Source
Religion News Association
About
The Religion News Association (RNA) is the professional association of journalists who cover religion, founded in 1949. Its Religion Stylebook is a free online reference written by religion-beat specialists, offering journalists definitions, capitalization rules, and pronunciation for terms across major faith traditions.
On the commons’ source spectrum this is an identity-journalism accuracy guide, not a progressive equity guide: its goal is precise, informed coverage of religious communities rather than advocacy framing. That makes it a cross-check on the equity guides. When an RNA entry and an advocacy guide agree on usage (as they do on anti-Semitism and on distinguishing Islam from Islamist), the agreement carries weight because the two kinds of source reach it from different starting points.
The commons archives the Judaism and Islam category entries specifically : they anchor the Faith & Religious Identity chapter and stand behind terms such as jew, islam, muslim, and nation-of-islam. The stylebook’s other categories (Christianity, Eastern religions, and general religion) are outside the commons’ current corpus scope.
Access
The stylebook is published openly at religionstylebook.com (the Judaism
category is linked above; the Islam entries live at the parallel
/entries/category/islam page) and was live as of the last check. Host
posture is private-mirror-link-out: the commons keeps a private
preservation copy of the two archived categories for citation verification
and links readers to RNA’s authoritative, continuously updated version.
Quotes are held within fair-use limits.
Works reviewed
Religion Stylebook (Judaism and Islam entries)
Available onlineVersion history
- 2026 editionCurrent canonical
Living online stylebook; the commons archived the Judaism and Islam category entries (≈158 unique headwords across the two categories) in June 2026.
Terms citing this source
- IslamUse
“Religion founded in seventh-century Mecca by the Prophet Muhammad, who said Allah (God), through the Angel Gabriel, revealed the Quran to him between 610 and 632, the year of his death. Followers of Islam are called Muslims …”
: "Islam" entry, Islam category
- JewUse
“Follower of the Jewish faith. Tradition holds that people are Jewish if their mothers are Jewish or if they have gone through a formal process of conversion, but some Jews argue for a more liberal definition. … Use Jew for men and women.”
: "Jew" entry, Judaism category
“Followers should be referred to as members of the Nation of Islam … Nation of Islam clergymen use the title minister, which should be capitalized on first reference before a name. On second reference, use only the person's last name.”
: "Nation of Islam" entry