The word Islam means ‘submission, peace and salvation’. God manifests Himself essentially through His absolute, all-inclusive Mercy and Compassion, and Islam is founded upon that affirmation. Islam is uncompromisingly monotheistic. The concept that begins and ends Islamic theology is the Unity of God.
The Qur'an uses the term people of the books to include all monotheists, including Jews, and Christians According to Islam, all nations were given a Messenger and guidance from Allah. Eventually, due to their abandonment of adherence to strict monotheism, the followers of Moses earned God's anger (by worshipping the Golden Calf and the followers of Jesus Christ supposedly went astray by worshipping Jesus Christ. It is popularly held by the vast majority of Muslims that the Holy Taurah (revelation given to Moses) and the Holy Injil (revelation given to Jesus Christ) have been corrupted over time and that the present day Bible and Torah share little or no resemblance to the original message. According to Islam, Muhammad was sent during a time of spiritual darkness and once the Qur'an was finally established, all past revelations were abrogated,.

Let’s have a look to some of the centerpieces of Islam belief

God
There is only one God , which is a personal one and who completed the religion He revealed and chose for mankind.
According to Islam it is the highest aim of creation and its most sublime result to belief in God. The most exalted rank of humanity is the knowledge of God and the love of God contained within the knowledge of God and the spiritual ecstasy contained within the love of God.

Laws created by god
One is the Shari’a governing man’s ‘religious’ life. The reward or punishment for following these laws or not usually pertains to the afterlife.
The other laws are generally called the ‘laws of nature’. The reward or punishment for them mostly pertains to this world.
The Quran insistently draws attentions to ‘natural’ phenomena, which are the subject-matter of sciences, and urges their study.

Prophet Mohammed
Differences between prophets lie in particular rules and injunctions, connected with economic and political relationships at a particular epoch. While all the previous Prophets were sent to a specific people for a specific epoch, the Last Prophet Muhammad, was sent to all mankind for all time.

Prophet
Prophet Mohammed is the last one but there were others. Notable prophets before Muhammad include Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus.
A Prophet is one who, purified of all sins and vices has a deep relation with God. He guides people to truth and sets a perfect example for them in life with his exalted character. Absolute truthfulness, trustworthiness, communication of Divine Message without hiding anything in it, having the highest intellectual capacity, wisdom and profound insight, sinlessness and being free from all mental and bodily defects are essentials
To be Muslim requires belief in all the previous Prophets and in the originals of the previous Scriptures. All the Prophets belief in the Divine scriptures; in angels and Divine Destiny and Decree without excluding human free will.

Religion
It is a guidance from beyond human reason and human experience, to whose authority all may freely give their assent. That guidance is the religion revealed and perfected for man by God through His Prophets, namely Islam.
Faith or belief is the very essence of religion. Belief has degrees and stages of expansion. and pertains to all Names of God and the realities contained in the universe. The most perfect of all human sciences and knowledge and virtues is belief, and knowledge of God originating in belief based on argument and investigation.
The life of religion and servant hood to God accepts ‘right’, not ‘force’, as the point of support in social life. It holds in place the realization of selfish interests, virtues and God’s approval as the aim of collective life, and in place of necessary conflict, it holds to the principle of mutual assistance. It promotes, not racism and negative nationalism, but the ties of religion, profession and country, as the bonds within and between communities.

Quran (The Divine Scripture)
Its title means "Recitation" or "Reading". It consists of 114 chapters (or Surahs)
It is regarded by Muslims as God's message to Humanity; describing the origins of the Universe, Man, and their relationship to each other and their Creator. It sets out rules for society, morality, economics and many other topics.
For Muslims, the Qur'an answers questions about daily needs, both spiritual and material. It discusses God and God's Names and attributes; believers and their virtues, and the fate of non-believers
Moslems don’t follow the laws of the Qur'an exclusively; they also follow the example of Muhammad, which is known as the Sunnah, and the understanding of the Qur'an contained in the teachings of the prophet known as the Ahadith.
Besides the Qur'an, the others are the book of Ibrahim (now lost) the Law of Moses (the Torah), the Psalms of David (the ''Zab r) and the Gospel of Jesus (the Injil). The Qur'an describes Christians and Jews as "the people of the Book" (ahl al Kit b). The teachings of Islam concern many of the same personages as those of Judaism and Christianity. However, Muslims frequently refer to them using Arabic names which can make it appear they are talking about different people: e.g. Allah for God, Iblis for Satan, Ibrahim for Abraham, and so forth.
Muslims believe that God revealed the Qur'an to Muhammad through the angel Jibrail (Gabriel); Muhammad then recited this to his companions, many of whom were said to have memorized it and written it down on available material. According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad was illiterate; the revelations to Muhammad were later gathered by his companions and followers in book form
Within an Islamic civilization there cannot be a contradiction between science, the objective study of the natural world, and religion, the effort in personal and collective life to seek the approval and good pleasure of God. True belief is not something based on blind imitation; it should appeal to the reason as well as the heart, and combine affirmation by the reason and the inward experience and submission of the heart.

Man
Man is the only creature with freedom of will. God has equipped him with the knowledge of things or a capacity to learn and discover and made him His vicegerent to rule the earth according to His laws.
Having free will means he can chose between right and wrong.
Man is empowered with three principal faculties. These are
a) his appetites for the opposite sex, offspring, livelihood, commodities, etc
b) his anger or forcefulness in defense and struggle
c) his power of reasoning or intellect.
Since man is tested in his worldly life and has freedom of will these faculties are not restricted by God. Man’s individual and collective happiness lies in his disciplining them for the sake of a harmonious, peaceful social life. If not disciplined these faculties drive man to immorality, illicit sexual relationships, unlawful livelihood, tyranny, injustices, deception and falsehood etc. To prevent the chaos and suffering that must follow undisciplined exercise of human powers, man must submit to an authority that will guide and regulate his collective affairs, means religion..

Science and religion
In the first five centuries of Islam, Muslims succeeded in uniting sciences with religion, the intellect with the heart, the material with the spiritual. However in later centuries, the West took the initiative in sciences.
Power and force have some right in life, they have been created for some wise purpose.

Universe
seen as an integral whole, whose parts are all interrelated and co-operative thus leading to a splendid co-ordination, harmony and order throughout the universe and within each individual organism, including man.
The harmony and orderliness prevalent in the universe and man come from the Unity of God who alone created them and He is absolute, without partner or peer or like.
The universe operative according to Islam belief is Muslim, absolutely submitted to God.
There will be a final destruction followed by Resurrection and Judgment

Women on the Quran
In Islam the worldly difference between man and woman is clearly recognizable. as God is always referred to as “He” In addition man are mostly leading, woman are mostly following.
Still there is no difference as far as their relationship to Allah is concerned, as both are promised the same reward for good conduct and the same punishment for evil conduct.

Worship
In Islam there is another degree of belief, namely certainty believed to be coming from direct experience of truth. This depends on regular worship and reflection. The one who has acquired this degree of belief is said to be able to challenge the world. So, the Muslims’ foremost duty is to acquire this degree of belief and communicate it to others in sincerity and for the sake of pleasing God.
From belief follow the different kinds of worship like the prescribed prayers, fasting, alms-giving and pilgrimage, worship obedient to the prohibitions such as against drinking alcohol, gambling, usury, killing, deception, etc.
To strengthen one’s belief and to attain higher ranks of perfection, one is expected to be careful about the ‘acts’ of heart and intellect, such as contemplation or reflection, invocation or recitation of God’s Names, self-criticism, perseverance and patience, thankfulness, disciplined living, perfect reliance on God, and so on.
Moral virtues are the ‘fruits’ of religious life
Through belief and worship, and through its intellectual, moral and spiritual principles, Islam aims to educate the individual in the best possible way. Through its social and economic principles, it aims to establish an ideal society. Its final aim is that there should be no dissension, corruption, anarchy and terror in the world and that all people may obtain happiness in both worlds.
The believer is asked not to degrade himself to bow in worship before any worldly power. He is a servant of God who does not take as object of worship a thing of even the greatest benefit like Paradise.

Islam and modern thinkers since the 19th century.
Although the dominant movement in Islam in recent times has been religious fundamentalism, there are a number of liberal movements within Islam which seek alternative ways to reconcile the Islamic faith with the modern world.
There have been basically two schools of thought.
The first one supports imitation of the West as indispensable. It aims to replace Islamic culture and lifestyle, including the economic and political systems, with Western ones.
The second approach blames the West for the fall of Islamic civilization. It ignores the internal problems of the Muslim world view

Abdu Filali-Ansari
According to him most Muslims live a life in which they maintain an attachment to the Muslim community without adhering to all the beliefs which flow from it. Therefore, daily life and belief can be in sharp contrast.

Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-98)
His approach is affected by modern rationality and natural sciences. Khan denied miracles and magic, with the result that in the case of Khan’s hermeneutics the scriptures become interpretable in the light of modern experience.

Abd Al-Karim Soroush (1945-)
the Iranian thinker’s main contributions to Islamic are his epistemology and his intellectual genealogy based on the analysis of other Islamic thinkers
At one level there is the religion itself, immutable, essential, and sacred; while at the second level there is the human understanding of religion, where everything can be the object of questioning and criticism
Soroush encourages openness, which is very different from the traditional fear of contamination by non-Islamic thoughts.

Sa’id Ramadan al-Buti (1929- )
a professor at the University of Damascus, Syria, as well as a religious leader. He tries to maintain a balance between the reality of the secular state and the ideal of Islamic society. Al-Buti, disapproves of radical political opposition against the secular state. He criticized the assassinations of Alawite officials by the Muslim Brotherhood at the end of the 1970s.
He regards the Islamic mission as educational and favoring non-violent resistance:
He accepts the necessity to respond to the modern problems. On the other hand, he emphasizes that the people who do not reach the level of religious “knowledge” need to imitate those who hold the knowledge.
Al-Buti, more than other intellectuals in the Islam world criticizes the inferiority complex of Muslims vis-à-vis the materialist Western civilization.

Husayn Ahmad Amin
a liberal writer who publishes journalistic articles and literary works in Egypt and other Arab countries. He emphasizes the significance of correct historical knowledge to differentiate between what is authentic and what is superfluous in the Muslim culture. Amin supports reformation of shari‘ah law. He aims to purify the spirit of Islamic law from the accumulation of historical traditions and the deductions of the jurists, which have resulted in stagnation of socio-political life in Muslim countries.
Amin departs from the mainstream Islamic approach denying the miracles of the Prophet Muhammad, underestimating some of his companions, and negating the veiling of Muslim women.

Mahmud Muhammad Taha’s (1909-1985)
A Sudanese thinker and activist who gained enemies from Islamic groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood. He was sentenced to death for apostasy in 1968 and executed in 1985.
According to Taha, civilization depends on individual freedom and in Islam the individual should be the end. Everything else, including the Qur’an and the religion of Islam itself, are means to that end.
Taha does not accept Western civilization as a target in his own because of the confusion of values in the West. Since Taha is a socialist-democrat, he sees the combination of socialism and democracy as the cure for the problems of the West.
For him Islam is in an ongoing reform process, rather than being a fixed body of dogmas. He views Islam as a synthesis of materialistic Judaism and spiritual Christianity. According to Taha, the revelation of the Qur’an in Mecca consists of the Second and higher message of Islam addressed to the early believers.
Since the community in Medina could not adopt to the higher message, the Medinan revelation shifted to the First message, which had lower status than the Second one. However the ummah in the modern era reached a level of evolution worthy of the second and higher message of Islam.
Taha provides new interpretation of contentious issues, such as jihad, slavery, capitalism, gender inequality, divorce, and the veil, arguing that the First and the Second messages contradict each other on these issues. Taha supports complete gender equality, denies the veiling of women, and rejects private property in favor of common possession. He does not see his project in terms of grafting ‘Western’ elements onto Islam, but rather of reinvigorating ‘dormant’ elements that are intrinsically Islamic

Mohamed Talbi (1921- )
a North African Muslim historian and intellectual. According to Talbi’s the Qur’an and hadith need to be analyzed in light of historical contexts to better understand their originally-intended significance and to differentiate their universal and axiomatic truths from the local and temporary ones.
The transcendental ethical and social truths can be known through “a special innate human nature which seems to precede and to be more basic than revelation itself. Talbi argues that anti-feminist tendencies in Islamic history contradict God’s universal teaching. For him Prophet Muhammad’s early feminism represents God’s true will for the longer term, as a general ethical standard
Talbi points out that Islam not only doesn’t oppose democracy; but it is even possible to find texts that legitimize it. He rejects political Islam that is intolerant and excludes diverse Islamic viewpoints. Similarly, he regards the political unity of the ummah as a utopia that has never been realized throughout history. According to Talbi, there is no single Islamic government or state in theory.
In this perspective, he attaches importance to freedom and respect for people, regardless of whether a state claims to be Islamic or non-Islamic.
For Talbi, a liberal, pluralistic, and secular society is necessary for the true religion to develop. He adds that the Islamic way of life is based on conviction and self-discipline, rather than coercion.

Jabri,
while conceptualizing modernity he differentiates between modern concepts and traditional Western ones. According to him, the former can be accepted as a deep reaction against the latter. Like other modernists, Jabri aims to purify the spirit of Islam from accumulated traditions.
Jabri, however, refuses a Salafi-type reaction, claiming that this kind of conservative approach is unaware of modern conditions and cannot solve contemporary problems. He points out that one of the problems of classical theology and Muslim politics is their overemphasis on duties at the expense of individuals' rights.
Jabri is against political Islam, stressing that there is nothing about the “Islamic” political system in divine revelation. He also mentions that political issues in Islamic history began with the Companions of Prophet Muhammad, rather than his own period.
Jabri sees religion and politics as naturally separate. Since the former deals with the management of material interests, it results in conflicts. Therefore, it should be based on “profane rationality”. The latter, on the contrary, depends on transcendental principles and aims to unify people. For these reasons Muslims cannot “practice politics within religion” On the other hand, Jabri also refuses radical secularism; since there is no church in Islam, the strict separation of church and state is not necessary.

Hamid Abu Zaid
surveys some features of the Qur’an and its interpretation. He touches upon a crucial long-lived debate about whether the Qur’an is the eternal word of God or the creation of God. This is crucial because the former argument restricts the scope of interpretation and change while the latter provides more open spaces for diverse time and space-based interpretations of Islam.

Sunni and Shia

The words Sunni and Shia appear regularly in stories about the Muslim world but few people know what they really mean. Religion permeates every aspect of life in Muslim countries and understanding Sunni and Shia beliefs is important in understanding the modern Muslim world.
The Sunni sect of Islam comprises 90% of all Muslims It is broken into four similar schools of thought which interpret specific pieces of Islam, such as which foods are halal (permissible) differently.
Shia Islam comprises most of the Muslims that are not counted among the Sunni. The Shia consist of one major school of thought known as the Jafaryia or the "Twelvers", referring to the number of infallible leaders they recognise after the death of Muhammad. The term Shia is usually taken to be synonymous with the Jafaryia/Twelvers.

The Beginnings
The division between the Sunnis and the Shia is the largest and oldest in the history of Islam. To understand it, it is good to know a little bit about the political legacy of the Prophet Muhammad
When the Prophet died in the early 7th Century he not only left the religion of Islam, but also an Islamic State in the Arabian Peninsula with one hundred thousand Muslim inhabitants. It was the question of who should succeed the Prophet and lead the fledgling Islamic state that created the divide.
One group of Muslims (the larger group) elected Abu Bakr, a close companion of the Prophet as the next leader (caliph) of the Muslims and he was duly appointed. However a smaller group believed that the Prophet's son-in-law, Ali, should become the caliph. This reflected the belief that leadership of the Muslims is a divine right of the family of the Prophet
Muslims who believe that Abu Bakr should be the Prophet's successor have come to be known as Sunni. Muslims who believe Ali should have been the Prophet's successor are now known as Shia. Both Shia and Sunni agree that Muhammad was the final prophet.
Both Sunni and Shia legitimize their views, using Islam's sacred scriptures. Both groups say that the Qur'an and the Hadith (the narrations of the Prophet) show their choice of leader to be the right one.

What happened next?
Ali delayed pledging his oath of loyalty to Abu Bakr. A few months later he changed his mind. He sought reconciliation with Abu Bakr and pledged allegiance to him.
Over the next two decades Umar ibn al-Khattab and Uthman ibn 'Affan succeeded as the second and third caliphs before Ali was elected as the fourth caliph. Ali became caliph following the murder of Uthman, but was opposed by Aisha, wife of the Prophet who accused him of being lax in bringing Uthman's killers to justice. The dispute led to the Battle of the Camel in 656 where Aisha was defeated. Later Aisha apologized to Ali but the clash had already strengthened any opposition to Ali's rule.
Considering the religious climate, the appointment of a caliph with a heretical theology seems inconceivable and demonstrates the political, and not theological, nature of the dispute at the time. In fact it was only later that the terms Sunni and Shia came into use. Sunni means 'one who follows the Sunna' (what the Prophet said, did, agreed to or condemned). Shia is a contraction of the phrase 'Shiat Ali', meaning the 'partisans of Ali'. Both groups, who embrace the Prophet and Ali, naturally dispute whether each others' group can be correct in claiming to be either 'Sunni' or 'Shia'.
Islam's dominion had already spread to Syria by the time of Ali's caliphate. The governor of Damascus Mu'awiya's fought Ali to claim the caliphate for himself. In the famous Battle of Siffin in 657 Mu'awiya's soldiers flagged the ends of their spears with verses from the Qur'an.
Ali's supporters felt morally unable to fight their Muslim brothers. The Battle of Siffin proved indecisive. Ali and Mu'awiya agreed to settle the dispute with outside arbitrators. However this solution of human arbitration was unacceptable to a group of Ali's followers. This group, the Kharijites, formed their own sect and opposed all contenders to the caliphate. In 661 the Kharijites killed Ali, while he was praying in a mosque in Kufa, Iraq. Later on the Kharijites were defeated in a series of uprisings. Around 500,000 descendents of the Kharijites survive to this day in North Africa, Oman and Zanzibar in a sub sect known as the Ibadiyah. The Egyptian Islamic Jihad terrorist group claims, as did a few long-extinct early medieval Kharijite sects, that Jihad is the "sixth pillar of Islam." Some Ismaili groups consider "Allegiance to the Imam" to be the so-called sixth pillar of Islam.

Sunnis and Shia Expansion
What happened next gave Shia Islam its strong theme of martyrdom. Ali's youngest son, Hussein, ruled Kufa in Iraq. When Yazid, Mu'awiya's son, seized the caliphate in 680 Hussein led a rebellion but was met by Yazid's forces in Karbala, Iraq. Despite knowing he was hopelessly outnumbered, Hussein fought heroically and was killed on the battlefield. It is one of the most significant events in Shia history, where Hussein is considered to have sacrificed his life for the survival of Shia Islam. It is still commemorated today as Ashura where millions of pilgrims still visit the Imam Hussein mosque in Karbala.

The leadership continued with imams, in lieu of caliphs, believed to be divinely appointed from the Prophet's family until the late 9th Century. According to the Twelvers, the largest Shia sect, Muhammad al-Muntazar al-Mahdi was the twelfth imam in the Prophet's family in the line of Ali and Hussein. The Shia believe that as a young boy Muhammad al-Muntazar al-Mahdi was hidden in a cave below a mosque in Samarra. He disappeared, and not accepting that he had died, the Shia await his return. This is a sacred place for the Shia and they still pray here for the return of the twelfth Imam. This event marks the end of leadership of the Shia in the family of the prophet.
After several centuries a council or Ulema was appointed to elect an Ayatollah, the supreme spiritual leader. Ayatollah translates literally from Arabic as 'Sign of Allah' and as the name suggests is bestowed with great religious authority.

As Sunni Islam expanded into the complex and urban societies of the once Roman and Persian empires, new ethical questions were encountered that demanded the authority of religious answers. In the first two centuries Sunni Islam responded with the emergence of four popular schools of thought the Hanbali, Hanafi, Maliki and Shaafii which to this day continue to seek to find Islamic solutions in any society, regardless of time or place.
Shia Muslims have always maintained that the Prophet's family were the rightful leaders of the Islamic world. Although the Shia never ruled the majority of Muslims they did have their successes. The empire of the Safavid dynasties in the 16th Century was a great political triumph for Shia Islam, encompassing parts of modern Iran, Azerbaijan and Iraq. Today, Iran is the political face of Shia Islam.
Politically, Sunni Islam continued through the Umayyads (started by Mu'awiya) and other dynasties that led to the powerful Ottoman and Mughal empires of the 15th to 20th Centuries. In the wake of these empires the Sunnis emerge as an over-arching identity grouping close to 90% of the now one billion Muslims. Sunnis have a large populations stretching geographically from the Indonesian archipelago through the Indian subcontinent, central Asia, the Arab world and Africa to the periphery of Europe.

How do Sunni and Shia differ theologically?
Initially the difference between Sunni and Shia was merely a difference concerning who should lead the Muslim community. The Shia however not only preferred the family of the Prophet in their choice of leader ship but also with regard to the Hadith Literature.
What does this mean?
The interpretation of Hadith is an Islamic science for Shia and Sunnis. The Shia give preference to the Hadith as narrated by Ali and Fatima and their close associates. The Sunnis consider the Hadith narrated by any of twelve thousand companions equally. This ultimately led to a different understanding of Islam.
Sunni Muslims tend to follow the opinion of the 7th and 8th century scholars Hanbali, Hanafi, Maliki and Shaafii. The Shia believe only a living scholar must be followed.
Shia muslims do not believe in absolute predestination ("Qadar"), since they consider it incompatible with Divine Justice. Neither do they believe in absolute free will since that contradicts God's Omniscience and Omnipotence. Rather they believe in "a way between the two ways" believing in free will, but within the boundaries set for it by God and exercised with His permission.

Holy Places
The Hajj or Pilgrimage is made to the sacred places of Islam in and around Mecca. Once in a lifetime every Muslim, man or woman, is expected to make a pilgrimage (a hajj) to Mecca. The pilgrim should be there during the sacred month Dhu-al-Hijja so as to enter with thousands of others into the annual mass observance of the circumambulation of the Ka'ba, the Lesser and Greater pilgrimages, and the Great Feast.
A great part of the pilgrims nowadays go by rail and ship or by air to the coast below Mecca or to nearby airfields. All male pilgrims are required, whether rich or poor, to enter the sacred precincts of Mecca wearing the same kind of seamless white garments and practicing the proper abstinence, means no food or drink by day, continence, and no harm to living things, animal or vegetable. This is the first of a long series of leveling practices by which people of all countries and languages are made to mingle in one unifying mass observance without distinction of race or class.
On the eighth day of Dhu-al-Hijja the pilgrims in a dense mass move off toward Arafat, nine miles to the east. They spend the night at a half-way point. The next day, all arrive at their final destination. The pilgrims participate in a prayer service conducted by an imam. They listen to his sermon, and, of utmost importance, stand or move slowly about, absorbed in pious meditation.
The final three days of the Haj are spent in eating, talking, and merry-making, in the
strictest continence.

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