Five Pillars of Islam—5.31.20

Five Pillars of Islam—5.31.20

Five Pillars of Islam
May 31, 2020
Those of us who have Muslim friends or acquaintances may have remarked that last Sunday, May 24, was the very important and joyful holiday of Eid-al-Fitr which marked the end of the month-long season of fasting known as, Ramadan. I’ve known of this for a long time, but it has been become even more important in my family in recent years because my grandson’s fiancée, Bahiya, is Palestinian-American. She and my grandson, Nicholas, who is not Muslim but wanted to share this with her, did their best to observe the requirements of fasting, which I will touch upon in a few minutes, despite the fact that she is a Registered Nurse at a large hospital in Buffalo with emotional and physical stress these days that we can only imagine, and Nicholas is an electrical engineer who staffs one of the control rooms for National Grid in that area and who was quarantined on site for weeks as an essential worker who could not risk getting infected. Yet, it was important for them to observe this practice of faith even in the difficult time they and we are facing as a society; in such times, a grounding in faith is even more important.
In touching upon the five pillars of Islam this morning, my purpose is not for us to learn a great deal about Mohammad and the religion of Islam. No, what I hope to do is to take a brief glance at one of the world’s most important, powerful and complex religions, one that is often misunderstood, and to consider what it might hold for us as Unitarian Universalists. I will also be taking into account the murder of Mr. George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the subsequent convulsions across the country.
The founders or originative figures of some of the world’s great religions are rather dim and shadowy, barely discernable through thousands of years of lore, even their factual existence open to question. However, the life and work of Muhammad are different. We can see Muhammad in sharper focus, as a historical figure, as a prophet and spiritual leader, as a political and military leader, and as a husband and father.
There is no doubt that he was born in Mecca, in what is now Saudi Arabia, in the year 570 of the Common Era, and lived until the year 632. He was an orphan, raised by an uncle, and at the age of 25 married a much older woman, a merchant named Khadijah, the first of his many wives, and worked with her in her business. Yet, in addition to such an everyday life, he also had a practice of retiring to a cave in the mountains near Mecca for solitary prayer and meditation. It was there, at the age of 40, that he reported being seized by an angel, given the first of many revelations about God, and commanded to preach them to the world. The gist of these revelations was that God is One, that the purpose and meaning of life is submission to God, and that he, Muhammad, was the last and greatest of the prophets of God.
This message of radical monotheism was not well received. The Mecca of Muhammad was polytheistic, a religious world made up of many gods, shrines and priests. A lot of money was generated by offerings and sacrifices. Seen as a threat to that very important economy, Mohammad and his followers were persecuted and finally forced to flee to the city of Yathrib, later known as Medina. Muhammad, his teaching here better received, became the dynamic political and civic leader of that city and some years later returned and subdued Mecca at the head of a conquering military force. The subsequent story of Muhammad, his descendants and the rapid spread of Islam throughout the Arabian Peninsula, the middle east, north Africa, Spain, the Balkans, Southern Asia, India and Indonesia is one of the great sagas of religious and political history.
It would be wrong to characterize Islam as being based on the “teachings of Muhammad.” The Arabic word, Allah means, literally, “the God”; that is, the only God, not one of many. What came forth from those cave experiences are understood by the faithful not to be, in any way, a product of Muhammad’s mind and thought but, in fact, a direct communication of Allah’s will and command to humankind.
Muhammad, like most people of his era, was illiterate, so the words revealed to him and through him were not originally written down but repeated and memorized by his followers and only after his death compiled into a single book. It was titled by an Arabic word meaning “he read” or “he recited,” Koran, referred to by the pious as “the Holy Koran.” Later, as in most religions, further holy writings, thoughts and laws by Muhammad and subsequent inspired teachers began to accumulate; more complex implications of the original revelations were teased out, resulting in an ever-larger body of sacred writings. Their interpretations touch on almost all areas of life.
The so-called Five Pillars of Islam proceed from this collection of holy sayings. The Koran presents them as the foundation and structure of Muslim life, and they are generally considered obligatory for all believers. Broadly speaking, these are the confession of faith, prayer, charity, fasting and pilgrimage to Mecca.
The Shahada, the Muslim confession of faith, is very simple. “I testify that there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.” That deceptively simple but profound statement is the core of Muslim belief.
The second pillar is prayer, salah, to which the pious Muslim is called five times a day: dawn, noon, afternoon, evening and night. All of the prayers are performed facing Mecca.
The third pillar is zakat; alms giving or charity. Almost all religions feature an ethos of charitable giving; in Islam it is an obligation, no less than confession or prayer. Zakat is to be given directly to the poor and in the amount of 2.5% of one’s wealth and more if one can afford it.
Fasting, or sawn, is the fourth pillar. During the fast, the faithful must abstain from food and drink from dawn to dusk. This, as you can imagine, is demanding; it’s not a one-day juice fast to sort of clean out your system. I was glad to learn that, despite their demanding professions, Bahiya and Nicholas came through their month of fasting in good health, even invigorated. Ramadan is a time when extra prayer and religious devotion are encouraged; it is also intended to remind the faithful that there are many in the world for whom fasting is not a choice, it is their daily condition, and Allah calls them to do something about it.
The fifth pillar is perhaps the most challenging—the Hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca. All Muslims who are both physically and financially able to travel to the city of Mecca are obliged to do so at least once in their lives. When they arrive, all pilgrims must dress in identical clothing, simple garments consisting of two white sheets. Dressed in this way, performing the same rituals with thousands of other pilgrims, none will know who is rich and powerful, and who is not. As that moving passage from Malcom X indicates, this is intended to celebrate the unity of all Muslims and their essential oneness before Allah, erasing distinctions of race, class and color.
I am moved to think about oneness this weekend in the light of the events unfolding in Minneapolis and throughout the nation, prompted by the murder of George Floyd at the hands of four police officers, one in particular, who has now been arrested and charged with murder. Now this incident had nothing to do with Mr. Floyd being a Muslim; in fact, it is reported that he was a Bible-believing Christian. It does have everything to do with brutal policing, carried out within a society that has racism built into the very systems within which we all live, work and carry out our lives. It is there; however, if you are not a person of color you will probably never have any reason to think about it. If you are white, have a permanent address and a few dollars in your pocket, any encounter you might ever have with the police will probably not escalate in such a way as to cost you your life. That is not something that any person of color can count on in this society, especially if they are a Black male. If there is a benefit of the doubt to be given, someone who looks like me will probably get it; such a benefit was not given to George Floyd and a large, fully armed, White police officer, accompanied by three others, knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes to demonstrate to George Floyd and any other people of color in that neighborhood, that he was not about to get the benefit of any doubts whatsoever.
As we know, rage has exploded in Minneapolis, a city with some history of poor police conduct toward minorities. It has spilled over to other cities; extremists of the right and left have taken advantage of the chaos to promote their own agendas of even greater violence; sadly, the impulse toward theft and looting, never far below the surface, has also emerged; all of this is heightened, I’m positive, by the covid-19 health crisis, the quarantine orders, the unemployment, fear and anxiety permeating the country.
It is the death of yet another Black man at the hands of a White police officer— yet another and yet another. We can do better; we must do better, and it will take people of all faiths–or none at all–to live up to the best of what their most basic moral principles call them to do. We Unitarian Universalists are called to affirm and promote justice, equity and compassion in human relations and it is my faith that when that vision is fully realized, it will mean that racism is no longer the scourge among us that is has been for hundreds of years, that every person may expect fair and equitable treatment at the hands of all police and authority figures; that in our political process no votes will be gerrymandered or suppressed and every voice will be count.
The Koran holds out a vision, much the same vision that is held out by all profound religions that both comfort and challenge us: We have evolved into tribes and nations, that we may know each other, not that we may despise each other. Angry voices now tell us, as they have told us again and again, that this vision has not yet been made real, not everywhere and not all the time. However, I also know that everywhere and all the time, there are people working and sacrificing to do what they can to make the vision real in their piece of the world. May it be that we are among them.
Amen.