Welcome to Islam For Dummies, the book that keeps you from mixing up Muhammad, Mecca, and Medina. These pages divulge what you want to know about the beliefs, practices, and origins of Islam, as well as current developments in the Islamic world.

About This Book

Shocked and grieved by the events of September 11, 2001, people around the world are coming to understand that they have questions, misconceptions, and perhaps even fear about Islam, and this book is here to help. From giving information about the 1,000-year-old wound left on Islam by the Christian Crusades to understanding the Five Pillars of Faith, this book helps you put today’s conflicts into perspective.

In addition, if you live or work among Muslims or have seen a new mosque near your church or synagogue, this book can help you understand and relate to the Muslims in your midst. Muslims are poised to become the second largest religious group in the United States. With this book, you can understand the appeal of this faith without ever having to step foot in a mosque or pray toward Mecca.

I’m not Muslim, so this book isn’t written to either defend or attack Islam. Without getting hung up on points of tension between Muslims and non-Muslims, I don’t pretend that valid reasons for such differences don’t exist. This book is also not a textbook. You find some references to other works but no footnotes detailing the support for each point that’s made in the text. A number of good, short introductions to Islam exist, but their brevity means that their treatment of issues is highly selective. Islam For Dummies is longer than the typical 100- to 150-page introduction and, thus, more comprehensive.

Foolish Assumptions

As I’ve written this book, I’ve had a picture of you in my mind — your background, your experiences, and your needs for this book. The following are the assumptions I’ve made about you:

• You don’t need to know anything about Islam or any organized religion prior to reading this book. However, when studying one religion, you often want to contrast and compare key concepts and terms with those in another religion. In this book, I introduce such terms from Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, but feel free to skip over these references to other religions, if you wish. In any book on Islam, you find more comparisons to Christianity and Judaism than to Far Eastern and South Asian religions. This is because Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are related religions of the same Abrahamic “family” (see Part 5). Of course, in today’s global society, the more you know about all religions and cultures, the better prepared you are to understand any one.
• You don’t have to be Muslim in order to understand Islam. Believers and non-believers have complementary insights into Islam.

• My experiences haven’t included all parts of the Muslim world. When I explain a particular belief or practice in Islam, don’t assume that what I say is the only way to understand that particular belief or practice.

  All Muslims won’t agree with everything in this book.

• This book isn’t proposing new interpretations of Islam. Instead, it conveys consensus thinking among scholars and theologians.

How This Book is Organized

While writing this book, I’ve had to be selective about which information to include about a religion that’s over 1,400 years old, has over a billion members, and spans the globe. In this book, you won’t find answers to every question you may have, but in each of the seven parts of the book, I’ve attempted to deal with topics that are related to one another. If the Table of Contents doesn’t lead you to what most interests you, try consulting the Index at the back of the book.

Where to Go From Here

This book is planned so that you can go directly to whatever interests you most about Islam. It’s not a novel that requires you to begin with Chapter 1 and end with the last chapter. You may want to begin with Chapter 1, which provides a quick overview of Islamic origins and beliefs. After that, check out the following common areas of interest:

• If you’re interested in Islamic beliefs, go to Chapters 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 11.
• For Muslim rituals and worship, go to Part 3.
• If you’re more interested in Islamic history, turn to Chapters 2, 5, and 15.
• If you’re primarily interested in the modern world, read Chapters 17, 18, and 21.
• To read about Islam in America and the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims, skip to Chapters 15, 16, and 17.

Or plan your own itinerary!

IN THIS PART …

Although you can begin reading this book anywhere, this part begins by providing an overview of Islamic origins and beliefs. You find out about the main branches of Islam, the number of Muslims in the world, and the countries that have the largest Muslim populations. You may also want to read Chapter 2 to get an overview of Islamic history: Some of the references you come across in other chapters of this book are easier to understand if you have this historical background.

The real meat of this part deals with Islamic beliefs, including how God is understood in Islam. This part examines the key attribute of God in Islam — his oneness — as well as his other attributes, his names, and the signs that testify to God. In addition, this part considers key theological issues in early Islam, such as the relationships between faith and works and between theology and philosophy. I conclude this part by looking at Islamic beliefs concerning the resurrection of the dead, the final judgment, and the ultimate destination of heaven or hell.

Getting an Overview of Islamic Origins

In about 610 A.d., the angel Gabriel appeared to a man named Muhammad in the city of Mecca in present day Saudi Arabia. Gabriel told Muhammad that God had commissioned Muhammad as His last prophet. The revelations Muhammad received until his death in 632 constitute the Qur’an, Islam’s holy book. Muhammad believed that he was restoring and completing the original religion of humanity, that he stood in the line of the Biblical prophets who had also been sent by God to call people to submit to God.

Muhammad’s contemporaries in Mecca worshipped many gods and rejected Muhammad’s call to worship only one God. In 622, Muhammad and his small band of believers emigrated from Mecca north to the town of Yathrib, which the Muslims renamed Medina. That year would eventually be set as the first year of the Muslim calendar (see Appendix A). At Medina, Muhammad established the first Muslim community.

In 630, Muhammad led the army of the growing Muslim community against Mecca, which submitted peacefully. By the time of Muhammad’s death, two years later, most of Arabia had accepted Islam and become part of the Islamic community. Muhammad was succeeded by a series of rulers (caliphs) under whom Islam burst forth as a new power on the world scene. In less than 100 years, Muslim armies had incorporated most of the lands from the western border regions of northwest India in the East to Spain in the West into a single, great empire usually called a caliphate.

Gradually, the original unity of Islam was lost, never to be regained. The caliphate fell before the Mongol onslaught in 1258. Islam continued to spread in the following centuries, but new Muslim kingdoms rose and fell. By the end of the 17th century, the military power of Islam ebbed away and by the end of the 19th and on into the first part of the 20th century, most Muslim countries came under direct or indirect control of European nations. In the second half of the 20th century, Muslim nations gained their independence. Despite political and economic decline, the number of Muslims in the world increased rapidly in the 20th century, and Islam became for the first time a truly global religion.

Summarizing Islamic Beliefs

Muslims share many of the same basic beliefs as Christians and Jews, while differing fundamentally from Eastern religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism:

• God created the world and all that is in it.
• God established in His revealed word the principles by which to live, including concern for the poor.
• One shouldn’t worship other gods, or money, or power, or oneself.
• At the end of time, God will judge all people.
• If a person had fulfilled the divine command, he or she will go to heaven.

God calls upon all people to submit to His will, as embodied in His revealed law. In fact, the word islam means submission; Islam comes from the same root as the word for peace. Islam is often thought of as the religion of submission to God. Basic Islamic beliefs are summarized in the Five Pillars of Faith (see Chapter 4).

Islam is the name of the religion. A Muslim is the name of a member of the Islamic religion. The word “Muslim” means “one who submits to God.” A Muslim isn’t a Mohammedan, and Muslims don’t belong to a Mohammedan religion, because Muhammad is only a man. Muslims worship God and not Muhammad.

Basic Islamic practice is summed up in the Five Pillars of Worship (see Chapter 9). Muslims must confess that only God is God and that Muhammad is His messenger. They stop whatever they’re doing five times a day to pray to God. Once a year, in the month of Ramadan, they fast from dawn to dusk. Each year, they give a defined portion of their wealth to serve God’s purposes. And once in a lifetime, each Muslim who is able must make the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Dividing into Branches

Islam has two main branches: the Sunnis and the Shi`ites.

• Sunnis constitute from 84 to 90 percent of the world’s Muslims. The term “Sunni” refers to the traditions followed by Muhammad and the early Muslims.
• After Muhammad’s death, some Muslims believed that his cousin and son-in-law, `Ali, should have succeeded him (as opposed to the first three caliphs who came after Muhammad). The term Shi`a refers to the party of `Ali, those who believed that religious and political leadership of the Muslim community should always remain in the line of `Ali and his wife Fatima. Because of disputes that arose about the line of succession, Shi`ites divided into a number of different groups, such as Ithna`-Ashari (or Twelvers), Isma`ilis, and Zaydis (see Chapter 12 for details).

Sufis are another large group of Muslims. Sufism is Islamic mysticism, rather than a sect, like Sunnis or Shi`ites. So, a Sufi is normally also a Sunni (or more rarely, a Shi`ite) Muslim. Many Sufi orders (see Chapter 13) exist just like many monastic orders exist in Roman Catholicism.

Counting the Numbers

Determining the membership of any religion is tricky, but the surveys and studies are good at giving general ranges, as provided in Table 1-1. The demographers (those who study populations) don’t judge whether people are active members or whether they almost never attend a temple, synagogue, mosque, or church. When one of these studies lists 360 million Buddhists in the world, this means that 360 million people consider themselves to be Buddhists.

Christianity and Islam are still both growing, most rapidly in Africa over the past century. Muslim countries have some of the world’s highest fertility figures, which accounts for much of the Islamic growth.

The figures for 1900 provide an interesting comparison to those for 2000. In 1900, the 555 million Christians represented 32 percent of the world’s population, about the same as today. In contrast, the 200 million Muslims constituted only 12.3 percent of the world population, in contrast to Islam’s 19 percent plus today. This percentage growth is why Islam is called the world’s fastest growing major religion.

For more information on the demographics of world religions, go to www.adherents.com.

Locating Islam on the World Map

All Arabs aren't Muslims, and all Muslims aren’t Arabs (the original inhabitants of the Middle East who became the dominant population of many Middle Eastern and North African countries, from Iraq to Morocco). In fact, Arabs are only 20 percent of the world’s Muslims. In contrast, South Asia (Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India) has 300 million Muslims. The Middle East has 200 million Muslims, but the two largest Muslim countries in the Middle East — Turkey and Iran — aren’t Arab countries. Of course, Arabic is the language of Islam, and Arabic culture has left an indelible impression upon Islam, although most Muslims don’t speak Arabic.

Don’t assume that all Arabs are Muslims. More Arab-Americans are Christian than Muslim. Arab Christians are a large minority of the population of Lebanon and a small but significant minority in Iraq. As late as the middle of the 20th century, Christian Arabs were an influential minority of the population of Palestine, although many have since emigrated to the United States and elsewhere. However, well over 90 percent of Arabs are Muslim.

Muslims are concentrated in a continuous band of countries that extends across North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and then to Malaysia and Indonesia in Southeast Asia. The percentage of the population that is Muslim in these countries (except India, where Muslims are a small minority) ranges from the low 80s to more than 99 percent. Note that Shi`ites are the largest Muslim group in Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, and Lebanon. For about 1,000 years, most of South Asia (today’s Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, but not Sri Lanka) was ruled by Muslims. If you add together the Muslim population of these three countries (see Table 1-2), you see that the total constitutes by far the largest number of Muslims in any area of the world.

Over time, through emigration and conversion, most of the population of today’s Pakistan and Bangladesh became Muslim, while the majority of the population of India remained Hindu. At independence in 1948, the former British colony of India (including all three of the countries named) split into India and Pakistan, resulting in a massive displacement of population as most Hindus in Muslim-dominated areas moved to India, while a substantial number of Muslims in areas with Hindu majority moved to Pakistan. (Later, a civil war in Pakistan gave rise to the independent nation of Bangladesh in what had been East Pakistan). Since 1948, relations between India and Pakistan have been tense, coming close at times to all-out war. Because a substantial number of Muslims remain in India, clashes at the local level have often broken out between Muslims and Hindus. Both religious factors (for example, some Hindus are offended by Muslims’ using cattle for food, because the cow is a sacred animal in Hinduism) and political factors (for example, disputes over Kashmir, a Muslim majority area that remains with India) play a role in these conflicts.

China may have many more Muslims than the figure in Table 1-2, but no one knows for certain because the Chinese government tends to understate the numbers of adherents of all religions and doesn’t cooperate with demographers wishing to arrive at more accurate figures.

Go to www.guardian.co.uk/flash/0,5860,567574,00.html on the Internet where you’ll find a click-on map. Click on 80–100 percent, and those countries light up; other percentage ranges follow suit.