This week in IDS, we were asked to write a blog post concerning the teachings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, and what became the faith of Islam.
Muhammad was a devout religious man hailing from Mecca. After proclaiming that he received revelations from God, Muhammad fled from Mecca with the few followers he had returning later with a vast army to conquer the lands and establish his religion. The religion states thats he was the last and greatest of the prophets of God, or Allah, and that Jesus was simply a prophet along the lines of Moses. The sacred text, the Quran, is the divine writings of Muhammad himself as dictated by Allah. The largest components of the religion are the Five Pillars of Islam. They are as follows:
1. Shahadah – proclamation that Allah is the only deity and that Muhammad was his messenger.
2. Salah – the ritual prayer which must be performed 5 times a day
3. Zakat – giving to the poor and other charity
4. Sawm – fasting during the holy month of Ramadan
5. Hajj – a holy journey, or pilgrimage, to the holy city of Mecca once during the lifetime of a Muslim
Today the religion is primarily focused on a debate between two division, the Sunni and Shia Muslims. The primary difference between these two sects, is there disagreement on the importance of several of the written laws of Islam which have erupted into extremely serious war between the two factions which has raged for centuries to this very day.
Each of these groups has several subgroups within their structure which uphold their own set of ideas on importance. The Sunni’s are made up of four smaller groups named Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i and Hanbali.
The Shia’s are broken into several branches as well, the largest of which are the Twelvers, the Ismaili, the Seveners, and the Zaidiyyah.
This concludes my post on the very brief summary of Muhammad the the religion of Islam.
