What is Islam ?

**Admin** Lun Mai 16, 2011 7:46 pm

With Islam, God completed the religion He revealed and chose for humanity (5:3). Literally, Islam means submission, peace, and salvation. In its most fundamental aspect, Islam is epitomized in the most frequently recited of all Qur’anic phrases, the Basmala—In the name of God, the Merciful (al-Rahman), the Compassionate (al-Rahim). Both words are related to the quality of rahma (mercy and compassion). God manifests Himself through His absolute, all-inclusive Mercy and Compassion, and Islam is founded upon that affirmation. The Qur’an calls Prophet Muhammad’s mission a mercy for all the worlds, for God sent him to spread Islam to all of humanity.
God created the universe so that He could be known and recognized in all His Names and Attributes, and so His creation includes one creature with free will: humanity. Of all creatures, only humanity can manifest the Divine Names the All-Willing, All-Knowing, and All-Speaking. God then endowed us with the knowledge of things (“names”), and made us His vice-gerent to rule on Earth according to His laws. As having free will means that one must choose, each person’s life consists of choosing between what is right and wrong.
God endowed humanity with three principal faculties fundamental to our survival and carrying out our function as His vice-gerent: an appetite for such things as the opposite sex, offspring, livelihood, and possessions; anger or forcefulness in defense and struggle; and reason or intellect. Since we are tested in this worldly life and are free to choose, God did not restrict these faculties.
According to Islam, our individual and collective happiness lies in disciplining our faculties so that we may produce a harmonious and peaceful individual and social life. If they remain undisciplined, they may drive people to immorality, illicit sexual relationships, unlawful livelihoods, tyranny, injustice, deception, falsehood, and other vices. To prevent the ensuing chaos and suffering, we must submit to an authority that guides and regulates our collective affairs. Since one person will not accept the authority of another, humanity needs a universal intellect, a guidance from beyond human reason and experience, to whose authority all may assent freely. That guidance is the religion revealed and perfected by God through His Prophets: Islam.
By means of belief and worship, as well as its intellectual, moral, and spiritual principles, Islam educates us in the best possible way. In addition, it uses its socioeconomic principles to establish an ideal society free of dissension, corruption, anarchy, and terror, one that allows everyone to obtain happiness both in this world and in the hereafter.
Islam does not reject modern civilization altogether. According to Said Nursi, the most influential Turkish scholar and writer of the 20th century, there are two Europes (or Wests): One that, benefiting from the religion of Jesus and Islamic civilization, made human life more comfortable through its inventions and the regulations it brought to human social life, and became the source of certain beauties; and another one that, based on naturalistic and materialistic philosophy, opposes the revealed religions. The evil of the latter is the cause of most human wretchedness and suffering. Islam opposes this second West.
On the past, present and future Islam is the key of life.

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