Islam all in one

Islam meaning is peace and serenity, it is these second worlds fastest growing religion. Islam at a glance

The word Islam means 'submission to the will of God'.

Islam is the second largest religion in the world with over 1 billion followers. The 2001 census recorded 1,591,000 Muslims in the UK, around 2.7% of the population.

Muslims believe that Islam was revealed over 1400 years ago in Mecca, Arabia.

Followers of Islam are called Muslims.

Muslims believe that there is only One God.

The Arabic word for God is Allah.

According to Muslims, God sent a number of prophets to mankind to teach them how to live according to His law.

Jesus, Moses and Abraham are respected as prophets of God.

They believe that the final Prophet was Muhammad.

Muslims believe that Islam has always existed, but for practical purposes, date their religion from the time of the migration of Muhammad.

Muslims base their laws on their holy book the Qur'an, and the Sunnah.

Muslims believe the Sunnah is the practical example of Prophet Muhammad and that there are five basic Pillars of Islam.

These pillars are the declaration of faith, praying five times a day, giving money to charity, fasting and a pilgrimage to Mecca (atleast once).

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Jesus in Muslims eyes

Jesus through Muslim eyes

In the year 630 A.D, the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) achieved one of his most cherished goals: the occupation of Mecca and the subsequent cleansing of the city from idol worship: it was at once a political and a religious victory of immense symbolic importance. Mecca had been declared the centre of the new faith; its conquest was therefore the fulfillment of a divine promise.

Entering the Ka'ba, the square structure which housed the city's idols, Muhammad (pbuh) ordered all its icons cleansed or destroyed. One of the icons in what must have been a very mixed gallery of divinities was a Virgin and child. Approaching the Christian icon, Muhammad (pbuh) covered it with his cloak and ordered all the others washed away except that one.

Fact or fiction? The question is immaterial. The report I cited is at least 1200 years old and therefore belongs to some of the earliest strata of Muslim historical writing.

What this episode illustrates is the fact that between Islam and the figure of Jesus Christ there exists a literary tradition spanning a millennium and a half of a continuous historical relationship -- a preoccupation with Jesus that may well be unique among the world's great non-Christian religions. To do full justice to this record, I would need a far larger canvas than the one available to me today. Instead I can only hope to draw a sketch of the contours of that relationship; to point to only a few of its highest peaks, its defining moments.

The Qur'an is the axial text of Islamic civilization, and it is of course where we must begin for Islam's earliest images of Jesus. Approximately one third of the Quranic text is made up of narratives of earlier prophets, most of them Biblical. Among these prophetic figures, Jesus stands out as the most puzzling. The Qur'an rewrites the story of Jesus more radically than that of any other prophet, and in doing so it reinvents him. The intention is clearly to distance him from the opinions about him current among Christians. The result is surprising to a Christian reader or listener. The Jesus of the Qur'an, more than any equivalent prophetic figure, is placed inside a theological argument rather than inside a narrative. He is very unlike his Gospel image. There is no Incarnation, no Ministry and no Passion. His divinity is strenuously denied either by him or by God directly. Equally denied is his crucifixion. A Christian may well ask, what can possibly be left of his significance if all these essential attributes of his image are gone?