed down by the sages or rabbinic scholars. A number of approaches to their study have been developed over the centuries, and they have been applied to these as well as biblical texts to arrive at varieties of Jewish religious and moral-ethical practice. In addition to expanding our library of rabbinic texts, we will be providing articles that will describe how these religious texts are read and analyzed by traditional and modern scholars.