Introduction to Islam

Let us begin in the Name of the All-merciful and All-compassionate.

Ask almost anyone in Argyle street if they are Christian and they will probably say yes. Ask them what it means, and you'll get a hundred different answers. Muslims are much the same when they are asked to define Islam.

"A complete system for life" many would say, suggesting that there is a set of rules for the perfect Islamic way of performing every action, all worked out for us over the years by hundreds of pious scholars filling libraries with books of abstruse behavioral instructions. Unfortunately very few muslims actually read any of these books at all, let alone use them as a basis for their daily actions, so this viewpoint is not a lot of use to an inquisitive westerner, and one wonders if these libraries really help us understand Islam?

Part of the confusion arises because Islam as the word is used nowadays has a specific and a general meaning. In it's general form it is used as an umbrella word to summarise all those libraries of books. All those different cultural outlooks and lifestyles, philosophies and understandings of a sixth of the world's population over the last 1400 years that we know as the Muslim Civilization. Yet this civilization was entirely based on a much simpler understanding of Islam, along with two other concepts essential to understanding the "muslim way of life", and these are known as Iman and Ihsan.

Islam, Iman, and Ihsan - I hope their meaning will become clearer as we progress. Let us start with the world of Ihsan.

It isn't necessary to be a believer to have Ihsan because its general meaning is simply "goodness", good behaviour, right action. We've all heard of honour among thieves, and even atheists need concepts of good and bad for any kind of social law. So Ihsan, good behaviour, is not confined to the overtly religious amongst us, but can be seen in all human beings who display its various guises, mercy, compassion, justice, honesty, tolerance, forgiveness, humility, generosity, courage, and the like. When we see these things in the face of a man, we see another shade of meaning contained within the word Ihsan, which is beauty. Not the plastic aesthetic of a Playboy bunny or a posing Pop-star or movie idol, but that quality which inspires trust and opens peoples hearts.

Ihsan is intimately connected with the condition of the heart. The Prophet said "Truly in the body there is a morsel of flesh which, if it be whole, all the body is whole and which, if it be diseased, all of it is diseased. Truly it is the heart."

We have seen that it is not necessary to be a muslim (one who practises Islam) to be a muhsin (one who practices Ihsan), but at the same time we can see a difference between an ideal all embracing behaviour pattern for man, and something more simple, like honour among thieves.

It is in trying to codify an ideal pattern of behaviour for all mankind based on the example of the Prophet, that those libraries begin to get filled. Let me give you a glimpse of one author's view, Shaykh Uthman dan Fodio, 200 years ago in Northern Nigeria. This is how he defined what a man requires for Ihsan.

"The purification of the heart from the whisperings of Shaytan. (Shaytan, or Satan, is the thing which directs you towards the fire, pain and torment, the thing which divides man and sets him in opposition to himself.)

The purification of the heart from conceit, from pride, and from false hope.

The purification of the heart from groundless anger, from envy, and from showing-off. (Quran says "Woe to those who pray and are heedless of their prayers, to those who make display yet withhold charity")

Turning away with regret from acts of rebellion. Doing without what is superfluous and excessive (The goal is strength and vigour, not just food, drink, and pleasure).

Safeguarding oneself out of fear of God; Trust and reliance in God; Contentment with the decree of God; Fear of punishment, and hope for mercy."

So here is a muslim trying to codify a way to approach good behaviour, Ihsan, (and there are many other wise men who would give you different lists), but to do it he uses words which often require some explanation, the most obvious example being "God". What on earth is this word supposed to mean? Can you show me what it is? Can you touch it, hear it, smell it, taste it? In fact, if I can't see it, why should I believe that this thing exists? Can you prove it to me? Well, no, you can't. For that you need faith, the world of Iman.

We all of us live in a material world that for 99.9% of the time rolls along perfectly happily with nothing more than those nice solid, tangible explanations of our experience that we all use for our daily life. Now this is very convenient on a day to day basis, but as soon as man starts to apply his mind to finding an underlying truth to the system, our material world rapidly starts to come apart at the seams, and it's no longer just philosophers getting lost in worlds of paradox, but science itself, that bastion of modern materialism, which now tells us how things work in the most outrageously immaterial terms, using post-Godelian mathematics and post-Einsteinian physics to give us a universe about as solid as a sense of humour.

Now that world of the Unseen, that world of intangibles, the theory behind and beyond the experiment or experience, that is the world of Iman, and the language of Iman composes six topics, the first being Allah, which in English becomes God.

The word God has been out of fashion of late. Does modern man have any need for the idea of God? Does God have any relevance to modern thought? Does the theory of God fit the facts as well, or even better than any other theory?

Well, as long as we don't first limit our definition to the ridiculous, then dismiss our definition as nonsense, we find God fits our experience perfectly. But as a muslim I consider God not just a convenient theory, but an ultimate necessity to any reasonable framework of understanding of how things work if they are to make any sense at all. But you can't prove it. In the end we have to accept that God is beyond proof and requires faith - Iman.

Scientists always claim that their theories are proved because they fit our experience of the facts, but somehow the theories keep on changing. An Ancient Greek would have seen a blazing chariot driven across the sky each day, which from our superior intellectual position we can laugh at as nonsense, even those of us who still watch the sun rise and conveniently forget Copernicus. Now presumably experiencing earthspin is not enough for the man who looks up into the sky each day and sees some kind of curvature of space-time. Yet man, with his arrogant sense of independence always thinks that this time he's got it right. He thinks that working out a theory and giving it a name, is somehow an explanation.

For the question of "How" things work has long been used by materialists as a smoke screen in reply to a question they can't answer at all, which is "Why?". Is there a purpose in our existence or not? If you feel that you and the universe have some kind of point to your existence, you probably live by a theory including something that could be named God. But how not to limit God by the restrictions of our limited imaginations? We can't help our limitations, I'm afraid, but the muslim has some guidance for his faith.

In the first place, a muslim believes that Allah is essentially a unity, oneness. We say God is One. But our experience and understanding are mostly dependent on fragmentation and variety, so to help us approach Allah we have many ways. Muslims even use 99 Names. Allah will always remain unseen, one whom "the eyes attain not, but who attains the eyes," yet if you look outside yourself for signs of God's existence, "wherever you turn, there is the Face of God." One can also look within, however, for "We indeed created man, and We know what his soul whispers within him, and We are nearer to him than the jugular vein."

Allah is the first aspect of Iman, and having come to terms with this word, we can start to talk of creation. A muslim calls the first forms to exist in creation the Mala'ik. The mala'ik are created of light, and are in constant movement. They surround us from all sides, are attached to us, and constantly with us. They preserve a record of our existence and actions in time. They are the means by which the Unity of Allah communicates with us the Creation, in fact the name means message bearers. We have no means of knowing the intrinsic nature or attributes of the Mala'ik, though we know some of their qualities, for instance we know they do not have will, or sexual definition, and we know some of the ways they are used by Allah sufficiently to give them different names - Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, and suchlike. Indeed we are talking about angels, but I'm quite sure that most scientists would think angels on the head of a pin less relevant than an electron micrograph of that same pinhead.

So now we've got creation under way with the angels, the second requirement of Iman, we can begin to consider how we think of things in time, and we all know that no matter how much the scientists are talking in multidimensions, one part of our understanding and experience of creation always seems so unidirectional. I look back and I have all sorts of memories, yet when I look forward - nothing. I can't even predict what I'll have for breakfast tomorrow. It's incredibly frustrating. So, can we make any order out of this peculiarity, does it have any purpose, is there a Divine Will?

This unidirectional revelation of Creation is referred to through concepts of the Pen writing the words of Creation upon the Tablet, "Though all the trees in the earth were pens, and the sea (and seven seas after it to replenish it) ink; yet would the words of God not be spent. God is All-mighty, All-wise." And what is written is the Books of Allah, the third requirement of Iman. "Every term has a Book. God blots out, and He establishes whatsoever He will; and with Him is the Essence of the Book." The mala'ik, as we have seen are the means of revelation and communication of these Books to man. It is through them that man learns from Allah. Part of the first few words of the Quran to be revealed were "And thy Lord is Most Generous, who taught by the Pen, taught man what he knew not."

Yet when we are talking about reading the Book of God in the Creation, things are perhaps getting a bit vague and open to misinterpretation. So if the Divine Will is to be at all intelligible, one would expect something a great deal more specific to be revealed for our use and guidance. Indeed, muslims believe specific guiding revelation has been bestowed on certain individuals, and these individuals are the fourth requirement of Faith, the Messengers, each of which has his Book of guidance to read to mankind. It is the collection and compilation of these revelations which constitute the Revealed Books.

The Revealed Books have been preserved with varying degrees of completeness and accuracy, yet they do not disagree on fundamental truths, such as the Oneness of God, the demand for doing good and abstaining from evil, etc., though they may differ as to the rules of social conduct in accordance with God's requirements for a people. The Revealed Book of the Messenger Muhammad, the Quran, has a qualitative difference to it, however, and it's importance to muslims can hardly be stressed enough. In a fragmentary fashion, over a period of approximately 23 years, Muhammad received moments of revelation that he heard and remembered in the Arabic language, words that he would never allow to be confused with his personal statements.

The arrangement of the text doesn't follow the chronological order of these revelations. When a verse, or group of verses was revealed, Muhammad announced the text and indicated its place in the sequence of the Quran, and it was then memorised, and recited in the prayer services and other occasions in that order. After the final revelation Muhammad died, but an exact and complete record of this Message remains. Quite a short book, and even the translation that I use and recommend (A.J.Arberry - OUP - italicised quotes) is a pale shadow of the original. One suggestion, don't treat it like a novel, starting at the beginning and working through. Dip into it and let it take you where it will. Read it from the inside out, it works better that way.

There have been lots of Messengers, some say 124,000, but there are only a few referred to in the Quran, mostly names with which you will be familiar, such as Adam, Noah, Lot, Abraham, Ishmael & Isaac, Joseph, Jethro, Moses & Aaron, David & Solomon, Job, Jesus, and of course Muhammad, the seal of the prophets, and with whom that form of revelation comes to a close. There are others mentioned, but many that are not. The Quran mentions only the lineage of Abraham, so we may not affirm categorically the Divine character of traditions of India, or China, for example. The Quran says "Indeed We sent forth among every nation a Messenger, saying; `Serve you God, and shun idols'." And "We sent Messengers before thee; of some We have related to thee, and some We have not related to thee."

Also this "Surely We have sent thee with the truth, good tidings to bear, and warning; not a nation there is, but there has passed away in it a warner." So here are some constituents of the Message. Truth, we have talked of - trying to understand the way creation works, but the good tidings and the warning also refer to the fifth aspect of the unseen that requires faith, the Last Day, with the re-creation of mankind and the afterlife.

If there is one thing we can guarantee in this life it is death, "and death's agony comes in truth" yet whether you regard it with terror or see it as a massive anticlimax, the often apparently random nature of its visitations seems to share with life, so full of suffering innocents, an overwhelming sense of unfairness. Belief in the afterlife transforms the system from one of pointlessness to one of justice, where we can receive the exact correlation of each action of our lives. "God created the heavens and the earth in truth, and that every soul may be recompensed for what it has earned; they shall not be wronged." "Every soul shall taste of death; and We try you with evil and good for a testing, then unto Us you shall be returned." "Upon that day men shall issue in scatterings to see their works, and whoso has done an atoms weight of good shall see it, and whoso has done an atom's weight of evil shall see it."

Some people find it hard to believe in a resurrection, even though they go to sleep each night never doubting that they will return to life in the morning. "Who shall quicken the bones when they are decayed? He shall quicken them, who originated them the first time." The Quran explains the way we are returned to life, frequently using the analogy of water falling on the dead earth, which rapidly turns green and lives again. "And of His signs is that you see the earth humble; then when We send down water upon it, it quivers, and swells. Surely He who quickens it is He who quickens the dead; surely He is powerful over everything." "We have decreed among you Death; We shall not be outstripped; that We may exchange the likes of you, and make you grow again in a fashion you know not. You have known the first growth; so why will you not remember?"

On the Last Day you are shown the Book of your life. "And We shall bring forth for him, on the Day of Resurrection, a book he shall find spread wide open. `Read thy book! Thy soul suffices thee this day as a reckoner against thee'" "And on the day when the Hour is come, upon that day the vain-doers shall lose. And thou shalt see every nation hobbling on their knees, every nation being summoned unto its Book: Today you shall be recompensed for that you were doing. This is Our Book, that speaks against you the truth; We have been registering all that you were doing."

Justice achieves its expression through reward and punishment, named the Garden and the Fire, but our ends are intrinsic to the actions that we choose. If you put your hand into the fire you get burned. We choose for ourselves the Fire or the Garden.

This ability to choose is part of the 6th requirement of Iman, to believe in Divine destiny, both good and evil. But this involves a paradox if we are to reconcile the apparent predestination that would result from God's omnipotence and omniscience, with what is essential to Divine Justice, freedom of choice. "There is no compulsion in religion" says the Quran, "The truth is from your Lord; so let whosoever will believe, and let whosoever will disbelieve." Yet it also says "If thy Lord had willed, whoever is in the earth would have believed, all of them, all together ...... Say: `Behold what is in the heavens and in the earth!' But neither signs nor warnings avail a people who do not believe."

A believer is a mu'min, one who has Iman; and here we reach the end of our journey through the Articles of Faith, and have finally reached the world of Islam. I mentioned earlier the double understanding of Islam, with a meaning which envelops all our prior talk of Iman and Ihsan, but a specific meaning which brings all that airy fairy intellectual talk down to earth with something more practical. Not everyone at the Old Firm match is interested in the further reaches of philosophy. What you need to counteract all this theory, is something you can practice. Islam.

If we accept that Muhammad was a messenger, is there any aspect of his behaviour that would be good for us to copy. Is there anything that he himself said was important? Well as a matter of fact there was. He said whatever else you discard hang on to these things or everything else will fall apart. Live your own life in your own way, but these things are indispensible. They are easy enough to remember, there's only five of them. They are usually known as the five pillars.

The first pillar is the Shahada. In the world of Iman we were given a Name, Allah, for what we believe in. But it's not enough to believe, we have to admit it to ourselves. "La ilaha illa Allah, Muhammad rasul Allah"; there is no god - except God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God.

The second pillar is the Salaat. "Prosperous is he who has cleansed himself, and mentions the Name of his Lord and prays." We have just one word prayer for what in Islam is two. Du'a is what one usually think of as prayer in this part of the world, asking for something, supplication. But Salaat is not an asking for something different, but more a recognition of the way things are, and an acceptance of it. It is made five times a day. Like eating it is a necessity, which can be relished or taken on the run, but not rejected completely. By examining our relationship with our Salaat in this daily fashion, we have a yardstick by which to measure ourselves, and a fixed base from which to explore ourselves. "Surely the Salaat is a timed prescription for the believers."

The third pillar of Islam is to pay our Zakat.

There are things that a man must do for his own well-being, and there are things that a group must do for the welfare of the social unit. In the prayer, a man helps the group by looking after his own spiritual welfare, and by paying the zakat he helps himself by looking after the well being of the group. In the formalization of a tax on all accumulated wealth for redistribution to the needy, we see the Realpolitik of Islam. It's not all prayer and philosophy, it's social security.

Ramadan, the month of fasting, is the fourth pillar of Islam. For one month each year, changing as the moon changes, muslims go without food, drink, sex and smoking, between the dawn and sunset. In the way that our day is structured by the prayer, so our years are punctuated by the reoccurrence of Ramadan. Like the prayer, it is not meant to be an excessive hardship, and the Prophet forbade extended fasts, and excessive voluntary fasting, saying "You have obligations even with regard to your own self."

Then the fifth and final pillar is the Hajj, or pilgrimage. Hajj literally means a travel (i.e towards God) as also an effort to dominate something (in this connection the self). Once in a lifetime, muslims try to visit the House of God towards which they align themselves five times a day in their prayers. If one were to go back only to Abraham - who according to Islamic tradition just restored the edifice erected originally by Adam - Kaaba would still be older than the temple of Jerusalem, constructed by Solomon. No other place of worship is older than the Ancient House in Makkah, and in his performance of the Hajj we see man stripped of all but a winding sheet, one drop in the ocean of humanity.

This then is Islam, the science of which is Fiqh, which codifies for us the Shariah, jurisprudence, and the manifest laws by which to live our lives. Iman gives us the science of Tawhid, Unity, codifying our philosophy and the languages of understanding, and from Ihsan we have the science of Tassawuf, which is the science of the heart.

The Messenger of Allah said: "Islam is to testify that there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, to perform the Salaat, to pay the zakat, to fast in Ramadan, and to make the pilgrimage to the House if you are able to do so." When asked about Iman, he said: "It is to believe in Allah, His angels, His books, His messengers, and the Last Day, and to believe in divine destiny, both the good and evil thereof." When asked about Ihsan, he said; "It is to worship Allah as though you are seeing Him, and while you see Him not, yet truly He sees you."