TELL ME ABOUT ALLAH

Islam is submission to God. Historically, Islam is the first and the last revealed religion with a Book. With Islam, God completed His religion, perfected His bounty over his creatures and was satisfied with Islam to be the only religion accepted by Him for all His creatures.

WHO IS GOD?

God is Allah, a concept we perceive in our hearts and minds. Human faculties are limited within two thresholds of capacities, a lower and a higher. Our minds' capacity of perception is like a glass of water, everything that is poured into it beyond its capacity to hold water overflows. This does not mean that there should be nothing beyond our minds' capacity to perceive or to understand. God in this respect lies beyond our minds' capacity to define. He is the Unlimited, the Omniscient and the Omnipotent. All that one can think of, as to be The God, God is beyond it. God is not present in His creatures, nor in what is created. Everything that is created is limited and limited, but God is the Infinite and the Unlimited. God is the absolute Abstraction.

HOW DID MAN KNOW GOD?

God sent His Messengers through revelation to selected persons of His human creatures to be His Prophets or messengers to acknowledge His human creatures of His presence, and to teach them His Way i.e, His religion which is, was and must always be only one, that is Islam, or Submission to God - the Creator who is the Beneficent and the Merciful. The Way to God is His religion with which all His creatures are bound, from the First couple, Adam and Eve, to the last Prophet Muhammad, and the last created man on earth. All human creatures are alike in their voluntary bondage to their Creator. They must be submissive to Him. Their life and existence are a trust bestowed to them by God. God had displayed His Trust i.e, life, to all His creatures permitting them to choose to be or not to be, but no one dared to bear such responsibility other than Man, who through his ignorance and destitution ventured and accepted it. Man is born responsible for his free choice. He is to be questioned at the Day of Judgment about what he had done during his first existence to be either rewarded or punished.

WHAT ARE THE REVEALED BOOKS OF GOD?

The revealed Books are basically mere editions of God's Book. Each issued book was kept sound and unchanged as long as its prophet was alive, but when the prophet died, his followers or his clergymen tried to claim to themselves his role and the distortion ensued. This was what has happened to Moses' book The Torah, which the Jewish Rabbis started to rewrite it from their own, including in it all their grudge and hatred upon all other peoples on earth. They monopolized and specified their own God Yahweh in a henotheistic way, and claimed to themselves being his chosen people after his becoming disappointed and unable to make other people keep his religion.

Some of the revealed Books, like their peoples, became extinct. Other Books, like the Torah of the Jews, and the Bible of the Christians, have lost their original texts and all what we have left about them we can see in the Holy Qur'an, the Last Edition of God's Book, which was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad in Arabic and God has taken the responsibility of its preservation to the Day of Judgment.

In the Holy Qur'an, we are told how the Jews rebuked Moses with their demands and how, when he left them for forty days, he returned to find them worshipping the golden calf. The Qur'an tells us as well, how they mutilated the Torah and rewrote it at their want and said, 'It is from God', but surely it was not.

In the Holy Qur'an, as well, we are also told, how the Christians have taken Jesus, the Prophet of God, as God and how they subdivided God's unity into three factions (the Trinity), and all that happened after the Christ's ascent to his Creator.

In Islam, the subject of belief is individual and only God knows who is a true believer and who is a hypocrite. Each person shall be questioned about what he or she had done in their First Life, and shall also get what they deserve in Life After.

There is no clericalism in Islam, every Muslim is his own minister.

THE FIVE PILLARS OF ISLAM

* The belief in God, in God's Angels, in God's Books, in God's Messengers, the Day of Judgement and in God's destiny;
* Five daily prayers;
* Fasting the month of Ramadhan;
* Paying the alms on one's superfluous possessions; and
* Pilgrimage to the House of God, if able.

"Say, we believed in God, and in what was revealed upon us, and upon Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and the Tribes, and in what Moses, Jesus, and the Prophets had from Their God. We do not discriminate between any one of them and any another one, that we are to him all Muslims. He who wishes to adopt any religion other than Islam, it shall not be accepted from him and he will surely be in the Hereafter amongst the losers." [Al-Qur'an