A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

h, wa Muhammadun ras lu l-L h—“There is no god but God, and Muhammad
is the Messenger of God.” All Muslims are expected to fulfill the five pillars, or
duties, of a Muslim: to profess the shahada, pray five times a day, observe the
fast during the month of Ramadan, make the pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca once in
a lifetime, and pay alms, or tithe (zakat).
The requirements of faith entail a belief in the One God, an acceptance of all
the Prophets of God (including Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad), a belief in the
Angels, a belief in the key holy books sent by God—which include the Old and
New Testaments and the Qur’an—a belief in the Day of Judgment and
Resurrection, and belief in Destiny, or Fate. The theological underpinnings of the
new faith facilitated easy transmission, explanation, and acceptance.

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Muhammad was the first self-professed “Muslim,” that is, one professing
Islam, or submission to God’s design. He perceived the need to clarify and
sharpen the message of the One God and to clear up the errors and misbeliefs
that had crept into human interpretation of the earlier Jewish and Christian
messages. But the line of revelation was one and the same.
Traditional Muslim scholars, of course, reject any causality in the emergence
of Islam that is not divine; in other words, no acknowledgment of possible
external, regional, or nondivine sources and influences upon the revelations
received by the Prophet. That’s fair enough within the framework of their own
theological commitments. But the environment in which Muhammad lived
would, of course, also exert influence over his mind, thinking, and personality; it
would affect his receptivity to the message and the manner in which his
revelations were understood and applied by himself and his followers. So it is
also fair enough for others to examine possible and plausible external influences
upon the experience and interpretation of revelation, paralleling the experience
and revelations of other prophets and religious figures in history.
At this time in the Arabian Peninsula, then, most of the basic new Qur’anic
precepts were familiar concepts, starting with the Jewish belief that denied Jesus
as the Messiah and saw him only as a faith healer. Also familiar were the range
of Christian “heresies” that had spread across the Middle East, speculating about
every aspect of Jesus’s nature. Indeed, the strict monotheism of the Qur’an was
closer in many respects to the views of the very earliest Christians in the Middle
East than they were to the theologically strained doctrinal compromises of the
Eastern Orthodox Church in later years. Variations on the basic themes of
monotheism permeated all cultures of the region.
Muhammad is the first prophet of a major religion to have lived in the full
light of history. Information about his life and actions abound, both in the Qur’an
and even more so in the accounts of his life from contemporaries of the Prophet
who recorded these events and sayings (the Hadith or Sunna). But even then,
Islam faced the same problems encountered by nearly all religions, including
Christianity: how accurate were the accounts of contemporaries about the
Prophet’s life and sayings? These sayings and actions had been transmitted
orally; in Islam, it would be over one hundred years before they were collected
in written form, analyzed, and systematically assessed. The task parallels the
Christian problem of collecting all the accounts of Jesus’s life to determine
which Gospels, for example, were “reliable” and which were not; this is a
subject still rife with speculation and debate and has yet to be laid to rest.
And while the Hadith are not literally sacred in Islam in the sense that the

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Qur’an is—directly derived from God through revelation—they often provide a
more important source for later Islamic legislation than the Qur’an itself; the
Hadith simply provide much more material dealing with specific, concrete
situations arising in the development of the early Islamic community that were
never touched upon in the Qur’an. The Hadith also supply an important guide to
indicate how the Prophet himself understood and situationally applied the
revelations that he had received. An analogy would be to those Christians who
ask today “What would Jesus do?”
Even then, there are small groups within Islam who argue that only the
Qur’an—due to its divine source—should be the source of understanding of
Islam, given the complex and varying natures of various Hadith, the differing
degrees of their reliability, and sometimes even the self-serving nature of
authorities adopting certain Hadith over others. It is interesting to note the clear
parallels here with the sola Scriptura (scripture alone) basis of the Reformation
movements that overthrew vast amounts of church history and its accretions,
council rulings, and so on, in favor of establishing theological understanding on
the basis of scripture alone.
The practical obstacles to applying the new revelations to a new Islamic
political and religious community were daunting, particularly in the face of early
militant opposition from the Meccan elite that felt its power, wealth, and position
threatened by Muhammad’s message. His life endangered, the Prophet and his
followers fled to the city of Medina, where he established the first Muslim
community and, by invitation, presided over warring elements within the city in
order to bring a peaceful new order. This is referred to as the Constitution of
Medina, in which the rights, responsibilities, and relationships among the
various tribes and religious groups within the city—Jews, Christians, and
Muslims—were spelled out in a document of clarification and reconciliation.
Meanwhile, this Muslim community in Medina continued to be militarily and
politically threatened by Meccan forces hostile to Islam over many years, until
Mecca finally gave up its opposition and the Prophet returned triumphantly in a
bloodless victory in 630 CE. This long period of tensions, hostility, war, shifting
alliances, and betrayals is reflected in some of the darker and more warlike
passages of the Qur’an, with its concern for Muslim unity in the face of enemies
seeking subversion of the fledgling community. The darkness and anger of many
of these passages resemble similar periods of the struggle of the Israelites to
counter hostile Semitic tribes, where the Old Testament calls for the ruthless
extirpation of all the enemies of the Jews who stood in their way of achieving a
state in Israel; reconciliation and peace are not in the spirit of those troubled
periods in either religion.

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The problem of the reliability of the Hadith had major political implications
as Islam developed, spread, and became involved in empire-building. As with
the Christian Church, how much might later Muslim secular or religious
authorities seek to retroactively influence, control, or interpret the message of
Islam? Unlike Christianity, Islam was fortunately spared debate over the possible
divinity of the Prophet—neither he nor others ever claimed it. Islam has, in fact,
seen far fewer heresies and divisions on the basis of scriptural interpretation than
Christianity has, perhaps in part due to the lean lines of its theological vision.
Nonetheless, even until today questions of interpretation of the Qur’an and the
Hadith remain central to the ongoing evolution of Islam.
As Islam spread, it encountered new languages, geographies, cultures, and
historical experiences. Like other religions, it adapted itself to local conditions to
facilitate acceptance and conversion to the new faith. But in the eyes of later
reformers, some of these accommodations and accretions were viewed as non-
Islamic, as innovation (bida’), requiring theological purging and a return to
orthodoxy. These issues will form the foundation of Islamic renewal and
fundamentalism. Such accretions were also a key issue for early Protestant
reformers such as Martin Luther.
FRICTIONS AMONG RELIGIONS and their followers are rarely based on
specific theological differences but rather on their political and social