- The Columbia Encyclopedia
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Islam (Is'lum, Iz'-, Islam') [ Arabic,=submission to, or having
peace with, God], the religion of which MOHAMMED was the prophet.
An adherent of Islam is called a Moslem or Muslim [Arabic, one
who submits]. It was the latest to appear of the three great
monotheistic religions (the others being Judaism and Christianity).
Islam is the principal religion of much of Asia (including part
of the Philippines): Kansuand Shensi provs. of China, Pakistan,
Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan and the Arabian states,
and Turkey, as well as much of the USSR in Asia. In Africa, Islam
has been the only highly successful missionary faith. It is the
religion prevailing in Egypt and the rest of the northern part
except Ethiopia; it is also well established in central Africa
and along the east coast. In Europe, outside of Russia, where
Islam was the religion of the Crimea and of much of the lower
Volga, the Moslems managed to establish themselves as a majority
in Turkey and Albania (15th cent.) and in the old state of Bosnia
(15th cent.). The Americas are the only continents in which Islam
has practically no adherents. [This Encyclopedia was published
in 1959 and the numbers have changed considerably. Muslims have
been brought to the US and Europe by the millions]
Islams most serious loss was suffered in Spain. The salient
feature of Islam is its devotion to a book, the Koran, believed
to be the revelation of God to Mohammed; this has made Arabic
the language of Islam all over the world; hence the common custom
of referring to God in Islam as Allah, his name in Arabic. According
to Moslem teaching, God has given men successive revelation through
his prophets. Man constantly falls away from these prophets and
the merciful God sends new ones; Mohammed is the last, and when
the world falls away from Islam the end of the world will come.
The two principal early prophets are Abraham and Jesus. According
Moslem teaching, Abraham was the Father of the Faithful, the
first Moslem; Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, did great miracles,
and was not crucified, but was instead taken away by God,
who left a shadow in his place (a common view among Gnostics
and others), and Jesus will return at the end of the world to
fight Antichrist as the Mahdi.
Wherever the Koran differs from the Old and New Testament,
it is explained that the Jews and the Christians have corrupted
or perverted the biblical test. The close relationship acknowledged
between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam has had for its chief
effect that Jews and Christians have been treated with special
toleration in principle in Moslem countries. It is commonly thought
that Mohammed's ideas about Judaism and Christianity were derived
not from reading but from converse with contemporary Arabian
Jews and Christians, who held their religions in a considerably
corrupted form.
The Mohammedan eschatology has affected Moslems much more
than the orthodox account of history. In the course of time a
rather elaborate account has grown up of what will happen at
the last things; but the final rewards have remained constant
- there will be a judgment, and heaven awaits the faithful and
hell the infidels. The ethos of Islam is its attitude toward
God; to his will Moslems submit; him they constantly praise and
glorify; and in him alone they hope. He is awful, transcendent,
almighty, just, loving, merciful, and good. No creature may be
compared to him, and to him alone do Moslems pray. Moslems ask
intercession of the prophets and the saints, but they (the Shiites
perhaps excepted) preserve jealously the distinction between
Creator and creature. They seldom ask God for favors, limiting
their prayer to thanksgiving and adoration. The pious Moslem
does not distinguish faith from works: both are indispensable
and mutually supplementary. There are five duties in Islam, the
marks and the sine qua non of devotion.
1) Once in his life the believer must say with full understanding
and absolute acceptance, "There is no god but God and Mohammed
is his prophet."
2) Five times daily he must pray - at dawn, at noon, in mid
afternoon, at dusk and after it has become dark; the prayers
are set and are accompanied by traditional postures and preceded
by ablutions; when he prays the Moslem covers his head, removes
his shoes, and places a carpet under him; he prostrates himself
continually. On Fridays the noonday prayer takes place in the
MOSQUE, which exists for the meeting; set prayers are said, the
Koran is read, and there is a sermon. The constantly recited
prayer of Islam, used on all occasions, is Sura 1 of the Koran;
it is singularly typical of the spirit of Islam. "In the
name of God, the merciful, the compassionate. Praise be to God,
the Lord of the worlds, the merciful, the compassionate, the
ruler of the judgment day! Thee we serve and Thee we ask for
aid. Guide us in the right path of those to whom Thou art gracious;
not of those with whom Thou art wroth; nor of those who err."
When the Moslem prays, he faces Mecca, the direction of which
is calculated in every Moslem settlement with the greatest exactness
possible.
3) The Moslem must give alms generously; these are prescribed
alms (e.g., so much of cattle, and so much of grain). He is also
obliged to give some alms beyond the minimum. In places where
Islam is the state religion the prescribed alms are often collected
by the state.
4) The Moslem must keep the fast of Ramadan; the physically
weak, the sick, soldiers, and some others are exempted.
5) Once in his life the Moslem, if he can, must make the pilgrimage
(Hajj) to Mecca. This, probably the greatest pilgrimage in the
world, is made a certain time of year, in the month (see calendar)
set apart for it. The importance of the pilgrimage can hardly
be overestimated; it unites Islam as nothing else has ever done;
at Mecca the Javanese meets the Negro from Senegal and the mountaineer
of Albania, all brought together by the same holy purpose. There
is a remarkable community of feeling in Islam, even today, when
Moslems are divided politically into many groups. This unity
is a result of the Moslem apologetic system.
Islam is, of course, founded in the Koran, the divine word,
but so little of this is dogmatic or legalistic that early in
the history of Islam Moslems found the Koran inadequate as an
authority for the good life. This was especially true when Islam
was making the first rapid spread and as new people submitted
to it. Hence arose the Sunna, fundamental in Islam. The Sunna
is the way or example of the Prophet, which supplements the Koran.
The Sunna is made up of collections of Traditions (moral sayings
and anecdotes) of Mohammed, sifted and collected with unflagging
effort by men from the earliest times of Islam. These collections
are by Bukhari (d. 870), Muslim (d. 875).
Abn Dawud (d. 888), An-Nasai (d. 915). At-Tirmidi (d. 892),
and Ibn Maja (d. 886). The first two of these collections are
undoubtedly more reliable than the others if the truth is desired
about Mohammed. The last four admittedly made use of a pious
fraud based on the theory that all religious truth was implicit
in Mohammed's sayings, so that a salutary maxim might be regarded
as having been said by the Prophet.
The Sunna is almost as important to Islam as the Koran, for
in it lie all the elaborations of Koranic teaching essential
to the firm establishment of a world religion There are
serious disagreements in the Traditions, and interpretations
of the Koran and the Sunna have varied as much as to be contradictions.
This situation is resolved by reference to what has become perhaps
the most important of all the sayings attributed to Mohammed,
"My community will never agree in an error." The principle
this expresses is called Ijma, the agreement of Islam, and according
to it every Moslem knows that a belief entertained by the greater
part of Moslems in history is infallibly true, and a practice
(e.g., the cult of saints) allowed by most Moslems over a long
period must be legitimate and good.
The Koran, the Sunna, and the Ijma are thus the three foundations
of Islam. It is Ijma which has given Islam its catholicity of
view, its constant unity with its past, and its continuous flexibility.
But while Ijma has given Moslems a voice of authority, they have
been saved from internal intolerance and the evils extreme sectarianism
by constantly bearing in mind the Tradition. "The difference
of opinion in my community is a divine mercy." Moslem sectarianism
in general may be said to be virtually negligible, except for
a fundamental division of Islam into Sunnites and Shiites. The
division arose over the caliphate in the first centuries. It
is a convention to treat Sunite Islam as the norm, because of
the vast superiority of numbers of the Sunnites and the fast
recognized by all non-Shiites (whether Moslem or no) that the
Shiites have departed to an amazing degree from anything that
can be considered the original Islam.
All Moslems except Shiites regard as monstrous and blasphemous
the fundamental Shiite principles that Ali was a vicegerent of
God and that his successors are infallible and sinless. The Ijma
and the toleration of Sunnite Islam have preserved the Sunnites
from serious defections and variations; the Wahabis are the only
important modern separatist Sunnite sect. The Shiites have fathered
countless sects, some of which are partially responsible for
the bad name Islam has had in Europe; such are the Assassins,
the Druses, he Fatimites, the Ismailites, and the Karmathians.
Shiism has always lent itself in an extraordinary degree to bigotry
and persecution of non-Shiites. That the Moslem world should
have divided irreparably over the political question of the caliphate
illustrates a characteristic of Islam, the every Moslem thinks
of himself as living in a theocracy. Just as the Prophet ruled
Medina, the true ruler of the Moslem state is the caliph, and
in theory, at least, all Islam should be united under one political
and religious ruler, the caliph.
Moslem princes have usually ruled their states according to
the theocratic ideal; a corresponding phenomenon in Europe is
a close incorporation of Church and state. In the Moslem state
only Moslems are really citizens; they alone are allowed and
obliged to serve in the army; their taxes go to the support of
the religious officers, the Imam and muezzin (announcer of prayer),
as well as of the state, and their courts have religious as well
as civil jurisdiction. Non-Moslems are in theory aliens who
live under sufferance in Moslem states; they have their own
organization and often their own courts; they are not allowed
to serve in the army; and they must pay a special tax, besides
the taxes to support the bureau of their community.
In many Moslem countries this system has been broken down
completely. This is notably true of Turkey, where Ataturk made
a clean sweep of most of Moslem culture, going even so far as
to order the use of Turkish instead of Arabic in the mosque.
Among his changes was the adoption of revised foreign codes of
law (the Swiss civil code and the Italian criminal code) to replace
Moslem law. Although most Moslem countries have been long since
forced to separate in practice the religious law from the civil
law is strongly Moslem in flavor, and Moslem jurists all follow
the same general method. The religious law of Islam in theory
governs the whole life of any individual, but in reality his
relations with his neighbor are a matter of state regulation.
Any demarcation between civil and religious law is, however,
very difficult to make. The law plays a great part in Moslem
life, and in this respect Islam has developed more similarities
to Judaism than to Christianity.
The minutiae of legal prescriptions in the Koran and the Sunna,
extending not only to ceremonial and things forbidden, but also
to such matters as divorce, have often needed interpretation
when they were to be applied to cases. There are in Sunnite Islam
four different systems of interpretations of the law which may
be called the Four Rites of Moslem Law; each of them is
equally orthodox and is so regarded by all Moslems. They all
agree entirely on the bases of Islam. They disagree on interpretation,
e.g., as to whether the prohibition of wine extends to hard drinks,
or as to whether horseflesh is as unclean as pork, or as to what
postures should be used at prayer, or as to whether a man may
take four wives only. The teaching of any rite is, of course,
considered to be in accord with Ijma. The nearest analogy to
the rites is probably the liturgical rites of Christianity.
The Fiyr Rites of Moslem Law are the Hanafite founded by Abu
Hanifa, the most speculative and individual of the rites, held
in most of Moslem Asia; the Malikite, founded by Malik ibn Aras
(d. 795), followed in the western and northern parts of Africa;
the Shafiite of Ash-Shafii (d. 820), the rite of much of Egypt,
of East Africa, of S Arabia, and of the East Idies; and the Hanbalite,
founded by Ahmed ibn Hambal (d. 855), the most literalistic and
narrowest of all, now not held in any great area. In Moslem view
the study of the law is all important, but with it are grouped
dogmatic theology and mysticism as sacred studies. Philosophy
in Islam as distinct from theology knows no place. In fact, Moslem
though is a distinct unity which shows historically three major
tendencies - toward dry legalism, toward rationalism, and toward
mysticism. These have been tempered by one another and held in
check by three great faits accomplis of Islam, Koran, Sunna,
and Ijma. Typcial of the disputes of Moslem theology are those
over freedom of the will and over the creation of the Koran.
The most famous schools of religious thought were the Muazilites,
who flourished in the 10th and 11th centuries under the Abbasid
caliphate; they have the distinction of beginning the first oppression
on theological grounds in Islam, under Caliph Mamun. The Mutazilites
were in general rationalistic, and they took the stand that predestination
was dangerous to religion; from this their interests spread all
though dogma, and they became famous as believers in the "created
Koran." This dispute over the creation of the Koran has
much in common with Neoplatonic disputes over the Logos and with
Christian disputes over Arianism. By far the most important figure
in Moslem thought is Al-Ghazali (Al-Gazel), who has been called
Thomas Aquinas of Islam. He owed his fame to his acceptance of
mysticism as the key to religion after he had so long held rationalistic
principles that his rationalistic method checked any extreme
tendencies of mysticism, while his mysticism prevented any resort
to legalism.
His great Restoration of the Sciences of Religion is a compendium
of Moslem thought, the authoritative guide to what is Ijma, and
the theological work par excellence of Islam. The Moslem philosophers,
Al-Farai, Al-Kindi, Avemperroes, and Avicenna, have had less
influence on Islam than on the philosophy of Europe. (For the
great period of Moslem thought and culture was the 9th to the
11th cent.; typical of the enlightenment and culture were the
great universities - Damascus, Bagdad, Bukhara, Seville, Cordoba,
and later Cairo (now the intellectual capital of Islam). The
spread of Islam within the first century after the Hegira (622),
the official beginning of Islam, was absolutely amazing. It is
not fair to assign as the greatest cause for this the idea that
he who died fighting for the faith went to paradise, since it
is a principle of Islam that conversion by the sword is no conversion.
The simple appeal of Islam, a universal religion, seems to have
been tremendous; its definite promises and its comparatively
easy rules undoubtedly aided. The modern spread of Islam, notably
in the East Indies and Africa, has not been aided by political
advantage at all. Since late in the 19th century a movement of
Pan-Islamism has arisen to unite the now politically disunited
Islam into a spiritual unity. This has had little political success
but is potent as an ideal. [Source: The Columbia Encyclopedia,
19th printing, Columbia University Press, New York, 1959, p.979,980
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