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The core mystical moment of Islam took place in the year 610, or “half the world and almost half of history away,” as Lesley Hazleton, biographer of Muhammad, puts it. On a hot desert night, this previously ordinary man received the first revelation of the Koran on a mountain outside Mecca.

Lesley Hazleton: The doubt essential to faith “What struck me even more than what happened was not what did not happen,” says Hazleton in today’s talk, given at TEDGlobal 2013. “Muhammad did not come floating off the mountain as though walking on air. He did not run down shouting, ‘Hallelujah. Bless the lord.’ He did not radiate light and joy. There were no choirs of angels, no elation, no ecstasy, no golden aura surrounding him. No sense of an absolute foreordained role as the messenger of God. That is, he did none of the things that might make it easy to cry foul and put down the whole story as a pious fable.”

No, according to Muhammad’s writings, he was convinced that the moment had to have been a hallucination, or the result of possession. He felt a deep sense of fear and even contemplated ending his life, says Hazleton: “He was overwhelmed not by conviction, but by doubt.”

While Hazleton points out that some Islamic theologians reject these accounts of Muhammad’s doubt, she says that it’s exactly this whirlwind of emotions that brought him alive for her. “It allowed me to begin to see him in full,” says Hazleton, whose biography of him, The First Muslim, was published in January 2013 after five years of research. “The more I thought about it, the more it made sense that he doubted,” she continues. “Because doubt is essential to faith.”

To hear what Hazleton means by this bold statement — and its implications for fundamentalists of all religions — watch this blistering talk, which points out that true faith takes deep internal wrestling. It’s a call for all religions to take back the public ground from hardliners who offer pat answers and dogma in place of an individual struggle with hard questions.

In honor of Hazleton’s powerful talk, below, watch six more talks from TED stages that give surprising, subtle understandings of Islam.

This post was originally published as a collection of six talks in December of 2012. It was updated to include Hazleton’s latest talk in June of 2013.