What Is Islam?
What is the meaning of the word Islam?
The answer to this question is facilitated for us by the word Islam itself. Islam means peace as well as submission. The purpose of life is to live it well; in other words, well being. The purpose of life is life itself lived in the manner that is progressively purified, edified, harmonised, enriched, strengthened and elevated. As Longfellow has beautifully put it, the purpose of life is not enjoyment or suffering but is to live it that each tomorrow finds us further than today, self-betterment is the essential aim.Life is full of conflicts within and without; in every phase of it, it is battlefield. The struggle of good against evil or of the better against the good is an essential and inevitable fact of human existence in a much larger measures than it is of the creation below him. Life in its phenomenal setting offers harmonies as well as disharmonies and the purpose of human existence and the object of all moral struggle is to overcome disharmonies either to mend or to end them. The craving for peace is inherenting human nature; hence every being naturally craves for Islam or peace. Peace, well- being and happiness are three different names of the same state.
The second meaning of the word Islam, i.e. self surrender, is closely connected with its first meaning; it defines the attitude that has peace as its fruit. Now the question arises if we are asked to submit, to whom is this submission due? Islam says it is submission to God and then it defines the God we have to submit. If the conception of God is narrow or false then the attitude of submission far from leading to well-being would make life narrow and perveted. Every worshipper assumes the complexion of the object of his worship. The God we are asked to submit to is Wise, Rational and Good and His chief trait is love and Mercy. The submission to such a God implies, in attitude and in action, regulation of our lives. God according to Islam is not a dogma but an ideal and regulative force of life. God is the guarantee of our highest values. When the Quraan says that God created man so that he may worship Him, worship in its essential significance means no verbal praise and begging for benefits but living in accordance with the will of God.
Man is so constituted that he must crave and strive for peace and he also desires to be free. Obedience to an ideal only can make man free. The wrong-doer believes that he is free to break a natural law and fancies that he has asserted his freedom when he has broken a law. But he fails to understand that in breaking the law he has really broken himself. Virtue is its own reward and vice its own punishment. As Emerson has put it, "the thief steals only from himself."
Religion then according to Islam, is that man should actively and effectively believe in God as the Creator of a rational and moral order in the universe and in human life and as the origin and promulgator of laws which are the laws of the preservation of values and the maintenance and enrichment of well-being. It is his duty to discover this God within himself and within the universe in general. Islam believes that such a God truly exists and can be discovered by observation and by Reason both theoretical and practical. If we understand our moral and social nature we shall also discover laws therein, submission to which will gurantee well-being for us. It is in this sense that Islam means submission.
Religious life is the life of surrender; the surrender of the less real to the more real, of personal desires to impersonal reasons, of the valueless to the valuable, of the temporal to the eternal, and of the particular to the universal. Belief in God is the comprehension of the Eternal and all true knowledge has a reference, direct or indirect, to action, all life will be guided and transformed by it. All knowledge is potential power and real knowledge of the Rational and the Good must mould life according to Reason and Love enlightened by reason. Surrender in this sense is the only means of the preservation and enhancement of life. Islam means this belief and attitude; al else will follow from it.
When giving the fundementals of faith, the Quran often couples with it the doing of good deeds. Which means that the mere profession of Faith in words or to be born in a muslim home is not enough. In the Quran we find a distinction created between a Muslim and a Mu'min (believer). Muslim is the one who has become a member of the Muslim Brotherhood by professing the tenets of Islam and obeying its laws and conventions. Faith or belief is something more than this; it enters the heart and begins to mould life from within. External observance without internal conviction is of little value.
According to the Quran the essential derivatives from belief in God are the following:
1. If God exist He must be nearer to us than anything else including our own selves. This nearnes must become a matter of direct intuition and experience. It follows from this that prayer is a genuine and effective approach to him. Prayer at its highest is the rememberance of God, which means fixing our gaze at the ideal of life and its highest values. The relation with God is not one-sided, it is a reciprocal relation. The call is heard and responded, though the mode of hearing and response may not be intelligible to us. Genuine prayer is not for material or individual benefits but its for guidance to the right path ; it is an aspiration for more light.
2. Although the whole creation is full of the Signs of God and although reason in its purity is also a great guide, there is another mode of Divine Guidance which is called Revelation granted to specially exalted souls. If God exists and guidance is one of His essential traits, the He must create some gifted beings who should serve as guides towards Him. Spiritual life is improved and elevated more by example than by precept; humanity therefore stands in dire need of spiritual exemplars. Such spiritual exemplars are called prophets. Belief in the prophets therefore follows as a corollary from belief in a Good and Guiding God.
3. With the belief in prophethood Islam joins a belief in the unity of prophethood and the unity of religion. The Holy Quran says that prophets have been raised among all people and the fundamental message of all the prophets was one, that people should believe in an omnipotent good God as the creator and the sustainer and that they should be good themselves and just. He is the real Master they should acknowledge Him as the Supreme Lord and worship no other being besides Him.The Holy Quran has repeated in brief the histories of a number of prophets, all of them delivering the same message. All great religions preach the same message. The difference in the teachings of different prophets is a difference of rules and laws and customs due to different times and varying circumstances. The spirit and essence of Revelation have been same although the body and the garb has been changing. Belief in the Prophethood of Muhammad (P.B.U.H) includes belief in all the prophets upon whose revelations the Prophet Muhammad (P.B.U.H) set his seal. He sifted the essential from the inessential, he revered all the scriptures in so far as they had preserved the teaching of the Unit of God and justice towards human kind; he refused to accept as genuine anything that ran counter to this belief or was derogatory to God or human kind.
4. In the realms of the unseen are the beings that serve the purpose of God; they are called angels. The exact nature of the angels and theirt mode of work can never become for the common man a matter of direct experience. All Nature works through agencies that fulfil the purposes of God. We see in Nature innumerable agencies at work but, it is an essential postulate of Islam that life as seen and experienced is not the whole of life; the Unseen exists and is much greater than the Seen. What a wonder, therefore , if there are invisible beings both good and bad, that work for good or evil. The agents for good are called the angels. In the prophetic experiences they are so much in evidence that the conviction about their reality and their functions becomes and integral part of such experiences.
5. Belief in the life after death also follows from belief in a creating and preserving God. Human life would be a mockery if it started with the body and ended with it. Islam says that the life of the ego will continue even after the dissolution of the body and the ego will carry with it in other planes of existence the cumulative effects of all that it has lived. The law of rewards and punishments works constantly even in this life though it may not always be obvious. In the life after death these effects will become more patent, perhaps because the removal of the gross physical envelopment would make the soul's vision clearer. Belief in the after death, belief in the moral order and the law of recompense or retribution follow one from the other.
If the moral order is real , good and evil must produce their effects which we call reward and punishment. Moral order would not be real if life is destroyed with the body. So there must be resurrection and a hereafter.
