The Five Pillars Of Islam
The Five Pillars of Islam are five basic acts, considered mandatory by believers and are the foundation of Muslim life. They are summarized in the Hadith of Gabriel, and practiced by both Sunni and Shi’a.
Some people underestimate the significance of dreams by completely disregarding them while others make too much of them and make every decision in their life based on a dream. Both the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad highlight that some dreams have symbols and meanings.
Like the Five Pillars of Islam, the Six Pillars comprise a practice-oriented approach to religion because they are meant to be ritually affirmed at the time of conversion or whenever one’s doctrinal orientation is called into question by the religious authorities of the Islamic state.
Since the days of Muhammad, followers of Islam have supported many educational, religious, and social welfare causes. Governments and individuals regularly contribute to charitable activities. In the Islamic world, giving serves both social and spiritual purposes.
The Arabic word for prayer is şalāh (plural şalawāt), which means “supplication.” The Qurʾān uses şalāh in relation to Allah, to the angels, and to believers as well. When it is attributed to Allah, it means “the granting of mercy” to the recipients of the prayer.
Five Fundamental Tenets – A Second Look
The Five Pillars of Islam (arkan al-Islam), which are presented systematically for the first time in the Hadith of Gabriel, are relatively simple to carry out and can easily be learned by the person who wishes to convert to Islam.
A’ishah was the third and youngest wife of the Prophet Muhammad. Born in Mecca, she was the daughter of Abu Bakr, one of the Prophet’s most important supporters.
Biographies – Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938) , Turkish soldier, nationalist leader, and statesman, who founded the republic of Turkey and was its first president (1923-1938).
Biographies – Shah Abd al-Aziz
Indian Islamic scholar and son of Shah Wali Allah (d. 1762), the foremost alim (also anglicized as Aleem) is one of the names of Allah in Islam, meaning “All-Knowing.”) of eighteenth-century India.
Biographies – Mirza Ghulam Ahmad
Founder of Ahmadi movement in Punjab, India, in 1889. Claimed to be the Mahdi of Muslims, the Messiah of Christians, and the avatar of Krishna for Hindus.
Biographies -ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Duri
ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dūrī (b. 1919), Iraqi educator and Arabist social historian, was born in Baghdad; he was educated there and at London University. He taught history at the Higher Teachers’ College and the Faculty of Arts, served as translation and publications director at the ministry of education, and dean of arts and then rector of Baghdad University, then ended his working career as professor of history at the University of Jordan in Amman.
Biographies – Mehmet Ziya Gökalp
Born in Diyarbakır to a family of mixed Turkish and Kurdish origins, Mehmet Ziya attended the Imperial Veterinary School (1896) at Istanbul, where he joined the revolutionary Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). He was dismissed from the school, arrested, and jailed when his affiliation with the CUP was discovered by the secret police in 1897. After his release from prison, he returned to his native city and married his cousin Cevriye in 1898.
Abdullah Gymnastiar (b.1962) is an Indonesian preacher popularly known as Aa (elder brother) Gym. Despite minimal orthodox religious education, Gymnastiar attained national fame through his adept use of media technologies, his entertaining preaching style, and his sermons on self-improvement.
Biographies – Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī
Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (1058–1111), also spelled al-Ghazzālī, was a medieval Muslim theologian, jurist, and mystic. Few in the intellectual history of Islam have exerted influence as powerful and varied as Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī.
According to the Safavid chronicler Dust Muhammad, ῾Abd al-Hayy trained under Shams al-Din at Baghdad during the reign of the Jalayirid sultan Uways I (r. 1356–74) and became the leading painter under his son Ahmad (r. 1382–1410), who was also ῾Abd al-Hayy’s pupil.
Biographies – Abd al-Muttalib ibn Hashim
Credited by hadith with receiving a command from God to dig up the well of Zamzam, over which he maintained control and from which he sold water to pilgrims coming to the Kaaba in Mecca.
Biographies – Qadi Abd al-Jabbar (d. 1024)
An adherent of the Shafii school of law, he was appointed chief justice (qadi) in under the Buwayhids. His Fadl al-itizal wa tabaqat al-mutazilah is a major source of Mutazili hagiography, and his Al-mughni fi abwab al-tawhid wa’l-adl is our major source for Mutazili doctrine.
Aḥmad Kasravi (1890–1946) was a major historian of modern Iran, political thinker, iconoclastic secularist, and founder of an ideological school named the Āzādigān (Freedom) Society.
Biographies – Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan
Umayyad caliph responsible for standardizing imperial coinage and collecting a corpus of hadith to be interpreted by appointed faqihs (Muslim jurists), causing hadith to emerge as a cornerstone of Islamic scholarship.
Abd al-Qadir led Algerian resistance to French colonization for nearly two decades. Born in Algeria to a family of Moroccan origin, Abd al-Qadir’s ancestors claimed to have descended from the Prophet Muhammad.
Biographies – Omar Abdel Rahman
Rahman, a well-known Egyptian religious scholar and Islamic fundamentalist leader, was born to a poor rural family in the village of al-Jamālīyah, in Lower Egypt. According to some sources, he was blinded in an accident at ten months of age, although he may have lost his eyesight to childhood diabetes.
Biographies – Thoughts On Qassem Soleimani, Armageddon, And al-Mahdi
From 1998 until his death on January 3, 2020 Qassem Soleimani was the Iranian major general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He commanded its Quds Force, a division primarily responsible for extraterritorial military and clandestine operations. His death now could very well be the linchpin of Armageddon.
Biographies – Muhammad Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb
Muḥammad Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb was a Saudi Arabian conservative theologian and reformer. Born in 1703 in al-ʿUyaynah in Najd, Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb belonged to a prestigious family of jurists, both theologians and qāḍīs (judges).
What Is Islamic Finance And Banking?
Conventional banking has been widely established for years in the Islamic world. While many Muslims and Muslim governments continue to rely on modern interest-based Western systems of banking and finance, in recent years increasing numbers of Muslims regard charging or earning interest as riba (which can mean usury, unearned gain, and exploitation) forbidden by the Qur’an.
Islamic finance — shorthand for “banking transactions in compliance with Islamic principles” — is a form of modern banking that has evolved in the context of modern-day global financial markets.
Conventional banking has been widely established for years in the Islamic world. While many Muslims and Muslim governments continue to rely on modern interest-based Western systems of banking and finance, in recent years increasing numbers of Muslims regard charging or earning interest as riba (which can mean usury, unearned gain, and exploitation) forbidden by the Qur’an.
Muḍārabah is a form of profit– loss-sharing joint-venture between two parties, one being the financial-capital provider (ṣāḥib al-māl or rabb al-māl) and the other, the entrepreneur or the investment manager (muḍārib).
In the course of the second millennium, the Islamic world failed to match the institutional transformation through which western Europe greatly expanded its capacity to pool resources, coordinate production, and conduct exchanges.
Three complications arise in assessing trade by Islamic countries in the modern period. First, the identification of countries as Islamic is a recent development, dating back to the establishment of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in 1969.
Within the context of providing Muslims with guidance about the commands of Allah, jurists devote a large portion of their works of fiqh to commercial law.
Payment of Islamic taxes is considered a religious duty. The most important tax is zakat, which is based on wealth and paid annually. Cash holdings, asset disposals, and inventories are subject to tax at a standard rate of 2.5 percent.
The question of whether interest is a legitimate financial instrument has long been a source of controversy throughout the Islamic world. The origins of the controversy lie in Qurʿānic verses that prohibit ribā, the ancient Arabian practice whereby borrowers saw their debts rise precipitously if they defaulted, and rise further if they defaulted again.
The Islamic Development Bank (IDB) is the principal organ of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in the economic field. The IDB is basically an international financial institution but its scope of activities is limited to the Muslim world.
Debates over Islamʾs economic implications are even more heated and inconclusive than debates over its social and political implications. Traditional texts and authorities provide countless blueprints for an ideal Muslim family and polity but not for an Islamic economy. The Qurʿān explicitly endorses few economic values beyond private property, commercial honesty, and competition tempered by concern for the disadvantaged.
Islamic Finance In Southeast Asia
Sharīʿa, as it does in everything else, provides the basis of Islamic banking. The teachings of Islam include the essence of economic well-being and the development of the Muslim at the individual, family, society, state, and ummah (Islamic universal community) levels.
In one of the first divine revelations recorded in the Qurʿān, the prophet Muḥammad was commanded by Allah to “arise and warn!” (74:1). This is taken by some Muslim scholars to signal the beginning of public preaching of the message, which until then was presumably done privately among the Prophet ’s family and intimate friends.
Rituals conducted at different stages of life, from conception until death and after, are means through which human beings live and act religiously. The terms “life-cycle rituals” or “rites de passage,” as described by Arnold van Gennep, embrace ritualistic ceremonies associated with conception, birth, puberty, marriage, death, and other significant events.
The carefully cultivated image of a Muslim community united around a simple set of basic beliefs masks a history of vigorous debate about Allah, creation, humanity, prophethood, ethics, salvation, and the Muslim community itself. In order to understand the religious discourse of Muslims, it is helpful to imagine Islam not as a static and monolithic core of essential beliefs but as a continuing story of inquiry and argument around these seven topics.
Five times each day, hundreds of millions of Muslims face Mecca (holiest city of Islam, birthplace of Muhammad, and site of the Kaaba, or House of Allah) to pray — at daybreak, noontime, mid-afternoon, sunset, and evening.
421 – 005 – Women (work now in progress)
Islam’s grand vision about women is given in one verse of the Qur’an:
Qur’an2 4:34 “Allah has made men superior to women because men spend their wealth to support them. Therefore, virtuous women are obedient, and they are to guard their unseen parts as Allah has guarded them. As for women whom you fear will rebel, admonish them first, and then send them to a separate bed, and then beat them. But if they are obedient after that, then do nothing further; surely Allah is exalted and great!”
While the world’s population is projected to grow 32 percent in the coming decades, the number of Muslims is expected to increase by 70 percent – from 1.8 billion in 2015 to nearly 3 billion in 2060. In 2015, Muslims made up 24.1 percent of the global population.
An Inside Look At Shari’a – Islamic Law
When you study Islam in Europe today, you are seeing America in 20 years. Why? The actions by Muslims in Europe are based on Shari’a law, the same Shari’a law that is beginning to be implemented in America today.
Islamic Law: The Death Penalty For Apostasy
Islamic Shari’a law contains many inhumane legal verdicts related to the treatment of non-Muslims and Muslims alike. Without delving into the subtle differences that exist between the various schools of Shari’a law, which is beyond the scope of this paper, it should be noted that all of the inhumane legal pronouncements made in the Shari’a are sourced directly from Islam’s core texts (the Qur’an, hadith and sira). Due to the fact that Islam is both a religion and a legal system, the consequences of this reality are troublesome and profound.
The Anthropology of Islamic Law
In The Anthropology of Islamic Law, Nakissa, assistant professor of Islamic studies and anthropology at Washington University, St. Louis, claims to use hermeneutic and practice theories to analyze the cultural, legal, and religious traditions of Islamic law. He focuses on higher Islamic learning in contemporary Egypt, drawing on more than two years of fieldwork at al-Azhar University, Cairo University’s Dar al-Ulum, and a network of traditional study circles associated with the al-Azhar mosque.
450 – 004 – The Growing Conflict Between Secular Law and Shari’a {work now in progress}
Facts About Muslims And The Hajj Pilgrimage
Muslims around the world are observing two special occasions this month: the annual hajj pilgrimage that brought almost 2 million Muslims to Mecca this year, and the Eid al-Adha festival that marks the end of hajj and commemorates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son for God (Muslims believe that it was Ishmael that was to be sacrificed, not Isaac — although, the Qur’an does not specify a name).
405 – 001-d – Mirza Ghulam Ahmad
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Last Update: 01/2021
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