The 4 Best Things About Islam
The religion of these new social entities reflected and supported the new social environments. Albert Einstein supported the compatibility of some interpretations of religion with science. The sect of the Ḥurūfīs developed these cabalistic interpretations of letters, but they are quite common in the whole Islamic world and form almost a substitute for mythology. Books such as Zakarīyāʾ ebn Moḥammad al-Qazvīnī’s Cosmography contain in some manuscripts a few pictures of angels, like Isrāfīl with the trumpet, and histories of the world or histories of the prophets, written in Iran or Turkey, also contain in rare manuscripts representations of angels or of scenes as told in the Qurʾān, especially the story of Yūsuf and Zalīkhā, which inspired many poems. Letters of the alphabet were assigned numerical values: the straight alif (numerical value one), the first letter of the alphabet, becomes a symbol of the uniqueness and unity of Allah; the b (numerical value two), the first letter of the Qurʾān, represents to many mystics the creative power by which everything came into existence; the h (numerical value five) is the symbol of huwa, He, the formula for God’s absolute transcendence. The importance given to the letters of the Arabic alphabet is peculiar to Muslim pious thought.
This is the essence of world thought. The idea of the hierarchy of saints, culminating in the quṭb, the pole or axis, thanks to whose activities the world keeps going, belongs to the mythology of Sufism. In recent years, the profile of atheism has risen substantially in the Arab world. In the 7th century ce a coalition of Arab groups, some sedentary and some migratory, inside and outside the Arabian Peninsula, seized political and fiscal control in western Asia, specifically of the lands between the Nile and Oxus (Amu Darya) rivers-territory formerly controlled by the Byzantines in the west and the Sāsānians in the east. The Muslims were heirs to the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Hebrews, even the Greeks and Indians; the societies they created bridged time and space, from ancient to modern and from east to west. After the consensus on the first two sites as well as further sites associated with the family of Muhammad, there is a divergence between Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims on the designation of additional holy sites. The first Jews arrived in Brazil as cristãos-novos (New Christians) or conversos, names applied to Jews or Muslims who converted to Catholicism, most of them forcibly.
A variation of the Buddha legend has been transferred onto the person of the first Sufi who practiced absolute poverty and trust in God, the Central Asian Ibrāhīm ibn Adham (died c. An earlier mystic, Abū Yazīd al-Bisṭāmī (died 874), was the first to speak about the ascension of the mystic to heaven, which is a metaphor for higher unitive, mystical experience. ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī (died 1166), the founder of the widespread Qādiriyyah order of mystics, and many others have attracted upon themselves a large number of popular stories that formerly had been told about pre-Islamic saints or about some divinities, and these motifs can easily be transferred from one person to the other. The members of different orders who settled in India from the early 13th century attracted thousands of Hindus by their example of love of both God and their own brethren and by preaching the equality of men. The old hero of romantic love in Arabic literature, Majnūn, “the demented one,” became a symbol of the soul longing for identification with God, and in the Indus valley the tales of Sassui or Sohnī, the girls who perish for their love, and other romantic figures, have been understood as symbols of the soul longing for union with God through suffering and death.
Almost every figure mentioned in the Qurʾān has become the centre of a circle of legends, be it Yūsuf, the symbol of overwhelming beauty, or Jesus with the life-giving breath, the model of poverty and asceticism. His death on the gallows is the model for the suffering of lovers, and allusions to his fate are frequent in Islamic literature. Strong influences of the Alexander romances (a widely distributed literary genre dealing with the adventures of Alexander the Great) are visible in his figure. The great religious personalities have become legendary, especially the martyr-mystic Ḥallāj (executed in Bagdad, 922). His words anā al-Ḥaqq, “I am the Creative Truth,” became the motto of many later mystics. A feature of Islamic mythology is the transformation of unreligious stories into vehicles of religious experience. By embracing the energy of the 911 angel number, you can find the courage and inspiration to step out of your comfort zone, share your gifts, and become a catalyst for positive transformation in the lives of others. Individual religious action began to compete with communal worship and ritual; sometimes it promised spiritual transformation and transcendence of a new sort, as illustrated in the pan-Mediterranean mystery religions.