Understanding Islam

as we get started with this the first thing we need to understand is that all three of the world's great monotheistic religions I know I keep getting this weird and end and out thing I don't know what's going on I'm standing in one place so all three of the world's great monotheistic religions all trace themselves back to one man and that is Abraham the four thousand years ago or right around 2000 BC let's try the other okay this it's that better not get anything now that's good okay you're right okay let's stay with that you guys tell me it's okay it's okay so all three of the great monotheistic religions Judaism Christianity and Islam all trace themselves back to father Abraham this drawing over here of Abraham you will notice that he is identified as father Abraham in Hebrew in Arabic and in English because again all three of those religions look back to him now a little bit of a history behind that Abraham was married to Sarah actually originally their names were abram and sarai abram's int exalted father his name later was changed when God promised that he would be the father of a great nation his name was changed to Abraham which means father of many and he had promised to Abraham ins and Sarah that they would have a son and that that son would then become a great nation of people unfortunately no God didn't put a timeline on this and they got impatient that they weren't having a son weren't having a son weren't having a son and so finally Sarah did something that records indicate was very common in ancient times in the Middle East and that is she gave her handmaiden whose name was Hagar to Abraham to bear a son so that he would be a surrogate heir so the first child of Abraham was by Sarah's handmaiden Hagar and his name was Ishmael well not too long after that Sarah becomes pregnant and she has a son named Isaac well Sarah gets frustrated with the fact that there now is another boy there that's not her natural son that is older and therefore might at some point claim to be the heir so she pressures Abraham to see Hagar and Ishmael away God tells Abraham it'll be alright I'll take care of them and in fact I will make of Ishmael a great people this is all Hebrew Bible stuff so Hagar son Ishmael later on is the founder of 12 tribes just like the 12 tribes of Israel there were two twelve tribes of Ishmael they became the Arabic peoples so the Arabic peoples are all descended from Abraham and that's why they see him as father Abraham later on in that line we have Mohammed and we'll talk about him in a second by the way this is not to scale there was a lot a lot more than happening here but from Isaac we have his son Jacob whose name was changed to Israel he like Ishmael had 12 sons they became the twelve tribes of Israel which were the Hebrew people and then long descent from that we end up 2,000 years later from Abraham Jesus comes up the line of Abraham so they are all descended from Abraham and all of the three great monotheistic religions trace themselves back we're going to focus right now on the Islamic part of this and so we start with of course the Prophet Abraham Abraham was born in the city of Mecca in the Arabian Peninsula in 570 he was orphaned as a young child was raised by an uncle and was involved in the caravan trades during which he got exposed to a lot of different kinds of people including other religions Jews and Christians were common in the areas that the caravans the camel caravans in the Middle East would travel so he had had exposure to them he at age 25 he started working for a widow named Khadijah who was 15 years older she was 40 they fell in love and they married and for the next 25 years Muhammad did not take a second wife polygamy was common in those days but apparently they had you know they love each other they they were had a great relationship and so he never took another wife during that whole time when he was 40 years old about 610 ad Muhammad had a happened of going up into the mountains above Mecca and entering in the caves for times of meditation and prayer he had a conception of there being one God even though at that time in Saudi Arabia in particularly in Mecca they were polytheistic the Kaaba which we'll see a picture of year later which is the black stone that's in the center of now Mosque in Mecca that was a sight of polytheistic worship there were many different idols of other gods in the kebab and the kebab by Islamic tradition had been built by Abraham and his son Ishmael they had come to Saudi Arabia and built it but the so there's all this polytheism well Muhammad during one of his times of meditation in 610 ad the angel Gabriel or Sheba veil as they would call him in Arabic made an appearance to Abraham and told him that he was bringing a message from from Allah God and the word Allah means God but it means the God it's a very clear singular so that Allah was sending a message to him and that he was to recite Mohammed was illiterate but the angel came his first reaction apparently by his own testimony was I can't recite I'm not a man of letters I can't and yet the angel Gabriel was insistent you must recite what I tell you later on the messages that he received initially and then later he recited to other people and later on they were written down but Muhammad couldn't write them down being illiterate so and he came back down from that first encounter to his wife Khadijah and said either going insane or God has called me to be a prophet and after several more revelations that the aja believed him he decided yes I've been called to be a prophet and he started to share the message that they'd been given in three years the first three years he only got 40 converts and during that time while he was sharing the message in in Mecca and this is Mecca and Medina in the area is Allah in Mecca he came under considerable persecution he was telling them it's wrong to worship multiple gods they didn't want to hear it Mecca was kind of a you've heard the expression well it's a real mecca of commercialism right well Mecca was a place where people would come to worship these multiple gods that were in the Kaaba and so there was a lot of money involved in this and by his preaching Muhammad was threatening their pocketbooks and so he and his followers were came under considerable persecution at first they would just you know throw sticks at them and throw dirt on them where they were praying but eventually the persecution got really dangerous after a while there were a group of people there was a city about 280 miles north of Mecca which at that time was called the fe and yet we the people from me Anthony were struggling they have five different groups within the city and they couldn't seem to get organized in terms of all working together they had heard that that this guy was really strong he was you know putting up with all this persecution down in Mecca they came to Mecca and said would you come to your feet and lead our community and if you do we will follow your religion we will defend you and so the in 622 there is the great event in fact this is the mark of the start of the Hebrew calendar is called the Hegira or the migration north and oddly enough although they persecuted them the meccans trying to prevent the from leaving well they managed to get away led by Muhammad and his father-in-law at that point of a walker his closest followers and companion they made a trip north and yet later on was renamed the city of the Prophet or later just the city which is medina so the two cities Mecca and Medina became the focal point of the Islamic religion those are the two holiest sites in Islam the people from Mecca attacked the people of Medina a couple of times usually than the demons although they were had a smaller army they ended up being successful they do her feet were defeated once and Muhammad was wounded during that war but eventually after much battle Muhammad comes back to Mecca in front of an army and they receive him and accept him and the whole city converts to Islam and at that point he begins to share the message of Islam throughout Saudi Arabia and virtually during his life of the whole of the Arabian Peninsula converts particularly those of you who were in Oman those anybody you know those of you who were before we come this Cruise in Dubai we went to a mono Monde is very proud of the fact that they were some of the earliest converts to Islam now they practiced a different kind of Islam it's called a body it's not Sunni it's not Shia and I'm splitting those in a minute but Mecca and Medina continued to be that most holiest of sites yeah give you a few minutes to memorize this this is Muhammad this is his whole genealogy you will notice here of his daughter Fatima I'll talk about a minute and Ali his son-in-law and cousin Muhammad's father and Ali's father were brothers down here you get Abu Bakr Umar and Othman now let me tell you why those people or when Mohammed died there was a considerable question as to who should succeed him leading the Islamic movement a number of people dream that it should be a lead because Ali was the only male blood relation that Mohammed had and this they came from a tribal background where there was an inheritance it went to the son or the closest male relative and he didn't have any sons he only had daughters and there was much discussion finally the Ummah the community which is a very important concept in Islam they decided that instead of it being a blood relation that has passed down to they needed to select the person to be the successor to Muhammad who was the best the best choice the one who best exemplified the ideals of Islam and what Muhammad had taught and so they selected Abu Bakr who was the a father-in-law of Mohammed Abu Bakr became the first of what were called the rightly guided caliphs or rashidun police the word Khalif means successor Abu Bakr the first thing that happened when Muhammad died and word got out is almost all of the tribes of the year Arabian Peninsula rejected Islam mostly because they didn't want to pay the tax some of them didn't reject the religion but they stopped paying the tax and so Abu Bakr immediately lost which called the campaign of the apostasy and he in fairly short order regained the commitment of the people in the Arabian Peninsula to Islam and he ruled he then began after that he began a campaign to spread the message by force of arms to other areas and so he began a period of conquest before Abu Bakr died and he was only Khalif for well over two years he recognized another of Muhammad's father lon far as being the next best candidate and so when a blocker died in his will he said Umar should be my successor and everyone agreed the whole time there's a group of people who still believe that Ali because the blood relationship that he should be the leader after Kumar and Umar was very important for two reasons umar set up the political structure that allowed them to rule they're spreading like wildfire the by the Arab Islamic armies are traveling north of defeating assassin and the empire which was the Persian Empire the Byzantine Empire they're taking land away from then they're conquering North Africa I'll show you maps in a second so these three abu bakr umar and then umar before his death he set up at a council of six man incident select one of you as a successor and they selected ruth mine for the first six years of his being khalid he was coming longer than any of the others first six years he was the most popular of all police the last six years people started disagreeing with him on things and he refused to put down rebellion by violence is after 12 years he was assassinated Kumar also had been assassinated by the way - if guzman was assassinated by an Egyptian servant because he they didn't like the fact that Egypt had been conquered now I tell you all that the fourth colleague was Ali now those four are polar rightly guided police but every time a new colleague needed to be named there was a conflict because the people who followed Ali and thought he should be the successor were called the shia of ali shia means the partisans of or the supporters are shia became shiite and today the second-biggest sect of islam are Shiites those people that are descendants of the first people who thought Ali should be of the the colleague the others who were not direct blood relations but were all related to there were two father-in-law's and the son-in-law they were all related to Muhammad they were selected because it was felt they were best representative of the Sunnah or the well-trodden path the tradition they represented what Muhammad meant for his lot to be well thus the followers of that track the ones who believed the best leader not the blood relation should be in charge were called the Sunnis from Sunnah the tradition well this the Shiites the partisans of Ali and the Sunnis those who supported them the one who they thought best representative the trip Mohammed had started became the dividing line in Islam Shia and Sunni and we're gonna talk about that a little bit as we go along this gives you an idea of the dark orange down here including this part of olan was what became Islamic during Muhammad's life when he died and you have the territory headed by the four colleagues that's Abu Bakr Umar Uthman and then finally a lead they took over all this area in yellow all of Egypt remember one of the Egyptian servants assassinated booth one because of that early mark sees me doesn't that all the way over into modern day Libya they conquered most of the Persian Empire they took over a significant part of what had been the Byzantine Empire the Byzantine Christian Empire and the Persian assassin of the empire had been fighting each other for so long they just Ward each other out so they they were easy targets once the Arab Muslim armies started attacking and then we come to another Umayyad caliphate that I'll talk about they extended all through North Africa the Maghreb as it's called over in northwest Africa and crossed over into Europe the Iberian Peninsula the umayyad caliphates which was the next belief to come along they conquered all of pretty much all of Spain and Portugal and then we're trying to come from the rest of Europe the armies went up into Western Europe all the way to Tours near Paris and finally were defeated the first first people that could defeat that Europeans was Charles Martel who is the grandfather of Charlemagne Charles the Great who would come along later and create a European Empire but had it not been for Charles Martel's stopping them here their intention was overall in Western Europe and that's an important historic point will come to this is what before Russia doner rightly guided police were able to take over Abu Bakr Umar Uthman and Ali the four successors right after Mohammed then the Umayyad Caliphate what happened is when Ali took over he did a couple things people didn't like he moved the capital away from Medina up to a place in Iraq modern-day Iraq and he also got rid of a lot of the governors and put his friends in place well Ruth maan the London is him right before Ali who had been assassinated was part of the Umayyad tried a different tribe did Muhammad and his relatives felt like Ali should focus on trying to get revenge for the people who killed him and Ali refused well one Muhammad's favorite wife Aisha put together an army marched north as far as Basra fought a battle they captured 4000 people they thought have been involved in the plot to kill earth maan they executed them and so Ali's horses and ayisha's forces ended up coming face-to-face neither one of them wanted to have a battle and yet in the night a battle started to spill the Battle of the camel it was the first civil war between Muslims well one of the relatives of Othman who was based in Damascus his name was Malaya he ended up challenging for the Caliphate and defeated Ali in battle actually they have kind of a draw and then the decision was made for Hawaii Ali was killed in battle and so Malaya takes over there's a new Caliphate and that's the Umayyad Caliphate they extended further to the east and further to the west of in tune and if you alhambra or the beautiful of some of the beautiful cities and buildings and things that are in currently in spain that was a product of the Umayyad caliphate taking over Iberia then the Abbasid Caliphate comes along a completely different group they take over from the Umayyads they moved the center to Baghdad they build a city of Baghdad the Abbasid Caliphate was responsible for the Golden Age of Islam in Baghdad where the science and mathematics and us medicine and astronomy they were seeking to take all of the great writings of history and can translate them in Arabic and keep them in in Baghdad and they that lasted until the 1200 when they were destroyed the city was destroyed by hulagu khan the Abbasid Caliphate lasted longer but that was the main part of it during the same period of time though there were challengers the fight about Caliphate which was all in North Africa and Egypt and the area along the coast the holy cities the only time the Shiites have ever controlled anything was the Fatima color they named after the daughter of Muhammad was the wife Holly during the same time that the khalif's were up here in Baghdad they ended up taking over a lot of land under the Abbasid their buses were from a scholarly point of view they were great but from a military point of view not so great they lost all of this territory to the vitamin Caliphate they lost the Iberian Peninsula the Western European part to the remaining Umayyads and so there were splits happening all the time here and then finally the human Dyess tea with dynasty within halothane there was a this year of the thought of a Caliphate was named Saladin you know the name he was involved in the Crusader Wars on the Muslim side well he was busier for a long time and he saw all of this what he thought was just stupid rulership that the rulers were not worthy so he ended up taking over the the Fatimid Caliphate and turning it into the ubud dynasty he did not claim religious authority for himself he did not say soliton did not say I am the successor or colleague to Mohammed he referred that Makani Bisons who were still around but he did create the overthrew the Ottoman Caliphate and created the human dynasty and this was one of the richest times one of the most prosperous times for the Muslim empires now some of these empires were the largest empires the the Umayyad Caliphate for instance was the largest empire in history to that point to this day it's still a fifth largest empire that has ever existed so they're conquering an enormous amount of property in a very short period of time then from the Far East from Merve Turkmenistan a group of Mongol warriors who had been converted to Islam traveled to West and in a battle in 1040 they they were mercenaries they were fighting on the side of the Persian leaders in who were Islamic by that point and yet they get just like Sullivan they got tired of people who are charged and said we're doing all the fighting we're the ones that are strong why are we listening to them so they ended up in 1040 conquering the local Persian Muslim leaders and becoming the rulers they were the Seljuk Turks Turks because they came from Turkey they then continued to control territory in 1071 they defeated the Byzantine army the Byzantine Christian army which was located in Constantinople and this was very close to the time by the way that the Crusades started because the emperor in Constantinople sent a message to the the Pope in Rome and said I've got these Muslim armies right outside my door help and so that's what started the crusade but you'll notice they took over most of Asia Minor what we know of is Turkey today and Constantinople is right there and so they were right outside the doors so the Seljuk Turks take over they become the largest part of the Muslim world and then later the Ottoman Osman one of the Turks he managed to stay controlled were not really sure to the state how he creates the Ottoman Empire and in its heyday which was in the 17th century they were right outside the gates of Vienna they conquered all of Eastern Europe the Crimea all around the Black Sea Armenia all of North Africa and Egypt and the holy cities so Ottoman Empire became a very powerful Empire in its early days later on it got weaker and weaker and weaker it was known as the sick old men of Europe eventually and through a series of battles initially they were being opposed by what was called the Holy League which were Christian nations in Europe that were fighting back against the Muslim armies and trying to hold them at bay interestingly in this period of time in the 1500s when the Ottoman Empire was sending troops into Europe was the 16th century 1500s was when the Protestant Reformation happened and every time the holy roman emperor charles was just getting his army together be ready to squash the Protestants it would be another incur by the Muslim armies in the east and he would have to send his armies over here to fight battles and during that period of time in Germany and Switzerland and elsewhere the Protestants got a foothold and that's why we ended up with the Protestant Reformation being successful but the Ottoman Empire through a series of wars they ended up losing more and more and more territory until eventually they lost all of North Africa and Egypt all of Armenia all of the European properties with the exception of a tiny area near Istanbul and this dark-brown was all that the Ottoman Empire was leading up to 1914 and we know what happened what started in 1914 right the first world war when the first world war started there were six great empires in Europe and in Asia the British Empire the French Empire the German Empire the austro-hungarian Empire the Russian Empire the Ottoman Empire but by the end of the First World War only two of those existed and not nearly as powerful as they have been that is the British Empire and the French Empire all the others had been destroyed the Ottoman Empire was taken and broken up and into various countries this is a real quick key dates I don't usually focus on dates when they do talk disgusting you don't need that but this will give you kind of a summary well hot lead was more than 570 in 610 he gets the first revelation of the Quran 622 during the Hegira the migration north to Medina that's when Islam is started that's when the calendar the Islamic calendar starts 6:30 Muhammad and his followers return and defeat Mecca 632 Muhammad eyes after converting mostly Arab peninsula in the series of khalif's or successors launched military campaigns the first floor of those are called Russian or rightly guided police then the Umayyad police the Abbasid caliphs thought of it Kelly view of the human dynasty and then the Ottoman Empire that's the history and I wanted to start with the history before we get into some of the beliefs that we have another chart where you memorize you think well Islam is one thing this is a not very detailed chart of the Islamic sects the two biggest ones are Sunni here and there are four or you might say five schools of theology that exists within Sunni Islam Sunni Islamist eighty five percent of all Muslims in the world are Sunni the Hanafi is fairly liberal this is what they had practiced in Turkey turkeys get more conservative all the time but the countries that are more progressive less restrictive tend to be Hanafi or Maliki hon Bali which is practiced in Saudi Arabia for instance is ultra conservative it's also the theology primarily that ISIL or Isis was focused on you also get Maliki and Shafi'i and other parts of the world the reason that by the way I'm talking about Islam now you're thinking hey we're not the Middle East the Middle East only constitutes twenty percent of all the Muslims in the world only 20% of Muslims are Arabic the country of Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world there are more Muslims in Indonesia than there is in the whole Middle East Africa has a large percentage of Muslims now across the northern Sahara and we need sub-saharan Africa we obviously get in in Southeast Asia we have some but the largest population of Muslims is in South Asia that is India Pakistan and Bangladesh so we have just been cruising around the part of the world that has more Muslims than any other region all right so you get Sunni it's 85% Shia is less than 15% this is an ensue me in Saudi Arabia most of the countries are Sunni Shia is primarily Iran which is more than 90 percent Shiite or Shia Muslim and Iraq now interestingly Iraq is predominantly Shia but during the time of Saddam Hussein he was Sunni and he was controlling the country so it was being run by a minority Sunni government but it is predominately Shia and of course Iran and Iraq had horrendous Wars they have an eight-year war of more than eight years where they were using child soldiers and just gassing each other name of horrendous things well within Shia there are all these different schools I may give you a little detail and then you'll notice there's a third the collage they were the group their predecessors of this group that actually were the ones that assassinated booth maan and became kind of outcasts but from them the body Islam and a body is there's a little pockets up in places but it's primarily in Oman and it's a different thing than Shia or Sunni they have some different doctrines this is Shia again it's only one thing right Islam is all the same well from Shia Islam I'll stand back here Muhammad and his daughter Fatima Fatima was married to Ali they had two sons the son and Hussein from that point the divisions between who are the legitimate heirs to Muhammad and therefore who are the people are supposed to follow very widely now in Shia Islam they believe that an imam and a mom in in Sunni Islam is simply a leader of Prayer it's a local person who's trained in the Quran and elites prayer and Imam and Shia Islam is considered to be appointed by God and speaking with the authority of God not God that's the the most important doctrine in all of Islam whether Shia are sunni with a couple of exceptions minor exceptions the most important doctrine is called tawi-tawi means singular thank God it's based on the number four one on one that God is one nothing can be compared to him nothing can be equated with him the idea that Jesus was the son of God is completely unacceptable to Muslims for instance and so the the idea of the descent here is how many Imams how many prophets were legitimately appointed in Shia by God as spokespeople so you have one group who believes that after Hasan and Husayn that his sons of ali and hussein was killed in a battle he had only like a small number of people like 40 people fighting for him and he was against a whole army and was killed and he still to this day the death of Hussein is a major major sore point for the the Shiites against the Sunnis well there's a group that believed that there was only one that follower or one Imam after Hussein Muhammad given the Han afiyah and they are the Hanafi you have another group that believe after Hussein that was Saeed Abedini and so Saeed they're called as IEDs some believe that after Hussein and insane there was Mohammad Baqir and Jafar al-sadiq and then a number of others they are what's called 12 verse because they believe there were 12 descendants or police after Mohammed twelvers are the largest group of Shia Muslims they are the predominant group in in Iran and particularly they believe that the 12th Imam the Muhammad Ali Mahdi that he went in the 11th century healing into what spoke I'm sorry the 9th century he went into what's called an occultation he disappeared from sight he's still around but you can't see him eventually the Mahdi is going to come back and interestingly enough they believe that his predecessor the one who will come and announce his coming will be Jesus Jesus is a prophet in Islam that the mighty will come back and he will he will declare the end of the world as we know it and the day of judgment and you know people appear before Allah and have to make it you know have to account for themselves so the 12 verse or the Umayyad are the largest group you then have a group that believed there were seven Ishmael being the last they are called the seven errs or sometimes be smileys then you have groups who have many more in the list the true Jews are considered by many people not to even be legitimate Muslims you have from here it goes back up and you have the nice saris that the saris are interesting unique in fact because their leader their Imam is a fellow named Ike akan are you familiar with the name Agha Khan he is a British businessman a billionaire a philanthropist he does a lot of work building schools and things but he is a he's a billionaire is famous for breeding racehorses and liking really fast cars today and he is considered the primary adviser on all matters spiritual and secular to the nazar ease around the world they're frequently called the misery Ishmael these are some times when they say Ishmael II they mean than the saris rather than this group over here so the icon who lives in Britain and France he is the leader of the masari's and it goes on down here you get the number of other theological groups now the Sufis come off within us this as well the Sufis are considered I think and have them here Sufi this Sufi is a Sunni sect but there are a lot of different movements within that and when ensue pious am i mentioning this particularly because of the event that happened in the North Sinai there are some aspects of Sunni that are committed to devotional practices some spiritual practices that are more direct of the goal of Sunni our Sufi ism is to come in direct contact with Allah we just consider the most Sunni Muslims to be heretical they also have always featured building of shrines to their great Imams their prophets they believe and so and they go to those and they they they wouldn't say worship they say they just focus on Allah because of the shrines up there of their leaders that's considered completely wrong to the radical other Sunni sense that's why we have the attack in northern Sinai because other radical Sunnis believe that the Sufis are heretics this is the layout right now all of the green area which is obviously most of it is predominantly Sunni the RNG areas which is primarily Iraq Iran a little bit of in Asia Minor and Turkey and the Yemen are the Shia and then you get since this purple here is a lot that's a body which is a third flavor there are others the outer lights President of Syria is Alawite which is a smaller set so there are a lot of other complications you see why it's ridiculous for people to make comments like well all Muslims believe whatever it is or do this or say that it is I mean imagine all the Protestant denominations if the Methodists were trying to kill all the Baptist's then you might have kind of a picture of what this looks like all right it is a very complicated picture now a little bit about the beliefs I'm not going to spend a long time of this the primary book of Islam is the Quran this is the written version of what was presented orally to Muhammad and it was it was captured the final version of it was formalized under under Newmar and that's one of the things he is highly regarded for for given the final version of it it's believed that the Quran the Quran is 114 surahs or chapters the word Summa literally means fence they vary in length the first one is always is fairly short the baqia and it's kind of the introductory one and after that they're in order of length longest to shortest which is kind of a reverse chronological order because we believe the shortest ones were written earlier 114 of these chapters or surahs' and then within then there are ayaats or what we would think of as verses that means the signs it is believed that the Quran has existed by most Muslims they believe that the Quran has existed eternally that it is the very word of God that is in some ways kind of the incarnation of God and that it is only truly legitimate if it is in an Arabic Muslims believe that Arabic is the language of God and that's why Arabic is used if you take the Quran and you translate it into another language that's you can do that but it's no longer the true Quran it's considered a commentary on the Quran because it is the book the holy book now interestingly Muslims also believe because Jews and Christians also have holy whoops that were given by God and they believe that they were although they later got corrupted by people according to Muslims then they are called the people of the book drop throughout all of this conquering and stuff that was happening Muslims have historically not required people to convert to Islam with very very rare exceptions there was a period of time in the 11th century and this is things that led up to the Crusades there was a five-minute Khalif based in Egypt named mad Hakim they called him the mad Kali al Hakim he was actually killing Christian pilgrims who were coming to the Holy Land and destroying holy land sites that were were Christian for instance he destroyed the tomb of the holy sepulchre again had to be rebuilt later the rest of the Islamic world didn't agree with that in fact the rest of the Islamic world asked the Byzantines if they would send troops to help protect their own pilgrims who were coming to the Holy Land and that's why the first troops came to the Holy Land to protect pilgrims at the request of the rest of the Islamic world and then it got nasty and turned into the war of the Crusades but the Quran is considered the holy book in addition there are two other factors the hadith hadith are the writings that capture the words and actions of Muhammad and his companions so and it's not seen as coming down from heaven it's a human document but very important because the Quran says obey God and obey His Prophet and so the words and life of the Prophet Muhammad are also very important second of the Quran but very important the hadith at one point there were a hundred thousand different hadith different writings that claim to be from Muhammad's life in words and they developed a whole science to determine which of these should we listen to and they now have categories there are the those that are considered perfect honey those that are good and those that are poor and the good ones are the the perfect ones the ones that people are supposed to follow from the Quran and the hadith they then have developed what's called the soon on this is from the root same root word that Sunni comes from it means the path the tradition of clearly trodden path that means they take all of the Quran and the hadith and they end so the Quran and the life and sayings of the Prophet and they create what is an ideal Islamic life supposed to be now one of the reasons that you get very different interpretations of Islam in different countries is that Sunnis and Muslim are Sunnis and Shias have different priorities on which hadith they follow and the hadith is critically important in developing the Islamic law the Sharia so you get very radical even what seems oppressive interpretations of the Quran in one place because of they follow she is a Sunnis followed different than these other places like Turkey you get a very liberal a kind of interpretation and so Islamic law is based not just on the Quran but on the interpretations that Barry for instance women's clothing and you've seen you know women in countries that don't have their heads covered they'll wear western clothes in Turkey for instance before it's starting to get more conservative but women would be out heads encumber often wearing a trench coat when they were outside and of in order to cover themselves they get to other offers they get their home and they take that off but they wear very western clothes because the only thing that Quran says is women should dress modestly well interpret modestly obviously in Iran and in Saudi Arabia and in some of the other very very conservative country so we have different hadith that they follow honestly is a very different interpretation okay there are six articles of faith in Islam I'm not going to dwell on these but just to let you know belief in one God I mentioned that tal weed is the most important doctrine in Islam it means the singular nature of God Allah means the God the greatest sin in fact the only unforgivable sin in Islam is considered it's called sheer sheer means to take anything and make it equal to God not only to worship another god but also if you take money or prep power or press or anything else and make it more important than God that is the unforgivable sin in Islam they believe in the angels of God angels are in Islam are created from white they do not have free will they are only they only do what God tells him to do on the other hand there's another spiritual creature called a jinn it's where we get the word Genie a jinn is a spiritual creature that does have free will they sometimes do good stuff they sometimes do bad stuff and they will be judged angels won't be judged because they never do anything except what God wants there is a belief in the prophets and messengers of God especially Mohammed prophets are those who came and spoke for God and that includes all of the Old Testament prophets pretty much messengers are those who brought writings from God and not just show you this the messengers include Noah and Abraham who we don't have the writings they were given but Islamic tradition said they were giving writings Moses receive the Torah or co-taught Jesus received the injeel or the Gospels and Muhammad received the Quran they are the messengers they're a step up but they have other prophets Adam Joe blot Ishmael Isaac Jacob Joseph Aaron etc and most of those prophets are highly regarded now Muhammad is seen as the last prophet and the seal of the prophets no one will come as a prophet after him but they have many you know they have many prophets from the Hebrew Bible and they believe and the New Testament as well they believe that these people were appointed by God but then their writings they brought in the message they had got corrupted later and Muhammad was sent to get rid of all the false gods and secondly to clear up the corruptions that had happened in Judaism and Christianity all right so belief in the books of God especially the Quran belief in the day of judgment and the afterlife it's believed that when the Mahdi or the 12 verse comes back there will be a day of judgment and that there in the judgment there will be blessing for those who have a bit of beneath a lot and condemnation for those who have not then a belief in the supremacy of God's will and defined decree you might think of that as predestination that that God's will is perfect and whatever he decides is perfect and it's not for us to argue with it all right messengers and prophets of Islam and then the five pillars of Islam this is the most important part terms of what they believe first there is the profession of faith or the Shahada in English it is there is no god but Allah remember that singularity of God and Muhammad is His Prophet to be a Muslim only requires that you say this in Arabic in front of two witnesses now you're expected to be able to pronounce it correctly it's Ya Allah ha you Allah why Muhammad break it up here across will Allah in Arabic so to say that in front of two witnesses and to say it correctly which I just didn't do la ilaha illa Allah Muhammad Rasul Allah that's what's required to be a Muslim that's all there is you don't have to do anything else but implied in that is that you really believe it and you're going to be obedient to the principles of must of Islam so the profession of faith and the Shahada is included in the call to prayer among other things that's the Shahada is there the second principle which people frequently know about is the Salah or prayer five times a day facing toward Mecca and every mosque there is a in the wall which is called a mica that tells you what direction to face so that you're facing toward Mecca and so early morning noon mid afternoon late afternoon evening five times a day is prayer that is required now we're gonna give you all of the previous trip and went to st. catherine's monastery buddy well st. catherine's monastery they have a mosque on the property of st. catherine's monastery it's a walled monastery one of the oldest in the world and they have a mosque in there but the mosque has never been used because when they built it they put the orientation of Mecca the niqab is pointed in the wrong direction and so it's not legitimate to use and I've always wondered if maybe those ones knew what they were doing because it's never been used for Muslim worship inside this Christian monastery so five times a day and on fridays people are expected to go to the community prayer in a mosque now there are in all of the five pillars of Islam there are exceptions if you are pregnant or nursing if you're traveling if you are ill then you get a pass now the idea is if you hopefully will make these things up later when you're better or not traveling anymore or if you have a job like your surgeon and you can't to stop what you're doing when the time comes and pray then that's okay there's no amount of problem with that the third is generous alms giving or zakat according to Islam every Muslim should give the equivalent of 2.5 percent of their total possessions not just their income for the year or the month or whatever they should give 2.5 the value of all their possessions to the poor to the support of Islam every year in addition they're encouraged to give charitably to people in need beyond that but this is an expectation but again it's if you can afford it there is an exception if you are poor if you cannot afford it then you don't have to do that number for fasting or some especially during the holy month of Ramadan the month of Ramadan is the holiest of time for all Muslims and the expectation is that from daybreak until sunset you will not eat anything you will not drink anything you don't chew gum but you don't curse you don't participate in in sexual activities so it's not just fasting from food it's fasting from any other bodily pleasures or bodily appetites and the month of Ramadan moves by 11 days every year because the Muslim calendar is a lunar calendar and so every year Ramadan starts 11 days earlier so over a period of time it will be throughout the whole year it's obviously more difficult to maintain the faster Ramadan during the summer months because the days are much longer and the heat and you know you're not allowed to drink and all kinds of things but this is this is a requirement as part of one of the pillars of Islam now again if you're sick traveling pregnant there are lots of reasons why you don't have to do this but the idea is if you can't fast during Ramadan then try to make it up later but there's nobody checking it off to make sure you do that and number five the pilgrimage to Mecca or the Hajj at least once in life the expectation is that every Muslim will have one at least once in their life that they will travel to Mecca during the period of Hajj which happens in the last month of the Arabic calendar they and their various ritual activities that you do during the Hajj and when we were in Egypt any storekeeper and sometimes houses that have made the Hajj on the sides of their building and they will have painted a ship if they made Hajj by ship if they went by airplane they'll have an airplane painted on the side of the building not everyone but this is very common if you if you attend Hajj you achieve an honorific that you can add to your name if you wish you are a high Sheen and so can be added to your name this is what it looks like during the period of Hajj between two and three million people usually will go to Mecca this is the main mosque and there's that of the kebab in the middle the kebab I'll show you a bigger picture in a minute there are number of rituals people do there they will walk seven times around the Kaaba counterclockwise and they go counterclockwise as a symbol of the fact that this is completely outside time this is this is it doesn't go by the usual rules they then over here you can see this there are two hills there this is all representative of what happened when Hagar and her son Ishmael were sent out they are in the desert and she's running back and forth trying to find water for her son and so there are two hills that you run back and forth between she found a well which was called Sam Sam and so it's there you can drink from the well you're supposed to drink from bulla Sam's M so people take a cut teen of water back home with them from Sam Sam you're supposed to spend the night out on the plains of Arafat you are supposed to throw stones at three pillars that represent the devil so there are a number of different rituals that you do during that time for the pilgrimage of the Hajj when people go to the Hajj they they all dress in the same clothing they all wear white and part of the point there is you are not supposed to know whether the person standing next to you is the head of state somewhere or is a beggar everyone is supposed to be equal during during the Hajj and they will shave their heads there there are rituals of purification and so a lot of that in factory I was just watching a history thing and they talked about the fact that Malcolm X who had been part of the Nation of Islam the black Muslims in the United States it was when he went on Hajj that he came back and completely repudiated all of the doctrines which were heretical by usual Muslim standards that the the leader of the Nation of Islam Hitler had presented in the u.s. partly because there was a one of the doctrines that they maintained the Nation of Islam was that only black people were true Muslims that no white people could ever really be accepted by Allah well he came back having extreme Malcolm X having experienced this absolute equality doesn't matter what color you are where you're from what language you speak what gender you are everybody's equal and he came back and repudiated all of those doctrines and was later assassinated for that but this is the Hajj I want to talk about one last thing and that Islamism Islamism is the basically the idea that Islam should not just be a religion but should affect all aspects of life including political life in other words it's a desire to make the principles of Islam the controlling factors in the government it is representing it's representative of the most radical movements there is what's called the Salafi movement which is is ultra-conservative now again a mistake people make it's estimated less than five percent of Muslims maintain any kind of radical leanings at all certainly less than five percent would want to do anything from a aggressive violent or military sense to try to convert people to Islam the idea that all Muslims are trying to force it rodeo spica Muslims that's contrary to the Quran Muhammad and the Quran said people should be allowed to to maintain their own religion and throughout the history of Islam that has been the case less than five percent would be part of what's called the Salafist movement the Salafi movement started really in the 1920s with the Muslim Brotherhood it was a group that had taken over the you know had been elected into an Egyptian government that lasted about a year before the Egyptians realized what a mistake they made and they threw them out you know and had another election it brought someone else in there is also the hottest movement which began in the 1700s with a a preacher and scholar whose name was Muhammad even out on liheap in Saudi Arabia while he happened to join forces with a guy named Saud who is the end sester of even south the fellow who started the study the family of Saud and created Saudi Arabia conquered the rest of Arabia and so they are under Saudi Arabia under the Wahhabist doctrine one of the most conservative doctrines that they have so Islamism the biggest point I wanna make there is it is in ISIL Isis or the Islamic state also under that there at these Sunni Muslims who attacked the Sufi temple or the the Sunni mosque excuse me they were part of Isis they are an offshoot of Isis Isis has various chapters in different so they maintain the Salafist ultra-conservative politically oriented you know take control by violence if necessary and they react to other Muslim groups they consider heretics just as much as they do non-muslims and that's what we saw in then but the main point I want to make in that is that as a very the the idea of Islamism is a very tiny percentage of Muslims around the world and in fact when Isis began to cut off people's heads and began to really make up you know a splash in Syria a hundred and twenty Muslim leaders from around the world declared them to be anti Islamic 120 Muslim leaders including League the primary leaders from all over the world so the idea that all Muslims are in favor of that kind of thing simply is not worn out by their historically or even in modern times that's a crash course I've gone along but there's a whole lot to it are there any questions about any of that yes yes men and women go on Tosh and by the way in terms of you know some people say well women are second-class citizens because they you know they're not allowed in the main room in temples with a reason and a lot of Muslim women will say they appreciate that because there are not suppose to be any distractions during prayer and you obviously kneel down you bend over put your forehead on the ground and if women and men were doing that together men being the Brutes that they are would be distracted by the fact that there are women's backsides right in front of them and so women are required to be either in a different room to the side or on a different floor most modern mosques trying to make arrangements for them to be in a position where they can see the Imam because they usually will have a sort of sermon before they actually have the time of prayer but it's not because women are considered less important it's because nobody's supposed to be distracted and it's actually out of regard for women that they not become objects and distract men from what they're supposed to be doing there okay but yes women are considered and in some countries women are in many ways very very much accepted in fact when when Muhammad came along he changed some of the rules that again interpretations have gone back women were allowed to to initiate divorce women were allowed to own property women were allowed to maintain their property when they married the initiation of Islam women were given freedoms that they had never known before and obviously some of that has slipped while cause of interpretation since then back there yes what's that there's a woman on to be an imam and in very few places but there are a few places that they are that they're allowed because an imam not in shia but in in sunni because they are prayer leaders and there are some there's actually a movement called progressive Islamism or I'm sorry progressive Islam that what I have a separation of church and state and women are seen as completely equal and so in rare instances it's not very very closeted very common but women are allowed to be prayer leaders yes well you gave us a history of Islamic expansion throughout the North Africa so a year and then into the into Egypt I got I got the sense that there was a lot of military campaigns involve the evolution of that's right and yet that sounds contrary to what the Quran expresses so it sounds like a contradiction okay it sounds like a contradiction if the Quran is saying is advocating peace then you know it looks sounds like they conquered all these areas by force of arms they did conquer these areas by force of arms but they did not conquer them for religious reasons per se in other words they didn't conquer them and then force everybody to be Muslim they conquered them and then control them you have to remember that when this started the Byzantines are trying to conquer every place assassin and Persians are trying to conquer every place you know this and so they pursued now the idea was to conquer in order for there to be an openness to Islam but they did not require people to be Muslims in the requirement only was that they pay a poll-tax basically paying for the policing services that they received as being part of the Islamic world now they did conquer you know by force of arms there's no question about that but they didn't convert by force of arms and then that's important point many of these areas that are now predominantly Muslim that were Christian all of North Africa was Christian Saint Agustin from the most important figures from the for hundreds was a Bishop of Hippo in what we know of is Libya and so North Africa was a hugely all the Middle East the st. Paul his activity in Asia Minor which is modern-day Turkey it's 98% Islamic now but those were the earliest of the Christian churches that were planning but they conquered those areas from other empires like the Byzantine empires assassin in four etcetera they didn't force people to convert but over generations because that was the dominant you know there was the religion of the those in power people converted it made for easier business relationships they didn't have to pay a special tax then who knows what the reasons were those areas it took a long time for most of those areas to become Muslim after they were conquered by the Muslim armies here first and them about yes right in so what about Jerusalem Jerusalem is considered the hurt third holiest place depending upon who you ask I mean some of the shi'ites that would maintain Kufa or some place in 1921 1921 621 before the Hegira Muhammad the story is told that Muhammad was given by Allah a wing and Steve sort of a horse length creature not quite a horse and that he was able to make the trip from Mecca to Jerusalem and one night you know we're talking about a trip that by camel would have taken you over a month and one night and when he got there he spoke with some of the prophets of old and then but because this way it Steve was carried into heaven where he was given other special training and was was actually had an audience with Allah and then came back to earth and when he came back to earth was then delivered back to Mecca by this wing and Steve well today the Dome of the rock which is the large golden dome temple that's on the or mosfets on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem it's called the Dome of the rock because right in the middle of the mosque there is a huge rock and on it there is what looks like a horseshoe print okay I've been in the dome the dome of the rock many many years ago back before it was much more restricted as it is now and it looks like and the idea is that that footprint was left there when Muhammad either way took off or when he landed you know in his journey to heaven so this this is the overnight journey which was supposed to be a mystical experience before the Hegira and all of that okay yes [Music] they have sure [Music] break even so this question is does anybody really examine the economic benefit to Saudi Arabia the fact they get between two and three million people if you're coming for for Hajj I'm sure they have I mean that's the sort of thing that people would be very interested in probably and I don't think they're running as a break even I think that having all of those tourists I mean just the just the value to the shipping lines and Airlines and all that would be enormous these people when they're not actually staying out on the plane you know the plains of Ararat or whatnot they're going to be staying in hotels they're probably going to be traveling around on before or after and so yes I'm sure there's enormous financial benefit to Saudi Arabia for them I don't know what that is [Music] right yeah yeah every year they they do have either major or minor disasters a few years in fact it dropped down significantly a few years ago because we they have like 500 people killed in a stampede something panicked people and there's so many people back together they started you know rushing to try to get away from something and people were killed they were trampled to death people get trampled to death at college football games too you know not as many but because of that big event we're about 500 people died there was a huge drop the next year and the number of people who went on and so that has have an effect but I think it's fun to back up again so but that is that is a factor no any time you get two to three million people together in one place you can imagine the logistics of trying to maintain that so thank you all very much for being here for this

Channel: Lakeside Institute of Theology Seminary

Views: 4,935

Keywords: Islam, World Religions, Windstar, Ross Arnold

Id: VmioQt8tAVo

Length: 66min 5sec (3965 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 13 2018