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Afghanistan
Islam
Islam is the Religion
Muslim is the Person
Islamic is the
Institution
World religion founded by the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon
Him). Founded in the 7th century, Islam is the youngest of the three
monotheistic world religions (with Judaism and Christianity). An adherent to
Islam is a Muslim.
Believers Worldwide
In 1990 there were
an estimated 935 million Muslims worldwide, fewer than one-fifth of whom were
Arab. Islam is the principal religion of much of Asia, including Indonesia
(which has the world's largest Muslim population), Malaysia, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan,
Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, the Arab states, and Turkey;
in Africa, of Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Djibouti, Gambia, Guinea, Libya, Mali,
Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Senegal, Somalia, Sudan, with sizable populations
also in Chad, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Tanzania (where the island of Zanzibar
is predominantly Muslim), and Nigeria.
In Europe, Albania is predominantly Muslim, and, historically, Bulgaria,
Bosnia, Macedonia, and Georgia have had Muslim populations. Elsewhere in Europe,
immigrant communities of Muslims from N Africa, Turkey, and Asia exist in
France, Britain, and Germany. In the Americas the Islamic population has
substantially increased in recent years, both from conversions and the
immigration of adherents from other parts of the world; 20% of the population of
Suriname is Muslim.
Islamic Beliefs
At the core of Islam is
the Qur'an, believed to be the final revelation by a transcendent Allah to
Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam; since the Divine Word was revealed in Arabic,
this language is used in Islamic religious practice worldwide. Muslims believe
in final reward and punishment, and the unity of the umma, the "nation" of
Islam. Muslims submit to Allah through arkan ad-din, the five basic requirements
or "pillars": shahadah, the affirmation that "there is no god but God, and
Muhammad is the Messenger of God"; salah, the five daily ritual prayers; zakat,
the giving of alms, also known as a religious tax; Sawm, the dawn-to-sunset fast
during the lunar month of Ramadan; and hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. The
importance of the hajj can hardly be overestimated: this great annual pilgrimage
unites Islam and its believers from around the world.
The ethos of Islam is in its attitude toward Allah: to His will Muslims
submit; Him they praise and glorify; and in Him alone they hope. However, in
popular or folk forms of Islam, Muslims ask intercession of the saints,
prophets, and angels, while preserving the distinction between Creator and
creature. Islam views the Message of Muhammad as the continuation and the
fulfillment of a lineage of Prophecy that includes figures from the Hebrew
Scriptures and the New Testament, notably Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and
Jesus. Islamic law reserves a communal entity status for the ahl al-kitab,
People of the Book, i.e., those with revealed religions, including Jews and
Christians. Islam also recognizes a number of extra-Biblical prophets, such as
Hud, Salih, Shuayb, and others of more obscure origin. The chief angels are
Gabriel and Michael; devils are the evil jinn.
Other Islamic obligations include the duty to "commend good and reprimand
evil," injuctions against usury and gambling, and a prohibition of alcohol and
pork. Meat is permitted (halal) if the animal was ritually slaughtered. Jihad,
the exertion of efforts for the cause of God, is a duty satisfied at the
communal and the individual level. At the individual level, it denotes the
personal struggle to be righteous and follow the path ordained by God. In Islam,
religion and social membership are inseparable: the ruler of the community
(caliph) has both a religious and a political status. The unitary nature of
Islam, as a system governing relations between a person and God, and a person
and society, helped the spread of Islam so that, within a century of the
Prophet's death, Islam extended from Spain to India.The evolution of Islamic
mysticism into organizational structures in the form of Sufi orders was also,
from the 13th century onwards, one of the driving forces in the spread of Islam.
Sufi orders were instrumental in expanding the realm of Islam to trans-Saharan
Africa, stabilizing its commercial and cultural links with the Mediterranean and
the Middle East, and to South East Asia.
Holidays and Honorifics
The original
feasts of Islam are id al-fitr, corresponding to the breaking of the fast of
Ramadan, and id al-adha, coinciding with the pilgrimage to Mecca. Shiite Islam
also celebrates id al-ghadir, the anniversary of Muhammad's declaration of Ali
as his successor. Other Islamic holidays include Mawlid Nabawi, Muhammad's
birthday, and al-isra wa-l-miraj, the anniversary of his miraculous journey to
Jerusalem and ascension to Heaven. Among the Islamic religious honorifics are
shaykh, a generic term refering to a religious scholar or a mystic master; qadi,
a religious judge (handling particular cases); mufti, a religious authority who
issues general legal opinions; and mullah, a synonym of shaykh used in the
Persian-speaking world.
Interpretation of the Quran
The revealed
word of Islam, the Qur'an, in a formal Arabic which became more archaic with
time, required explication. A complement to the Qur'an is the Sunna, the spoken
and acted example of the Prophet, collected as hadith. The Sunna is almost as
important to Islam as the Qur'an, for in it lie the elaborations of Qur'anic
teaching essential to the firm establishment of a world religion. There are
serious disagreements in the hadith, and interpretations of the Qur'an and the
Sunna have varied so much as to be contradictory. These situations are resolved
by reference to one of the most important of the sayings attributed to the
Prophet, "My community will never agree in an error." This leeway also allowed
Islam to expand by incorporating social, tribal, and ethnic traditions. For
example, with the exception of inheritance and witness laws, Islamic rights and
obligations apply equally to men and women. The actual situation of women is
more a function of particular social traditions predating Islam than of
theoretical positions.
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