Ask Me Anything: Muslim Edition

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Why do you say ‘peace be upon him’ after mentioning Muhammad’s name?
 
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shazirah said:
so I’ve had interpreter assignments where I’ve helped work with radicalized youth.
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I wish you and those kids the best from my heart.
shazirah said:
So, I can imagine a situation in which the world would rightfully execute someone as a dangerous apostate,
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Not wanting to go against your faith, I would rethink this. There are plenty of countries that abolished “capital punishment” and “slavery”. It might be wise not to advocate “capital punishment” or “corporal punishment” in any way.

And thank for your answers on apostasy. I recon it’s not easy trying to answer these questions.
 
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shazirah said:
ISIS has soured me on the idea of a Mahdi, I’m sorry to say. I don’t necessarily disbelieve in the Mahdi, but I hope that if he and Jesus do come back for the buddy cop movie at the end of the world to fix everything, they sneak up on us and don’t tell us who they are until after its all over and they reveal themselves in glory, because I’m really sick of hearing radicals talk about it. My father, on the other hand, is 100% convinced that that Mahdi is real and will probably will come back within my lifetime. I guess the Mahdi could also be the Jewish Messiah, too. That would be pretty cool, actually, because it would mean Jews and Muslims would be reconciled before the Judgement and there would be peace in the Middle East at the end.
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@shazirah for me personally this was your most interesting and significant post. Thank you very much for taking the time to explain. No one had ever talked with me about this. I appreciate your effort and good will 🙂
 
shazirah said:
I guess the Mahdi could also be the Jewish Messiah, too. That would be pretty cool, actually, because it would mean Jews and Muslims would be reconciled before the Judgement and there would be peace in the Middle East at the end.
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And with Jesus to help Mahdi/Mashiach out Christianity, Islam and Judaism would all be reconciled. How wonderful would that be?
 
It’s happened before in Islamic history during the Reconista of Spain, some of the Crusades, and during the early days of Islam. It’s not common, which is why I say for the Sunni majority it will probably never be a factor. For Shia, Druze, Sufis, and other minority groups, it’s happened more frequently because they’ve been labeled heretics during certain parts of history. ISIS and their ilk are the main threat to other Muslims these days and they love to pit their captives against each other, so in modern terms a number of people have been in situations where they had to choose whether to go along with ISIS’ brand of insanity or have co-workers, friends, and family members killed or tortured.
 
Plenty of Muslims may have gone to Fatima, but extremely few when compared to the total Muslim population. If you stopped the average Muslim on the street in the Middle East or even in the US, they would have no idea what you were talking about. It’s just not a thing for most of us. I’ve never read a Shia opinion on Marian Apparitions, but I’ll see if I can find one. The Sunni view is that they’re either false or attributable to the jinn, since in our view, dead people are incapable of appearing to the living. Shia Islam on the whole is more credulous of supernatural phenomenon and less concerned about the validity of accounts, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some Shia muftis who gave the idea credence.
 
Does Islam in general recognize the right of Israel to exist and have Jerusalem? Why or why not?
 
Mainstream is hard to p(name removed by moderator)oint with Islam as a whole. Kind of like there is no real “mainstream” concept of the Eucharist in Christianity as a whole. Catholics believe in transubstantiation, Protestants largely don’t and they both make up big portions of the Christian world. So, one can speak to mainstream Catholicism or mainstream Protestantism, but not mainstream Christian opinion on the subject. What appears to be mainstream among the Islamic world depends on the exact slice and angle of who you ask. It differs wildly between the developed world and the developing world and right now the majority of Muslims live in the global south. Hanbali and Salafi schools are technically the majority because of that, but that’s likely going to change over the next 50 years, because people of my generation across the globe have largely embraced modern revivalist interpretations that are incompatible with medievalism due to greater education. So, yeah, there are points of difference between Islamic and Christian views of sin and forgiveness, but in the spirit of the law, probably not as much as it would seem.
 
Under Islam, almost all sins can be forgiven (with one potential exception, as has been previously discussed), but there are still consequences of sin. If you murder someone, you deserve temporal punishment whether God forgives you or not. The concept of secular legal punishment didn’t exist in early Islam, it was all the same thing. So, God imposes just consequences for sin, but also offers the possibility of spiritual forgiveness to the repentant. Islam as a furnace that purifies metal and burns away dross is sort of the major literary analogy in the Koran.
 
Habit. Allah is just the Arabic word for God. Even Arabic Christians call God Allah. I grew up with several languages natively in my head, so I use Allah and God interchangeably because that’s how I think.
 
It’s the salawat. It’s a means of honoring the Prophet (peace be upon him). It’s not compulsory or anything, it’s just (1) respectful and (2) some Muslims believe that one gains spiritual benefits from the salawat. One who consistently says the salawat is thought to be blessed by Allah and the angels and saying the salawat is a method of sincerely atoning for sins and purifying oneself. By tradition, a person who sincerely recites the salawat shows faith enough to save them from the fires of hell.

Some people abbreviate the phrase to PBUH for English or SAWS for Arabic, but I prefer to use the whole phrase. Technically, it’s appropriate to use the salawat for any recognized prophet, so one could even use the salawat after Jesus’ name, but most Muslim’s just use it for Mohammed (peace be upon him).
 
Regarding women who wear a hijab, do they wear it only outside of the horne or do they wear it all the time?
 
What is the consequence of sin? Is the consequence spiritual? If justice of Allah puts humans in an ongoing state of spiritual death, how is forgiveness possible?
 
Personally, I’m not a fan of capital punishment because there’s clearly a racial component in places like the US and there have been too many cases where someone has been executed and then forensic evidence turns up later proving them innocent. I’d rather 20 guilty people go free than see 1 innocent person die. The nature of capital punishment in Islam is complicated by the fact that we’re talking about the legal proceedings of a tribal society 1000 years ago when all anyone really had to go on was testimony. That’s why a number of scholars now advocate for modernist interpretations of Islamic law because we no longer have a rightly guided Islamic society to properly enforce anything and also we have better tools than our predecessors did. Islam was created with the capacity to adapt to changing scientific wisdom and so we should.

And, yeah, it’s not my favorite subject and it’s contentious even among Muslims.
 
There’s no Muslim consensus on Israel. it’s just too divisive a subject and there are a lot of old, bitter cultural grudges on all sides there, so I don’t think it’s possible for there to be a a really authoritative opinion that would be both valid and satisfying to any given population of Muslims. Various people have issued fatwas, but none of them are even close to universally regarded.

My feeling on Israel is that it doesn’t matter. I’m not thrilled at the way the Palestinians are treated and I have the same problem with Zionism that I have with a lot of Muslim statists, but I get why Jewish people need Israel to exist and I’m completely appalled by Hezbollah and other anti-Israeli groups… Anyway, Israel isn’t going anywhere anytime soon and everyone needs to put their big boy pants on and learn to live peaceably with each other, imo.
 
It depends on the specific circumstances. Muslim women typically don’t wear hijab if they’re in the company of only other women (like, there are shopping malls in Saudia Arabia where no men are allowed so that women can shop and hang out with other women without their niqab) or if they’re at home with just their family. Most of the hijabi I know vary their dress depending on what they expect to be doing. Around the house in the daytime, they might wear a headcovering because someone could come to the door or something, but they would take it off in the evening. Personally, I wear a turban-style headcovering if I’m just hanging around the house or doing yard work, a hijab when I’m out in public, and a chador to mosque or if I feel the need to be really conservative that day. The only way I’m ever wearing a niqab or a burka is if I legally have to.
 
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Sin is an act of defiance against the will of Allah. The consequences of sin are both spiritual and temporal, so if you steal from people there are are going to be consequences in the world as well as for your soul. The difference is that Allah will forgive the sins of someone who is truly repentant, but Allah’s forgiveness does not directly translate into avoiding the temporal consequences of sin. No one is constantly in a state of spiritual death unless they choose to be.
 
Amen, sister!
I see Israel/Palestine conflict as political/power/territorial issue more than religious, but a lot of people use/bring religions into the mix too.

Thank you for sticking around and answering questions.
 
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