By Babatunde Jose
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 Quran; see Surah Al-Qiyamah (Quran 75: The Resurrection). That is why the Prophet of Islam is called the “Seal of Prophets” (khatam al-Anbiya). Quran 33:40.
However, we must take ecclesiastical notice of The Ahmadiyya Community who believe that though Muhammad was the last prophet, prophethood subordinate to Muhammad is still open. New prophets may be born, but they must be seen as subordinate to Muhammad and cannot create any new law or religion.
Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who founded the Ahmadiyya movement in Qadian, India in 1889, declared to be the promised Messiah and Mahdi. He also claimed a kind of prophethood, which became mired in controversy in the Islamic Ummah. Mainstream Muslims accused him and his followers of apostasy and of denying the finality of prophethood. Ahmadiyya Muslims are subjected to considerable persecution for their beliefs; in some quarters, they are regarded as apostates. Though later the Movement itself became divided over this issue of prophethood, things have not been the same between them and mainstream Muslims. They have remained pariahs within the community of Islam.
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. Twenty-five prophets are mentioned in the Quran, though there have been 124,000. Muslims believe the prophets taught the same basic ideas, most importantly belief in one God.
There is, in fact, but a single religion, that of Divine Unity (al-tawhid), which has constituted the heart of all prophetic messages from Heaven of which Islam is the final form.
The Islamic message is, therefore, none other than the acceptance of God as the One (al-Ahad) and submission to Him (taslīm), which results in peace (salaam), hence the name of Islam, which means simply “surrender to the Will of the One God.”
To become a Muslim, it is sufficient to bear testimony before two Muslim witnesses that:
“There is no god but God” (Lā ilāha illa’Llāh) and that “Muhammad is the Messenger of God” (Muhammadun rusul Allah).
These two testimonies (Shahadah) contain the alpha and omega of the Islamic message.
The Quran continuously emphasizes the doctrine of Unity and the Oneness of God. Al-Ikhlāṣ, also known as the Declaration of God’s Unity and al-Tawhid, “Monotheism”, is the 112th chapter of the Quran: “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” (Quran 112:1–4)
The term “Allah” 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.
Surah Al-A’raf – 172 describes the event of the great heavenly covenant which the Creator, Allah, made with all His created beings even before they took the form of their existence. This covenant is known as the covenant of Alust: “Am I not your Lord?” and not one person, but the whole of humanity, both male and female, answered: “Yes, verily we bear witness” (Quran 7:172).
By virtue of the pre-eternal response of humanity to the lordship of the One, Islam also signifies the return to the primordial religion and names itself accordingly (din al-fitrah, the religion that is in the nature of things, or din al-hanif, the primordial religion of Unity).
Islam is not based on a particular historical event or an ethnic collectivity, but on a universal and prehistoric 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 exigencies.
The Quran, in fact, refers to Abraham, who lived long before the historic manifestation of Islam, as Muslim as well as hanīf; that is, belonging to that primeval monotheism that survived among a few, despite the fall of the majority of men and women of later Arab society, preceding the rise of Islam, into a crass form of idolatry and polytheism that Muslims identify with the age of ignorance (al-Jahiliya).
As a result of his significance as a patriarch, Abraham is sometimes given the title ‘Father of the Prophets’. The Quran extols Abraham as a model, an exemplar, obedient and not an idolater. In this sense, Abraham has been described as representing “primordial man in universal surrender to the Divine Reality before its fragmentation into religions separated from each other by differences in form”. The Quran states that Abraham’s family, Noah, Adam and the family of Amram (father of Moses) were the four selected by God above all the worlds.
Islam is a return not only to the religion of Abraham, but even to that of Adam, restoring primordial monotheism without identifying it with a single people, as is seen in the case of Judaism, or a single event of human history, as one observes in the prevalent historical view of the incarnation in Christian theology.
The Prophet asserted that he brought nothing new but simply reaffirmed the truth that always was. This primordial character of the Islamic message is reflected not only in its
essentiality, universality, and simplicity, but also in its inclusive attitude toward the religions and forms of wisdom that preceded it.
Islam has always claimed the earlier prophets of the Abrahamic world and even the pre-Abrahamic world as its own, to the extent that these central spiritual and religious figures play a more important role in everyday Islamic piety than they do in Christian religious life.
Most of the prophets of the Old Testament are captured in the Quran albeit with Arabized names. The prophets of Islam include: Adam (Adam), Idris (Enoch), Nuh (Noah), Hud (Heber), Saleh (Methuselah), Lut (Lot), Ibrahim (Abraham), Ismail (Ishmael), Ishaq (Isaac), Yakub (Jacob), Yusuf (Joseph), Shu’aib (Jethro), Ayyub (Job), Dhulkifl (Ezekiel), Musa (Moses), Harun (Aaron), Dawud (David), Suleyman (Solomon), Ilyas (Elias), Alyasa (Elisha), Yunus (Jonah), Zakariya (Zachariah), Yahya (John the Baptist), Isa (Jesus) and Muhammad.
Prophets in Islam: al-Anbiya fī al-Islam are individuals in Islam who are believed to spread God’s message on Earth and to serve as models of ideal human behavior. Some prophets are categorized as messengers: rusul, those who transmit divine revelation, most of them through the interaction of an angel, especially Angel Gabriel (Jibril).
Muslims believe that many prophets existed, many not mentioned in the Quran. The Quran states: “And for every community there is a messenger.” Belief in the prophets is one of the six articles of the Islamic faith. Islam also enjoins us to believe in the books.
The Books include Torah given to Moses (Musa) is called Tawrat, the Psalms given to David (Dawud) is the Zabur, the Gospel given to Jesus is Injīl.
The last prophet in Islam is Muhammad ibn Abdullah, whom Muslims believe to be the “Seal of the Prophets” (Khatam an-Nabiyyin), to whom the Quran was revealed.
In Islam, every prophet preached the same core beliefs, the Oneness of God, worship of that one God, avoidance of idolatry and sin, and the belief in the Day of Resurrection or the Day of Judgement and life after death.
Also, as a result, Islam has been able to preserve something of the ambience of the Abrahamic world in what survives of traditional Islamic life; Westerners who journey to traditional Muslim areas even today are usually reminded of the world of Hebrew prophets and of Christ himself.
It was not, however, only the Abrahamic world that became included in Islam’s understanding of itself as both the final and the primordial religion. As Islam encountered non-Semitic religions later on in Persia, India, and elsewhere, the same principle of the universality of revelation applied. The result was that many of the philosophies and schools of thought of the ancient world were fairly easily integrated into the Islamic intellectual perspective, as long as they conformed to or affirmed the principle of Unity.
In this case they were usually considered remnants of the teachings of earlier prophets, constituting part of that vast family that brought the message of God’s Oneness to every people and race, as the Quran asserts.
One of the results of this primordial character of Islam, therefore, was the formation and development of the Islamic intellectual tradition as the repository for much of the wisdom of the ancient world.
As every veritable omega is also an alpha, Islam as the terminal religion of humanity is also a return to the primeval religion. In its categorical and final formulation of the doctrine of Unity, it returns to the ancient message that bound Adam to God and that defines religion as such.
The universality of Islam may be said to issue from this return to the original religion, whereas its particularity may be said to be related to its finality, which has provided the distinctive form for one of the world’s major religions.
Next, we shall interrogate the unity and diversity of the Umma.
Barka Juma’at and Happy weekend.
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