by Todd Buchanan
| Note: What follows I composed some years ago with the input of many members of the Outreach Team at the Islamic Center of Boulder. It was intended as an introduction to Islam for non-Muslims, hence its several non-Islamic references. I post it here today to convey how compelling and vital I found Islam to be, and still do. | |
O ye people! Adore your Guardian Lord, Who created you and those who came before you, that ye may become righteous, Who made the earth your couch and the heavens your canopy; and sent down rain from the heavens; and brought forth therewith fruits for your sustenance; then set up not rivals unto Allah, when ye know the truth (Qur’an, 2:21-22).
Muslims believe there is one God, the Most Merciful, in Whose hands is all power and goodness. Islam comes from the root s-l-m, which means the peace that comes when one surrenders one’s will to God’s. Allah is God in Arabic.
Early in 7th century Arabia, a region plagued by tribal conflict, economic disparity and other social evils, one Muhammad ibn ‘Abdallah began reciting some extraordinary verse. Known for his honesty but not the poet’s gift, what Muhammad recited surpassed Arabia’s finest poetry. Indeed, it claimed to be revelation, from the same God who had sent revelation to all peoples before.
I swear by the stars that slide, stars streaming, stars that sweep along the sky, by the night as it slips away, by the morning when the fragrant air breathes, this is the word of a messenger ennobled…(81:15-19).
This was the God of Abraham, the supreme example of submission. The people who lived by the new revelations were Muslims, those who submit to God’s will. The recitations were compiled and preserved in the Qur’an, and in the memories of millions since who memorized them in their entirety.
When God decided to create humans with free will, His angels were baffled. Why create beings capable of mischief and bloodshed? they asked. God replied: “I know what ye know not” (2:30). When Adam and Eve sinned, humans were consigned to Earth for a time. “Then learnt Adam from his Lord words of inspiration, and his Lord turned towards him; for He is Oft-Returning, Most Merciful” (2:37).
God provides for all of our needs, urges us to worship Him alone, to be constant in prayer and regular in charity, and patient in adversity. God sees that “For every soul there is a guardian” (86:4).
Muslims, like traditional Christians and Jews, “fear” God. But to truly fear God is to fear nothing else, as in this passage from the Christian song Amazing Grace: “’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved.” To fear God is be ever mindful of life’s purpose and meaning. “Life is real! Life is earnest!” wrote Henry Longfellow. Islam agrees. Frederick Denny writes:
…God is believed to have revealed his will definitively through prophets, signs, and mighty acts….[P]eople cannot merely fatalistically accept what happens; their behavior must be intentional….Responsible living requires making hard choices. History in the biblical and Islamic traditions is an irreversible process in which fateful consequences are decided, either in close covenant relationship with God or, perilously, outside of it (Islam and the Muslim Community).
Muslims do not believe in original sin, or that Eve tempted Adam; he sinned all on his own. We are born with a sound moral foundation, or fitra, which inclines us to believe in God, but we are forgetful and need constant reminding of our purpose. Hence, the five daily prayers. We have free will with the expectation that we will submit to God, but “Let there be no compulsion in religion”(2:256). “We must earnestly search out Allah’s Truth”, writes Abdullah Yusuf Ali, “encouraged by the fact that Allah’s Truth is also, out of His unbounded mercy, searching us out and trying to reach us” (The Meaning of the Holy Qur’an).
With the coming of Islam, for the first time in Arabian society women had real rights: female infanticide and the sexual abuse of slave girls were banned, as was the denial of inheritance to women. No one could be married against her will, and a wife could initiate divorce. Many abuses of women which Westerners associate with Islam, such as “honor” killings, are cultural and have no basis in Islam.
Muhammad’s biggest challenge was tribalism. In place of a multitude of gods, each associated with a specific tribe, the revelations asserted that there is One God, and by implication, one humanity. According to Fazlur Rahman, “Muhammad’s monotheism was… linked up with a humanism and a sense of social and economic justice whose intensity is no less than the intensity of the monotheistic idea, so that the two must be regarded as expressions of the same experience” (Islam, p.12).
All we are and all we possess comes from God, and that includes our individual talents and qualities we typically attribute to our own ingenuity and perseverance. There is no such thing as the self-made individual. Wealth is provided in trust, to be circulated for the benefit of all.
Throughout the Qur’an are vivid images of the day of reckoning:
When the sky is torn, When the stars are scattered, When the seas are poured forth, When the tombs are burst open, Then a soul will know what it has given and what it has held back (82:1-5)
“The Qur’an warns those who reject the day of reckoning and who are entrenched in lives of acquisition and injustice that an accounting awaits them,” writes Michael Sells in Approaching the Qur’an. The warnings collapse a momentous future event into the present, in which we make critical choices. Unbelievers “see the (Day) as a far off (event): But We see it (quite) near” (70: 6-7). Yet, God’s Mercy matches His Power, and He promises mercy to all who are merciful here.
Do you see him who calls the reckoning a lie? He is the one who casts the orphan away, who fails to urge the feeding of one in need. Cursed are those who perform the prayer unmindfully, who make of themselves a big show but hold back the small kindness (107:1-7).
Many Muslims believe gratitude for God’s love suffices to inspire good deeds (righteousness): “And they feed, for the love of Allah, the indigent, the orphan, and the captive” (76:8). The eighth-century Sufi sister Rabi’a denounced anything done out of fear of punishment or desire for rewards. In any case, Muslims believe God loves spontaneous acts of kindness. Once, a woman who was desperate for water finally found a well. After satisfying her thirst, she noticed a very thirsty dog. She went back down into the well and filled a shoe with water for the dog, for which all of her sins were forgiven.
We are to give to those in need, especially what we most value. This idea is captured in the Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life”. Soon after George Bailey’s father dies, George enters a board meeting of the Bedford Falls Building and Loan, of which his father was president. We see a portrait of his father with these words inscribed: “All you can take with you is that which you’ve given away.”
It is not righteousness that ye turn your faces towards East or West; but it is righteousness—to believe in Allah and the Last Day, and the Angels, And the Book, and the Messengers; to spend of your substance despite your love of it, for your kin, for orphans, for the needy, for the wayfarer, for those who ask, and for the ransom of slaves; to be steadfast in prayer, and practice regular charity, to fulfill the contracts which ye have made; and to be firm and patient, in pain (or suffering) and adversity, and throughout all periods of panic. Such are the people of truth, the God-fearing (2:177).
Reform CAIR 