JESUS in the QURAN The Islamic view of Jesus lies between two extremes. The Jews , who rejected Jesus as a Prophet of God, called him an impostor. The Christians, on the other hand, considered him to be the son of God and worship him as such. Islam considers Jesus to be one of the great prophets of God and respects him as much as Ibrahim (Abraham), Moses, and Mohammed. (Peace Be Upon Them) This is conformity with the Islamic view of the oneness of God, the oneness of Divine guidance, and the complementary role of the subsequent mission of God's messengers. The essence of Islam - willing submission to the will of God - was revealed to Adam, who was passed it on to his children. All following revelations to Noah, Ibrahim, Moses, Jesus, and finally Mohammed (Peace Be Upon Them) were conformity with that message, with some elaboration to define the revelation between man and God, man and man, man and instructions. Thus, any contradictions among revealed religions is viewed by Islam as a man-made element introduced into these religions. The position of Jesus in the three major religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - should not be an exception. Although the Quran does not present a detailed life-story of Jesus, it highlights the important aspects of his birth, his mission, his ascension to heaven, and passes judgements on the Christian beliefs concerning him. The Quranic account of Jesus starts with the conception of his mother, Mary, whose mother, the wife of Imran, vowed to dedicate her child to the service of God in the temple. When Mary became a woman, the Holy Spirit (the Archangel Gabriel) appeared to her as a man bringing her news of a son. We read the following dialogue in the Quran between Mary and the Angel: "When the angel said, "Mary, god gives you a good tidings of a Word from Him whose name is messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, -high honoured shall he be in this world and the next, near stationed to God. He shall speak to men in the cradle, and of age, and righteous he shall be, "lord" said Mary "How shall I have a son, seeing no mortal has touched me? "Even so, he said "God creates what He will". When he decrees a thing He but say to it, "Be", and it is. (Al-Imran 3:45-47) In a chapter (Surah) entitled "Maryam" (Mary), the Quran tells us how Mary gave birth to her son, and how the Jesus accused her when she brought the child home: "Then she brought the child to her folk, carrying him, and they said, "Mary, you have surely committed a monstrous thing. Sister of Aaron, your father was not a wicked man, nor your mother a woman unchaste. Mary pointed to the child; but they said, 'Hoe shall we speak to one who still in the cradle, a little child. And he said, 'Lo, I am God's servant, God has given me the Book and made me a Prophet Blessed He has made me ,wherever/may be; and hi has enjoined me to prayer, and to give the alms so long as I live, and likewise to cherish my mother; He has not made me arrogant and wicked. Peace be upon me, the day I was born, and the day I die, and the day I am raised up a live. "Maryam 19:29-33) in the same chapter, following the above quotation, God assures Mohammed (PBUH) and through him the whole world, that what is told above is the TRUTH about Jesus (PBUH), although Christians might not accept it. Jesus is NOT the son of God: He was obviously enough, the son of Mary. The verses continue: "That is Jesus, son of Mary, in word of truth, concerning which they are doubting. It is not for God to take a son unto Him. Glory be to Him, He nut says to it, 'Be, and it is. (Maryam 19:34-35) After this strong statement about the nature of Jesus, God directed Mohammed (PBUH) to call the Christians to worship the one God: "Surely God is my God, and your God, so surely serve him. This is the straight path". (Maryam 19:36) The rejection of the very idea of God having a son is restated later in the same chapter with even stronger words: "And they say, The All- merciful has taken unto Himself a son. You have indeed advanced something hideous. As if the skies are about to burst, the earth to split asunder and its mountain to fall down in the utter ruin for that they have attributed to the All-merciful a son; and behaves not the All-merciful to take a son. None there in the heavens and earth but comes to the All-merciful as a servant" (Maryam 19:88-93) The Quran recognizes the fact that Jesus had no human father, but this does not make him the son of God, or God himself. By this criterion, Adam would have been more entitled more entitled to be the son of God, because he had neither a father nor a mother, so the Quran draws attention to the miraculous creation of both in the following verses; " truly the likeness of Jesus, in God's sight is as Adam's likeness; He created him of dust, then He said upon him, 'Be' and hi was. (Al- Imran 3:59) The Quran rejects the concept of Trinity God the Father, God the son, God the Holy Spirit - as strongly as it rejects the concept of Jesus as the son of God. This is because GOD IS ONE. Three cannot be one. The Quran addresses Christians in the following verses from the Surrah entitled "An-Nisaa" (The Women) People of the Book, do not go beyond the bounds in your religion, and say nought as to God but the Truth. The messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, was only the messenger of God, and his word (Fulfilment of his word (Fulfilment of His command, through the word "Be", for the creation of Jesus) that he committed to Mary, and a spirit originating from Him (was given life by God). So believe in God and His Messengers, and say not 'Three'. Refrain, better is for you. God is only one God. Glory be to him-that He should have a son! To Him belongs all that is in the Heavens and in the Earth; God suffices for a guardian. The Messiah will not disdain to be a servant of God, neither the Angels who are close to Him. Whosoever disdains to serve Him and walks proud, He will assuredly muster them to Him, all of them. As for the believers, who do deeds of righteousness, we will pay them their rewards in full, and He will give them more, of His bounty; as for them who disdain and walks proud, then He will punish with a severe punishment, and they shall not find for them, apart from God, a friend or helper." (An-Nissa 4:171-173) The denial of Jesus's divinity (and. For the matter, of Mary's divinity) is presented in the Quran in the form of a dialogue, at the Day of Judgement, between the Almighty Jesus. All the Messengers and their nations will gather before God and He will ask the Messengers how they were received by their people and what they said to them. Among those who will be questioned is Jesus: "And when God said, 'O Jesus, son of Mary, did you say unto men, "Take me and my mother as gods, apart from God"? He said, 'To you be glory! It is not mine to say what I have no right to. If I indeed said it, you would have known it, knowing what is within my heart, though I do not know your knowledge; you know the things unseen. I only said to them what you did commands me: "Serve God, my God and your God." (Al- Maida 5-116) Given that the Quran denies the Trinity and the son ship of Jesus, what, according to the Quran, was the real mission of Jesus? The answer is that Jesus was a link in a long chain of Prophets and Messengers sent by God to various nations and societies whenever they needed guidance or deviated from his teachings of Moses and other Messengers. As he was miraculously supported by numerous miracles to prove that he was a Messengers from God. However, the majority of the Jews rejected his ministry. In another verse of the Quran, Jesus confirmed the validity of the Torah which was revealed to Moses, and also conveyed he glad tidings of a final Messenger who follow him: "And when Jesus son of Mary said, 'Children of Israel, I am indeed the Messenger to you, confirming the Torah that is before me, and giving good tiding of a Messenger who shall be the praised one."(As-Saff 61:6) Note that "praised one" is a translation of "Ahmad" - The Prophet Mohammed's name. Careful study of the New Testament shows that Jesus refers to the same Prophet in John 14:16-17: "And I will give you another Counsellor (ThProphet Mohammed). To be with you for ever, even the Spirit of Truth." The usual explanation of this Prophecy is that the counsellor referred to is the Holy Spirit, but this explanation is excluded by a previous verse in John: "Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counsellor will not come to you." The characteristics of this counsellor, as can be derived from the prophecy, are that he will stay forever with the believers, he will glorify Jesus; and he will speak that he hears form God. All four characteristics apply to the Prophet Mohammed. He came six centuries after Jesus. He came six centuries after Jesus. He came with a universal and everlasting message, fulfilling the prophecy that the counsellor will stay forever with the faithful. He glorified Jesus as a great Prophet. The Quran attributes to Jesus miracles not mentioned in the Bible's Old and New Testaments, as well as specific verses in the Quran show how the Prophet Mohammad is rejected by Jews and Christians out of prejudice and misunderstanding, rather that carefully study the Bible. It is a sad fact of history that not many are following the "straight path" to which people were called by Jesus. He was only followed by a few disciples inspired by God to support him. The non-believers plotted - as they would against Mohammed, six centuries later - to kill Jesus. But God had better plan for him and his followers, as the Quran tells us: "And when Jesus perceived their unbelief, he said 'Who will be my helpers in the cause of God? The apostles said, 'we are Gods helpers. We believe in God; so bear witness of our submission God, we believe in that you have sent down, and we follow the Messenger. Inscribe us therefore with those who bear witness. 'And they devised, and God devised, and God devised, and God is the best of divisors. When God said, 'Jesus, I will take you to Me and will raise you to Me, and I will purify you (of the falsehoods) of those who do not believe. I will make your followers above the unbelievers till the Resurrection Day."(Al-Imran 3:52-55) As the above verses indicate, Jesus was taken and raised to heaven. He was not crucified. It was certainly the plan of the enemies of Jesus to put him to death on the cross, but God saved him and someone else was crucified: "And for their unbelief, and their uttering against Mary a grave false charge, and for their saying, 'We killed the messiah, Jesus son of Mary, the Messiah of God"…yet they did not slay him, neither crucified him, only a likeness of that was shown to them. Those who are at variance concerning him are surely in doubt the following of conjecture; and they did not kill him of certainty…no indeed; God raised him up to Him; God is Almighty, Allwise. There is not one of the people of the book but will assuredly believe him before his death, and on the Resurrection Day he will be a witness against them." (An-Nissa 4:156-159) The Quran does not explain who was the person crucified instead of Jesus, nor elaborate on the Second Coming of Jesus. However, explanators of the Quran have always interpreted the last verse of the above quotation to mean that Jesus will believe in him before he dies. This understanding is supported by authentic sayings (Hadith) of the Prophet Mohammed may the peace and blessings of Allah him and upon all His Messengers.
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ In The Name Of Allaah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful YOU MUST KNOW THIS MAN MUHAMMAD (May peace and blessings of God Almighty be upon him) You may be an atheist or an agnostic; or you may belong to anyone of the religious denominations that exist in the world today. You may be a Communist or a believer in democracy and freedom. No matter what you are, and no matter what your religious and political beliefs, personal and social habits happen to be - YOU MUST STILL KNOW THIS MAN! He was by far the most remarkable man that ever set foot on this earth. He preached a religion, founded a state, built a nation, laid down a moral code, initiated numberless social and political reforms, established a dynamic and powerful society to practice and represent his teachings, and completely revolutionized the worlds of human thought and action for all times to come. HIS NAME IS MUHAMMAD, peace and blessings of Almighty God be upon him and he accomplished all these wonders in the unbelievably short span of twenty-three years. Muhammad, peace and blessings of God Almighty be upon him was born in Arabia on the 20th of August, in the year 570 of the Christian era, and when he died after 63 years, the whole of the Arabian Peninsula had changed from paganism and idol-worship to the worship of One God; from tribal quarrels and wars to national solidarity and cohesion; from drunkenness and debauchery to sobriety and piety; from lawlessness and anarchy to disciplined living; from utter moral bankruptcy to the highest standards of moral excellence. Human history has never known such a complete transformation of a people or a place before or since! The Encyclopedia Britannica calls him "the most successful of all religious personalities of the world". Bernard Shaw said about him that if Muhammad were alive today he would succeed in solving all those problems which threaten to destroy human civilization in our times. Thomas Carlysle was simply amazed as to how one man, single- handedly, could weld warring tribes and wandering Bedouins into a most powerful and civilized nation in less than two decades. Napoleon and Gandhi never tired of dreaming of a society along the lines established by this man in Arabia fourteen centuries ago. Indeed no other human being ever accomplished so much, in such diverse fields of human thought and behavior, in so limited a space of time, as did Muhammad, peace and blessings of God Almighty be upon him. He was a religious teacher, a social reformer, a moral guide, a political thinker, a military genius, an administrative colossus, a faithful friend, a wonderful companion, a devoted husband, a loving father - all in one. No other man in history ever excelled or equaled him in any of these difficult departments of life. The world has had its share of great personalities. But these were one sided figures who distinguished themselves in but one or two fields such as religious thought or military leadership. None of the other great leaders of the world ever combined in himself so many different qualities to such an amazing level of perfection as did Muhammad, peace and blessings of God Almighty be upon him. The lives and teachings of other great personalities of the world are shrouded in the mist of time. There is so much speculation about the time and the place of their birth, the mode and style of their life, the nature and detail of their teachings and the degree and measure of their success or failure that it is impossible for humanity today to reconstruct accurately and precisely the lives and teachings of those men. Not so this man Muhammad, peace and blessings of God Almighty be upon him. Not only was he born in the fullest blaze of recorded history, but every detail of his private and public life, of his actions and utterances, has been accurately documented and faithfully preserved to our day. The authenticity of the information so preserved is vouched for not only by faithful followers but also by unbiased critics and open-minded scholars. At the level of ideas there is no system of thought and belief-secular or religious, social or political-which could surpass or equal ISLAAM- the system which Muhammad peace and blessings of God Almighty be upon him propounded. In a fast changing world, while other systems have undergone profound transformations, Islaam alone has remained above all change and mutation, and retained its original form for the past 1400 years. What is more, the positive changes that are taking place in the world of human thought and behavior, truly and consistently reflect the healthy influence of Islam in these areas. Further, it is not given to the best of thinkers to put their ideas completely into practice, and to see the seeds of their labors grow and bear fruit, in their own lifetime. Except of course, Muhammad, peace and blessings of God Almighty be upon him, who not only preached the most wonderful ideas but also successfully translated each one of them into practice in his own lifetime. At the time of his death his teachings were not mere precepts and ideas straining for fulfillment, but had become the very core of the life of tens of thousands of perfectly trained individuals, each one of whom was a marvelous personification of everything that Muhammad peace and blessings of God Almighty be upon him taught and stood for. At what other time or place and in relation to what other political, social, religious system, philosophy or ideology-did the world ever witness such a perfectly amazing phenomenon? Indeed no other system or ideology secular or religious, social or political, ancient or modern - could ever claim the distinction of having been put into practice in its fullness and entirety EVEN ONCE in this world, either before or after the death of its founder. Except of course ISLAAM, the ideology preached by Muhammad, peace and blessings of God Almighty be upon him which was established as a complete way of life by the teacher himself, before he departed from this world. History bears testimony to this fact and the greatest skeptics have no option but to concede this point. In spite of these amazing achievements and in spite of the countless absolutely convincing and authentic miracles performed by him and the phenomenal success which crowned his efforts, he did not for a moment claim to be God or God's incarnation or Son - but only a human being who was chosen and ordained by God to be a teacher of truth to man kind and a complete model and pattern for their actions. He was nothing more or less than a human being. But he was a man with a noble and exalted mission-and his unique mission was to unite humanity on the worship of ONE AND ONLY GOD and to teach them the way to honest and upright living in accordance with the laws and commands of God. He always described himself as A MESSENGER AND SERVANT OF GOD, and so indeed every single action and movement of his proclaimed him to be. A world which has not hesitated to raise to Divinity individuals whose very lives and missions have been lost in legend and who historically speaking did not accomplish half as much-or even one tenth-as was accomplished by Muhammad, peace and blessings of God Almighty be upon him should stop to take serious note of this remarkable man's claim to be God's messenger to mankind. Today after the lapse of some 1400 years the life and teachings of Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings of God Almighty be upon him, have survived without the slightest loss, alteration or interpolation. Today they offer the same undying hope for treating mankind's many ills which they did when Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings of God Almighty be upon him, was alive. This is our honest claim and this is the inescapable conclusion forced upon us by a critical and unbiased study of history. The least YOU should do as a thinking, sensitive, concerned human being is to stop for one brief moment and ask yourself: Could it be that these statements, extraordinary and revolutionary as they sound, are really true? Supposing they really are true, and you did not know this man Muhammad, peace and blessings of God Almighty be upon him or hear about his teachings? Or did not know him well and intimately enough to be able to benefit from his guidance and example? Isn't it time you responded to this tremendous challenge and made some effort to know him? It will not cost you anything but it may well prove to be the beginning of a completely new era in your life. Come, let us make a new discovery of the life of this wonderful man Muhammad, peace and blessings of God Almighty be upon him the like of whom never walked on this earth, and whose example and teachings can change YOUR LIFE and OUR WORLD for the better. May God shower His choicest blessings upon him! Written by S.H. Pasha ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــWHAT IS ISLAM? Can we find an explanation of the great universe? Is there any convincing interpretation of the secret of existence? We realize that no family can function properly without a responsible head, that no city can prosperously exist without sound administration, and that no state can survive without a leader of some kind. We also realize that nothing comes into being on its own. Moreover, we observe that the universe exists and functions in the most orderly manner, and that it has survived for hundreds of thousand of years. Can we then say that all this is accidental and haphazard? Can we attribute the existence of man and the whole world to mere chance. Man represents only a very small portion of the great universe. And if he can make plans and appreciate the merits of planning, then his own existence and the survival of the universe must also be a planned policy. This means that there is an extraordinary power to bring things into being and keep them moving in order. In the world then must be a great force in action to keep everything in order. In the beautiful nature there must be a Great creator who creates the most charming pieces of art produces every thing for a special purpose in life. The deeply enlightened people recognize this creator and call him Allah "God". He is not a man because no man can create or make another man. He is not an animal, nor he is a plant. He is neither an Idol nor is He a statue of any kind because non of these things can make itself or create anything else. He is different from all these things because he is the maker and keeper of them all. The maker of anything must be different from and greater than things which he makes. There are various ways to know God "ALLAH'' and there are many things to tell about him. The great wonders and impressive marvels of the world are like open books in which we can read about God. Besides, God Himself comes to our aid through the many Messengers and revelations He has sent down to man. These Messengers and revelations tell us everything we need to know about God. The complete acceptance of the teachings and guidance of God 'Allah' as revealed to His Messengers Muhammad is the religion of Islam. Islam enjoins faith in the oneness and sovereignty of Allah, which makes man aware of meaningfulness of the Universe and of his place in it. This belief frees him from all fears and superstitions by making him conscious of the presence of the Almighty Allah and of man's obligations towards Him. This faith must be expressed and tested in actions, faith alone is not enough. Belief in one God requires that we look upon all humanity as one family under the universal Omnipotence of God the Creator and Nourisher of all. Islam rejects the idea of chosen people, making belief in God and good actions the only way to heaven. Thus, a direct relationship in established with God, without any intercessor. Islam is not a new religion. It is, in essence, the same message and guidance which Allah revealed to all Prophets. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Ismael, David, Moses and Jesus (PBUT). But the message which was revealed to Prophet Mohammed (PBUT) is Islam in its comprehensive, complete and final form. The Quran is the last revealed word of Allah and the basic source of Islamic teachings and laws. The Quran deals with the basis of creeds, morality, history of humanity, worship, knowledge, wisdom, God-man relationship, and human relationship in all aspects. Comprehensive teaching on which, can be built sound systems of social justice, economics, politics, legislation, jurisprudence, law and international relations, are important contents of the Quran. Hadith, the teachings, sayings and actions of Prophet Mohammed (PBUT), meticulously reported and collected by his devoted companions. Explained and elaborated the Quranic verses. THE FUNDAMENTAL ARTICLES OF FAITH IN ISLAM The true faithful Muslim believes in the following Principal articles of faith:- 1. He believes in One God 'Allah', Supreme and Eternal, Infinite and Mighty, Merciful and Compassionate, Creator and Provider. 2. He believes in all Messengers of God without any discrimination among them. Every known nation had a warner or Messenger from God. They were chosen by God to teach mankind and deliver His divine message. The Quran mentions the name of twenty five of them. Among them Mohammad stands as the last Messenger and the crowning glory of the foundation of Prophethood. 3. Muslin believes in all scriptures and revelations of God. They were the guiding light which the Messengers received to show their respected peoples the Right Path of God. In the Quran a special reference is made to the books of Abraham, Moses, David and Jesus. But long before the revelations has been lost or corrupted. The only authentic and complete book of God in existence in the Quran. 4. The true Muslim believes in the Angels of Allah. They are purely spiritual and splendid beings whose nature requires on food, drink or sleep. They spend their days and nights in the worship of God. 5. Muslim believes in the last Day of Judgement. This world will come to an end someday, and the dead will rise to stand for their final and fair trial. People with good records will be generously, rewarded and warmly welcomed to the Heaven of Allah, and those with bad records will be punished and cast into Hell. 6. Muslim believes in the timeless knowledge of God and His power to plan and execute His planes and nothing could happen in His Kingdom against His will. His knowledge and power are in action at all times and command over His creation. He is wise and merciful, and whatever He does must have a meaningful purpose. If this is established in our mind and hearts, we should accept with good faith all that He does, although we may fail to under stand it fully, or think it is bad. THE FIVE PILLARS OF ISLAM Faith without actions arid practice is a dead end, as far as Islam is concerned. Faith by nature is very sensitive and can be most effective. When it is not out of practice or out of use, it quickly loses its liveliness and motivation power. There are five pillars of Islam: 1. The declaration of faith: To bear witness that there is none worthy of worship except Allah, and that Mohammad (PBUH) is His Messenger to all human beings till the Day of Judgment. The Prophethood of Mohammad obliges the Muslims to follow, His exemplary life as a model. 2. Prayers: Daily, prayers are offered five times a day as a duty towards Allah. They strengthen and enliven the belief in Allah and inspire man to a higher morality. They purify the heart and prevent temptation towards wrong - doings and evil. 3. Fasting the month of Ramadan. The Muslims during the month of Ramadan not only abstain from food, drink and sexual intercourse from dawn to sunset but also sincerity and devotion. It develops a sound social conscience, patience, unselfishness and will - Power. 4. Zakkah: The literal and simple meaning of Zakkah is purity. The technical meaning of this word designates the annual amount in kind or coin which a Muslim with means must distribute among the rightful beneficiaries. But the religious and spiritual significance of Zakkah is much deeper and more lively. So it has humanitarian and sociopolitical values. 5. Hajj (Pilgrimage to Makkah): It is to be performed once in a 6. lifetime, if one can afford it financially and physically. http://www.islamtoday.com/ http://www.islam.ws/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "FE-1 Study Group" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.ie/group/FE-1-Study-Group?hl=en-GB -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
