Ask Me Anything: Muslim Edition

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Wahhabism teaches not to separate politics from religion?
Does this mean that the North Caucasus will not accept/submit to the Russian Empire, but will continue to fight for political independence?
I mean such peoples as Chechens, Ingush, Dagestanis. These people are Wahabis.
 
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"Christians, when interrogated, must answer that those who die as infidels are damned.”
  • Pope St. Pius X
Condemned as error: 17. Good hope at least is to be entertained of the eternal salvation of all those who are not at all in the true Church of Christ. — Encyclical “Quanto conficiamur,” Aug. 10, 1863, etc.

This will be my last post in this thread.
 
Do Shiites perform the Haj? Assuming the answer is yes then are there any tension between sunnis and shiites at Mecca during the Haj? Presumably every Muslim is bound to perform Haj if able, that would include extremists as well? Do they cause problems at the Haj?
 
The Koran does say that people will have spouses in heaven, although the mainstream thought is that those will be drawn from among the houri. Some people believe that men and women with great affinity for each other may live as spouses in heaven.

The radicalist idea about suicide bombers receiving 72 virgins comes from a hadith that has very poor historical validity and is an example of the sort of twisted version of Islam that radical preachers use to manipulate vulnerable people. A suicide bomber is likely to find himself in hell. Suicide is a sin under Islam and is specifically forbade in the Koran. A person who dies by suicide - except possibly in the case of severe mental illness, because a person has to choose to sin and mental illness can complicate that - cannot atone for their sin. A person who dies by suicide and murders other innocent people in the process has a lot of sin unatoned for. Although we believe that if they were a believer in their heart they will eventually reach heaven, they’re going to be spending a very long time in hell first.
 
I’m sure books could be written on that subject and I’m by no means an expert on the politics, but I would suggest that if the goal is to end terrorism, then a part of the package in addition to typical law enforcement measures to catch people engaged in terrorism would be to understand why people become radicalized to begin with, create effective ways to intervene, and reduce the vectors that make radicalism and violence attractive alternatives.

So, for instance, I mentor Muslim teenagers through a program at my mosque and, in addition to the usual teen issues it’s a fairly regular occurrence that I end up talking a kid through dealing with frustration about racism, discrimination, or antipathy towards Muslims. I also often get questions about something they’ve read online that feeds into radicalist ideas about the West and non-Muslims. It’s not a coincidence that the latter is targeted at people who experience the former and it’s not a coincidence that teenagers and young twenty-somethings are prime targets for recruitment. Every time I see a meme on Facebook bashing Muslims, I know that it’s also being co-opted by a radical somewhere to convince someone that Americans hate them. It’s important that young people have real, tangible engaged adults in their lives to provide counterpoint to both anti-Muslim and anti-Western ideologies and help them come up with strategies to deal with adversity instead of allowing resentment and frustration to fester into anger. Countering terrorism ultimately has to start with helping people choose not to turn to extremist ideologies to begin with. It’s also important that we as adults do what we can to model peaceful conflict resolution, civil discourse, and cooperation with people different from us. Not that we shouldn’t protect ourselves against violence, but that we should try to understand where the violence comes from and not throw further fuel on the fire or respond to hate with hate.

Just my ten cents.
 
There have been Muslims who now see Jesus as the eternal God, do you?
 
Yeah, there are very deeply entrenched racial issues between Arabs and Persians that extend beyond the scope of religion. There have always been political rivalries, we speak different languages, the cultures are different, Shia has always been more deeply entrenched in Iran, etc. I don’t really think either side is in the right at this point, although I understand why Iranians feel the way they do given the history. Being “mixed” can be odd sometimes while traveling and it makes getting both sides of my family together sort of a headache. My father’s parents are pretty chill by Iranian standards and they get along with my mother’s parents now, but evidently the lead up to my parent’s getting married was sort of tense.
 
I’m not really well versed on the situation in Eastern Europe and the satellite states. I do know that there are a lot of Muslim groups that do resent Russian interference, although I would question how much exactly that has to do with religion. Wahhabism sees religion and politics as being the same thing as a factor their particular ultraconservative interpretation of the Koran and hadith. so there is a tendency for Wahhabis to resist any sort of non-Muslim governmental control. As I said, though, that’s a situation with a lot of complex political history behind it as well.
 
He should be. One the goals of these radicals is to get rid of his family’s rule.
 
Under sharia, a dead person must be buried as soon as possible except in instances where murder is suspected or the person died in battle, when it might take some time to bury many bodies. Most of the time, the body is buried the following day and is prepared at home by the women in the family, but it can be stretched a day or so if close relatives need to travel. Coffins are not used unless legally mandated (Muslim cemeteries usually pursue some sort of special legal permission to allow natural burial) so the dead are wrapped in a simple shroud and the graves are typically aligned so that when the corpse is placed on its side in the grave, it will be facing Mecca. In the US, this means that most Muslim cemeteries are aligned north-south instead of the typical west-east.

Funerals include the prayers for the dead before the burial and then there is a three day mourning period afterward.
 
Oh, there are definitely tensions. There was an incident between some Shia Hajjis and the Saudi police force in the 80s that resulted in Iranians boycotting the Hajj for years and the Saudis banned Iranians from participating in the Hajj in 2016 for a year because Iran criticized their management of Mecca. It’s always something, but since it’s a requirement for all Muslims who are able to make the Hajj, efforts are made to try and keep the worst tensions at bay.

The Hajj is a pillar of the faith, so even extremists are required to make the Hajj at least once in their life but the Saudis are pretty strict about who they let in and that area around Mecca and Medina is very well protected and not the place you want to run afoul of the Saudi police. Someone who is known to be attached to a terrorist organization will be unlikely to get a visa to begin with and they would be pretty stupid to go to Saudi Arabia anyway with the current climate. A person who is affiliated with radicals but isn’t known to be actively a threat may or may not be allowed to enter depending on the specific circumstances, from what I understand. Anyone causing a problem in Mecca during Hajj season is likely to be deported pretty much immediately.
 
I have a better understanding of how Christians view the Trinity now, but I don’t believe that Jesus is a part of God or the son of God.
 
I know there are some disagreements about music, but I want to know what you think. How do you view music? do you believe it’s haram?
 
On what bases do you NOT believe that Jesus is a part of God or the Son of God?
 
shazirah said:
I’m not a theologian and I’m not here to convert anyone, be converted, or argue theology, just to try to answer questions as an average everyday Muslim person as best I can
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  • I have never understood the Hanafi Muslim Massacre back when I was a kid. Two groups of Muslims confronted each other a Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s home in Washington, and it was really rather frightening even for those of us outside the islamic community. Was the beef strictly about money, as Mr. Jabbar has said more recently, or were there profound religious reasons behind this? We haven’t had anything like this in America since 1973 when it came down.
 
We thank you very much @shazirah for this topic and your willingness to answer in detail so many questions about Islam.
 
I think that it would be a misnomer to classify Islam as a Christian heresy if heresy is defined the same way in Christianity as it is in Islam. That is to say, to be a Christian heretic, one must first be some sort of Christian. Mohammed and the original Muslims were hanifah, parallel in their monotheism with Jews, and Islam on the whole has more in common with Judaism than Christianity in essentials. So, while I can see why someone might confuse Islam’s concept of God with Arianism, it’s more likely that the Islamic conception of God is independent of Christianity, resembling pre-Christian Abrahamic traditions of monotheism, and that Arianism became the dominant Christian variant in the Arabian Peninsula because it reflects those same traditions more than than the Trinitarian view. There’s just not enough evidence in my mind that Arianism as a Christian heresy has a necessary causal link with Islam in the way some polemics would suggest.
 
So, it seems that the Hadiths pertaining to heaven are not valid or untrue.

In the Bible Matthew 22:23-30 Jesus said to the Sadducees about heaven that “For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven”.

As for the suicide bombers, were they doing the jihad? Most moslems applauded them __openly or secretely in their mind __ and hailed them as martyrs/heroes. Some of them said that they were not worthy or called to do such a noble deed…
 
The music issue can be really confusing even for Muslims, but I’ll relate what I feel is probably the best chain of reason I’ve heard on the subject.

So, this is the verse in the Koran that is sometimes interpreted as being anti-music:
And of the people is he who buys the amusement of speech to mislead [others] from the way of Allah without knowledge and who takes it in ridicule. Those will have a humiliating punishment. ~ 36 : 6
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Amusement of speech often being used to mean singing and by extension wind and string music due to the particular wording in Arabic. From the hadith:
that he heard the Prophet (ﷺ) saying, "From among my followers there will be some people who will consider illegal sexual intercourse, the wearing of silk, the drinking of alcoholic drinks and the use of musical instruments, as lawful.
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However, there are two versions of this hadith - one that contains “musical instruments” and one that does not and there are various opinions about which source is more valid. Additionally, there is a prohibition of teaching female slaves to sing or selling them as entertainers due to the previously mentioned verse of the Koran.

So, typically in jurisprudence, if something is not explicitly forbidden or required by the Koran it is up to individual judgement. Since God did not explicitly forbid music, then there is an argument to be made that the purpose of 36 :6 does not pertain to music or at least not all music. The reference in the hadith is more about sexual purity since selling a woman as an entertainer has other obvious implications that might cause her and her male audience to sin through immodesty and lust.

Similarly, there is a hadith in which there was a holiday and two girls were singing a triumphant song in the vicinity of the Prophet (peace be upon him). Abu Bakr rebuked them, but the Prophet (peace be upon him) told him to leave them alone. If all singing or music were haram, then there would be no reason for him to allow it.

Taking all of that into context then, I feel like the prohibition extends to music which can cause an occasion of sin - so music that is profane, encourages lust or violence, or involves some sort of immorality. I’m careful about what I listen to and I try to avoid music that contains profanity and sexual content - so basically like the entire Katy Perry-esque brand of American pop music. I don’t feel like I’m missing much.
 
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