Submitting yourself to God does not bring redemption from sin in quite the Christian sense. While God is ultimately the source of all eventsâ€"and Muslim and non-Muslim thinkers alike differ with regard to the role and extent of predestination in Islamâ€"God has created man as a free-willed creature who invites evil on himself and his fellows. Man’s relationship to God isn’t that of a son who has rebelled, but that of a servant or slave who has lapsed due to weakness, forgetfulness, or lack of resolve. God’s self-disclosure through the Qur’an is not a way to understand the nature of God but of his will or law, with the practical intent that humans obey the rules given to them. Submission is necessary not only to please God but also to promote the welfare of humans as the pinnacle of creation, to help them achieve personal and social health consistent with the natural goodness God has given them.
Belief must issue in the 5 Pillars of Islam: confession of faith, prayer, almsgiving, fasting, and pilgrimage. Though this sounds fairly easy, each of these must be performed in a carefully prescribed manner. Beyond these externals, the Muslim is told to live a constantly God-conscious life in order to be in good standing with God above and to those around. Therefore, justice joins submission as a corner stone of Islam. Submission reflects the willingness to try to see things God’s way, while creation gives the opportunity for ethical living. This is the theory, in any case, along with a belief that theremustn’t be any compartmentalization of religious and secular aspects of life, sacred and profane.
As such, Islam doesn’t provide for a separate Sabbath day, though Fridayâ€"the day when public prayers are conducted and a sermon presentedâ€"has evolved into something of a set-apart day for Muslims who are in a position to treat it accordingly. Prayers are uttered five times daily, requiring short interruptions of whatever the individual is doing at the time, after which he or she goes back to it. In predominantly Muslim locales, you’ll notice people praying almost anywhere: the janitor in the school, the gardener in his garden, 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 need not expect it, while the righteous may reasonably hope for it.
The resemblance to Christianity is clear, 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 dispense not only with rank paganism, but also with the overlay of Jewish and Christian corruptions which had muddied the waters of the true religion. Innovation in religion is considered a grave sin in Islam. Regardless of how much his critics may 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 chattering, conflicting sects, an unyielding allegiance to its own clear-cut monotheism and its sense of its own archetypal authenticity remains normative within Islam. Regardless of the efforts of those with more modern thoughtsâ€"some sensitive, others less soâ€"and a rich philosophical heritage, traditional doctrines have held up over time.
Muslim modernists argue that traditional beliefs have held up all too well, in the sense that they have lost their flexibility and become separated from the current realities of everyday life. The ordinary Muslim is less likely to think along those lines than to adapt to the requirements of the day as he deems appropriate, while rarely, if ever consciously looking at critically or repudiating tradition. Today’s politicized radical Islam has been conditioned by both modernists and archaists, the former with their demands for rationality and immediacy while the latter locate their norms in a mythical, righteous, ultra-orthodox past. By combining futurism and archaism, political Islam identifies itself as a revolutionary change like many others -- Nazism and Soviet Communism come to mind.
Author Resource:-
The Universal Life Church provides courses in a variety of subjects through its online seminary, including Christian, Pagan, and Spiritual topics.
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