Islam is what type of religion

In this transmission, the prophet, Muhammad, does not play a role akin to that of Moses and Jesus. He does nothing but receive texts, which he repeats as if under dictation. It is the uncreated Word of God. Islam distinguishes between an authentic prophet nabi and a messenger rassul , or one who has received a particular legislative message. Adam, Noah, Moses, David, Jesus were messengers, dispatched to particular peoples.

That mission was made necessary because the books of the earlier messengers of God, which were also dictated, had become falsified. Jews and Christians had manipulated the writing and distorted the meaning. That is why Muslims do not credit the worth of revealed documents prior to their own. Muslims are the true followers of Jesus. The ball is thus in the court of Jews and Christians.

The answer is no. Muslims aver that Muhammad was illiterate. Medina was full of Jews and Christians of varied sects. John of Damascus believed he had been influenced by an Arian monk; others, that it was a Nestorian monk.

As for Jesus, he appears, as Issa, out of place and out of time, without reference to the landscape of Israel. His mother, Mary or Mariam, identified as the sister of Aaron, gives birth to him under a palm tree. Then Issa performs several miracles, which seem to have been drawn from the apocryphal gospels, and announces the future coming of Muhammad. Indeed, all possess the same knowledge and proclaim the same message, which is Islam.

Like the rest, Issa is sent to preach the oneness of God. Nor is he the son of God, but a simple mortal. Nor is he a mediator between earthly men and their heavenly Father, because Islam knows not the concept of mediation.

Nor, since in Islam it is unimaginable that a messenger of God can be vanquished, does he die on the cross; a double is substituted for him.

Foreign to Islam is the idea of a progressive revelation. The divine message, in toto, is instead infused in Adam, the first man and the first messenger. Only, men forget the message, and a repetition becomes necessary. Muhammad is the last messenger and prophet. The point holds even for those passages reflecting an evident concurrence on the idea of the one God. The Muslim God is utterly impassive; to ascribe loving feelings to Him would be suspect. The Abraham whom Islam claims for itself is yet another messenger—and a Muslim.

He is not the common father first of Israel and then of Christians who share his faith. Far from Muhammad sharing the faith of Abraham, it is Abraham who holds the faith of Muhammad. A common feature of natural religions is a sense of God, or of the divine, being everywhere present in nature. For the Greeks and the Romans, it was enough to contemplate the cosmos, the created universe, to be certain, prior to any process of mental reasoning, that God, or the gods, existed.

Not to believe in them was a sign of insanity, marking off the unbeliever from the realm of the human. This is not the Christian viewpoint, which holds rather that the existence of God can be grasped only with the help of investigation and reason, with faith coming in as an act of heavenly grace to seal this acquired knowledge. But the Christian perspective is not the Islamic perspective, which in this regard bears a greater resemblance to the classical pagan sense of things. Islam does not suppose that faith is needed to perceive the divine presence; that presence is obvious.

In Islam, God gave a law to man by means of a unilateral pact, in an act of sublime condescension. This law has nothing in common with the law of Sinai, by which Israel joined in partnership with God, nor with the law of the Spirit about which Paul speaks in the New Testament. Any impulse to exceed those limits is discouraged. It is enough to do good and avoid evil in order to escape punishment and profit from the promised rewards of obedience.

There is again some similarity here with pagan conceptions, and specifically with pagan ethics. Islamic civilization is a civilization of the good life, and it offers a certain latitude in the realm of sensory pleasure. Asceticism is foreign to the spirit of Islam.

There is a Muslim spirit of carpe diem , a this-worldly contentment that often fascinated Christians who may have seen in it a dim echo of the ancient, classical world. There is nothing like the doctrine of original sin in Islam, or eternal damnation for the sinner. Predestination, in the Muslim understanding, is not so different from the ancient notion of fatum. Much fun has been made, wrongly, of the Muslim notion of paradise.

Admittedly, it is not like the Jewish or Christian notion, which envisions an eternity participating in the life of the divine. Ancient mythologies are replete with similar images: idealized banquets with flowing cups, beautiful virgins and young men, a climate of heavenly satiety in which all desire is fulfilled. In concordance with natural religion and with the Hellenistic substratum on which Islam was built , Muslim religious life offers more than one model of piety.

For the truly devout, two ways are open, just as in the Greco-Roman world: philosophy Arab falsafa , itself heavily impregnated with neo-Platonism and mysticism.

From this perspective, two facts about Islam that always astonished medieval Christians seem not so astonishing after all: the difficulty of converting Muslims, and the stubborn attachment to their faith of even the most superficially observant.

From the Muslim point of view, it was absurd to become a Christian, because Christianity was a religion of the past whose best parts had been included in and superseded by Islam. But that is hardly surprising, for in Islam the very categories of nature and revelation take on wholly unfamiliar aspects. I am not referring here to such things as the peculiar arrangements of the Muslim city, or Islamic family structure, or the position of women, or the particular customs and manners of Islamic people.

I have in mind a number of other, more essential qualities of the Muslim religion itself. One of them, which I have already mentioned in passing, is the characteristic Islamic denial of the stability and consistency of nature. According to Islam, the world is not governed by an unchanging natural law. Atoms, physical properties, matter itself: these endure only for an instant, being created anew at every moment by God. Nor is there any straightforward cause-and-effect relation between events that occur in time.

Although daytime usually coincides with the presence of sunlight and night with its absence, God can change things around as He likes and make the sun shine in the middle of the night. With causality abolished, anything can happen: in place of causes, there are only sequences, one thing after another.

Islam spread quickly first throughout Arabia and surrounding countries and then throughout the world. There are 1. The countries with the largest Muslim populations are Indonesia and India.

Although they share the same basic beliefs, they disagree on who was the rightful leader of Islam after Muhammad's death. Islam is an Arabic word which means "surrender, submission, commitment and peace.

He is the same universal God worshipped by people of all faiths. The word "Allah" is sometimes preferred over God because it is neither masculine nor feminine. Also, there is no plural for "Allah. These are guides for daily life for putting the beliefs of Muslims into practice:. Muslims believe that the last revealed scripture sent by God is the Qur'an or Koran.

It is the speech of God revealed in the Arabic language to Muhammad during his mission of twenty-three years. The Qur'an was written down by scribes and memorized during the lifetime of Muhammad.

The Qur'an emphasizes moral, ethical and spiritual values with the aim of establishing justice for everyone. Many Muslims try to learn to read the Koran in its original language, Arabic. It is not uncommon for Muslims to memorize whole chapters of it.

They read part of it every day. The Sunnah is a record of Muhammads words and deeds. Moral values are intertwined with history, and the details of daily life are based on a continuum with life in the hereafter.

Its topics range from the most specific to the most general and include the past and future, life on earth, and existence of the soul after death.

It is, in short, a comprehensive and integrated guide to life. A man studies a copy of the Qur'an as he sits by a carved column in the Upper Swat village of Bahrain, south of Kalam, Pakistan. Say, Oh Muslims, we believe in Alllah and that which is revealed unto Abraham and Isma'il and Isaac and Jacob and the tribes and that which Moses and Jesus received and that which the Prophet received from the Lord.

We make no distinction between any of them and unto them we have surrendered. We are Muslims. Qur'an Islam is a universal faith for all times, all places, and all peoples. It is predicated on the belief that there is but one God, Allah, the Creator of the universe and of humankind. The relationship which exists between God and His creation is based on one religion. These fundamental unities are the foundation of faith.

The Qur'an refers to the creation of the earth and other celestial bodies out of the darkness of chaos. Scientific theories that hive evolved about the creation highlight the unity of the universe. If God created this unique universe and shaped humankind to inhabit it, it follows that God would also have communicated with humankind through a single religion, even though it be in successive revelations.

Islam is the last and most all- encompassing message of God. If one believes that there is but one humankind which is part of a single universe created by one God, then one believes in an interrelationship among all created things.

Religion in this context is a set of rules that regulate the relationship between the Creator and the created and establish the basis of accountability in the hereafter. It also sets forth the framework for permissible economic, social and political systems and formulates the principles and rules through which people should deal with one another. In effect, it provides a variety of prescriptions and guidelines as well as inspiration.

In this respect, Islam is very much a law-oriented religion. It provides the guidelines and principles upon which laws and regulations can be established.

The influence of Islam must not be viewed in a narrowly legalistic light but rather as providing a framework which guarantees basic fairness and justice to all. Islam is holistic, requiring that its followers have iman faith to fulfill the requirements of its religious tenets. The Muslim is required to express his Ibada, service to Allah, through his deeds, conduct, and words. The Qur'an enjoins that Muslims do good and abjure evil. Life in this world is a passage, and the eternal soul shall be judged by the Almighty on Judgment Day by intentions as well as by deeds.

Reward and punishment shall be meted out in heaven and hell, but Allah is merciful to those who repent and do good. Repentance and mercy are among Islam's great themes. Allah in Arabic implies the one and only true God, the beginning and the end of everything, neither born nor giving birth. The Qur'an states that He is beyond human description, but is referred to in the Qur'an by ninety-nine attributes, such as the merciful, the compassionate, the forgiving.

Together with the command to bear witness and acknowledge the singularity, centrality, unity, and uniqueness of God, the believer is enjoined to confess that Muhammad is God's messenger and prophet. Although required by the Qur'an, zakat is specified in detail only in the practice and teachings of the Prophet and in later interpretations. It is the payment of a certain percentage of one's income to support the needy and to fulfill other objectives of the community.

While this can be rightly equated to a combination of taxation and charity, zakat is different from sadaqa, charity, which is equally mandated by the Qur'an but left to the discretion of the individual Muslim, depending upon circumstances. Sadaqa is both tangible and intangible a kind word, for example, may be a form of Sadaqa.

But Zakat is tangible. It is paid at the end of the Ramadan fast. Non-Muslims, the people of the book Christians and Jews , are not required to pay Zakat but another tax, called Jizyah. Fasting from dawn to sunset during the month of Ramadan, the ninth month in the Islamic lunar calendar, is required of those whose health permits.