wfn.org | Islam - An Introduction

[PCUSA NEWS <PCUSA.NEWS@ecunet.org>]

Note #6853 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

19-September-2001
01335

Islam - An Introduction

by The Rev. Terry Muck
for Religion News Service

(Editor's Note: The following is excerpted from a yet-to-be-published
manuscript, The Pocket Guide to America's Religions. Terry Muck, a
Presbyterian minister, teaches at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.)

Islam is one of the fastest-growing religions in the world in the past 50
years, with a growth so pronounced that there are more Muslims in the United
States than there are Episcopalians or Presbyterians.

One of the three monotheistic religions with roots in the Middle East, like
Judaism and Christianity, Islam traces its history to worship of the one God
(Allah) instituted by Abraham in the second millennium B.C.

Muslims claim for this common history the traditional prophets and leaders
of Jewish and Christian history such as Adam, Noah,  Moses, Abraham and
Jesus, but believe that this line of genuine prophets ends with Muhammad, a
man born in Mecca, in present-day Saudi Arabia, in 570 A.D.

Muhammad is called the "seal of the prophets," the one to whom Allah
revealed that last and most authoritative of his revelations, the Koran, the
Muslim holy book.

Muhammad began to receive the revelations that eventually made up the
chapters of the Koran while wandering in the rocky hills outside Mecca. A
voice from the heavens, the angel Gabriel, gave Muhammad the revelation,
commanding him to learn and recite the message to others. After receiving
each of these audible revelations, a process that lasted many years,
Muhammad would then return to the streets of Mecca and preach them to his
compatriots.

His standard sermon had three points: the uniqueness of Allah; the need to
care for the poor, orphaned, and widowed; and the inevitability of a final
judgment. Each of these three points, however, seemed to alienate segments
of the Meccan populace.

By stressing the uniqueness of Allah, Muhammad threatened the various tribal
and clan gods, a threat that had not only religious but economic overtones
in a city that had become something of a religious pilgrimage site for
followers of the many tribal gods. By advocating the need to care for the
poor, Muhammad was calling for social welfare at a time when the trading
fortunes of Mecca had taken a downturn and money was tight. By predicting a
judgment at the end of time, Muhammad alienated whomever he had not
alienated with the first two points - no one likes to be told their current
lifestyle could lead them to the fires of hell.

After several years of reciting these revelations and interpreting them for
the citizens of Mecca, Muhammad had only a handful of followers and was in
danger of losing his life.

At this crisis point, a delegation from Medina, a town 200 miles northeast
of Mecca, came to town looking for a leader. Medina was a town divided by
rivalry between a fairly large Jewish population and an indigenous
population that held to the belief in tribal gods.

Muhammad's message proved to be a bridge between the two. Muhammad saw
himself as a legitimate prophet in the Jewish-Christian tradition; yet the
name he gave to the God of Abraham and Jesus, Allah, was the name of an Arab
tribal god. As unpopular as Muhammad's message was in Mecca, it was popular
in Medina.

After building a secure base there, Muhammad began to incorporate the
surrounding areas into his fiefdom, eventually incorporating all of Western
Arabia, including Mecca. Many have seen Muhammad's political skills as
important as his religious message.

Muhammad's message has often been summarized as five basic duties, sometimes
called the Five Pillars:

1.	The Creed (Shahada);
2.	Prayer (Salat);
3.	Alms giving (Zakat);
4.	Fasting (Sawm);
5.	Pilgrimage (Hajj).

The Creed: The basic requirement for calling oneself Muslim is to be able to
say the creed with conviction of its truth: "There is no god but Allah, and
Muhammad is his messenger."

Prayer: An observant Muslim prays a standardized set of prayers five times a
day: at dawn, noon, midafternoon, dusk and evening. The prayers are said
either alone or in community. Friday noon is the traditional time for a
communal service at the mosque, the Muslim building of worship, facing
Mecca, with accompanying physical postures and movements. The prayer content
is almost exclusively praise of Allah taken from various chapters of the
Koran.

Alms-giving: Required alms-giving, Zakat, is a once per year "loan" to Allah
of an amount of money based on one's net worth. However, Muslims are also
encouraged to give regularly throughout the year to the mosque for the
support of the poor in the community.

Fasting: During the lunar month of Ramadan, observant Muslims practice a
daylight fast: no food, drink, smoking, nor sexual activity. In the evening
and predawn, the fast may be broken.

Pilgrimage: Once during every Muslim's life, if he or she is physically and
financially able, pilgrimage during the official three days of the Great
Hajj should be made to Mecca's holy sites.

The Five Pillars are the basic practices of Islam, and most of the
theological thinking of Islam is readily apparent in the practices: the
oneness of Allah, the praiseworthiness of Allah, the importance of the
Prophet Muhammad, and the requirements of membership in both the local and
the larger Islamic community.

Other key theological tenets include a belief in spiritual beings (both
angels and more ambiguous spiritual beings called jinn), the centrality of
the Koran and the importance of its purity in the Arabic language, a literal
belief in heaven and hell, and the importance of establishing sharia law in
order to unite the secular and religious communities.

Sharia, or the "Islamic Way," is the legal code of Islam and is derived from
the teachings of the Koran and other Islamic religious texts.

This last tenet - the importance of sharia law - has shaped much of the
interaction of modern Islam with the non-Islamic world. Muhammad himself set
the tone for this debate in that he was as much a political leader as he was
a spiritual leader. By incarnating both roles in his singular leadership
style, Muhammad managed to unite, or set the stage for his immediate
followers to unite, much of one of the most politically fractious
geographies on earth, the Middle East.

In the early days of Islam, from the 8th to the 19th centuries, this has
taken the form of a number of waxing and waning dynasties. With the coming
of the colonial powers -- Britain, France, and the United States - and the
peace accords after World War I, this dynastic structure gave way to the
nation-states of the 20th century.

The Orthodox Islamic Sects - Sunni and Shiite

Although Muhammad was a marvelously skilled political leader, he died
without naming either a successor or establishing a process by which his
successor should be named.

As a result, two opinions developed among his followers regarding who should
lead this increasingly powerful religious community. Some thought the leader
should come from Muhammad's family. Others thought that the leader should be
elected through a process of consultation and consensus.

The second opinion carried the day, perhaps in part because Muhammad had no
sons survive him, and the only viable candidate from his family was a
son-in-law, Ali, husband of one of Muhammad's daughters, Fatima.

The three leaders that directly followed Muhammad, then, were called
successors or caliphs: Abu Bakr (632-634), Umar (634-644), and Uthman
(644-656). The party advocating that leadership come from Muhammad's family
finally succeeded in getting their candidate appointed in 656 when Uthman
was assassinated and Ali was named head of the Islamic community.

Controversy continued, however. Ali was considered the fourth caliph by
those advocating that process of choosing a leader, but was considered the
only rightful heir of leadership, an imam, by those who considered the first
three caliphs usurpers. The controversy raged and eventually led to Ali and
his son, Husayn, being assassinated.

The importance of this controversy for understanding modern-day Islam cannot
be overestimated. It represents both the historical and ongoing division
between the two largest Muslim sects, the Sunni and the Shiite. Sunni
Muslims, by far the largest of the Muslim groups accounting for
approximately 95 percent of worldwide Muslims, were the champions of the
caliphate system. Although the caliphate per se no longer exists, the
caliphate principle of choosing leaders through consultation and consensus
was adapted to the dynastic structures that ruled Islam through the Ottoman
Empire in the 19th century.

Shiite Muslims, accounting for perhaps 3 percent of the worldwide Muslim
community, still advocate the imanate, the descendants of Muhammad as the
rightful heirs of the leadership mantle.

The important point to remember is that this modern division is largely a
division over polity: how the community should be led. It is not primarily a
division of either belief or religious practice, except where belief and
practice relate to theories of leadership and political questions.
Otherwise, both Sunnis and Shiites practice the same Islam taught by
Muhammad. It does account, however, for much of that division that exists in
the Muslim world, especially surrounding the difficult questions of sharia
law. Both Sunnis and Shiites agree that some form of sharia law should be
established but differ widely over the means to accomplish it.

Questions

As a result of the above questions, Muslims in today's world present the
non-Islamic population with several difficult questions.
    
1. Politics: Are Muslims democratic or authoritarian? In a sense, the
Islamic world is out of step with the current political trend of moving
toward pluralistic democracies. These democracies, fashioned largely after
the United States model, have as one of their key characteristics the
separation of church and state. This is not a congenial model for Muslim
countries where the ideal is not separation of church and state but the
identification of the two under a single, Muslim dominated leadership
structure. In other words, in the Muslim world, President Bush and Pope John
Paul would be the same person. Given this difference in viewpoint, the
question is whether a form of political leadership congenial to Islamic
theological views and nonantagonistic to democratic ideals can be developed.

2. Jihad: Why are Muslims so intense about their religion? Muslims, like
Christians and Buddhists, have a very powerful missionary tradition, a
theological mandate to spread the influence of their religion worldwide.
This practice is included in a wider mandate to fully realize the
injunctions of the Koran called jihad. Because Muslims do not have a strict
separation between the theological and the political spheres, this
missionary mandate is often indistinguishable from the political aims of
Islamic governments. In practice this means some of the tools of statecraft
- political negotiation, economic leverage, and military might - have
sometimes been employed in the spreading of religion. In practice this is
not much different from some of the methodologies used by Christians and
Buddhists. In Islam, however, the theological warrant for such practices is
much clearer and less controversial.

3. Religious Pluralism: Traditional Islamic teaching has no place for
secularism and polytheism and merely tolerates the other monotheistic
religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism. This
religious/political exclusivism is at odds with the notion of   different
religions enjoying equal freedoms under secular pluralistic democracies.

4. Human Rights: Islam has often been called a communitarian religion, not
an individualistic one. This means that when it comes to balancing
individual rights with community responsibilities as defined by religious
teaching, the community responsibilities usually win out. This puts many
Islamic moral and ethical emphases at odds with Western individualism.

Connections

Muslims find themselves in agreement with many positive features of United
States culture:

* Human Rights: Despite their communitarian emphases and drive to extend the
sway of Koranic teaching, Muslims are not anti-human rights. They believe
all humans are created by Allah and as such deserve respect. This is
particularly true of the disadvantaged of society. One of Muhammad's main
points in his preaching was the need to take care of the widows, orphans and
poor.

* Anti-drugs: Observant Muslims do not use any mood-altering drugs,
including alcohol.

* Pro-family: Muslims have very high ethical ideals particularly where they
relate to family members. One of the difficulties immigrant Muslims in the
United States have, for example, is the relaxed mixing of the sexes in
schools and the unchaperoned dating common to most teen-agers.

* Monotheism: Thinking of God in the singular is natural to Muslims. This is
a point of contact with Americans, many of whom are strongly influenced by
the Judeo-Christian tradition of monotheism.

Other aspects of Islam

* Holidays: Muslims celebrate two major holidays: Eid ul-fitr is the
celebration at the end of Ramadan, the month of daylight fasting. It lasts
three days. Eid ul-adha is the celebration at the end of the Great
Pilgrimage to Mecca. Those who do not go on the pilgrimage celebrate at home
with a four-day feast. Both of these major feasts are times of joy and
praise of Allah.

* Dress: Perhaps no feature of modern Islam is more publicly evident than
the way some Muslim women dress. The full-length chador and face veil are
not required.

These are cultural expressions that actually have their roots in Persian
culture. They are worn in some Muslim cultures, for example Saudi Arabia and
Iran. Two general principles of dress apply: modesty and cleanliness. For
women these two general principles mean that covering the hair in public is
required. It also mean the neck to knees should be covered, thus the
hemlines of dresses should fall below the knees.

* Food: In Islam there are two kinds of food: halal, or allowable foods, and
haram, or prohibited foods. Haram foods fall into two categories: The first
category prohibits
foods based on the way they were killed. Animals killed by any means other
than the single approved way of killing - a single knife stroke across the
jugular while saying a prayer - are not allowed, nor are animals that kill:
birds of prey, animals with claws and fangs, rodents, reptiles and insects
with the exception of locusts are all haram. The second category foods
prohibits foods by what they are. The two main groups here are pork and the
blood of any animal.

* Worship: The primary worship service is Friday noon prayers. Shoes are
removed at the door of a mosque. Most mosques have an entryway with racks
for shoes. The main room of a mosque is the prayer room. Men and women pray
separately. After a ritualized purifying washing, worshippers enter the
prayer room and sit in rows facing a mark on the wall that signifies the
direction they are to face while praying, toward Mecca. The service is made
up of regular prayers, a series of memorized prayers done in a standing,
bowing, prostrate series of bodily positions. Prayers will be followed by a
sermon or homily on a Koranic passage, perhaps followed by announcements.
The entire service will take less than an hour.

* Marriage: Marriage is very important to Muslims; everyone should get
married unless physically or financially unable. The ceremony at the mosque
lasts from 30 minutes to an hour and guests are invited.

* Death: Muslims have a strong belief in an afterlife, heaven for the
righteous, hell for the unrighteous. The funeral ceremony is held two or
three days after death, usually in a funeral home. The funeral service is
simple, less than an hour with interment following. There will be no open
casket. Muslims bury their dead - no cremation is allowed. Mourning may last
up to but not exceeding 40 days.

For help managing your Ecunet membership, write to mailrequests@ecunet.org,
with HELP in the subject line.
------------------------------------------
Send your response to this article to pcusa.news@pcusa.org

------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send an 'unsubscribe' request to

pcusanews-request@halak.pcusa.org