Contrary to how popular culture portrays Muslim women's rights and privileges, Islam gives women many rights, including the right to inherit, to work outside the home, and to be educated. As in all cultures and communities, these rights are often violated. This is the result of the intersection of Islam with existing cultural norms, which may reflect male-dominated societies.
In Muslim communities, women often have a strong influence in the family, the workplace, the religion and society in general. For the Greeks and the Romans, it was enough to contemplate the cosmos, the created universe, to be certain, prior to any process of mental reasoning, that God, or the gods, existed.
Not to believe in them was a sign of insanity, marking off the unbeliever from the realm of the human. This is not the Christian viewpoint, which holds rather that the existence of God can be grasped only with the help of investigation and reason, with faith coming in as an act of heavenly grace to seal this acquired knowledge. But the Christian perspective is not the Islamic perspective, which in this regard bears a greater resemblance to the classical pagan sense of things.
Islam does not suppose that faith is needed to perceive the divine presence; that presence is obvious. In Islam, God gave a law to man by means of a unilateral pact, in an act of sublime condescension. This law has nothing in common with the law of Sinai, by which Israel joined in partnership with God, nor with the law of the Spirit about which Paul speaks in the New Testament.
Any impulse to exceed those limits is discouraged. It is enough to do good and avoid evil in order to escape punishment and profit from the promised rewards of obedience. There is again some similarity here with pagan conceptions, and specifically with pagan ethics. Islamic civilization is a civilization of the good life, and it offers a certain latitude in the realm of sensory pleasure.
Asceticism is foreign to the spirit of Islam. There is a Muslim spirit of carpe diem , a this-worldly contentment that often fascinated Christians who may have seen in it a dim echo of the ancient, classical world.
There is nothing like the doctrine of original sin in Islam, or eternal damnation for the sinner. Predestination, in the Muslim understanding, is not so different from the ancient notion of fatum. Much fun has been made, wrongly, of the Muslim notion of paradise. Admittedly, it is not like the Jewish or Christian notion, which envisions an eternity participating in the life of the divine.
Ancient mythologies are replete with similar images: idealized banquets with flowing cups, beautiful virgins and young men, a climate of heavenly satiety in which all desire is fulfilled. In concordance with natural religion and with the Hellenistic substratum on which Islam was built , Muslim religious life offers more than one model of piety.
For the truly devout, two ways are open, just as in the Greco-Roman world: philosophy Arab falsafa , itself heavily impregnated with neo-Platonism and mysticism.
From this perspective, two facts about Islam that always astonished medieval Christians seem not so astonishing after all: the difficulty of converting Muslims, and the stubborn attachment to their faith of even the most superficially observant.
From the Muslim point of view, it was absurd to become a Christian, because Christianity was a religion of the past whose best parts had been included in and superseded by Islam. But that is hardly surprising, for in Islam the very categories of nature and revelation take on wholly unfamiliar aspects. I am not referring here to such things as the peculiar arrangements of the Muslim city, or Islamic family structure, or the position of women, or the particular customs and manners of Islamic people.
I have in mind a number of other, more essential qualities of the Muslim religion itself. One of them, which I have already mentioned in passing, is the characteristic Islamic denial of the stability and consistency of nature. According to Islam, the world is not governed by an unchanging natural law.
Atoms, physical properties, matter itself: these endure only for an instant, being created anew at every moment by God. Nor is there any straightforward cause-and-effect relation between events that occur in time. Although daytime usually coincides with the presence of sunlight and night with its absence, God can change things around as He likes and make the sun shine in the middle of the night.
With causality abolished, anything can happen: in place of causes, there are only sequences, one thing after another. The same applies humanly. Another, related feature is the denial of history. The Bible is a history, a narrative of a revelation that proceeds in stages. God intervenes in this narrative by means of deeds and words, the memory of which is preserved by tradition and in an inspired book that is perpetually subject to interpretation.
It does not contain a history, but stories. God intervenes only to extend His protection to His prophets and messengers, who are infallible and without sin, and to destroy their enemies.
There is no clear differentiation of past, present, and future—another dreamland. A third connected feature concerns the moral and religious habits promoted by the Islamic system. In the latter, man is responsible for conducting his affairs within the framework of a universe—natural, social, political—that operates by internally consistent rules. In Islam, by contrast, the will of God extends, as it were, to the secondary causes as well as to the primary ones, suffusing all of life.
Religious and moral obligation can thus take on an intensity and an all-encompassing sweep that, at least in Christian terms, would be regarded as trespassing any reasonable limit. These, then, are some of the elements that conduce to misunderstanding when Christians and Jews approach Islam. Such outsiders may well be struck by the religious zeal of the Muslim toward a God whom they recognize as being also their God. But this God is in fact separate and distinct, and so is the relation between Him and the believing Muslim.
Christians are accustomed to distinguish the worship of false gods—that is, idolatry—from the worship of the true God. To treat Islam suitably, it becomes necessary to forge a new concept altogether, and one that is difficult to grasp—namely, an idolatry of the God of Israel. To put it another way, Islam may be thought of as the natural religion of the revealed God. Let us now return to the present. For some Christians, however, Islam exercises an undeniable appeal.
In Europe, this appeal owes much to the work of a single scholar, Louis Massignon Of course, reading these books, one begins to sense the presence of other elements as well. Contributing to the partiality toward Islam is an underlying dissatisfaction with modernity, and with our liberal, capitalist, individualistic arrangements.
These are implicitly found wanting when contrasted with the enduring beauties of traditional Muslim culture, among which the spirit of community, the courtesy and warmth of family relations, and the shared customs and ceremonies are often singled out for approving notice. Alarmed by the ebbing of religious faith in the Christian West, and particularly in Europe, these writers cannot but admire Muslim devoutness.
They are filled with wonder at the spectacle of men who, whether alone in a desert or in the midst of a crowded European factory, stop whatever they are doing and bow down five times a day in prayer. Surely, they reason, it is better to believe in something than to believe in nothing, and since these Muslims believe in something, they must believe in the same thing we do. But this is to confuse demonstrations of faith with religious beliefs. In losing sight of the difference between the two, these writers commit other and even more dangerous confusions.
And that is only one of several willful misreadings of Islam whose cumulative effect is not only to destabilize Christian self-understanding but to disturb, fatally, the theological relation between Christians and Jews.
That would seem to be the conclusion of those who, from this perspective, weigh Judaism and Islam in the balance, with the advantage going to Islam.
But no serious Christian can seriously entertain such an idea, and the Catholic Church has historically condemned it—for good reason. Instead, these groups as well as two other peoples in possession of a scripture, namely Sabians and Zoroastrians were allowed to retain their property and to continue to reside in Muslim lands with the second-class status of dhimmi. Muslims believe the Angel Gabriel delivered the ideas in the Quran to Muhammad. There are chapters in the Quran.
The Hadith is a collection of the traditions and sayings of Muhammad, also used to frame the Muslim way of life and beliefs. According to Islamic traditions, Jihad is the struggle exerted while following God's commands at both a personal level as well as at a community level. Muslim Denominations. Sunni - The largest branch of Islam. They accept that the first four caliphs leaders are the legitimate successors to Muhammad. Wahabi - A Sunni sect comprised of members of the Tameem tribe in Saudi Arabia, following the strict orthodox teachings of Sheikh Mohamed bin Abdulawahab.
Shiite - Or Shia, the second-largest branch of Islam, believes only the caliph Ali and his descendants are the legitimate successors to Muhammad and reject the first three caliphs. Alawite - Concentrated in Syria, a sect within the Shiite community that maintains similar but different core beliefs about the divinity of Ali and the seven pillars of the faith.
They also observe some Christian and Zoroastrian holidays in addition to Islamic holidays. Kharijites - Members of the earliest sect in Islam that left the followers of Ali; their break with the Shiite was over the selection method for a new leader.
They were known for uncompromising positions on the observance of the Quran and for radical fundamentalism.
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