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Sunday Topics - May 20, 2007
Sundays Online Service - May 20, 2007 -
Sundays Online Service
Great Religions: Islam
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Opening Words
Sufi Order, North AmericaToward the One
The Perfection of Love, Harmony and Beauty,
The Only Being,
United with all the illuminated souls,
Who form the embodiment of the master,
The spirit of guidance.
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Children’s Story
traditional
Most of us know the story of the bright star that led the shepherds to the manger where Jesus was born. There was also an unusually bright star that appeared on the night Muhammad was born.
According to the story, the king and ministers of Persia—that’s Iran today—were out studying the heavens when they saw a star that was almost as bright as the sun. They looked at one another in amazement. “A great prophet has been born,” they told each other. The star shone over the city of Mecca (in what is now Saudi Arabia) at the very hour of Muhammad’s birth.
At the same time, the mountains began to dance and sing: “There is no god but God!”
“And Muhammad is his prophet!” the trees whispered.
All the birds flew to Mecca to sing their praises, and all the fish in the sea raised their heads above the water and shouted: “The time has come! The world has a new leader!”
Even the great fish Tamoosa, king of all creatures that swim, was very happy. Tamoosa had seven hundred thousand tails, and his back was so enormous that seven hundred thousand cattle with golden horns could run around on it. When Muhammad was born, Tamoosa began to splash the sea with all seven hundred thousand tails. If God had not quieted him down, he would have overturned the earth in his great joy.
That is what the legends say about the night Muhammad was born.
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Reading
by Akbar S. Ahmed
Islam’s appeal lay—and lies—in its simplicity: one God, one Book, one Prophet. It was a tidy, uncomplicated religion with clearly defined ritual. But the simplicity was deceptive. Layers of profundity covered it. As a boy, I thought the five daily prayers were meant to instill discipline—the regular washing and waking at early hours in preparation for prayers and the bowing and bending during them. Later, in manhood, I gradually perceived the deeper significance of the prayers. They were a constant reminder of the transient, passing nature of the world. And, related to this, a constant declaration of the permanence of God. Muslim prayers can create sublimity around the believer, peace within.
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Sermon
“Great Religions: Islam”
by the Rev. Kenneth Phifer
Islam is a religion rooted in the assertion that God—Allah, in Arabic—is one. The name, Islam, is an Arabic word meaning surrender and peace. To a Muslim, surrendering to the will of God is peace. Knowledge of how to achieve this, and of why it is significant, comes through God’s revelation, given to a succession of messengers (or prophets). The first of these was Adam and the last Muhammad. One of the most important was Abraham, father of the two predecessor religions of Islam, Judaism and Christianity.
In the first of these, through the prophet/messenger Moses, God revealed the Law. In the second, through the prophet/messenger Jesus, God revealed the Way. In Islam, through the prophet/messenger Mohammed, God revealed the unity of the Law and the Way. Judaism, through the Law, teaches humanity the fear of God. Christianity, through the Gospel, teaches humanity the love of God. Islam, in the unity of Law and Way found in the Koran, teaches humanity the knowledge of God. Islam synthesizes previous revelations of God and brings to a close the Prophetic Cycle.
An ancient legend tells us more of the Islamic notion of the relation of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Sarah, the wife of Abraham, was jealous of Hagar, her maid, for bearing Abraham a son before she herself had been able to do so, even though it had been at Sarah’s instigation that Hagar had become pregnant by Abraham. In time, Sarah insisted that Abraham send Hagar and her son Ishmael away and give the considerable inheritance due the first born son in the family to her son by Abraham, Isaac. Far out into the desert Hagar and Ishmael wandered, weary, discouraged, and maddeningly thirsty. Furious at the loss of his rightful place in the Abrahamic family, Ishmael kicked the sand in anger. Immediately, water shot into the air.
When Abraham heard of this miracle, he came and built a temple there. He placed within the temple the black stone, the Kaaba, which he had inherited from his forefathers back to Adam, who had brought it with him out of Eden. Thus was Mecca founded, and the tradition of the well of Ishmael and the sacred black stone as part of the meaning of Mecca begun. It was in Mecca that the Prophet Muhammad was born about the year 570 CE.
At the time of Muhammad’s birth, Mecca was a major trading center for the desert caravans that roamed the Arabian penninsula. It was also a place where the polytheistic nature worship of the Bedouin tribes mingled with the strict monotheism of Judaism and the evangelizing trinitarianism of Christianity. Muhammad was an illiterate shepherd and camel-driver who was deeply sensitive to the richness of Jewish and Christian belief because those faiths had a revelation and a book, while his people did not. His marriage to Kadijah, a wealthy widow 15 years his senior, gave him time to think about these things.
One day as he sat in a cave on a hillside just outside the city, dreaming, he heard a voice which said to him,
Recite in the name of your Lord who created—created humanity from clots of blood. Recite: Your Lord is the Most Bounteous One, who by the pen teaches humanity what it did not know.
Sura 96 (Quran)
As other revelations came to him, Muhammad began to go about the city preaching. He taught that God is one and that judgment day was coming and that the horrors of hell awaited non-believers. The keepers of the pagan temple in Mecca found him a nuisance and drove him and his followers from the city. Although his journey to Medina in 622 CE was at the invitation of citizens of that town, it was called a “flight,” or hejira. The Islamic lunar calendar is dated from the year of the Hejira.
Muhammad and his adherents soon gained political power in their new home. Within eight years, they had sufficient military power to go back and take over Mecca as well. Two years later, Muhammad was dead. The polity he had established, blending religion and politics in a unified whole, did not die with him, but grew stronger in succeeding decades. The bond of blood and tribal loyalty was replaced by a wider bond of human fellowship and faith among Muhammad’s people. Islam utterly transformed the life of the Arabs. In less than a century, its theocratic ways had embraced not only all of Arabia, but northern Africa and western Asia as well. Military prowess, the confidence of belief, and a rich culture enabled early Muslims to build this empire.
After the death of the Prophet, the central problem facing Islam was succession—not to his role as Prophet, since he was, and is, regarded as the last prophet—but to all the other offices he had held and functions he had performed: religious leader, chief judge, commander of the army, civil head of state, and lawgiver. Two points of view were put forward. One argued that the successor must be one of the family. As such, he would have spiritual power and esoteric knowledge to correctly understand and interpret the Prophet’s revelation. The other view was that the successor should be chosen by consensus, and that he would have political but not spiritual power.
At first, four caliphs, or successors, were chosen by the latter method: Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s scribe, followed by Umar and Uthman, and then Muhammad’s cousin, Ali, were and are all accepted as legitimate caliphs by the Sunni Muslims who comprise some 80-85% of the world’s Islamic population. Shi’ite Muslims accept only Ali and certain later leaders as legitimate successors to the Prophet. After Ali’s death by poison at the close of the fourth decade of the Islamic era (661 CE), the Umayyad Caliphate was established, and with it the principle of dynastic succession. There were to be several great caliphate dynasties over the coming years, but never again a caliph whom all acknowledged as leader of Islam and proper successor to the Prophet Muhammad.
The split between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims is the most prominent difference among Islamic believers, but not the only one of importance. Regional variations in the practice of Islam, for example, are quite diverse. One observer noted that Islam does not look like the same religion in Morocco and Indonesia. There are also special attitudes and practices within Islam that are removed from the ways of the mainstream. The Sufis, including the Whirling Dervishes of Turkey, are examples of this.
Sufis are a small but influential group of mystics who have had a significant impact on the development of Islam. Sufism began in the days of Muslim conquest. The name derives from the rough wool clothing, or suf, which they wore in protest against the ostentatious style adopted by the Islamic Empire. Sufis have been artists, poets, and assimilators of valuable traditions from other faiths. It is their conviction that direct personal experience of God is possible, a conviction they regard as being not a contradiction of more orthodox Muslim understanding, but a complement to it.
The faith of all Muslims centers on the Quran, the revelation of God to humanity through the Prophet Muhammad. The Prophet received the revelation and then spoke it to others, who either memorized it or wrote it down. On his death, his successor Abu Bakr began the process of compiling these sayings. It was completed within 19 years. An authorized copy of the Quran was prepared “from scraps of parchment and leather, tablets of stone, ribs of palm branches, camels’ shoulder blades and ribs, pieces of board,” and the memories of the followers of Muhammad. All other versions were destroyed.
The contents of the Quran have been meticulously counted. There are 323,621 letters, 77,934 words, and 6,239 verses, divided into 114 suras, or chapters. The first sura is the Fatihah, “the Quran in Brief.” The remainder is organized according to length of contents, with the longest first and the shortest last. Each sura is identified as having been revealed either at Mecca (the shorter and more spiritual chapters) or at Medina (the longer and more practical ones). Each sura has a title, such as The Opening, The Cow, The Family of Imran, Women, and The Table Spread, to name the first five.
Since Arabic was the language in which God gave the revelation to Muhammad, it is the only language in which one can truly read the Quran. Translations, however faithful to the original, are regarded as, at best, discussions of the meaning of the Quran. Furthermore, the Quran is meant to be heard out loud in its original language. The word Quran means “recitation” or “discourse.” The arrangement of the verses within a given sura is not by the meaning of the passage or by grammatical rules so much as it is by the rhythm of the Arabic tongue.
George Foot Moore once did an “imitative translation of a sura” to give an English speaker some sense of how the Islamic Scripture might be heard in the language in which it was transmitted. This is an imitative translation of Sura 93:
By the bright day
And the night without ray,
Thy Lord forsakes not nor casts thee away,
The hereafter the present will more than repay;
Thy Lord will give, nor say thee nay,
Found he thee not an orphan and became thy stay,
Found thee wandering and set thee on the way,
Found thee poor and did thy wants allay?
Therefore the orphan do not thou gainsay,
Nor the beggar drive away;
But the goodness of thy Lord display.
The Quran is more than just a book of religious teaching for the faithful Muslim. It is the revelation of God, the very words of God. As “the mother of all books,” the Quran contains, in essence, all the knowledge there is.
In the first several centuries of Islamic history, the Sharia, or “Divine Law,” was developed. Its two primary sources were the Quran and the hadith, the authoritative sayings of Muhammad. Sharia is a more explicit statement of the way to be a good Muslim. While so-called priestly or ritualistic functions can be performed by any Muslim, judgments about Sharia are restricted to highly educated and qualified scholars called ulamas. Their training is in law as much as theology, because in the Muslim understanding (and sometimes in practice), theology and law—church and state—are unified.
There are differences of approach to Sharia among Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims, and within both groups there are various methods of interpretation. But for all Muslim believers, Sharia is ultimately determinative, being an extension and clarification of the Quran. As Seyyed Hussein Nasr has noted, “Islam is not, technically speaking, a theocracy, but a nomocracy; that is, a society ruled by Divine Law.” It is also a patriarchal nomocracy, with a sharp and clear distinction between the role of each sex. Only men function in society and in their families as the symbolic voice of God’s authority in this world.
Few can be trained in the Law, but anyone can live as a Muslim by observing the “Five Pillars of Islam.” Kadi Wajdi Tabari has called these “the identity of a Muslim.” These Five Pillars are:
Kalima: the recitation of the Shihada (statement of faith): “There is no God but God and Muhammad is his Prophet;”
Salaat (prayer): five times daily, recited while facing Mecca, at sunrise, noon, afternoon, sunset, and night;
Sawm (fasting): required of a Muslim from before sunrise to sunset during the 12th lunar month, Ramadan; no food, no drink, no intercourse, no anger, no bad words or deeds;
Zakat (almsgiving): the 2% “tax,” or loan to God, on your yearly income to provide for the poor;
Hajj (pilgrimage): to Mecca, at least once in a lifetime if possible, because Mecca is the center of the Muslim world; the annual gathering during Ramadan is the holiest expression of Islamic community.
The practice of the Five Pillars of Islam identifies one as a Muslim.
Full acceptance as a Muslim is accorded by God to those who also adhere to the Six Columns of Faith. One must believe in:
The oneness of God;
All the prophets of God, from Adam to Muhammad;
The four holy books of God: the Torah, the Gospel, the Psalms of David, and the Quran;
Destiny;
Angels; and
The Day of Judgment.
Muslims believe that we each have the free will not to sin and that we will be held accountable for our misdeeds as well as rewarded for our good behavior. Heaven and hell are vivid concepts in Islam, though whether the torments envisioned for the non-believers will be eternal is not something on which Muslim writers agree.
Jihad is also an important concept in Islamic thinking. Jihad means a “fight for the way of God.” Often, this has meant war against non-believers. But the more spiritual meaning points to the internal struggle of every human being to control and conquer the wickedness and weakness within. In this sense, it is not unlike the message of the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita, which also frames the inner spiritual struggle in the language of the battlefield.
Jihad means opposition to disruption and chaos and disorder and injustice, not only in the larger society, but within oneself as well. Muslims are therefore enjoined to be charitable, caring for the orphan and being faithful to covenants made. Kindness to animals is a high virtue, for they too are creatures of God. Muslims are to avoid alcohol and other drugs (“the mother of all evil”) and adultery (“which God abhors”). This is a jihad that each good Muslim is supposed to carry on throughout life.
Islam is a very popular religion, second only to Christianity in world-wide appeal. There are at least two reasons for this. The first is that the requirements for the believer are simple: follow the Five Pillars of Islam. A Muslim needs nothing more than the will to worship God to do so. There are no intermediaries and there is no necessity to go to a mosque (although it is recommended that the faithful gather together for the Friday noon salaat). God is everywhere, and will always hear the sincere prayer of a believer who recites the holy words of the Quran while facing Mecca.
A second factor in Muslim strength is what Islam offers to the poor and the downtrodden, the hopeless and the despairing. Islam teaches and practices the message that anyone, even the most wretched of the earth, is fully acceptable within Islam, just by believing. There are no castes or racial elites to disturb the equality of each human being before God. As the American black leader, Malcolm X, wrote in wonder of his experience in Mecca, “We were truly all the same.”
As we seek to understand and evaluate Islam across the enormous gap between our culture and theirs, we might do well to keep in mind the three essential qualities of the Sufi spiritual path. The first of these is humility, which is neither meekness nor a despising of intelligence, but a recognition of our own limitations in the context of the vastness that is the universe.
The second is charity, not in the materialistic sense of giving hand-outs to the poor and the needy, but as an attitude that lives within us and directs us to reach out to care for others.
And truthfulness, which enables us to see things as they are, and not as we sometimes falsely make them out to be in order to avoid discomfort; truthfulness which enables us to appreciate the interdependence, the diversity, and the value of life.
These qualities are called the “heart” of the message of Islam.
May each of us grow in humility and charity and truthfulness that the world might truly draw closer to a time of harmony and happiness for all.
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Meditation
Sura 1: The Fatihah,
from The Quran
(as well-known to Muslims as the Lord’s Prayer is to Christians)
Bismillah, ar-Rahman, ar-Rahim:
In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful:
Praise be to God, the Lord of the Universe,
The compassionate, the merciful,
Sovereign of the Day of Judgment!
You alone we worship, and to You alone we turn for help.
Guide us to the straight path,
The path of those whom You have favored,
Not of those who have incurred Your wrath,
Nor of those who have gone astray.
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Closing Words
anonymous
“From you I receive,
To you I give,
Together we share,
And from this we live.”
-Sufi chant
Let us receive our gifts in love,
Let us give with courage and caring,
Let us live in peace.
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Questions for Discussion
How do you respond to Islam?
Which of the three qualities of the Sufi spiritual path are you most drawn to, and why?
What are some of the differences between Islam and your own beliefs?
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