Origin Of Islam Biography
Source:- Google.com.pkIslam
Beginning as the faith of a small community of believers in Arabia in the seventh century, Islam rapidly became one of the major world religions. The core of this faith is the belief that Muhammad (c. 570-632), a respected businessman in Mecca, a commercial and religious center in western Arabia, received revelations from God that have been preserved in the Qur'an. The heart of this revealed message is the affirmation that "there is no god but Allah (The God), and Muhammad is the messenger of God." The term islam comes from the Arabic word-root s-l-m, which has a general reference to peace and submission. Specifically, Islam means submission to the will of God, and a Muslim is one who makes that submission.
This submission or act of Islam means living a life of faith and practice as defined in the Qur'an and participating in the life of the community of believers. The core of this Islamic life is usually said to be the Five Pillars of Islam: publicly bearing witness to the basic affirmation of faith; saying prescribed prayers five times a day; fasting during the month of Ramadan; giving a tithe or alms for support of the poor; and making a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once during the believer's lifetime, if this is possible.
Muslims believe that Islam is the basic monotheistic faith proclaimed by prophets throughout history. The Qur'an is not seen as presenting a new revelation but rather as providing a complete, accurate, and therefore final record of the message that had already been given to Abraham, Jesus, and other earlier prophets. As the basis for a historical community and tradition of faith, however, Islam begins in Mecca with the life and work of Muhammad in the early seventh century.
The Early Community
Muhammad's life as a preacher and leader of a community of believers has two major phases. He proclaimed his message in a city in which the majority did not accept his teachings. Mecca was a major pilgrimage center and sanctuary in the existing polytheism of Arabia, and the proclamation of monotheism threatened this whole system. The message presented in the Meccan period emphasizes the general themes of affirmation of monotheism and warnings of the Day of Judgment. Muhammad did not set out to establish a separate political organization, but the nature of the message represented a major challenge to the basic power structures of Mecca.
The second phase of Muhammad's career and the early life of the Muslim community began when Muhammad accepted an invitation from the people in Yathrib, an oasis north of Mecca, to serve as their arbiter and judge. In 622 Muhammad and his followers moved to Yathrib, and this emigration, or hijrah, is of such significance that Muslims use this date as the beginning of the Islamic calendar. The oasis became known as the City of the Prophet, or simply al-Medina (the city).
In Muslim tradition the sociopolitical community that was created in Medina provides the model for what a truly Islamic state and society should be. In contrast to tribal groups, the new community, or ummah, was open to anyone who made the basic affirmation of faith, and loyalty to the ummah was to supersede any other loyalty, whether to clan, family, or commercial partnership. The political structure of the new community was informal. Although Muhammad had great authority as the messenger of God, he could not assume a position as a sovereign monarch because he was only human and only a messenger. The emphasis on the sole sovereignty of God provides an important foundation for Islamic political thinking throughout the centuries, challenging both theories of monarchy and absolutism, as well as later theories of popular sovereignty.
In this early era the characteristically Islamic sense of the ummah or the community of believers, rather than a concept of church or state, was firmly established as the central institutional identification for Muslims. In this way Islam is frequently described as a way of life rather than as a religion separate from politics or other dimensions of society. In Medina Muhammad provided leadership in all matters of life, but Muslims carefully distinguish the teachings that are the record of revelation and recorded in the Qur'an from the guidance Muhammad provided as a person. Because of his role as the messenger of God, Muhammad's own personal actions and words have special prestige. In addition to the Qur'an, the accounts of these, called hadith, provide the basis for a second source of guidance for believers, the Sunnah (customary practice) of the Prophet.
By the time of Muhammad's death in 632, the new Muslim community was successfully established. Mecca had been defeated and incorporated into the ummah in important ways. The Ka'ba, a shrine in Mecca that had been the center of the polytheistic pilgrimage, was recognized as an altar built by Abraham, and Mecca became both the center of pilgrimage for the new community and the place toward which Muslims faced when they performed their prayers.
Sunni and Shi'i
When Muhammad died, Muslims faced the challenge of creating institutions to preserve the community. Muslims believe that the revelation was completed with the work of Muhammad, who is described as the seal of the prophets. The leaders after Muhammad were described only as khalifahs (caliphs), or successors to the Prophet, and not as prophets themselves. The first four caliphs were companions of the Prophet and their period of rule (632-661) is described by the majority of Muslims as the age of the Rightly Guided Caliphate. This was an era of expansion during which Muslims conquered the Sasanid (Persian) Empire and took control of the North African and Syrian territories of the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire. The Muslim community was transformed from a small city-state controlling much of the Arabian Peninsula into a major world empire extending from northwest Africa to central Asia.
This era ended with the first civil war (656-661), in which specific conflicts between particular interest groups provided the foundation for the broader political and theological divisions in the community and the Islamic tradition. The first two caliphs, Abu Bakr and Umar, had been successful in maintaining a sense of communal unity. But tensions within the community surfaced during the era of the third caliph, Uthman, who was from the Umayyad clan. Uthman was murdered in 656 by troops who mutinied over matters of pay and privileges, but the murder was the beginning of a major civil war.
The mutinous troops and others in Medina declared the new caliph to be Ali, a cousin of Muhammad who was an early convert and also the husband of Muhammad's daughter Fatimah (and, therefore, the father of Muhammad's only grandsons, Hasan and Husayn). According to Shi'i Muslim tradition, there were many people who believed that Muhammad had designated Ali as his successor. An Arabic term for faction or party is shi'ah, and the party or shi'ah of Ali emerged clearly during this first civil war. Ali's leadership was first challenged by a group including Aisha, the Prophet's most prominent wife and a daughter of the first caliph, Abu Bakr. Although Ali defeated this group militarily, it represented the tradition that became part of the mainstream majority, or Sunni, tradition in Islam, recognizing that all four of the first four caliphs were rightly guided and legitimate.
Ali faced a major military threat from the Umayyad clan, who demanded revenge for the murder of their kinsman, Uthman. The leader of the Umayyads was Muawiya, the governor of Syria. In a battle between the Umayyad army and the forces of Ali at Siffin in 657, Ali agreed to arbitration. As a result, a group of anti-Umayyad extremists withdrew from Ali's forces and became known as the Kharijites, or seceders, who demanded sinlessness as a quality of their leader and would recognize any pious Muslim as eligible to be the caliph. When Ali was murdered by a Kharijite in 661, most Muslims accepted Muawiya as caliph as a way of bringing an end to the intracommunal violence.
Many later divisions within the Muslim community were to be expressed in terms first articulated during this civil war. The mainstream, or Sunni, tradition reflects a combination of an emphasis on the consensus and piety of the community of the Prophet's companions, as reflected in the views of Aisha and her supporters, and the pragmatism of the Umayyad imperial administrators. The Sunni tradition always reflects the tension between the needs of state stability and the aspirations of a more egalitarian and pietistic religious vision. Shi'i Islam has its beginnings in the party of Ali and the argument that God always provides a special guide, or imam, for humans and that this guide has special characteristics, including being a descendant of the Prophet and having special divine guidance. Leadership and authority rest with this imamate and are not subject to human consensus or pragmatic reasons of state.
The Kharijites represent an extreme pietism that expects sinlessness from its leaders and asserts the right of the pious believer to declare others to be unbelievers. Over the centuries, explicitly Kharijite movements have declined in importance within the Muslim world, and by the late twentieth century were represented by small communities in the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa. The spirit of puritanical anarchism, however, although always a minority position within the Muslim community, has continued to provide a marginal but significant critique of existing conditions. Activist, sometimes militant, movements of puritanical renewal that exist throughout Islamic history are sometimes accused of being Kharijite in method if not in theology.
Another major period of civil conflict followed the death in 680 of the first Umayyad caliph, Muawiya. The Umayyad victory by 692 affirmed the pragmatic, consensus-oriented approach of the rising Sunni mainstream. Umayyad military power and the emerging pious elite's fear of anarchy resulted in the majoritarian compromise that is fundamental to Sunni views of society, community, and state. There is a tension between the pragmatic needs of soldiers and politicians and the moral aspirations of religious teachers. The Sunni majority usually accepted the necessary compromises, legitimized by the authority of the consensus of the community.
The main opposition to the structures of the new imperial community came from developing Shi'i traditions. Husayn, Ali's son, and a small group of his supporters were killed by an Umayyad army at Karbala in 680, and Husayn became a symbol of pious martyrdom in the path of God.
When the Umayyads were overthrown in the civil war of 744-750, the core of the revolutionary movement was Shi'ah. Piety-minded scholars, who were increasingly opposed to the worldly materialism of the Umayyads, joined the opposition. The organizers of the revolution were supporters of the Abbasids, the family of Abbas, an uncle of the Prophet, and when an Abbasid was proclaimed caliph following the defeat of the Umayyads, the supporters of the line of Ali remained in opposition. The new Abbasid caliphs reestablished the pragmatic compromise with the pious mainstream, and the Abbasid state succeeded as the new version of the Sunni caliphate.
Caliphs, Sultans, and the New Community
The world of Islam continued to expand, even during periods of civil war. By the mid-eighth century, Muslim conquests extended from the Iberian Peninsula to the inner Asian frontiers of China. The new Muslim state was, in many ways, the successor to the imperial systems of Persia and Rome, but the caliphates were clearly identified with Islam. The boundaries of the state and the Muslim community were basically the same, and the rulers, even when they were not known for piety, were still viewed by the majority as the successors to the Prophet.
It was the people of knowledge, or ulama, of the mainstream and not the caliphs who defined Islamic doctrine. Although there were state-appointed judges, Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) was defined by independent ulama. The Sunni majority came to accept four schools of legal thought--the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, and Hanbali--as legitimate. By the eleventh century the ulama had also compiled authoritative collections of hadith, providing a standard for understanding the Sunnah of the Prophet. In this way, the Sunni tradition developed within the caliphal state but was not identical to it.
By the middle of the tenth century, the effective political and military power of the Abbasid caliphs had been greatly reduced. Power shifted to the military commanders who frequently took the title of sultan, meaning authority or power. The Abbasid caliphs continued to reside in Baghdad and provided formal recognition to sultans. Increasingly, military leadership was Turkish. Turks had come to the Middle East from Central Asia as slaves and mercenaries, but by the eleventh century there was a significant migration of Turkish peoples into the region. In 1055 Turks, under the leadership of the Seljuqs, took control of Baghdad and established a major sultanate in cooperation with the Abbasid caliphs. The new Seljuq sultanate represented a reorganization of Muslim institutions with great patronage for the ulama and establishment of the sultanate as the legitimate political system. This caliph-based sultanate system came to an end when the Mongols invaded the Middle East and conquered Baghdad in 1258.
Origin Of Islam Islam Facts For Kids Pictures About Religion Wikipedia And History And Beliefs Worksheet On Women Today And Information Images Wallpapers
Origin Of Islam Islam Facts For Kids Pictures About Religion Wikipedia And History And Beliefs Worksheet On Women Today And Information Images Wallpapers
Origin Of Islam Islam Facts For Kids Pictures About Religion Wikipedia And History And Beliefs Worksheet On Women Today And Information Images Wallpapers
Origin Of Islam Islam Facts For Kids Pictures About Religion Wikipedia And History And Beliefs Worksheet On Women Today And Information Images Wallpapers
Origin Of Islam Islam Facts For Kids Pictures About Religion Wikipedia And History And Beliefs Worksheet On Women Today And Information Images Wallpapers
Origin Of Islam Islam Facts For Kids Pictures About Religion Wikipedia And History And Beliefs Worksheet On Women Today And Information Images Wallpapers
Origin Of Islam Islam Facts For Kids Pictures About Religion Wikipedia And History And Beliefs Worksheet On Women Today And Information Images Wallpapers
Origin Of Islam Islam Facts For Kids Pictures About Religion Wikipedia And History And Beliefs Worksheet On Women Today And Information Images Wallpapers
Origin Of Islam Islam Facts For Kids Pictures About Religion Wikipedia And History And Beliefs Worksheet On Women Today And Information Images Wallpapers
Origin Of Islam Islam Facts For Kids Pictures About Religion Wikipedia And History And Beliefs Worksheet On Women Today And Information Images Wallpapers
Origin Of Islam Islam Facts For Kids Pictures About Religion Wikipedia And History And Beliefs Worksheet On Women Today And Information Images Wallpapers
Origin Of Islam Islam Facts For Kids Pictures About Religion Wikipedia And History And Beliefs Worksheet On Women Today And Information Images Wallpapers
Origin Of Islam Islam Facts For Kids Pictures About Religion Wikipedia And History And Beliefs Worksheet On Women Today And Information Images Wallpapers
Origin Of Islam Islam Facts For Kids Pictures About Religion Wikipedia And History And Beliefs Worksheet On Women Today And Information Images Wallpapers
Origin Of Islam Islam Facts For Kids Pictures About Religion Wikipedia And History And Beliefs Worksheet On Women Today And Information Images Wallpapers
Origin Of Islam Islam Facts For Kids Pictures About Religion Wikipedia And History And Beliefs Worksheet On Women Today And Information Images Wallpapers
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