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Holy days

The Islamic calendar (based on the lunar year) dates from the emigration (hijrah) of the Prophet from Mecca to Medina in 622. the 2 festive days within the year are the Eids (ʿīds), Eid al-Fitr, which celebrates the top of the month of Ramadan, and Eid al-Adha (the feast of sacrifice), which marks the top of the hajj. due to the crowds, Eid prayers are offered either in very large mosques or on specially consecrated grounds. Other sacred times include the “Night of Power” (Laylat al-Qadr; believed to be the night during which God makes decisions about the destiny of people and therefore the refore the world as a whole) and the night of the ascension of the Prophet to heaven. The Shiʿis celebrate the 10th of Muḥarram (the first month of the Muslim year) to mark the day of the martyrdom of Ḥusayn. The Muslim masses also celebrate the death anniversaries of varied saints during a ceremony called ʿurs (literally, “nuptial ceremony”). The saints, faraway from dying, are believed to succeed in the zenith of their spiritual life on this occasion.

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Islamic Thought

Islamic theology (kalām) and philosophy (falsafah) are two traditions of learning developed by Muslim thinkers who were engaged, on the one hand, within the rational clarification and defense of the principles of the Islamic religion (mutakallimūn) and, on the opposite , within the pursuit of the traditional (Greek and Hellenistic, or Greco-Roman) sciences (falāsifah). These thinkers took an edge that was intermediate between the traditionalists, who remained attached to the literal expressions of the first sources of Islamic doctrines (the Qurʾān, Islamic scripture; and therefore the Hadith, sayings and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad) and who abhorred reasoning, and people whose reasoning led them to abandon the Jemaah Islamiyah (the ummah) altogether. The status of the believer in Islam remained in practice a juridical question, not a matter for theologians or philosophers to make a decision . Except in reference to the elemental questions of the existence of God, Islamic revelation, and future reward and punishment, the juridical conditions for declaring someone an unbeliever or beyond the pale of Islam were so demanding on make it almost impossible to form a legitimate declaration of this type a few professing Muslim. within the course of events in Islamic history, representatives of certain theological movements, who happened to be jurists and who succeeded in converting rulers to their cause, made those rulers declare in favour of their movements and even encouraged them to persecute their opponents. Thus there arose in some localities and periods a semblance of a politician , or orthodox, doctrine.

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Islam

Sunni Muslims consider ‘Ali to possess been the fourth “rightly guided” caliph (successor to the Prophet Muhammad).

Origins, nature, and significance of Islamic theology

Early developments

The beginnings of theology within the Islamic tradition within the last half of the 7th century aren't easily distinguishable from the beginnings of variety of other disciplines—Arabic philology, Qurʾānic interpretation, the gathering of the sayings and deeds of Muhammad (Hadith), jurisprudence (fiqh), and historiography. along side these other disciplines, Islamic theology cares with ascertaining the facts and context of the Islamic revelation and with understanding its meaning and implications on what Muslims should believe and do after the revelation had ceased and therefore the Jemaah Islamiyah had to chart its own way. During the primary half the 8th century, variety of questions—which centred on God’s unity, justice, and other attributes and which were relevant to human freedom, actions, and fate within the hereafter—formed the core of a more-specialized discipline, which was called kalām (“speech”) due to the rhetorical and dialectical “speech” utilized in formulating the principal matters of Islamic belief, debating them, and defending them against Muslim and non-Muslim opponents. Gradually, kalām came to incorporate all matters directly or indirectly relevant to the establishment and definition of spiritual beliefs, and it developed its own necessary or useful systematic rational arguments about human knowledge and therefore the makeup of the planet . Despite various efforts by later thinkers to fuse the issues of kalām with those of philosophy (and mysticism), theology preserved its relative independence from philosophy and other nonreligious sciences. It remained faithful its original traditional and non secular point of view, confined itself within the bounds of the Islamic revelation, and assumed that these limits because it understood them were identical with the bounds of truth.

The Hellenistic legacy

The pre-Islamic and non-Islamic legacy with which early Islamic theology came into contact included most the religious thought that had survived and was being defended or disputed in Egypt, Syria, Iran, and India. it had been transmitted by learned representatives of varied Christian, Jewish, Manichaean (members of a dualistic religion founded by Mani, an Iranian prophet, within the 3rd century), Zoroastrian (members of a monotheistic, but later dualistic, religion founded by Zoroaster, an Iranian prophet who lived before the 6th century BCE), Indian (Hindu and Buddhist, primarily), and Ṣābian (star worshippers of Harran often confused with the Mandaeans) communities and by early converts to Islam conversant with the teachings, sacred writings, and doctrinal history of the religions of those areas. At first, access to the present legacy was primarily through conversations and disputations with such men, instead of through full and accurate translations of sacred texts or theological and philosophic writings, although some translations from Pahlavi (a Middle Persian dialect), Syriac, and Greek must even have been available.

The characteristic approach of early Islamic theology to non-Muslim literature was through oral disputations, the starting points of which were the statements presented or defended (orally) by the opponents. Oral disputation continued to be utilized in theology for hundreds of years , and most theological writings reproduce or imitate that form. From such oral and written disputations, writers on religions and sects collected much of their information about non-Muslim sects. Much of Hellenistic (post-3rd-century-BCE Greek cultural), Iranian, and Indian religious thought was thus encountered in an off-the-cuff and indirect manner.

From the 9th century onward, theologians had access to an increasingly larger body of translated texts, but by then that they had taken most of their basic positions. They made a selective use of the interpretation literature, ignoring most of what wasn't useful to them until the paranormal theologian al-Ghazālī (flourished 11th–12th centuries) showed them the thanks to study it, distinguish between the harmless and harmful doctrines contained in it, and refute the latter. By this point Islamic theology had coined a huge number of technical terms, and theologians (e.g., al-Jāḥiẓ) had forged Arabic into a flexible language of science; Arabic philology had matured; and therefore the religious sciences (jurisprudence, the study of the Qurʾān, Hadith, criticism, and history) had developed complex techniques of textual study and interpretation. The 9th-century translators availed themselves of those advances to satisfy the requirements of patrons. aside from demands for medical and mathematical works, the interpretation of Greek learning was fostered by the first ʿAbbāsid caliphs (8th–9th centuries) and their viziers as additional weapons (the primary weapon was theology itself) against the threat of Manichaeism and other subversive ideas that went under the name zandaqah (“heresy” or “atheism”).

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