Minute with a Muslim #125 – The Islamic Perspective on Religion

All religion true religion comes from Allah. That's the Islamic perspective. Okay? Religion is not what people invent for themselves. actual true religion comes from a law because we take it upon faith as a part of faith that there is a Creator. And there's various proofs for that we don't need to get into but assuming that there is a Creator, and assuming that the Creator is merciful, then the Creator out of His mercy wants to guide he wants to guide human beings as to what is right and what is wrong. It would be unjust or unfair if the Creator were to leave us groping in the dark, not knowing what was right and what was wrong or what to do. And so he communicates, and he communicates

through prophets, messengers, Revelation, so we believe that all true religion is the communication from the Divine, authentic actual communication from the Divine. And anything that anybody else made up human beings came up with themselves is false religion doesn't deserve to be called religion, because it's not actually what a lot communicated. Okay, then well, how can we tell what is actually authentic communication from the Divine from the Creator, and what's made up by human beings? That's the million dollar question. In Islam, we believe that every single communication previous to ours has been either lost or changed or corrupted somehow, through the passage of time. And people only

need to go to the most recent revelation before Islam before the Koran, which was the Bible, the Gospel given to Jesus, in order to see how easily this thing happens? Anybody and Christians themselves admit this, anybody who looks into the preservation of the gospel of Jesus knows very, very well that what we have in quote, unquote, Scripture is not a very accurate depiction of what Jesus actually said or did. There is lots of different contradictions. There's lots of irregularities and even just the preservation of the text itself is very, very shoddy. That's the closest revelation that was given to a prophet before Mohammed was given the Quran, Allah He sets it

up. So what about those that are even older? What about the Torah given to Moses? What about the other possible prophets that we don't even know about? Because Allah tells us in the Quran, the identity of some prophets, and he also does not tell us the identity of others. And so because all of these messages were either lost or changed, or they're not entirely preserved, it necessitated a renewal of that message. That's why a lot of the Creator kept on sending messengers, okay, if they had all been completely preserved, then maybe there wouldn't have been a need. But the fact that they weren't necessitated that the Creator continued to communicate what he wanted from us. And so

the last one, and the final one was the correct, it's in late antiquity, the world is becoming smaller, you have a very unique language, like the Arabic language that has is very, very systematic, and has been very, very well preserved. You have a culture that is basically takes pride in its ability to memorize orally, and then very soon after, are able to write everything down and meticulously keep the records on what was said and how it was conveyed. It was the perfect storm historically, for the appearance or the revelation of a text that would be preserved forever. And so Islam, in some sense, is not something new, in an important sense. And the sense that I'm talking

about is that it is simply the last manifestation of the last communication from the Creator. And that central message that the Creator has always been communicating, which is to heed the worship of one guard alone is completely unchanged, when it comes to other things, small things, what we should do, you know, the types of rules and regulations, they vary slightly from community to community, but Islam is the last software update Islam as the last, the last type, everything else has been replaced, and there's no need for it anymore, because Islam has been preserved, whereas the others have not. That doesn't mean that does not affect the way in which Muslims are supposed to act with

people of other religions. Okay. And this is a very, very hard thing for people that have a historically European Christian experience to understand, because throughout European Christianity, or the history of European Christianity, if you disagree with someone on religion, you fought them, you killed them, you oppressed them, you persecuted them, whether it was France, or England or Germany or anywhere else. For a long time, you weren't allowed to believe in a religion, even a Christian sect that wasn't the Christian sect of your Lord. In the feudal system. We don't know that when it comes to Islam. That's not our way. And so when it comes to us, believing that we have the

truth 100% of Muslims believe we have the truth, we have the final revelation, the perfect book, the preserved revelation, and yet we are instructed our love and our revelation to respect other people and to treat other people with honor and even to revere in a certain understanding of the word, their customs and their traditions and their even understanding of their religion. Allah tells us in one of the chapters of the Quran, the sixth chapter, he says, Don't curse the idols of others, even if we think that their idols don't curse them. Because if you do, then they're going to turn right around and curse God, they're going to curse the real creator. And so that's a parodic Matic sort of

principle of guiding sort of Axiom for how we're to treat other people. So there's a difference between belief and this is a lot of people confuse this these days. There's a big difference between belief

Giving your rights and treating other people with respect. We can believe that we're 100% correct and that you guys are wrong and still respect you and still give you respect and honor that you deserve as a human being, just like anybody else.