|
Submitting yourself to God does not bring redemption from sin in quite the Christian sense. While God is ultimately the source of everything—and Muslim and non-Muslim thinkers alike differ with regard to the role and extent of predestination in Islam—he has created man as a responsible creature who invites evil on himself and his neighbours. Man’s relationship to God is not that of a son who has rebelled, but that of a servant or slave who has lapsed via weakness, forgetfulness, or lack of resolve. God’s self-disclosure through the Qur’an isn’t a way to understand the nature of God but of his will or law, with the guidelines that humans obey the revealed precepts. Submission is necessary not only to win God’s favour but also to promote the welfare of humans as the pinnacle of creation, to assist them in gaining personal and social health consistent with the natural goodness God has bestowed upon them. God’s provision for this blessing comes not via his introduction of himself into history in even the Jewish manner, let alone the Christian one; for although the Qur’an does have narrative parts, the center of Islam is not in story form or a discussion or a mystery, but is rather the communication of God’s expectations for man. Unlike Christianity and Judaism, which experience God through salvation history and the hard pedagogy of earthly experience, Islam emphasizes the Creator who is known via his messengers, teachers of correct belief and conduct. It’s a religion of prophets, a prophetic faith above all, that term being used here in reference to one who warns or proclaims, not in the sense of one who predicts the future. As such, Islam does not have a separate Sabbath day, though Friday—the day when public prayers are held and a sermon given—has evolved into something of a separate day for Muslims who can to treat it accordingly. Prayers are uttered 5 times daily, requiring brief interruptions of the person’s activities, after which he or she returns to it. In areas dominated by Muslims, you’ll notice people praying almost anywhere: the janitor in the school, the taxi driver beside his vehicle, the chef in his kitchen. Though salvation is ultimately a GIFT from God, an act of grace rather than a product of good works, the unrighteous shouldn’t expect it, while the righteous might reasonably hope for it. The similarity to Christianity is obvious, and indeed Muhammad didn’t consider himself as an innovator, but rather as a person given the job to recover the original Abrahamic monotheism, to get rid of not only rank paganism, but also with the overlay of Jewish and Christian corruptions which had obscured true religion. Innovation in religion is thought to be a grave sin in Islam. Regardless of how much his detractors might think he himself had muddied the waters, Muhammad appears to have regarded himself as a simplifier; and although Islam has since developed its own diverse strains of thought and its own yammering, clashing sects, an unyielding allegiance to its own clear-cut monotheism and its sense of its own archetypal authenticity remains constant within Islam. Notwithstanding the efforts of those with more modern thoughts—some sensitive, others less so—and a rich philosophical heritage, traditional beliefs have held up over time. Muslim modernists complain that traditional beliefs have held up all too well, in the sense that they have hardened into something dry, lifeless, and disconnected from the realities of contemporary life. The ordinary Muslim is unlikely to think along those lines than to adapt to the needs of the day as he deems appropriate, while seldom, if ever consciously questioning or repudiating tradition. Today’s politicized radical Islam has been conditioned by both modernists and archaists, the former with their demands for rationality and expedience while the latter find their norms in a mythical, righteous, ultra-orthodox past. By blending futurism and archaism, political Islam identifies itself as a revolutionary change like many others -- Nazism and Soviet Communism for instance. The http://www.ulcseminary.org provides courses in a variety of subjects through its http://www.onlineseminary.org, including Christian, Pagan, and Spiritual topics.
Related Articles -
islam, religion, spiritual development, prayer, christianity, christian, advice,
|
