What Exactly is Islam? [Archives:2000/50/Focus]

COMMON SENSE
By: Hassan Al-Haifi
In looking at Islam within the context of the Five Pillars of Islam, we can see that Islam is more than just a few worship rites here and there or some dos and donts, that lack any spiritual connotations or for that matter any meaning to life itself. The Five pillars of Islam are: the attestation that There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is the Prophet of Allah; the Five Daily Prayers; Fasting the Month of Ramadhan, the Zakat, or religious duty tax; and the Pilgrimage to Mecca.
It is the five pillars of Islam which represent the basic foundations that guide the Moslem to the fulfillment of the worshipper of all his life long obligations to the Al-Mighty and in essence provide that checklist of necessities, which the Moslem must fulfill to make his life meaningful in the Islamic sense and which provide the grounds for being beneficiary for the mercy of Allah in this life and in the hereafter. Of course these should not be taken to be the only criteria, by which the faithful is adjudicated in the Heavens, but they do represent the groundwork for a full spiritual attachment to the faith and serve to open the door to spiritual salvation and happiness.
The five pillars are the firm ties that bind the faithful Moslem to his Creator, God Al-Mighty and represent the principal rites and commitments that are obligatory, and by which the believer is expected to manifest his faith in Allah (Allah, one of the ninety- nine names of the Al-Mighty found in the Holy Quran, is synonymous with God and accordingly used by Christian and Jewish Arabs to mean God, as well). These form the fundamental obligations of the Moslem and accordingly enter the worshipper among the faithful, which assure the Moslem that his rights and duties have become equal to the rights and obligations of all the worshippers. Some of these are compulsory and there is no excuse from being unable to fulfill them, namely the First, Second and Third Pillar. However, the Third Pillar allows for deferment in the event of illness or travel or compensatory alms, in the event that the year following Ramadhan should pass and the believer is still under severe physical stress.
In looking at the first Pillar the testimonial of the believer that there is no god but Allah and Mohammed is the Prophet of Allah, we find the pre-requisite to the entry among the faithful, without which all the other pillars and the ancillary duties and commitments expected of a Moslem, would be meaningless, with respect to weighing the relationship between the believer and the Lord, Al-Mighty. It is a declaration that must be viewed not just merely as a verbal statement that is uttered every now and then, but a commitment of the heart that insists that the authority of Allah rules supreme in the mind and the soul of the believer, and to which no compromises can be allowed to dispute the absolute authority of the Lord, in guiding the worshippers life, in its mundane as well as spiritual context.
This declaration is not a matter of convenience only for the entry pass to the fold of the faithful, or the citizenship of the Nation of Islam the nation that does not recognize race, color or ethnic background of its believers, or even the boundaries or artificial borders that serve to cut the Nation, in present times, to the fake jigsaw puzzle, that seem to serve as a convenience for the majority of the despots that oversee the affairs of Moslem States, in their various forms and constitutions. Thus the declaration must be viewed in a universal context and the current international political map of the Moslem World has no significance as far as this declarations is concerned, for the Moslem is bound to work towards the elimination of such boundaries and to insist that every Moslem is a bona-fide citizen of every Moslem state, no matter what the international new order insists or no matter what the authoritarian regimes that rule over the Moslem states insist on as national affiliations. In Islam, there is only one nation, indivisible, under God with liberty and justice for all. If we cannot come to this kind of assumption about the allegiances of the faithful, then the blood of all those who died for the cause of Islam for 15 centuries would have gone in vain. The declaration implies more than a political, economic and social affiliation of the worshipper, for it means that the declarer has pledged his allegiance to the service of the Lord, who is indeed entitled to this pledge, and which can never be broken by its maker. While this declaration is broken down into two parts, both still serve to emphasize the Oneness of the Divine and insist that there can be no partnership in the Divinity. Moreover as great and pious as the Prophet Mohammed (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) was, he is still never to be attributed to be of any part of the Divine, but rather as a product and miracle of His own work, As Adam, Jesus Christ and Moses were before him mortals assigned to carry out a blessed mission for their Lord and Maker. This declaration not only assures the unity of the Divine Creator, but also educates the Moslem to comprehend that mortals, in all their status and forms are also of a one humble status, in the eyes of the Lord and in the eyes of the believers as well. Thus any human beings that insist on claiming excessive power and force over the believers that is without mandate of the rest of the faithful is acting theoretically against this declaration, and does not have any blessings from the Lord Al-Mighty whatsoever. This is the fundamental principle that underlies the spiritual as well as the political implications of Islam. Thus, any mortals that seek to be glorified and deified beyond reasonable cause and in difference to this declaration should be considered as vying for quasi-spiritual status that no man has a right to even seek or claim. It is in this that the magnificence of Islam should be really viewed and anything that seeks to alter this is heresy and is damned by the Al-Mighty and all true faithful Moslems.
Islam came to underscore several modern concepts in human relations as well as the principles by which the relationships of the faithful with their Creator are based upon. Thus, it can be seen that there is just no room for authoritarian or despotic rule in Islam, just by looking in-depth at this declaration, and as firmly established by the Prophet Mohammed (P) and all the other messengers before him, as well as his early disciples, who insisted that any responsible official is to consider himself accountable to the believers, as well as to the Lord Al-Mighty for how they carry out the trust they have been burdened with. Authority in Islam is based on severe criteria, which include that the official must understand that his declaration of this testimonial is the guiding principle by which he carries out his responsibility and if he fails to understand that any effort to turn that office into a private ego trip is in defiance of this declaration and worthy of the resistance of the faithful and the wrath of the Al-Mighty together. Any Moslem failing to see this has deprived himself of the sense of freedom and liberty that the worshipper enjoys as a member of the faithful and surely brings upon himself great suffering and deprivation, both in a material and spiritual sense. It is hard to believe that very few Moslems truly understand Islam along these lines, and if they do, they lack the courage to insist that they are either given these freedoms and rights or else they are getting what they deserve!
Therefore, it is imperative that Moslems understand what their faith in Islam means and what is the outcome of uttering this fundamental declaration. God is supreme and all authority must be based on what He has clearly ordained in the Quran, and it is up to the Moslem worshipper to safeguard the sanctity of this declaration and to prevent any mortal from overstepping the boundaries, which this declaration truly implies, and the rights and freedoms that this declaration truly give the believer in Allah. Islam is a dynamic revolutionary religion that insists on a high degree of activism by the believers to ensure that no one defies the underlying principles of the monotheism that is emphasized by this declaration, and how this declaration was manifested by the Prophet Mohammed and the four orthodox caliphs and other pious Moslem leaders that came and went over the ages. We will deal with the other Pillars of Islam in the forthcoming articles.

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