The Significance of the Study of Islam Today
These days, the reality of Islam penetrates the consciousness of contemporary Westerners from nearly every direction. Whether it is consequences of the decades-old Middle Eastern conflict between Arabs and Jews, the aftershocks of the upheavals of the Iranian Revolution, the civil war in Yugoslavia, where Muslim Bosnians were caught between feuding Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the sudden appearance of a number of Muslim republics, the tragic events of September 11, 2001, in New York and Washington and their aftermath, or the ever more frequent use of Muslim names in the pages of American newspapers, it seems that the name and reality of Islam have come to constitute an important dimension of the life of humanity today, even in America and Europe. And yet there is no major religion whose study is more distorted in the West than Islam, which is too familiar to be considered an exotic religion and yet distinct enough from Christianity to pose as the “other,” as it has in fact done in the West for well over a millennium.
The study of Islam as a religion and as the “presiding Idea,” or dominating principle, of a major world civilization is of great significance for the West not only because it makes better known the worldview of more than a billion two hundred million people ranging from blue-eyed Slavs and Berbers to Black Africans, from Arabs to Malays, and from Turks and Persians to Chinese. It is also significant because Islam and its civilization have played a far greater role than is usually admitted in the genesis and development of European (and American) civilization. Today Islam constitutes the second largest religious community in Europe and has a population almost the size of Judaism’s in America. But most of all, the study of Islam is significant because it concerns a message from God revealed within that very Abrahamic world from which Judaism and Christianity originated. The Islamic revelation is the third and final revelation of the Abrahamic monotheistic cycle and constitutes a major branch of the tree of monotheism. It is, therefore, a religion without whose study the knowledge of the whole religious family to which Jews and Christians belong would be incomplete.
Islam as the Final Revelation
and Return to the Primordial Religion
Islam considers itself the last major world religion in the current history of humanity and believes that there will be no
other plenary revelation after it until the end of human history and the coming of the eschatological events described so eloquently in the final chapters of the Quran, which is the verbatim Word of God in Islam. That is why the Prophet of Islam is called the “Seal of Prophets”
(khtam al-anbiy’). Islam sees itself as the final link in a long chain of prophecy that goes back to Adam, who was not only the father of humanity
(abu’l-bashar), but also the first prophet. There is, in fact, but a single religion, that of Divine Unity
(al-tawd), which has constituted the heart of all messages from Heaven and which Islam has come to assert in its final form.
The Islamic message is, therefore, none other than the acceptance of God as the One
(al-Aad) and submission to Him
(taslm), which results in peace
(salm), hence the name of Islam, which means simply “surrender to the Will of the One God,” called Allah in Arabic. To become a Muslim, it is sufficient to bear testimony before two Muslim witnesses that “There is no god but God”
(L ilha illa’Llh) and that “Mu
ammad
1 is the Messenger of God”
(Muammadun rasl Allh). These two testimonies
(shahdahs) contain the alpha and omega of the Islamic message. One asserts the unity of the Divine Principle and the other the reception of the message of unity through the person whom God chose as His final prophet. The Quran continuously emphasizes the doctrine of Unity and the Oneness of God, and it can be said that the very raison d’être of Islam is to assert in a final and categorical manner the Oneness of God and the nothingness of all before the Majesty of that One. As the chapter on Unity
(srat al-tawhd) in the Quran asserts: “Say He God is One; God the
eternally Besought of all. He begetteth not nor is He begotten. And there is none like unto Him” (112:1-4).
2The term “Allah” used in this and other verses of the Quran refers not to a tribal or ethnic god, but to the supreme Divine Principle in the Arabic language. Arab Christians and Arabized Jews in fact refer to God as Allah, as do Muslims. The Arabic word “Allah” is therefore translatable as “God,” provided this term is understood to include the Godhead and is not identified solely with Christian trinitarian doctrines. Islam, in asserting over and over again the Omniscience and Omnipotence as well as Mercy and Generosity of God as the One, puts the seal of finality upon what it considers to be the universal religious message as such. It also places the primordial reality of human beings directly before the Divine Presence, and it is this primordial nature hidden at the heart of all men and women that the Quran addresses. That is why, according to the Quran, even before the creation of the world, God asked human beings: “Am I not your Lord?” and not one person, but the whole of humanity, both male and female, answered: “Yes, verily we bear witness” (7:172). As the final religion of humanity, Islam is the last divinely orchestrated response of yes to the pre-eternal Divine question, the response that constitutes the very definition of being human.
By virtue of its insistence upon Divine Oneness and pre-eternal response of humanity to the lordship of the One, Islam also signifies the return to the primordial religion and names itself accordingly
(dn al-fitrah, the religion that is in the nature of things, or
dn al-hanf, the primordial religion of
Unity). Islam is not based on a particular historical event or an ethnic collectivity, but on a universal and primordial truth, which has therefore always been and will always be. It sees itself as a return to the truth that stands above and beyond all historical contingencies. The Quran, in fact, refers to Abraham, who lived long before the historic manifestation of Islam, as
muslim as well as
hanf; that is, belonging to that primordial monotheism that survived among a few, despite the fall of the majority of men and women of later Arab...
