“presence of the heart,” all such acts are spiritually empty.
What country has the largest Muslim population?
Indonesia, a nation of some three thousand islands in Southeast Asia, with a population of over two hundred million people, about 90 percent Muslim.
What countries have the largest Muslim population after Indonesia?
The next three largest Muslim populations are in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India— with a combined total of nearly five hundred million.
Aren’t most Muslims Arabs?
Approximately one in five Muslims are Arabs, the remaining 80 percent represented by dozens of ethnicities, nationalities, cultural backgrounds, as well as scores of different languages.
Are all Middle Eastern Muslims Arabs?
Though Arabs do comprise the ethnic majority of the “Middle East” and North Africa, Turks, Kurds, and Iranians of varied ethnic origins represent important non-Semitic peoples whose languages are unrelated to Arabic.
Do all Muslims believe and express their faith in exactly the same ways?
There is considerable unity concerning the core beliefs and ritual practices but also some variation due to internal diversity. This includes, for example, majority Sunni and minority Shi’i communities, as well as a broad spectrum of attitudes to what additional rules are “essential” and how strictly religious law must be enforced, and considerable variety in the interaction of religion and cultures across the globe.
How did Islam begin?
Five hundred years after the Roman destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem dramatically altered the history of Judaism, an equally momentous event occurred in the Arabian Peninsula. According to tradition, Muhammad was born around 570 C.E. in the trading town of Mecca. When he was about twenty-five, Muhammad married a businesswoman named Khadija, fifteen years his senior. Muhammad developed the habit of seeking prayerful solitude in the hills and caves surrounding Mecca. One day around the year 610, he began to undergo some troubling auditory and visual experiences. Encouraged by Khadija not to dismiss the experiences, Muhammad came to understand them as divine revelations that he was meant to communicate to his fellow Meccans. He was to be a messenger of God, a prophet charged with delivering a message that would set straight misinterpretations of earlier revelations given through the prophets God had sent to the Jews and Christians.
What and where is Arabia?
The Arabian Peninsula is an enormous land mass that makes up the south-central portion of western Asia, also known as the Middle East. It is now home to the nations of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, and United Arab Emirates, and several other small so-called Gulf States. Arabia is bordered on the west by the Red Sea, on the south by the Arabian Sea, and on the east by the Persian Gulf. Mostly desert, the peninsula is larger than Iran and Iraq combined, twice the size of Egypt, and about 10 percent larger than Alaska. Total population today is just over twenty million. Riyadh is the capital of Saudi Arabia, the peninsula’s largest nation state. Jeddah is the Red Sea port that serves the holy city of Mecca, Muhammad’s home town. Medina, the second holy city, is about two hundred miles north of Mecca.
The Arabian Peninsula, just east of Africa, is where the holy city of Mecca is located and where Islam originated.
What was pre-Islamic religion like and did Islam retain any of its features?
Pre-Islamic Arabian tribes believed that the universe was animated by innumerable spirits, each inhabiting its own distinctive elements and natural features. They called each of these minor deities an ilah, “god,” but tribespeople in many regions singled out one particular local power as the chief spiritual force. That power they called the god, al-ilah, or allah (ah-LAH). Mecca was one of several major cultic sites over which such a chief deity ruled.
There, a peculiar cubic-shaped structure called the Ka’ba stood for perhaps centuries at the center of pilgrimage traffic associated with a lively caravan trade. Pre-Islamic beliefs also acknowledged the existence of numerous troublesome beings called jinns, as well as downright diabolical spiritual forces. Muhammad’s ancestors emphasized the importance of following the moral code of tribal custom unquestioningly and did not believe in an afterlife. In his early preaching the Prophet focused on the need to behave morally and justly in light of the coming judgment. He taught that a divine will was more important than tribal custom, however ancient, and gradually increased his condemnation of the cult of many spiritual powers (called polydaemonism). The Ka’ba remained an important symbol, as did the practice of pilgrimage, but Muhammad appropriated those aspects of tradition by underscoring their association with Abraham and Ishmael especially.
Why is Mecca a holy city for Muslims?
Mecca, in western Saudi Arabia, is the birthplace of the prophet Muhammad (c. 570) and was his home until the year 622, when those who opposed him forced him to flee to Medina (a city about 200 miles north of Mecca). Muhammad later returned to Mecca and died there in 632. Mecca is also the site of the Great Mosque, which is situated in the heart of the city. The outside of the mosque is an arcade, made up of a series of arches enclosing a courtyard. In that courtyard is the most sacred shrine of Islam, the Ka’ba, a small stone building that contains the Black Stone, which Muslims believe was sent from heaven by Allah (God). When Muslims pray (five times a day, according to the Five Pillars of Faith), they face the Ka’ba. It is also the destination of the hajj, or pilgrimage.
What is the Ka’ba and why is it important?
According to tradition, Abraham and his son Ishmael built (or perhaps rebuilt) a simple cube-like structure in what came to be the center of the city of Mecca. During Muhammad’s time the Ka’ba was a relatively small structure, about fifteen feet tall, with a black stone, the size of a bowling ball, of (perhaps) meteoric origin built into one of its corners. Rebuilt several times since Muhammad’s day, the Ka’ba now stands about forty-three feet high, with irregular sides ranging from thirty-six to forty-three feet. During Muhammad’s lifetime, the building is said to have housed some 360 idols. In 630, Muhammad cleansed the Ka’ba, and it has since remained empty except for some lamps. Its holiness as a symbol of divine presence derives largely from its associations with the lives of Abraham and Muhammad.
Why did Mecca stand out as a religious center?
By the late sixth century, Mecca had achieved the status of the principal cultic center, attracting large numbers of traders and pilgrims to its regular religious and cultural festivities. At the heart of the city was—and still is—the Ka’ba, which in Muhammad’s time was a simple, nearly cube structure of dark stone. In one of its four corners was set a black stone, an ovoid somewhat larger than a bowling ball, now fractured into seven pieces and framed in a collar of silver. Such stones had long been part of local religious centers not only in the Arabian Peninsula, but throughout the greater Middle East. In the Hebrew Scriptures, stone pillars had been both signs of contention, when they were at the center of idolatrous cults, and altogether acceptable symbols of help and witness. When Joshua, for example, gathered the people of Israel together to renew their special relationship with God, he set up a stone and called upon it to witness in its mute integrity how the people had reaffirmed the covenant (Joshua 24). Popular tradition has it that the Ka’ba’s black stone has likewise been taking note of momentous events—the rise and fall of the powerful, the making and breaking of oaths—since the very dawn of Creation. At the appropriate
