Society Today

Understanding Islam across the World

Islam is a misunderstood religion that people tend to form negative opinions on mainly due to lack of knowledge in the Islamic faith. Islam made its appearance on the world stage more than fourteen hundred years ago and immediately came into contact with the Persian and Byzantine worlds. As the Islamic world expanded it had to come to terms not just with the rationalism of the Greeks but with the belief systems of the Persians, the Hindus, the Buddhists and the Chinese. The Muslims learned, absorbed, amalgamated the ideas of the east and the west and gave to the world the empirical-scientific method, algebra, chemistry, arabesque, Tasawwuf and the Taj Mahal. Centuries went by. There were short periods of conflict followed by long periods of cooperation between the world of Islam and the worlds of other faiths. The traces of these interactions have shaped the perceptions of Islam in the modern global consciousness. Much of the work on Islamic history suffers from the limitation of an excessive focus on the Middle East. Islam is a global enterprise.

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...