﴿ ما الإسلام؟ ﴾
] English – إنجليزي [
2011 - 1432
Among the
blessings and favors that God has bestowed upon humanity is that He endowed
them with an innate ability to recognize and acknowledge His existence. He
placed this awareness deep in their hearts as a natural disposition that has
not changed since human beings were first created. Furthermore, He reinforced
this natural disposition with the signs that he placed in Creation that testify
to His existence. However, since it is not possible for human beings to have a
detailed knowledge of God except through revelation from Himself, God sent His
Messengers to teach the people about their Creator Who they must worship. These
Messengers also brought with them the details of how to worship Allah, because
such details cannot be known except by way of revelation. These two
fundamentals were the most important things that the Messengers of all the
divine revelations brought with them from God. On this basis, all the divine
revelations have had the same lofty objectives, which are:
1. To affirm the
Oneness of Allah - the praised and glorified Creator – in His essence and His
attributes.
2. To affirm that
Allah alone should be worshipped and that no other being should be worshipped
along with Him or instead of Him.
3. To safeguard
human welfare and oppose corruption and evil. Thus, everything that safeguards
faith, life, reason, wealth and lineage are part of this human welfare that
religion protects. On the other hand, anything that endangers these five
universal needs is a form of corruption that religion opposes and prohibits.
4. To invite the
people to the highest level of virtue, moral values, and noble customs.
The ultimate goal
of every Divine Message has always been the same: to guide the people to Allah,
to make them aware of Him, and to have them worship Him alone. Each Divine
Message came to strengthen this meaning, and the following words were repeated
on the tongues of all the Messengers: “Worship Allah, you have no god other
than Him.” This message was conveyed to humanity by prophets and messengers
which God sent to every nation. All of these messengers came with this same
message, the message of Islam.
All the Divine
Messages came to bring the life of the people into willing submission to Allah.
For this reason, they all share the name of Islam, which means submission in
Arabic. Islam, in this sense, was the religion of all the Prophets, but why
does one see different variations of the religion of God if they all emanated
from the same source? The answer is twofold.
The first reason
is that as a result of the passage of time, and due to the fact that previous
religions were not under the Divine protection of God, they underwent much
change and variation. As a result, we see that the fundamental truths which
were brought by all messengers now differ from one religion to another, the
most apparent being the strict tenet of the belief and worship of God and God
alone.
The second reason
for this variation is that God, in His infinite Wisdom and eternal Will,
decreed that all the divine missions prior to the final message of Islam
brought by Muhammad, may the Peace and Blessings of Allah be upon him, be
limited to a specific time frame. As a result, their laws and methodologies
dealt with the specific conditions of the people whom they had been sent to
address.
Humanity has
passed through numerous periods of guidance, misguidance, integrity, and
deviation, from the most primitive age to the heights of civilization. Divine
guidance accompanied humanity through all of this, always providing the
appropriate solutions and remedies.
This was the
essence of the disparity that existed between the different religions. This
disagreement never went beyond the particulars of the Divine Law. Each
manifestation of the Law addressed the particular problems of the people it was
meant for. However, the areas of agreement were significant and many, such as
fundamentals of faith; the basic principles and objectives of the Divine Law,
such as protecting faith, life, reason, wealth, and lineage and establishing
justice in the land; and certain fundamental prohibitions, some of the most
important of these being idolatry, fornication, murder, theft, and giving false
witness. Moreover, they also agreed upon moral virtues like honesty, justice,
charity, kindness, chastity, righteousness, and mercy. These principles as well
as others are permanent and lasting; they are the essence of all the Divine
Messages and bind them all together.
But where does the
message of Muhammad fit in with the previous messages revealed by God? A brief
history of the prophets might clear this point.
The first human,
Adam, followed Islam, in that he directed worship to God alone and none else
and abided by His commandments. But through the passage of time and the
dispersal of humanity throughout the earth, people strayed from this message
and began directing worship to others instead of or along with God. Some took
to worshipping the pious who passed away amongst them, while others took to
worshipping spirits and forces of nature. It was then that God started to send
messengers to humanity steering them back to the worship of God Alone, which
accorded to their true nature, and warning them of the grave consequences of
directing any type of worship to others besides Him.
The first of these
messengers was Noah, who was sent to preach this message of Islam to his
people, after they had started to direct worship to their pious forefathers
along with God. Noah called his people to leave the worship of their idols, and
ordered them to return to the worship of God Alone. Some of them followed the
teachings of Noah, while the majority disbelieved in him. Those who followed
Noah were followers of Islam, or Muslims, while those that did not, remained in
their disbelief and were seized with a punishment for doing so.
After Noah, God
sent messengers to every nation who had strayed from the Truth, to steer them
back to it. This Truth was the same throughout time: to reject all objects of
worship and to direct all worship without exception to God and none else, the
Creator and Lord of all, and to abide by His commandments. But as we mentioned
before, because each nation differed in regards to their way of life, language,
and culture, specific messengers were sent to specific nations for a specific
time period.
God sent
messengers to all nations, and to the Kingdom of Babylon He sent Abraham – one
of the earliest and greatest prophets – who called his people to reject the
worship of the idols to which they were devoted. He called them to Islam, but
they rejected him and even tried to kill him. God put Abraham through many
tests, and he proved true to all of them. For his many sacrifices, God proclaimed
that he would raise amongst his progeny a great nation and choose prophets from
amongst them. Whenever people from his progeny started to stray away from the
Truth, which was to worship none but God alone and to obey His commandments,
God sent them another messenger steering them back to it.
Consequently, we
see that many prophets were sent amongst the progeny of Abraham, such as his
two sons Isaac and Ishmael, along with Jacob (Israel), Joseph, David, Solomon,
Moses, and of course, Jesus, to mention a few, may the Peace and Blessings of
God be upon them all. Each prophet was sent to the Children of Israel (the
Jews) when they went astray from the true religion of God, and it became
obligatory upon them to follow the messenger which was sent to them and obey
their commandments. All of the messengers came with the same message, to reject
worship of all other beings except God Alone and to obey His commandments. Some
disbelieved in the prophets, while others believed. Those that believed were
followers of Islam, or Muslims.
From amongst the
messengers was Muhammad, from the progeny of Ishmael, the son of Abraham, may
the Peace and Blessings of God be upon him, who was sent as a messenger in
succession to Jesus. Muhammad (pbuh) preached the same message of Islam as the
previous prophets and messengers – to direct all worship to God Alone and none
else and to obey His commandments – in which the followers of the previous
prophets went astray.
So as we see, the
Prophet Muhammad was not the founder of a new religion, as many people
mistakenly think, but he was sent as the Final Prophet of Islam. By revealing
His final message to Muhammad, which is an eternal and universal message for
all of mankind, God finally fulfilled the covenant that He made with Abraham.
Just as it was
incumbent upon the those who were alive to follow the message of the last of
the succession of Prophets which was sent to them, it becomes incumbent upon
all of humanity to follow the message of Muhammad (pbuh). God promised that
this message would remain unchanged and fit for all times and places. Suffice
it to say that the way of Islam is the same as the way of the prophet Abraham,
because both the Bible and the Quran portray Abraham as a towering example of
someone who submitted himself completely to God and directed worship to Him
alone and none else, and without any intermediaries. Once this is realized, it
should be clear that Islam has the most continuous and universal message of any
religion, because all prophets and messengers were “Muslims”, i.e. those who
submitted to God’s will, and they preached “Islam”, i.e. submission to the will
of Almighty God by worshipping Him Alone and obeying His commandments.
So we see that
those who call themselves Muslims today do not follow a new religion; rather
they follow the religion and message of all prophets and messengers which were
sent to humanity by God’s command, also known as Islam. The word “Islam” is an
Arabic word which literally means “submission to God”, and Muslims are those
who willfully submit to and actively obey God, living in accordance with His
message.