The founder of Islam, Muhammad, saw himself as the last in a line of prophets that reached back through Jesus to Moses, beyond him to Abraham and as far back as Noah. According to the Quran, God known as Allah revealed to Muhammad:.
Thus, since Muhammad inherited the Jewish and Christian understandings of God, it is not surprising that the God of Muhammad, Jesus and Moses has a similarly complex and ambivalent character — a blend of benevolence and compassion, combined with wrath and anger. If you were obedient to his commands, he could be all sweetness and light.
To those who turned to him in repentance, this God was above all else merciful and all-forgiving. But those who failed to find the path or, having found it failed to follow it, would know his judgment and wrath. The God of the Old Testament was both good and evil.
He went way beyond the good when he told Abraham to offer his son to God as a burnt sacrifice. He was a warrior God who murdered the firstborn of Egypt and drowned the army of Pharaoh. Yet he was also a compassionate and loving God, one who in the well-known words of Psalm 23 in the Book of Psalms was a shepherd whose goodness and mercy supported his followers all the days of their lives.
He loved Israel like a father loves his son. Christianity developed out of the monotheistic tradition of Judaism; Jesus, its founder, was a member of the Jewish community in Roman Palestine. Its holy scriptures are the Old Testament the Jewish Torah with additions , and the New Testament written by the followers of Jesus after his death and containing the life story of Jesus and other early Christian writings. Jesus is considered the son of God, born to the virgin Mary and come to Earth to offer redemption for mankind's sins.
After Jesus was crucified and executed by the Romans, he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. This event is celebrated at Easter, while the birth of Jesus is celebrated at Christmas. Christians believe in an afterlife where those who have lived a good life will reside in heaven with God, and those who have lived an unrepentant life of sin will be punished in hell.
Although Christianity developed out of Judaic texts, Christians do not follow Jewish law. Instead, they believe that the ritualistic Jewish law was abrogated in favor of a universal gospel for all of humanity and the Christian teaching, "Love thy neighbor as thyself. Relationships between Jewish and Christian communities have often been difficult, particularly in Christian Europe. There, Jewish communities were often subject to discrimination and violence at the hands of Christians.
Christianity has also had a problematic relationship with Islam. Christians do not accept Muhammad as a prophet. While many Christians in the Middle East converted to Islam during and after the seventh century, the Church hierarchy in Rome and Constantinople considered Islam to be both a political and theological threat.
The Crusades were an unsuccessful attempt to reverse the Islamic conquest of the eastern Mediterranean and the holy places of all three monotheistic religions. Islam arose in the early seventh century C.
It developed from both the Judeo-Christian tradition and the cultural values of the nomadic Bedouin tribes of Arabia. Islam expanded into areas controlled by the Byzantine Empire largely Greek-speaking and Orthodox Christian, but with a diverse population and the Sassanian Empire officially Zoroastrian and Persian-speaking, but also diverse.
As Islam expanded, the new Islamic societies adapted and synthesized many of the customs they encountered. As a result, Muslims in different areas of the world created for themselves a wide array of cultural traditions.
The culture of Islamic Spain, for example, was so cosmopolitan that some Christian and Jewish parents complained that their children were more interested in developing their knowledge of Arabic than in learning Latin or Hebrew, respectively. Many elements of Islamic society became integral parts of medieval and Renaissance European culture, like the notion of chivalry, and certain forms of music the lute, the arabesque and poetry.
On the eastern end of the Islamic world, many Indonesians converted to Islam between the 15th and 17th centuries.
Preexisting animist beliefs were often incorporated into the local practice of Islam. Within Islam, there are many different communities. Adherents of Islam may be more or less observant, conservative or liberal. Sufism is the mystical tradition of Islam, where direct experience of the divine is emphasized. The 13th-century poet Jalaluddin Rumi is a well-known Sufi figure whose work has become popular in the United States today.
Whirling dervishes are dancers who are entranced in their experience of Sufism. Muslims believe that Allah the Arabic word for God sent his revelation, the Quran , to the prophet Muhammad in the seventh century C. The Quran contains verses surahs in Arabic that tell Muslims to worship one god, and explains how they should treat others properly. Another historical text, the Hadith, written by scholars after the death of Muhammad, describes Muhammad's life as an example of pious behavior, proscribes law for the community based on the Quran and the example of Muhammad, and explains how certain rituals should be performed.
Observant Muslims practice five principles pillars of Islam: orally declaring their faith shahadah ; praying five times a day salat ; fasting in the daylight hours during the month of Ramadan sawm ; giving a share of their income for charity zakat ; and making a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lifetime if they can afford it hajj.
A lunar cycle follows the phases of the moon, which means that the celebrations happen at a different time every year. Some Christian feast days are also influenced by the lunar calendar. These celebrations recall events in the dramatic history of the Jewish people. These celebrations honor the events in the life of Jesus Christ.
Jesus is an important prophet in both Christianity and Islam, and both religions believe that he is the Messiah.
Ramadan is considered a holy month of fasting and is commanded in the Quran. Muslims abstain from eating or drinking from sunrise to sunset during that month. They also focus on forgiveness and special prayers. The feast day that ends Ramadan is called Eid al-Fitr. The ritual journey, or pilgrimage, to Mecca called the Hajj and Eid al-Adha both commemorate events in the life of Abraham and his family. Fasting — going without food or certain kinds of foods — for a period of time is a common form of worship in the Abrahamic tradition.
Fasts are often related to holy days in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Each of the Abrahamic religions has days of fasting, in which people deny themselves the ordinary necessities of life for a time of remembrance — and feast days of thankfulness.
Sharing food and other gifts with family, neighbors, and needy people are common ways to celebrate these days. People also attend special services of worship as part of these celebrations. Belief in the need to worship God is common to all religions. The most basic form of worship is prayer. Each tradition prescribes specific words and requirements for prayer, which takes place at appointed times of day.
Public prayer in houses of worship is common to all three faiths: for Jews on Saturday, for Christians on Sunday, and for Muslims on Friday, and during celebrations throughout the year. What is interesting, however, is that each of the two faiths has significant internal divisions on matters of political theology. Could you say a bit about that? The everlasting and indeed ever-revealing countenance of the divine mentioned in the Quran , for example is glossed in the tradition as the person of the Imam.
The Imam is not the defender of the Law; he is the Law — he is not the exegete of scripture, he is revelation itself. Through the person of the Imam, the transcendent divine, the origin and the true King, is manifest; and believers follow the path to salvation through their devotion and obedience to the Imam. In this sense, Shia is a normative political theology, concerned with the relation of political authority and salvation.
The comparison with Christ Pantocrator and the person of the emperor in Eastern Orthodox Christianity is rather striking. Shia political theology speaks of a messianic 12th Imam who will come as a redeemer and avenger in the last days, though this theme is routinized and deferred. Sunni traditions tend to be more pragmatic about politics, even though there is a rather atavistic nostalgia about the caliphate as a paradigmatic institution of early Islam, a nostalgia for a golden age that never was.
It has always been the normativity of the community and its consensus that is binding which lead to a greater stress on conformity of practice but also leaves space for condemnation of views outside of the consensus as heresy. But what is essential to remember is that each theological strand and community within Islam claims the true and proper interpretation and practice of the faith for themselves. While there are theological accounts that back the discourses of condemnation in the modern world, the impetus often comes from the scramble for political and economic resources.
The basic stability of Europe in opposition to what is happening in Syria and Iraq is the differentiating factor — and even then in times of crisis, as we saw in the former Yugoslavia in the s, sectarian entrepreneurs could be relied upon to manipulate emotions for political gain. There is, of course, the sense that religious feelings even within faiths are strongly held — and this is clear even in Europe and North America.
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