Origins of Islam

This research will discuss the origins of Islam. The origins of many religions are clouded by the passage of time. When exactly Judaism began, for example, is open to variousinterpretations. Christianity seems more capable of defining the period when it began, but the exact year is really not possible.

Islam is the youngest of the world's major religions. It is perhaps for this reason, or the fact that Islam seems to have kept particularly careful records, that it can name an exact year for its founding. Whatever the reason, the accepted date for the beginning of Islam is 610 A.D. when the Prophet Muhaammed, then forty years old, had the first experience of the Qur'an. However, despite this date, the calendar of Islam does not begin with the prophet's first vision, but begins instead in the year 622 A.D., the year of the hegira, when Muhammed who was despised and rejected in his native Mecca, turned north to Medina, the city if his maternal uncles.

Muhammed's journey to Medina was frought with peril and danger brought on by the constant fighting Muhammed had with the Jews and pagans who feared and despised Muhammed. However, it was in Medina that the state of war between Muhammed and his kinsmen if Mecca was brought to an end. "The total victory of the Islamic forces [was] climaxed by Muhammed's triumphant entry into the city of his birth to destroy the monuments if idolatry. Prophetic though his career remained, Muhammed had increasingly come to wield th

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all other relationships are to be subdued. It is ultimate religion in unambiguous definition and in true balance. The role of Islam in relation to all other faiths is to prune, correct, purge and complete them." "Man in Islam is frimly and vigilantly set in the Divine milieu, not by election in distinction form others, but by dint of natural human worth, universally shared, born under the Divine mercy, destined for immortality...and...guided...and discilined by Islam into that conformity with the will of God which is whole raison d'etre of humanity." This is the basic theology of the religion and it is documented in the Koran (Qur'an). It should be noted htat Islam is in the Judeo-Christian tradition of insistent monotheism, and is especially fervent in Islam because of the polytheistic environment from which it grew and had to do battle with from its earliest times. It believes one should worship God and be submissive to him. It focuses on the will of God rather than his being. It is a religion of law. it has been said that "the most characteristic activity of Islamic scholarship has not been, as in other religions, theology, but the study and explication of the law...in Islam the concept of the law follows natur

Category: Philosophy - O