Post 9 Islam
After reading Smith’s chapter on Islam and watching all of the videos on the Internet I have learned a lot about Islam. The life of Muhammad was very interesting to me he was a normal person who claimed that angles that were sent from Allah appeared to him and told him that he was the new profit. He was born into a well to do family when both his parents died at a very young age; his uncle then raised him. As an adult he became a successful merchant and a very respectable man in Mecca.
One day Muhammad went to some caves for a couple of days just outside of Mecca where the angel Gabriel appeared to him. He then went back to Mecca and slowly started converting his close friends and family members. Eventually Muhammad and his followers were chased out of Mecca and led to Medina. For hundreds of years the people of Mecca had been worshiping hundreds of Gods that is why they rejected Muhammad’s teachings. After a few years Muhammad and his followers returned to Mecca and took control of the city. Muhammad came up with the five pillars of Islam, and he also wrote the Koran.
Some of the main concepts of Islam are, the main one is to understand that there is no other god but Allah and followers should summit their lives to him. Islam has quite a few similarities of Christianity as well as Judaism, in the fact that they all stem from Adam, Moses, to Abraham. It is found in the Old Testament, the Torah, as well as the Koran.
The five pillars of Islam are as follows: The first is to confess your faith, which is known as the shahaddah, which is saying, “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his profit.” The second pillar is that Muslims should pray at least five times a day. The third pillar is giving to charity. The forth pillar is fasting during the holiday of Ramada. And the fifth pillar is least once in a Muslims life they should make a pilgrimage to Mecca the only exception is they are handicapped or they are unable to afford it.
I found the videos to be very interesting as well as helpful, it really help me picture all of this in my mind. The video on the influences of Arabic culture had on Europe I found the most interesting partly because it is left out of most textbooks and much of the history, architecture, as well as culture with the exceptions of Southern Spain and Sicily.
