MEANING
Islam is an Arabic word that literally means submission, surrender and obedience. It is an active, conscious, ongoing and continuous process of willfully submitting ones own will, surrendering ones own wishes and desires which results in dutiful obedience throughout ones life.
WHO
The object of this submission, surrendering and obedience is the Creator of the Universe. At this point of our discussion, whatever name you call or language you use pertaining to this creator is immaterial. What is important is that you believe that you were created and you just didn’t come from nothing or evolved from some molecule or single cell organisms. The Being you believe that created you – that is the object of this submission and obedience. Muslims believe that that Creator has a name that He Himself revealed – His name is Allah.
Further, this Creator is unique in His qualities one of which is that He is transcendent. He is above and beyond His creation. He is neither enclosed by the creation nor is any part of the creation above Him in any way. He is not a part of the created world nor is it a part of Him. His Being is totally distinct and separate from His creation. He is the Creator and the universe and its contents are all a part of His creation. Therefore whatever is found in the universe is not God. Since man’s cognition is limited by his experience in the universe, whatever he can think of and imagine in any shape or form could not possibly be God. However, God doesn’t have to be in the creation in order to affect them. He hears and sees and has power over everything without the need of being in the creation.
In essence this belief about the Creator is mentioned in the Qur’an,
“…There is nothing like Him, and He is the hearer and seer of all.” (Qur’an 42:11)
WHAT
The next logical question is what’s that submission entails and what is required from our obedience. In Islam, it is believed that only the Creator alone should be worshipped and that nothing from His creation is worshipped. In other words the Will of this Creator, the action that He requires from His creation is to offer their worship to Him alone. In Islam, this worship is the very purpose of creation.
“I did not create the jinn and mankind except to worship me” (Qur’an 51:56)
There should be no intermediaries between the Creator and the creation in terms of worship. The Arabic word for the one that is worshipped is called Ilah or translated as god.
Worship in Islam is not confined to prayers, supplications, fasting or pilgrimage but every deed that is done to please God is essentially worship. It can be expressed as calling to Him in times of needs. It also includes emotions like love, trust and fear, all of which have degrees which should only be directed to the Creator. Therefore supplicating to Prophets, dead saints, ancestors and asking their help is considered worship of them. Consequently, if the very purpose of creation is to worship the Creator, then the greatest sin is to worship the creation in lieu of the Creator.
HALF OF FAITH
If you can believe that the One who created you alone deserves your worship and veneration, then, technically you are a half believer. If you can accept that no one in the creation deserves this worship and veneration then you are a partial believer. This is because if one wants to embrace Islam, one has to declare the testimony of faith, the first half of which is “I bear witness that none has the right to be worshipped except God”.
Some people may be surprised about this fundamental and simple Islamic belief. That in reality Islam calls to the pure and unadulterated worship of the Creator, untainted by the worship of the creation.
HOW
At this point, we ask the question, if we can agree on the point that we should only worship the Creator alone and not worship anything else, how are we supposed to worship Him? Since the Creator gave us brains can we then decide individually for ourselves the manners and ways of worship? The answer is no because there will be confusion as to what manner of worship should be followed and mankind would be lost and cannot possibly fulfill the very essence of their existence.
The ‘how’ of worship was made shown to us by God by sending His prophets and messengers. There are about 125000 prophets sent by God to mankind, twenty five of them were mentioned in the Qur’an. Prophets like Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus and lastly Muhammad were all sent by God and revealed to them scriptures in order to tell and remind mankind above all else that the purpose of their existence – that is they should only worship the Creator alone.
“And We certainly sent into every nation a messenger, [saying], ‘Worship Allah and avoid taghut [false objects of worship].’” (Qur’an 16:36)
The fundamental message of all the Prophets are the same. That is to worship the Creator alone. However, they manner of worshipping Him might slightly vary from one another and their Laws also varies from one another.
This concept is preserved in the following biblical passage,
I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. Exodus 20: 2-3
If a prophet, or one who foretells by dreams, appears among you and announces to you a miraculous sign or wonder, and if the sign or wonder of which he has spoken takes place, and he says, "Let us follow other gods" (gods you have not known) "and let us worship them," you must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer. The LORD your God is testing you to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul. Deuteronomy (13:1-3)
However, if Muslims are required to believe in all the Prophets like Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, does it mean that they should also be Jews, Christians and Muslims at the same time? Did God the Creator sent these prophets with different messages? Is God the author of confusion? Of course the answer is no. Then why are there different religions?
WHY
Islam maintains that the pure teachings of the prophets before Muhammad were lost and corrupted. This is due to the fact that none of the scriptures of these previous prophets remained intact in their pure form.
Since Jesus was the prophet preceding Muhammad, for the sake of brevity, we will only consider Christianity in our discussion. Most Christians believe that the New Testament is the Gospel of Jesus. Many would even say that each and every letter of the Bible is the word of God. In the first few hundreds of years after Christ there were many written accounts about Jesus and those accounts vary because they were written by people who had different views who really Christ was. If one would compare and contrast the epistles of James and Paul for example, one could say that these very early Christians had different view of Christ and consequently his message. Early Christian writings such as the Gospel of Thomas had different views of Christ which represents the view of the Agnostics and the Ebionites.
Furthermore these written accounts were copied and re-copied by hand. In due course of time, errors in copying crept in, and these errors were copied by later scribes and became part of the scriptures believed to be the Gospel of Christ.
Consequently, this variation led to different beliefs concerning the nature of Jesus. These books represented the scriptures of different forms of Christianities that exists side by side even in the same city. This difference ultimately led to discord and violence between their adherents. To preserve the unity and harmony of his empire, Emperor Constantine convene the Nicene Council in the fourth century over which the official scriptures about Christ is to be decided and the official ‘view’ of Christ should be adopted by the empire. These collections of books became the canonized gospels and this one form of Christianity recognized by the Roman Empire became the Roman Catholic Church. This is after thousands have been massacred and numerous ‘gospels’ were burnt.
To date, there is nothing that we can call the very gospel of Christ that he dictated to his disciples. Even the so called synoptic gospels were only written account of Jesus attributed to his disciples. Meaning, the gospel according to Matthew was not written by the disciple Matthew, the gospel of Mark was not written by the apostle Mark, and so on. The earliest of which was probably written at least 30 years after Christ. Those that remained fairly intact were the epistles of Paul (of course after his gospels were chosen at the Nicene Council) who didn’t see and meet Christ and had a different view of Christ’s message against the real disciples of Christ like James. It is important to note that these early accounts Jesus were written in Greek, a language that Jesus didn’t speak.
Moreover, many Christians didn’t know that these gospel-manuscripts were hand copied by scribes who were deeply influenced by cultural, theological and political disputes of their day, for almost fifteen hundred years before the invention of the printing press. Hence copying mistakes and intentional changes abound in what is now called the New Testament.
Concerning the difference of the surviving manuscripts, Dr. Bart Ehrman, one of the leading contemporary scholars of New Testament wrote in his New York Times best selling book, Misquoting Jesus – the Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, wrote in page 10,
“…These copies differs from one another in so many places that we don’t even know how many differences there are. Possibly it is easiest to put it in comparative terms: there are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament”
With such magnitude of changes and discrepancies, how sure can we get concerning the true nature of Jesus and his message? In the end, after the corruption of the message of Jesus, the worship of the Creator was changed to the worship of the creation – like Jesus, Mary, and several pious people and saints.
The purpose of explaining this is not certainly to degrade Christian’s Holy Scriptures but to explain why God has to send Prophet Muhammad and why does He has to reveal the Qur’an.
This answers the question why God sent His last Prophet Muhammad peace and blessings of Allah upon him in order to communicate to them once again the purpose of their creation and re-establish the correct belief about God and the proper way of worshipping Him. This last communication of God to mankind is called Qur’an.
“He has sent down upon you [O Muhammad], the Book in truth, confirming what was before it. And He revealed the Torah and the Gospel.” (Qur’an 3:3)
The Qur’an doesn’t only confirm the truth that is contained in the older scriptures such as the Bible but it is a criterion over it. It is the final word from God in terms of who the Creator is and what does He wants us to do in this life.
“And We have revealed to you [O Muhammad], the Book [i.e. the Qur’an] in truth, confirming that which preceded it of the Scripture and as a criterion over it.” (Qur’an 5:47)
Fourteen hundred years before Dr. Bart Ehrman wrote his best selling piece, the Qur’an declared that the Bible was written and changed by people and condemns them,
“So woe to those who write the ‘scripture’ with their own hands, then say, ‘This is from Allah,’ in order to exchange it for a small price. Woe to them for what their hands have written and woe to them for what they earn.” (Qur’an 2:79).
THE FINAL WORD
Thus Allah had to send His final prophet, Muhammad so that His final word is revealed to mankind. Prophet Muhammad restored the original belief of mankind since Adam - that the Creator should only be worshipped. The way of worshipping the Creator is according to the prophet of their time. Hence, Jesus was the way, the truth and the life and no one can come to God in his time except through him. And so does Moses, David, Solomon, they were the truth and the way in their own time.
In our present time since the dawn of Islam, our way of worshipping our Creator is the way Prophet Muhammad taught us how to worship Him.
PRESERVATION OF QUR’AN
Moreover, since no prophet will come after Prophet Muhammad and no revelation would descend from God, then this final message has to be preserved. God promised in the Qur’an that it will be preserved and He Himself will do it.
“Verily We: It is We Who have sent down the Reminder (i.e. the Quran) and surely, We will guard it (from corruption).” (Qur’an 15:9)
Indeed the Qur’an has been preserved from the beginning of Islam until now. It has been preserved both in written as well as in recited form (memory). Both types of preservation complement each other especially in the early days of Islam when the Qur’an was first compiled in its totality in the era of first Caliph Abu Bakr (d. 634 CE ), and reproduced and canonized in the time of Caliph Uthman (d. 656 CE). Copies of these original manuscripts still exist today in museums in Turkey and Tashkent Uzbekistan.
John Burton a renowned orientalist had this to say about the Qur’an:
The method of transmitting the Qur’an from one generation to the next by having the young memorise the oral tradition of their elders had mitigated somewhat from the beginning worst perils of relying solely on written records.…the text which has come down to us in the form which it was organized and approved by the Prophet…What we have today in our hands is the mus-haf (written form of Qur’an) of Muhammad. [The Collection of the Qur’aan p. 239-40. Usool at Tafseer p. 160]
Perhaps there is no other book in the world that is memorized from cover to cover except the Qur’an. Preschool kids, housewives, laborers, lawyers, doctors and indeed every Muslim in the earth right now have to have some verses or chapters of the Qur’an memorized. It is said in Muslim prayers at least five times daily and in it is recited completely during the night time prayers in the month of Ramadan. In fact one would find during the daily prayers that the Imam (leader in the congregational prayer) is corrected by people praying behind him once he makes a small mistake.
Moreover, the Qur’an is probably the only book in the world with a fully developed science of how to read and articulate it’s every letter. This science is taught religiously in many mosques in the world. If this is the case, one would wonder that if the reading and pronunciation of the Qur’an has been fully preserved then how much more of its text.
CHALLENGES
“Then do they not reflect upon the Qur’an? If it had been from [any] other than Allah, they would have found within it much contradiction.” (Qur’an 4:82)
Consequently, the criterion of the authenticity of any scripture is the absence of contradictions both internally and externally. Internal consistencies mean that there should be no contradictions between the verses of the scripture that cannot be reconciled. External consistency means that there should be no contradictions between the copies of the manuscripts of the scripture.
CONCLUSION
Therefore, dear reader, if you can accept the belief that you should only worship the One who created you, gave you life, provide for you the air you breathe and food you eat, the earth you stand upon; if you can accept the belief that none of His creation deserves to be worship including the Prophets, pious men, saints, stones or trees; If you can accept that He sent prophets continually throughout human history in order to bring back mankind to the very purpose of their existence; If you can accept that the last of these prophets was Muhammad and with him the Qur’an, the very last revelation sent to mankind; then you are actually now knocking at the door of Islam. All you have to do is declare the testimony of faith.
“Ash hadu an La ilaha Illallah wa ash hadu Muhammadan Rasoolullah”,
I bear witness that nothing deserves to be worshipped but God and Muhammad is His messenger.
Abu Khalid
