The Prophet Muhammad (570-632) was an Arab prophet who founded Islam, today the religion of a fifth of mankind. He wrote its holy book, the Koran. Islam says he is the Final Prophet and the Perfect Man, but he is in no way divine. He is the Paraclete promised by Jesus Christ in the Bible.
Unlike the founders of world religions, he fought battles and founded an empire. This has made Islam a very political religion.
He worked no miracles, but God spoke to him through the angel Gabriel. He wrote it all down word for word. That became the Koran. It is itself a miracle: no mere man could have written it. The Hadith has the sayings and deeds of Muhammad.
Islam says he is the Final Prophet and the Koran the perfect Word of God. The prophets that came before, like Noah, Abraham, Moses, Isaiah and Jesus, had their prophecies put in the Bible. But the Bible has been corrupted by men who, for example, made Jesus into the Son of God.
So Islam is not so much a new religion, but religion purified. It is Christianity, for example, without the priests, holy bread or Jesus as one of three gods.
Yet Muhammad did keep some of the old Arab religion, like the pilgrimage to Mecca.
Muhammad was a businessman from Mecca. Every year during the month of Ramadan (then always in summer) he went to the mountain to pray and fast. In 610 the angel Gabriel began to speak to him. It sounded at first like ringing, but in time he heard the words. Gabriel spoke to him till his death. Gabriel’s words have become the Koran.
When Muhammad got back to Mecca he told people what happened and gathered followers. They became the first Muslims.
In those days Arabs fought each other in an endless this for that. Arabs were divided by bloodlines into tribes and worshipped many gods. The Muslims were something new: a community based not on kin but on faith. They seemed like strange sort of tribe.
The Muslims soon became a threat to Mecca and its old ways of tribes and gods. They had to leave. Their flight to Medina, in the following summer in 622 is called the Hegira. This began the Muslim calendar. In Medina they built the first mosque, where they could pray.
In Medina the Muslims attacked traders on the way to Mecca. This led to war, which Muhammad won. By 630 Muhammad ruled Mecca and Medina.
Because Muslims promised not to fight each other, the Muslim part of Arabia was a region of peace. This made it stronger than the rest of Arabia, which was divided and consumed by countless little wars. So in time all of Arabia became Muslim and by Muhammad’s death it was united into one country.
In the hundred years after his death, Arabs went on to conquer lands from Spain to India. It was the start of the Arab Empire and the Muslim world.
– Abagond, 2006.
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hello..
am really happy coz u wrote about Islam here those true words..
thank u for that..!
but i just want to say important 2 things:
1- Qura’an is Allah’s speech,which is sent to prophet Mohammad (peace be upon him) through the angel Gabriel..which means Qura’an is Allah’s words.. that’s why it is a mirecal..and that’s why it is the best book in the world..coz no one have the ability to form one sentence like what we read in Qur’an..ever!
2- hadith also is from Allah..and was sent by the angel Gabriel too .. but the prophet had said it by his own words but the meaning and aim is from Allah..
thats why Qur’an and hadith are so important in Islam..
i thank u again for putting this topic here..
and may Allah bless u..
peace..
^-^..
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Thanks. I agree with what you say about the Koran and updated the post accordingly. But that is not my understanding of the hadith:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadith
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I’m a Black Muslim woman from Africa, living in Canada. I enjoy most of your posts but this one is full of inaccuracies. Allow me to rectify some of them:
1.Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) didn’t write the Qur’an, he was an illiterate man, like most of his people. Arabs of that time were known for their spontaneous poetry, solely based on oral prowess, but almost none of them could read and write. So he couldn’t possibly have written the Qur’an, even most orientalists agree on that. I guess non-Muslims are confused because it’s a book (al kitab in Arabic) but “Qur’an” means recitation. We memorize parts of it that we recite in our 5 daily prayers. From Senegal to Malaysia, from Bosnia to Maldives, from America to France and pretty any country in the world, hundreds of thousands of us have memorized the entire Qur’an.
2. He did perform miracles. Too long to go into details but a simple Google search will inform you. Moreover, Muslims consider the Qur’an a linguistic and scientific miracle. There’s no such thing as the Qur’an in any language than Arabic. Translations of the Qur’an are called “interpretations of the meaning of the verses” for reasons too long to explain. Links at the bottom of this post. They’re not the Qur’an because of the specificity of the Arabic language, among other things. For instance, there are THOUSANDS of words to say “camel” in Arabic. Yes, I did say thousands.
3. Islam is not Christianity purified. Christianity is Islam corrupted. Here’s the explanation: Christians worship Jesus Christ, Muslims don’t worship messengers. We’re not Mohammadans, or Mosesistes or Abrahamiens or Christians. We’re Muslims, which literally means “those who submit”( to the will of God). The “closest” definition of God in Islam is the entity Christians call “God the Father” although we don’t believe He resemble His creatures in any way, shape or form. We don’t call Him “Father”. He’s not a humanoid giant who lives in the clouds. Said God only had one message of pure monotheism (worship Him and no one else) that he sent down upon all his messengers. After their deaths, people slowly but surely perverted the message again and again, so God kept sending new messengers and new prophets (there’s a difference between the two in Islam) until he sent the last one (pbuh) and that’s why He said everything He wanted us (human beings) to know until the end of time in the Qur’an. He appointed Himself guardian of the book and promised His word would never be corrupted in any way. Anyone who submits to the will of God and believes in all his messengers is a Muslim. From the beginning of time until the end. So people who accepted the message of Moses, Lot, Jesus, Jonas, Jacob, Joseph, Abraham, Noah etc. (peace upon them all) were Muslims. They’re mentioned in the Qur’an. Islam didn’t start 1436 years ago. The final message did.
4. There was no “old Arab religion”. We believe Abraham and his son Ismael built the Kaa’ba. Islam was the original, the only religion revealed by God. Then as I said, people perverted it. The Quraysh (Arab tribe of Mecca) started worshiping idols about 300 years before the birth of the last prophet (pbuh) and they got them from a people who lived in present day Syria, called the Amalekites. The Quraysh knew there was only one God who created them, that their ancestors used to worship but they worshiped idols as intercessors between God and themselves. Concept that is known in Islam as “shirk”. It means associating partners with God, whether it’s in attributes that only belong to the Creator or in worship, that only God deserves. Islamic monotheism is described in the 112th surah of the Qur’an (al ikhlaas), which means “the sincerity” and also referred to as “pure monotheism”.
5. I can’t talk about the “ringing” experience, it’s too long to describe. It applies to later revelation, it’s a hadith. It didn’t happen like you wrote. The angel told him “iqra” which can be translated as “read” or “recite”, to which he replied that he couldn’t. Again, sorry, it’s way too much to write, you have to read or listen to the seerah for more details. Links below.
6. He didn’t go to the mountain to pray and fast. Praying and fasting were revealed WAY later in Islam. He went there to meditate. You might think it’s the same but it’s not in Islam. Prayer (salah) is a specific act of of worship that is codified and it’s even different than supplication (du’a). Too long to explain.
7.Muhammad (pbuh) did not tell his people immediately what had happened to him, that’s a different incident that happened much later and is not as simple as you describe. He ran to his house and told his wife: “zamilloni! zamilloni!” (cover me, cover me). There is a surah in the Qur’an titled “Al Muzzammil” which means “The one who is covered” that refers to this incident. He was afraid. Angels in their real form are MASSIVE creatures that occupy the space that is between Earth and heaven. That specific angel, Djibril (Gabriel in English and French) is known to have 600 wings. He saw him after the voice and the squeeze in the cave. Anyways,the first wife of prophet Muhammad, Khadidja Bint Kuwaylid is the first convert to Islam. Then a few days later, they told his wife Khadidja’s uncle, a Christian man named Waraqah ibn Nawfal, he accepted Islam but was very old and died a few weeks after. Then he told his best friend Abu bakr and he converted too. He became the first caliph of Islam after the death of Muhammad (pbuh). Then if memory serves the next one was Zayd, his adopted son. The incident you’re referring to happened later when he gathered the people of Makkah to ask them to save themselves from hell by not worshiping idols. It didn’t go well AT ALL and to my knowledge, no one accepted Islam that day. One of his own paternal uncle (Abu Lahab) cursed him publicly and called him crazy. He spent the rest of his miserable life persecuting the prophet (pbuh).
8. The Muslims weren’t something new. There were Arab Jews and Christians tribes living in Arabia. Even among the Quraysh, such as the husband of Umm Salama (I can’t remember his name) who converted to Islam, then reverted back to Christianity once they reached Abyssinia and I also mentioned Waraqah, among others. These Arab tribes didn’t have “one religion” and they weren’t even that attached to their “faith”. Any idol worship pagan belief was good enough for them. They cared about the money they made by housing the idols from all around Arabia in the Kaa’aba (the black stone, which was very different than the one today). Mecca and nearby Ta’if were rival cities because they were homes to the biggest of their idols : Obal and Al Uzza.
I left out a lot of stuff but honestly, you should delete this post and everything else you wrote about this religion and learn about it from sources other than Wikipedia and random websites. No offense but 50 % what I wrote here, every Muslim CHILD knows. I was quite disappointed to read this, because this is not Islam at all. Not even close.
We have English-speaking, American scholars who speak in details about the biography of the prophet (pbuh), the linguistic miracle of the Qur’an and pretty much anything you’d possibly like to know about Islam.
I I recommend Dr Yasir Qadhi’s lectures on the seerah (biography of the prophet), he lives in Memphis, Tenessee and as a Yale PhD in Islamic studies.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOUp3ZZ9t3A&list=PLAEA99D24CA2F9A8F)
For the linguistic aspect of the Qur’an itself, I’d say any video of Nouman Ali Khan from the Bayyinah institute in Texas:
(https://www.youtube.com/user/BayyinahInstitute)
For the concept of tawheed (islamic monotheism) Dr Bilal Philips (ex-Christian) e-book, he’s originally from Jamaica, he now lives in Gambia:
Click to access fundamentals_of_tawheed.pdf
For accurate, general info about Islam: Islamreligion.com or http://www.whyislam.org
For questions about Islam: http://www.chatislamonline.org (just log on ask any question you want, they’re there to answer non-muslims only )
For debates Atheism vs Islam: google Hamza Andreas Tzortzis, ex-atheist, Greek Muslim convert.
For debates Chrisitianity vs Islam : google Ahmed Deedat, South African from Indian descent. He passed away a few years ago but his debate against Reverend Jimmy Swaggart is absolutely legendary.
For general articles about Muslim affairs in North America (political, social, religious, etc.)
http://www.muslimmatters.org and http://www.virtualmosque.com
For thousands of videos about Islam : The Youtube channel “Digitalmimbar”
For free e-books about everything islam: http://www.kalamullah.com
For the best biography ever written on prophet Muhammad (pbuh): google “The sealed nectar pdf”
How the Qur’an was compiled (5 min): (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBxN3iwF9YE)
Modesty in Islam by Shaykha (female scholar) Muslema Purmul of the Muslim American Society:
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH09SMDJKzs)
Last but not least, a recent video that summarizes what Islam is all about by one of my favorite Ustadha (female teacher) Yasmin Mogahed from Raleigh, North Carolina:
Take back your heart : (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VUk5wddLDY) (20 min)
Thank you for the intention. May God guide us all. Ameen.
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