Muhammad's message rests on Five Pillars

Terry Muck

Communitarian emphasis, other features present non-Islamic people with questions

Islam is one of the fastest-growing religions in the world in the past 50 years, with a growth so pronounced that there are more Muslims in the United States than there are Episcopalians or Presbyterians.

One of the three monotheistic religions with roots in the Middle East, like Judaism and Christianity, Islam traces its history to worship of the one God (Allah) instituted by Abraham. Muslims claim for this common history the traditional prophets and leaders of Jewish and Christian history such as Adam, Noah, Moses, Abraham and Jesus, but believe that this line of genuine prophets ends with Muhammad, a man born in Mecca, in present-day Saudi Arabia, in 570 A.D.

Muhammad is called the "seal of the prophets," the one to whom Allah revealed the last and most authoritative of his revelations, the Quran, the Muslim holy book. Muhammad began to receive the revelations that eventually made up the chapters of the Quran while wandering in the rocky hills outside Mecca. After receiving each of these audible revelations from the angel Gabriel, Muhammad would then return to the streets of Mecca and preach them to his compatriots.

His standard sermon had three points: the uniqueness of Allah; the need to care for the poor, orphaned and widowed; and the inevitability of a final judgment. After several years of reciting these revelations for the citizens of Mecca, Muhammad had only a handful of followers and was in danger of losing his life.

At this crisis point, a delegation from Medina, a town 200 miles northeast of Mecca, came to town looking for a leader. Medina was divided by rivalry between a fairly large Jewish population and an indigenous population that held to belief in tribal gods. Muhammad's message proved to be a bridge between the two. Muhammad saw himself as a legitimate prophet in the Jewish-Christian tradition; yet the name he gave to the God of Abraham and Jesus, Allah, was the name of an Arab tribal god.

After building a secure base in Medina, Muhammad began to incorporate the surrounding areas into his fiefdom, eventually incorporating all of Western Arabia, including Mecca. Many have seen Muhammad's political skills as important as his religious message.

Muhammad's message has often been summarized as five basic duties, sometimes called the Five Pillars:

* The Creed (Shahada): The basic requirement for calling oneself Muslim is to be able to say the creed with conviction of its truth: "There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger."

* Prayer (Salat): An observant Muslim prays a standardized set of prayers five times a day: at dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, dusk and evening. Friday noon is the traditional time for a communal service at the mosque, the Muslim building of worship. The prayer content is almost exclusively praise of Allah taken from various chapters of the Quran.

* Alms-giving (Zakat): Required alms-giving is a once per year "loan" to Allah of an amount of money based on one's net worth. However, Muslims are also encouraged to give regularly throughout the year to the mosque for the support of the poor in the community.

* Fasting (Sawm): During the lunar month of Ramadan, observant Muslims practice a daylight fast: no food, drink, smoking, nor sexual activity.

* Pilgrimage (Haj): Once during every Muslim's life, if he or she is physically and financially able, pilgrimage during the official three days of the Great Haj should be made to Mecca's holy sites.

The Five Pillars are the basic practices of Islam, and most of the theological thinking of Islam is readily apparent in the practices: the oneness of Allah, the praiseworthiness of Allah, the importance of the Prophet Muhammad, and the requirements of membership in both the local and the larger Islamic community.

Other key theological tenets include a belief in spiritual beings (both angels and more ambiguous spiritual beings called jinn), the centrality of the Quran and the importance of its purity in the Arabic language, a literal belief in heaven and hell, and the importance of establishing Shariah law in order to unite the secular and religious communities.

Shariah or the "Islamic Way," is the legal code of Islam and is derived from the teachings of the Quran and other Islamic religious texts. This last tenet -- the importance of Shariah law -- has shaped much of the interaction of modern Islam with the non-Islamic world. Muhammad himself was as much a political leader as he was a spiritual leader.

In the early years of Islam, from the 8th to the 19th centuries, this took the form of a number of waxing and waning dynasties. With the coming of the colonial powers -- Britain, France and the United States -- and the peace accords after World War I, this dynastic structure gave way to the nation-states of the 20th century.

Muhammad died without naming either a successor or establishing a process by which his successor should be named. As a result, two opinions developed among his followers regarding who should lead this increasingly powerful religious community. Some thought the leader should come from Muhammad's family. Others thought that the leader should be elected through a process of consultation and consensus. The second opinion carried the day, perhaps in part because Muhammad had no sons survive him.

The three leaders that directly followed Muhammad, then, were called successors or caliphs: Abu Bakr (632-634), Umar (634-644), and Uthman (644-656). The party advocating that leadership come from Muhammad's family finally succeeded in getting their candidate appointed in 656 when Uthman was assassinated and Muhammad's son-in-law Ali was named head of the Islamic community. Controversy continued, however, and eventually led to Ali and his son, Husayn, being assassinated.

The controversy represents both the historical and ongoing division between the two largest Muslim sects, the Sunni and the Shiite. Sunni Muslims, accounting for approximately 95 percent of worldwide Muslims, were the champions of the caliphate system. Although the caliphate per se no longer exists, the principle of choosing leaders through consultation and consensus was adapted to the dynastic structures that ruled Islam through the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century.

Shiite Muslims, accounting for perhaps 3 percent of the worldwide Muslim community, still advocate the descendants of Muhammad as the rightful heirs of the leadership mantle.

This modern division is largely over how the community should be led. It is not primarily a division of either belief or religious practice, except where belief and practice relate to theories of leadership and political questions. Otherwise, both Sunnis and Shiites practice the same Islam taught by Muhammad. It does account, however, for much of that division that exists in the Muslim world, especially surrounding the difficult questions of Shariah law. Both Sunnis and Shiites agree that some form of Shariah law should be established but differ widely over the means to accomplish it.

Muslims in today's world present the non-Islamic population with several difficult questions:

* Politics: Are Muslims democratic or authoritarian? Pluralistic democracies, fashioned largely after the United States model, have as one of their key characteristics the separation of church and state. This is not a congenial model for Muslim countries where the ideal is not separation of church and state but the identification of the two under a single, Muslim-dominated leadership structure. Given this difference in viewpoint, the question is whether a form of political leadership congenial to Islamic theological views and nonantagonistic to democratic ideals can be developed.

* Jihad: Why are Muslims so intense about their religion? Muslims, like Christians and Buddhists, have a powerful missionary tradition, a theological mandate to spread the influence of their religion worldwide. This practice is included in a wider mandate to fully realize the injunctions of the Quran called jihad. This missionary mandate is often indistinguishable from the political aims of Islamic governments. In practice this means some of the tools of statecraft -- political negotiation, economic leverage and military might -- have sometimes been employed in the spreading of religion.

* Religious pluralism: Traditional Islamic teaching has no place for secularism and polytheism and merely tolerates the other monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Zoroastrianism. This religious/political exclusivism is at odds with the notion of different religions enjoying equal freedoms under secular pluralistic democracies.

* Human rights: Islam has often been called a communitarian religion, not an individualistic one. This means that when it comes to balancing individual rights with community responsibilities as defined by religious teaching, the community responsibilities usually win out. This puts many Islamic moral and ethical emphases at odds with Western individualism.

On the other hand, Muslims find themselves in agreement with many features of United States culture:

* Human rights: Despite their communitarian emphases and drive to extend the sway of Quranic teaching, Muslims are not against human rights. They believe all humans are created by Allah and as such deserve respect. This is particularly true of the disadvantaged of society.

* Anti-drugs: Observant Muslims do not use any mood-altering drugs, including alcohol.

* Pro-family: Muslims have very high ethical ideals particularly where they relate to family members. One of the difficulties immigrant Muslims in the United States have, for example, is the relaxed mixing of the sexes in schools and the unchaperoned dating common to most teenagers.

* Monotheism: Thinking of God in the singular is natural to Muslims. This is a point of contact with Americans, many of whom are strongly influenced by the Judeo-Christian tradition of monotheism.

Holidays

Muslims follow the lunar calendar. As a result, Muslim holidays rotate throughout the solar calendar year. Muslims celebrate two major holidays: Eid ul-fitr is the celebration at the end of Ramadan, the month of daylight fasting. It lasts three days. Eid ul-adha is the celebration at the end of the Great Pilgrimage to Mecca. Those who do not go on the pilgrimage celebrate at home with a four-day feast. Both of these major feasts are times of joy and praise of Allah.

Dress

Perhaps no feature of modern Islam is more publicly evident than the way some Muslim women dress.

What is not required in Islam is the full-length chador and face veil. These actually have their roots in Persian culture. They are worn in some Muslim cultures, for example Saudi Arabia and Iran.

What is required in Islam are two general principles: modesty and cleanliness. For women these principles mean that covering the hair in public is required. It also means the neck to knees should be covered, thus the hemlines of dresses should fall below the knees.

Food

In Islam there are two kinds of food: halal, or allowable foods, and haram, or prohibited foods.

Haram foods fall into two categories: The first category prohibits foods based on the way they were killed. Animals killed by any means other than the single approved way of killing are not allowed, nor are animals that kill. The second category prohibits foods by what they are. The two main groups here are pork and the blood of any animal.

Allowable animals are killed by a single knife stroke across the jugular while saying a prayer. The carcass is then left upside down to be drained completely of blood. Muslim halal killing is the same as Jewish kosher killing; Muslims may buy meat from a kosher shop. All fish, fruits, vegetables, gains, and root crops are allowable.

Worship

The primary worship service is Friday noon prayers. Shoes are removed at the door of a mosque. The main room of a mosque is the prayer room. Men and women pray separately.

After a ritualized purifying washing, worshippers enter the prayer room and sit in rows facing a mark on the wall that signifies the direction they are to face while praying, toward Mecca. The service is made up of regular prayers, a series of memorized prayers done in a standing, bowing, prostrate series of body positions. Prayers will be followed by a sermon or homily on a Quranic passage. The entire service will take less than an hour.

COPYRIGHT 2001 National Catholic Reporter
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group