To learn more about the foundations of Islam, click on a Pillar * First Pillar (Ash-Shahadah) [Two Testimonies] *La ilaha illahLlah:* There is no deity save God* Muhammadun rasuluLlah: *Muhammad is the Messenger of God. These two phrases which punctuate and transform the Muslim life, sum up fully the theology of the Islamic religion and function as a sort of miniature creed. Every Muslim is required to affirm that there is no deity save God and that Muhammad is the messenger of God. By implication more than by statement, the first testimony declares the unity of the metaphysical, while the second is the gate to what that unity implies. Full membership of the world community of Islam consists in the uttering of these two statements. Nothing more, nothing less. In Islam there is no rite of initiation, no sacrament of belief. It is the faith of the individual, who by their own spiritual strivings, rather than through any formal liturgical function, climb upwards along the spiritual ladder. The Shahadah distinguishes between other-than-God and God himself, and it brings the former - all that appears to be other - back to its origin and true identity. Perfect incomparability means that nothing can be set beside the Incomparable. According to the Hadith Qudsi (one of the directly inspired sayings of the Prophet), Allah was, and there was nothing beside Him; to which Ali (the cousin of the Prophet) is said to have added: And He is now even as He ever was. The Shahadah is not only doctrine; it is also practice - or the key to practice. Its truth is something to be assimilated and lived, which is why, when we speak of the Islamic Credo, we are speaking, not of an abstraction, but of the way in which men and women order their whole lives, their waking and their sleeping, their work and their rest, the words they use in speaking to one another and the gestures they make in loving one another, the planting of a seedling and the reaping of a crop, the turning on of a tap from which water flows and its turning off, and the life and death of all creatures.
Posted on: Sat, 20 Sep 2014 16:53:58 +0000
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