Introduction to Islam

the word Islam can best be translated into English as meaning surrender and in the context of the Islamic faith it's referring to a surrender to the will of God now a Muslim is someone who practices Islam one who submits to the will of God and the central text in Islam is the Quran which Muslims believe is the revealed knowledge or the revealed words of God through the messenger Mohammed now it's very important sometimes especially in older texts older Western texts you might see Islam referred to as Muhammad ISM the same way that Christianity referred to Christ now Muslims are very sensitive to this because they don't view Muhammad as a divine figure the way that Christians view Christ they view Muhammad as a human a human whose practices and whose life they view they revere but they don't view him as a divine figure they view him as the messenger who revealed God's words through the Quran and they take this so seriously in most Muslim traditions they don't create images of Moms for fear that people would start to worship it as some type of an idol now on this timeline you see other significant judeo-christian figures and that's because according to Muslims they are following in the same tradition of these figures they view these other figures as people who have submitted to the will of God and Moses and Jesus in particular are the most frequently mentioned prophets in the Quran now Muslims also believe that the Quran isn't the first book that God had revealed to mankind they also believe that the Torah which is the first five books of the Hebrew Bible and also the first five books of the Christian Old Testament Genesis Exodus Leviticus numbers and Deuteronomy they believe that to be a revealed text from God through the prophet Moses they also believe that psalms is a revealed text from God through King David so through the Prophet David who lived around 1000 BCE and they think that the gospel is a revealed message through Jesus now above and beyond these revealed texts another significant part of the Muslim tradition or faith are the notions of sunnah and hadith and sunnah are the practices and life and sayings of Muhammad and many of them are accounted for in the hadith hadith are secondhand accounts of other people who lived at the time of Muhammad although many of them were written decades or sometimes hundreds of years later and so it is a debate in the Muslim community on which hadith are considered more trustworthy than others the one commonality regardless of sect is the centrality of the Quran and viewing that as the actual Word of God to see this a little bit more concretely in terms of how much Muslims view themselves as the same tradition that we see from the old and new Testament here are some Quranic quotes and the first one essentially speaks to this core idea of being in that same tradition he has ordained for you of religion what he enjoined upon Noah and that which we have revealed to you O Muhammad and what we enjoined upon Abraham and Moses and Jesus to establish the religion and not be divided therein and this is speaking to the importance of Abraham and who is better in religion than one who submits himself to God while being a doer of good and follows the religion of Abraham inclining toward truth and God took Abraham as a friend and Abraham in particular plays a very central role the Kaaba which Muslims view as the house of God based in Mecca right over here is viewed as being built by Abraham and Ishmael and so Medina which is where in future videos we'll talk more about where the early Muslims sought exile to escape persecution that's often viewed as the city of Muhammad but Mecca which is the direction that all Muslim pray and during their ritual five times a day prayer which we'll talk about a little bit that's often referred to as the city of Abraham and now here is reference to Moses and before it was the scripture of Moses to lead and as a mercy and this is a confirming book and an Arabic tongue so this this being the Quran this is a quote from the Quran and this is a confirming book and an Arabic tongue to warn those who have wronged and as good tidings to the doers of good so once again a very clear message and at least the Islamic tradition that this is the same faith or tradition as that of Moses and now here is reference to Jesus then we cause our messengers to follow in their footsteps and we caused Jesus son of Mary to follow and gave him the gospel and placed compassion and mercy in the hearts of those who followed him the key difference between Muslims and Christians in terms of the life of Jesus is that Muslims do not believe in the crucifixion and the resurrection and they do not believe that Jesus was God or the Son of God they believed him to be a very significant prophet the prophet before Muhammad came to reveal the Quran now for a practicing Muslim they are often considered to be five pillars and this is especially the case in for the majority of Muslims for Sunni Muslims Shia Muslims have a slightly different combination combination of pillars but there's a lot of commonality so the five pillars the first is this notion of faith which is referred to as Jehovah and Shahada can also be interpreted as testifying or testimony and it's this notion that a Muslim needs to believe and say that there is no god but God Muhammad is God's messenger and in fact to convert to Islam you need to say this and you have to say it in the presence of at least two witnesses and that's all that's necessary in order to convert now the other key element of Islam the second you could say of the five pillars is this notion of prayer so Muslims pray five times a day at on noon in the afternoon evening and night and they face in the direction of the Kaaba which is based in Mecca which once again they believe that Abraham constructed with his son Ishmael who they believed that the Arab people are descendent from now what's interesting about this this has a lot of parallels with the five times a day prayer of the Zoroastrians including the ritual washing of your body before each prayer now the third pillar is charity and it's called a zakat and this is customarily two-and-a-half percent of wealth a two and a half percent might not sound like a lot but this isn't of income this is of wealth the fourth pillar is the notion of fasting dawn-to-dusk during the ninth month of the Islamic calendar and that month is Ramadan and it's fasting without food or water once again from dawn to dusk and the Islamic calendar is a lunar calendar and the notion of a month in fact in English it comes from the word moon because it's referring to a full cycle of the moon now the end of this month ends with the eid outfitter which is the festival of breaking the fast which is considered one of the two major holidays in islam now the fifth pillar of islam is the notion of pilgrimage to the Kaaba during the 12th month and it's during a certain period in that twelfth month and then also in that twelfth month you have the second major holiday in Islam and that's either a Lada the festival of the sacrifice and that once again is making reference to Abraham and his willingness to sacrifice his son before God stops him so this is the general idea of Islam and other videos were going to go into much more detail in terms of how it started the life of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad in Mecca and Medina and then how it spread through the world shortly after or even during the life of Muhammad in the sixth and seventh centuries of the Common Era