subject: Islamic Submission To God [print this page] Submitting yourself to God does not bring redemption from sin in quite the Christian sense. While God is ultimately the source of all eventsand Muslim and non-Muslim thinkers alike differ with regard to the role and extent of predestination in Islamhe has created man as a responsible creature who brings evil on himself and his neighbours. Mans relationship to God is not that of a rebelling son, but that of a servant or slave who has failed due to weakness, forgetfulness, or lack of resolve. Gods self-disclosure through the Quran is not a revelation of his person but of his will or law, with the practical intent that people obey the revealed precepts. Submission is intended not only to win Gods favour but also to promote the welfare of humans as the pinnacle of creation, to help them achieve personal and social health consistent with the natural goodness God has bestowed upon them.
Gods provision for this blessing comes not via his introduction of himself into history in even the Jewish manner, let alone the Christian one; for although the Quran does contain narrative parts, the center of Islam isnt in story form or a conversation or anything mysterious, but is rather the communication of Gods expectations for man. Unlike Christianity and Judaism, which experience God in salvation history and the hard pedagogy of earthly experience, Islam emphasizes the Creator who is known via his messengers, teachers of correct belief and conduct. It is a religion of prophets, a prophetic faith above all, that term being used here in reference to one who warns or proclaims, not in the sense of one who predicts the future.
As such, Islam does not have a separate Sabbath day, though Fridaythe day when public prayers are conducted and a sermon presentedhas turned into something of a separate day for Muslims who can to treat it as it was meant to be. Prayers are uttered five times daily, requiring brief interruptions of whatever the individual is doing at the time, after which he or she returns to it. In predominantly Muslim locales, one can see people will pray almost anywhere: the worker in the field, the gardener in his garden, the shopkeeper behind or beside his counter.
Though salvation is considered a GIFT from God, an act of grace rather than a product of good works, the unrighteous need not expect it, while the righteous might reasonably hope for it.
The resemblance to Christianity is obvious, and indeed Muhammad didnt consider himself as an innovator, but rather as someone given the job to recover the original Abrahamic monotheism, to dispense not only with rank paganism, but also with the overlay of Jewish and Christian corruptions which had obscured true religion. Innovation in religion is considered a grave sin in Islam. Regardless of how much his critics might think he himself had complicated things, Muhammad seems to have considered himself as someone who clarified things; and although Islam has since developed its own disctinct strains of thought and its own chattering, conflicting sects, an unyielding devotion to its own clear-cut monotheism and its sense of its own archetypal authenticity remains constant within Islam. Notwithstanding the efforts of those with more modern thoughtssome sensitive, others less soand a rich philosophical heritage, traditional doctrines have held up over time.
Muslim modernists argue that traditional doctrines have held up all too well, in the sense that they have lost their flexibility and become separated from the current realities of everyday life. The ordinary Muslim is less likely to think along those lines than to change to meet the demands of the day as he deems appropriate, while seldom, if ever consciously questioning or dismissing tradition. Todays politicized radical Islam has been conditioned by both modernists and archaists, the former with their demands for rationality and expedience while the latter locate their norms in a mythical, righteous, ultra-orthodox past. By putting together the past and the future though processes, political Islam identifies itself as a revolutionary change like many others -- Nazism and Soviet Communism come to mind.
