Islam Part 1

In today and tomorrow’s studies, we turn to Islam, the second-largest religion in the world, with an estimated 2 billion adherents across the Middle East, North Africa, Asia, and increasingly Europe and the Americas.

Islam was founded in seventh-century Arabia by Muhammad, who was born in Mecca around AD 570. According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad began receiving visions from the angel Gabriel in 610, visions that over the following twenty-three years became the contents of the Qur’an. Muhammad preached a strict monotheism against the polytheistic religion of his contemporaries, eventually returning to Mecca with an army and purging it of its many deities. The Qur’an, supplemented by the hadith (oral traditions of Muhammad’s teaching collected centuries later), forms the authoritative basis of Islamic belief and practice. Muslims are primarily divided between Sunnis, who form roughly 85 percent of the global Muslim population, and Shiites, who differ over the proper line of succession after Muhammad.

Islamic belief and practice are structured around the Five Pillars: the confession that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is his prophet; daily prayer five times a day; almsgiving of approximately 2.5 percent of one’s wealth; fasting during the month of Ramadan; and at least one pilgrimage to Mecca during one’s lifetime if one is able. Underlying these practices is the teaching that Allah is one, transcendent, and absolutely sovereign, and that human beings stand before him with the duty of submission. The word Islam itself means “submission.”

Like Christianity, Islam is monotheistic. It traces itself back to Abraham and incorporates many figures and stories from the Bible, and it teaches a coming day of judgment. But the differences are far more substantial than the similarities, and they center on the doctrine of God and the person of Christ. The Qur’an explicitly denies that God has a Son. It denies that Jesus died on the cross, teaching instead that He was rescued from execution and taken up to Allah. It denies that Jesus is divine, presenting Him only as a great prophet who pointed forward to Muhammad. The very heart of Christianity, the eternal Son who became flesh and died for our sins, is denied at every point.

Today’s verse brings the matter to its sharpest point. The one who denies the Son does not have the Father (1 John 2:23). There is no fellowship with God apart from Christ.