Islam

Hi, this Dr. Paris, and this week we're talking about Islam reviewing misconceptions and talking about now there a lot of misconceptions about Islam and once the first ones we want to address is talking about their religion and its adherents. First of all, Islam is the name of their religion. Now in the past, even scholars early on had called the religion the religion of Mohammed calling the adherents of religion Mohammedans. Islam is the name of their religion and the adherents of their religion are called Muslim, so those are two important things to remember that's not the same as Christians where the religion is Christianity and adherents are called Christians. But here Islam is practiced by Muslims Next, we'll talk about the name of God. Sometimes when people heare the name "Allah," and they hear a Allah as their god. They may assume that that's just the Muslim god. We have to remember that Muslims are so for Muslims Allah is God. Allah is the one God. Allah is the Arabic word for god, so we're not talking about the some other deity as it in a polytheistic system or that they're just saying that that's the Muslim god, but they believe that that in fact would believe that Allah is just God who would also be the God of Jews and Christians as well which brings in store next point which is that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all considered Abrahamic religions. Now some people may think in fact that Islam is very different from Judaism and Christianity that there actually have similar roots they all trace the origins back to Abraham so they're known as Abrahamic religions and in fact many universities and liberal arts colleges Abrahamic religions, and they discuss Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are three of the main religions in the are really worthy of discussion not to discount the others but in considering religions of the western world in talking about Europe and the United States and South America in particular we really need to consider Judaism, Christianity, and Islam now the Abrahamic religions, how do they all tie together? Abraham was the father of the Jewish people through have heard the song "Father Abraham." "Father Abraham had many sons and many sons had Father Abraham. I am them and so are you." That's often sung by Christians. Abraham is associated with Christianity because Christians believe that their religion is the fulfillment of God's promise that God will bless all the family's of the earth through Abraham. So we look back to genesis 12 to read and see the Abraham will be multiplied and have many children but they consider themselves the children of Abraham as well because God's blessings of come to the gentiles through Abraham and through Christianity so that's what Abrahamic religions, but what about Islam? Abraham and Islam. Muslims trace their heritage to him through his son Ishmael. If you remember from the book of genesis if you've ever read it if you haven't that's fine Abraham had two sons: an older son named Ishmael he was the he was the son of the handmaiden Hagar. She was from Egypt that she was Ishamael's mother. Abraham also had a son named Isaac by his wife Sarah and so when we read in Genesis Abraham and Ishmael they go their separate ways. In fact Abraham sends Hagar and Ishmael away at the request of Sarah. We don't read too much more about Ishmael in Genesis The story continues with Abraham and and Isaac throughout the book of Genesis, and then goes on to to Jacob However, when we look at some at Islamic heritage Abraham and Ishamel set up the Ka'bah in Mecca. If you remember from Matthews, the ka'bah is a cube shaped stone in the open court of the great mosque of Mecca. According to Matthews, many of the tribes came to the Ka'bah because their gods were there and Mohammed was a monotheistic and he got rid of all the other gods in that, so this a sacred stone cube shaped building that makes up the ka'bah is very important to Muslims when they make their hajj or every year and so that's how we tie all the religions together. The Abrahamic religions from Abraham the father of Jews to being the blessing of to Christianity and then finally Islam picking up the story of Abraham Ishamel which is not and recorded in the Bible. Let's talk about another similarity between the Abrahamic religions. In Islam- that would be the similarity between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam Muslims believe that Gabriel gave the word of God or the Koran to the Prophet Mohammed and, of course, getting close to December Weremember that in the book of Luke it was the angel Gabriel who came to Mary the mother of Jesus and announced that she was going to have the savior so here's another connection and of course one thing you might want to know about the named Gabriel in Hebrew and in Arabic would be a Semitic language be similar to this. Gabriel means "man of God" and you may hear for it as Gi- breel in Arabic so there's a man of god or an angel came both to Mary and came to the Prophet Mohammed. But how do we represent God? is the next question. We saw on the last slide the picture of an angel but how do you. represent God? How do you represent Allah? Well, according to Muslims you don't. God cannot be represented. In in fact, the Prophet Mohammed cannot be represented in and you may have heard stories read in the newspaper about unrest when someone makes a cartoon depiction of the Prophet Mohammed. It can create a lot of unrest among. Muslims may be disappointed. Now for Christians and Jews you often see cartoons of Moses and Jesus. It's acceptable in those Abrahamic religions but is not acceptable in Islam so you'll notice from this mosque that there are no and no symbols of God and if you went inside, there would be no pictures of Mohammed or God. You have these geometric patterns that is what is used to represent god and in fact thinking about geometry and mathematics we get algebra from from a Arabia so that there's a connection there too but the main thing to remember is that Muslims do not want to represent God in anyway. Well, that becomes a little bit tricky when we get to popular culture. For example there was a Muslim comic book creator who created a group of heroes called the 99 He believed that these heroes would have the powers of Allah, the 99 powers that Allah and so the superheroes have had these powers as other Muslim superheroes and it was a chance to reach out to Muslim young people and bring Muslim belief more into the mainstream there was a cartoon about the 99. Also the 99 team up with the Justice Jeague of America and this was all interesting and in good and was kind ofa nice thing to see Muslims emerging as superheroes since most superheroes are white Males and probably Christians are but of course there some problems in talking about the 99. Should you say that they represent a the powers of God? Is that OK? also some other issues in comics that I want to raise we see here another comic book character and this is Dust and she is one of the X-Men. It seemed a logical place for a character like Dust to be part of the X-men since they are all about challenging people who might fear and hate them because of their powers and of course X-men is also a metaphor for challenging our ideas about discriminating against people based on the religion of their gender their *** orientation X-men has always been on the cutting edge of this so it makes sense that they would have a character like dust She wears of the bark of which is part of this week's discussion, but other characters that have not had such an easy issue and have really a drawn the ire of some comic book fans. One of them is called Nightrunner, he is the Batman of Paris. What happened a few years ago in Batman comics is the Bruce Wayne came out and he announced that he'd been funding Batman for years and he wanted to find other Batman throughout the world Well one person who took up the mantle was Nightrunner. Now the interesting story about Nightrunner is that he is a Muslim and he's living in Paris and one of his friends had been killed in a riot in Paris because of the ethnic unrest Now he had the choice to do something a wrong and continue to riot and fight against the police but instead he a decided to fight against crime. At first though he wasn't well received when Batman Incorporated came up, you had a couple of the Batman try to capture Nightrunner and stop him from what he's doing but eventually Nightrunner gains their the respect of Bruce Wayne and is allowed to continue doing what he does. Now he doesn't have the superpowers like Batman He does parkour. you know that kind of street gymnastics stuff where you run up the side of buildings jump off of this and off of that. He doesn't really have it have any powers. He's thought to be a criminal at first but eventually Bruce Wayne comes around,and you see here that Bruce Wyan is happy for what he's done any talks about Night Runner wearing his mask and it's not just to keep a secret identity. If knight runner did not wear the mask, it might spark a racial or ethnic hatred and so he may wear a mask for a bit of a different reasons. Now there has been a lot of backlash against the character Nightrunner which is just indicative of the backlash that real Muslims have felt since 911 and we saw a little bit about Sikhs experiencing the same thing because they'd the wearer similarclothing items. So it's an interesting way to explore a a tough issue in to think about how people are responding to Muslims and definitely we've seen of a lot of hatred of Muslims and we're in a talk about a very specific incident near you in just a moment. One thing to keep a lookout for is this was just announced recently on November 2013 that Ms. Marvel is a Muslim superhero. Now they're trying to downplay the fact that they she's a Muslim and say it's just about a teenage girl who is a superhero who happens to be Muslim and so it's not quite the same ad as Nightrunner where the fact that he's a Muslim comes into play in the story lot but it will be interesting to seem the reaction to Ms. Marvel Will people react to her positively Will there be criticism like Nightrunner got? Does it matter that she's not really an iconic character like Batman was? Some of the back lash against Nightrunner may have been treated to it being such a popular character in Batman. So watch out see what happens in this and be something interesting up to take a look at in the next few months from now and see what happens and if people are buying the comic and how are they responded to it. Another final pop culture example that I want to give you is the example of the jinn. We would think of them is genie's and our culture. Matthews defines them in Arabia a race of being created from fire distinguished from humans who were created from clay. Some Jinn are good and others are bad. We see the good jinn there the genie from Aladdin and then of course Jaffar becomes the genie and you notice that he is like fire and interesting thing you know we also have fire like creaturesin the Hebrew scriptures we have the seraphim which literally in Hebrew means the burning ones, so you kind of have these ideas of otherworldly creatures burning or being on fire. The jinn has most definitely come down to us in Aladdin's magic lamp. And if you've ever heard of the book I've the tales of the Arabian nights, There are a lot of great stories that come out of there. So our American pop culture has definitely been influenced by that whether it's in our comic books with a Dust and Nightrunner and most recently Ms. Marvel. But one issue I wanted to bring to the forefront is the Murfreesboro mosque controversy because it's pretty close to where you'll all live I live in Nashville just south of Nashville not too far is the city of Murfressboro. It is a very large city with the campus of Middle Tennessee State university and has been this controversy because the Muslim community in the city wanted to build a new mosque and they have met a lot of opposition from people they're doing whatever they can to stop them from from building a mosque saying that they did make announcement to get proper permits or whatever and then you can read about if you look at the Tennesseean.com online would probably have of references to articles about this. This issue has even been featured on the "Daily Show" with john Stewart I'm guessing Stephen Colbert may have mentioned it, but it's an Islamic community center and the question is in America we say we believe in freedom of religion but the question for a lot of people is does that mean every religion? and so the groups that are challenging the Murfreesboro mosque are coming up a lot of reasons why it that they don't want them there If you go to a lot of major cities there are mosque and of course you read in Matthews about the controversy having a mosque so close to ground zero at 911. A lot of controversy has come up over these issues so this would be something interesting to check out might be an interesting paper up to write just to learn something more about this and also to put ourselves in the shoes of the most into one of the the community center. What if we decided we want to build a place of worship and were denied in the U.S., today would that be acceptable? Definitely something that you should look into think about, but I'll leave some additional terms We talked about Muslims being monotheists believing in Allah the one god and we have the haddith. This was being a monotheist even before before there was Islam living in Tawid, the unity of God. One of the most important things is Salat prayer five times a day. Uou have the call to prayer facing mecca and you pray facing Mecca, but you can also take a hajj which is a pilgrimage to Mecca. And I recommend that you learn the difference between the Shia and the Sunni. And then a big topic that you may have actually heard about this in the U.S. is Sharia (Law). Matthews has a larger definition of this. But a lot of time you will hear about Sharia law in the U.S., and people are worried about Muslism coming coming in to U.S. because of sharia law Just give an example of what Sharia law amight be like for someone. I have a friend he's an evangelical Christian and he works in Dubai He is an educator is a librarian and he teaches in a university setting over there and he says that's a real law is a very fair law He likes the equity of it. When I was an undergraduate at Western Kentucky University, there was a student who was an economics major who also studied religion and he talked about the economic system in Islam and he thought that it was a very fair system because it didn't allow a person who lent money to go to charge too much interest and it didn't allow the person who borrowed the money to cheat someone so it would be something interesting to look in two and see if Sharia law is as bad as some people say. Another important term that you want to look at is the nation of Islam this is associated with Louis Farrakhan and was associated with Elijah Mohammed. Nation of Islam is largely made up of African Americans, they are not recognized by mainstream Islam. One of their main adherents was Malcolm X We talked about and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his his connection to Gandhi and in his connection to the Jain's The time that MlK was expressing the ideas of nonviolence Malcolm X was on the other side calling people not to accept this nonviolent approach but to be of little more active Malcom X though, if you watched the movie with Denzel Washington starring as Malcolm Xhas a change of heart and he goes to Mecca and he sees people of all races and ethnicities going on a Hajj to Mecca, and it changes his mind and he does and he doesn't any longer want to bepart of the nation of Islam so these are some terms they should think about as you read the chapter. The semester is coming to a close I wish you the best of luck! Take care.