* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
Download Islam reflected as a major religion of the world
The Jewel of Medina wikipedia , lookup
LGBT in Islam wikipedia , lookup
Political aspects of Islam wikipedia , lookup
International reactions to Fitna wikipedia , lookup
Satanic Verses wikipedia , lookup
Criticism of Twelver Shia Islam wikipedia , lookup
Muhammad and the Bible wikipedia , lookup
Sources of sharia wikipedia , lookup
Islam and secularism wikipedia , lookup
Criticism of Islamism wikipedia , lookup
Islam in Afghanistan wikipedia , lookup
Islam in Somalia wikipedia , lookup
Islamic–Jewish relations wikipedia , lookup
Islam and modernity wikipedia , lookup
Islam and violence wikipedia , lookup
Soviet Orientalist studies in Islam wikipedia , lookup
Historicity of Muhammad wikipedia , lookup
Islam and war wikipedia , lookup
Islamic missionary activity wikipedia , lookup
Islam in Indonesia wikipedia , lookup
Islam and Sikhism wikipedia , lookup
Islam and Mormonism wikipedia , lookup
War against Islam wikipedia , lookup
Hindu–Islamic relations wikipedia , lookup
Islamic culture wikipedia , lookup
Origin of Shia Islam wikipedia , lookup
Schools of Islamic theology wikipedia , lookup
Yoel Lopez 1 Islam reflected as a major religion of the world The youngest of the world’s major religions is known to be the Islam and it is also one of the largest of the world with more than one billion adherents. Islam is the dominant religion in many of the developing nations in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Because of these factors, Islam is one of the most interesting and important religions of the world. Islam began among the Arabian Desert people in the seventh century. The people of this area had developed religious forms of their own and had been exposed to various other religions for centuries. Although the influence was not strong, Byzantine Christianity had been a factor in the lives of the people. There were many cities involved with Christianity close to Arabia such as, Judea, Damascus, Caesarea, Antioch; where the Christian princes ruled, and many of the early church fathers wrote and taught there. The people of Arabia were also familiar with Judaism. Several of the desert tribes were Jewish were Jewish. There are also traces of another religion that may have influenced the formulation of Islam, “Zoroastrianism”. It is said that this religion is the oldest religion of the revealed world religions and it provably have had more influence in humankind than any other. Since Islam is one of the youngest of the world’s religions, the details of the life of its founder are more readily available than are those of other founders. Muhammad was born into the trading society of Mecca in 570. He was a part of one of the dominant tribes, the Qu'raish. Not much is known about this man during the first forty years of his life other than the fact that he married a rich widow and later they had a daughter, Fatima, Yoel Lopez 2 who became the wife of the great warrior, Ali. However, around 610, Muhammad claimed that after meditating in the desert God had revealed many messages to him concerning life. These revelations came from the angel Gabriel, who Muhammad claimed God had used to call him to publish his religion. After these experiences in the desert, Muhammad claimed to be a prophet of God with the great desire to guide others by God's message. So, he began to preach to those around him in 617. The people of Mecca at this time were involved in a religion called Ka'aba meaning "black stone," in which they literally worshipped a black stone. Those following this religion believed that many objects, other than the black stone, possessed spirits and power. Therefore, Muhammad's message asserting the lordship of Allah was not well received at first. The people called him a sorcerer and false prophet and claimed that he was possessed. Later in 622 Muhammad was forced to flee Mecca, he had been condemned by Meccan authorities who held to Ka'aba. Muhammad found refuge in the rival city of Medina where he was accepted and gathered a fairly large following. Even in Mecca he had some followers and people all over were accepting his message, but, from Medina, he issued a holy war against Mecca. After eight years, Muhammad captured Mecca and became the ruler. He implemented the divine orders he believed he was called to carry out and retained the pilgrimage to Mecca as part of his religious restoration. The Qur’an or the scriptures of Islam indicates the basic believes that Muslim holds. It is also said that The Qur'an is a Message from Allah to humanity. It was transmitted to us in a chain starting from the Almighty Himself to the angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad (saas). This message was given to the Prophet (saas) in pieces over a period spanning approximately 23 years, he was 40 years old when the Qur'an began to Yoel Lopez 3 be revealed to him, and he was 63 when the revelation was completed. The first things the Muslims hear in the mornings are selections of the Qur’an. Verses from it are inscribed on the walls of the Muslim homes for decoration; its words are often the last a person hears before death. Among Muslims it is considered a supreme act of piety to commit the entire Qur’an to memory any person that achieves this is given an honorific title “Hafiz”. Since the Qur’an is the word of God, its messages are authority for all Muslims on God, how God expects people to live, and the eternal destiny of humankind. Allah is revealed as the sovereign God over the entire universe. In the Qur’an it is revealed that humans are the creation of Allah and must be obedient to him. Righteous person who would win the favors of God must submit to his will. Because of this emphasis on God’s power and sovereignty, the words fatalism and predestination has been used to describe Islam. Whether one does good or evil, enjoys success or suffers failure it is ultimately entirely in the hands of God who rules the world and who has planed each event in advance. When the idea is carried to this extreme, people do not possess freedom of choice, therefore they are not responsible for their acts. It is also known that Islam is not a temple oriented religion. Although certain places are venerated by Muslims, it would not have suited the nomadic life of the Arab people to require them to worship in any sort of temple. However, Muhammad decreed that Muslims were required to pray together at a mosque on Friday. There an imam leads in prayer; the imam is not a priest but a pious man. The scripture of Islam is the Quran (reading) which is made up of 114 surahs (chapters) arranged according to the length of the surah. The Quran is the Word of God; it is eternal, absolute, and irrevocable. Muhammad acted only as a stenographer for Allah. Probably no scripture has influenced Yoel Lopez 4 its people more than the Quran. It is dutifully read by Muslims and memorized in its entirety by many. The Quran has twenty-five references to Jesus Christ and represents Jesus as predicting the coming of the founder of Islam. It is also known that the position of in pre-Islamic Arabia was very low. Apparently, Islam women were considered property, owed by her father, husband, or elder brother. If she displeased her husband, he could divorce her without any recourse on her part. Also the practice of murdering babies was forbidden by Islam. Whereas Muhammad allowed polygamy to continue and marry to many women himself, limited the number of wives a Muslim could have to four, provided a man could afford them and treat them equally. It is clear that in Islam as in many other religions the women are expected to be submissive to their fathers, husbands and brothers. One of the most controversial aspects of Islam is Jihad, in the Qur'an, however, and even in later Muslim usage, the term jihad is usually followed by the expression fi sabil Illah, which means "in the path of God." The description of violence against the enemies of the Muslim community as jihad if sabil Illah gave a sacred meaning to what was otherwise just tribal warfare. Historically Muslin nations waged war to spread Muslim rule, as well as the most clearly political and economic reasons. Muslim scholars teach that only defensive wars are truly “Jihad”. Muslim leaders have, however, often used the concept of “holy war” to justify their actions, usually with mixed results. Because Muslim war against the Christians crusades war to defend Islam, it was rightly called “Jihad”. Islam spread and developed at exactly the right time is history for expansion. It came at a time when the Arab people were ready for unifying force; when the Byzantine Yoel Lopez 5 Empire in the Middle East was on the verge of collapse from internal corruption and misrule; and when the Persian Empire was vulnerable. Within a century of the death of the prophet, the religion of Islam has become the unifying force of Arabs. Muslim armies conquered Palestine, Syria, Persia, and Egypt and swept across North Africa to Spain. In the centuries that fallowed, Islam spread throughout the Middle East and moved into India, China and south East Asia. There were several reasons for this massive rapid expansion. Islam is a universal religion; is a religion with wide appeal and the world that surrounded the Muslin at that time was corrupt and confused. Islam is not highly structure as Roman Catholic Christianity is, one reason is that Islam can be practiced privately, and that most duties of a Muslim God can be done at home, without a priest. Another reason for this lack of structure is that Muhammad never clearly left a successor or a plan for the succession of his leadership. The hint of succession that the prophet made was to appoint at his friend abu-Bakr should be the caliph-“deputy” or “representative”, who could rule the Muslims in temporal matters. The caliphate is the one and central unifying office in the history of Islam, they were friends to the prophets and acted as pious leaders of the faithful. History has noted that after the tenth century, however the golden age of Muslim civilization began to decline and the caliphate began to lose its power. It is also notated in history that there have been periodic attempts to restore the Caliphate. Some Islamist organizations consider it to be only legitimate form of government in Muslim societies. Eighty-five percent of Muslims are Sunnis or Traditionalists. Sunni Muslims think of themselves as the guardians of Islamic orthodoxy and tradition. They base their practice of Islam on the Qur’an and traditions, known as hadith, concerning the words Yoel Lopez 6 and acts of the prophet Muhammad and his close companions, as well as analogy and the consensus. As Islam grew and adopted the character of many nations into which it spread, schools of interpretation arose that varied in the amount of weight they gave to the Qur’an, the hadith, and human reason in interpreting the life of Islam. It is recorded that there are four of these schools of thought, and every Sunni Muslim is a member of one of then. The basic body of the Islam religion is represented by the Shi’ites. It began as a political dispute over the leadership of Islam but it is said that later took on theological overtones. Because Muhammad left no clear message on who was to succeed him, he was followed by three of his closed associates. Muslims believe that Muhammad had actually named Ali, his cousin and son-in-law as his successors. Ali was finally named caliph in 656, but gradually lost control of the Muslim world. He was murdered in 661, and the Umayyad dynasty took the caliphate. Ali Youngest son, Husayn challenged the caliphate but was defeated in the battle of Karbala in Iraq. Husayn and most of his family were killed in the battle, therefore they are considered as martyrs by the Shi’ites. The shi’ites believe that while revolution ended with Muhammad and the Qur’an in later generations, there were divinely inspired figures called “imams”, and for them an “imam” speaks with the authority of God. They also believe that with the disastrous events of 680, the next imam was another son of Ali-Zain. They have also traditionally believed in the existence of Mahdi, a messiah figure who will one day appear on earth and lead the world into an era of Justice. In addition the Shi’ites doesn’t trust on the Qur’an, because in the current version of it is not mentioned that Ali is Muhammad successor, and it must have been tempered with by his enemies. Yoel Lopez 7 In the following years the glories of the caliphate of Bagdad, Islam settled down to a relatively routine existence. There still were the battles with the Christian crusades over the Holly sites in Palestine in the twelve or thirteen centuries, which produced one of the most outstanding leaders of all times, Saladin. When the European countries were moving out of the medieval twilight into industrial age, many Islamic nations chose to continue living in pre-industrialize societies. One of the strongest reasons the Islamic had to choose to stay in such conditions was obvious that the conservative nature of the religion played a significant aspect. Another important and nevertheless outstanding reason for the lack of change in the Muslim world may have been their sense of self satisfaction relative to European Countries. It is clear that the Muslim world as one of the youngest major religions of the world, have followed their believes without major changes, which enables them to maintain a perfect equilibrium when teaching the prophet’s words and thoughts. They have also chosen not to open their nation to major changes since they are settled in their believes there is nothing in this world that would attract them more than the messages from their God Ala. It is very important and nourishing to be able to acquire this knowledge as this religion keeps growing and more of its practitioners are slowly but surely arriving to our nation to cohabit with the western neighbor. Yoel Lopez 8 Sources: 1. Text Book, Religion of the World Ninth Edition by Lewis M. Hopfe & Mark R. Woodward. Websites : 2. http://www.thenagain.info/WebChron/Islam/MohammadLife.html 3. http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/ 4. http://www.indialife.com/Religions/islam1.htm