 So good afternoon, my name is Asad Tarsin. I am going to present to you a brief sort of five-minute explanation of probably 10 I think and then we'll get into a bit more of the very foundations of Islam. So this is gonna be a brief overview. So I'm challenged with summarizing an entire religion, its civilization, its teachings, short amount of time. Should be easy, right? And there will be a quiz at the end, so pay close attention. So I'm gonna start with definitions. The first is the word Islam. What does Islam mean? So taken as a term in the in the Arabic language, if you were to look it up, Islam is a term that means to turn oneself over to or to surrender or resign oneself to. Being a Semitic language, the Arabic language that is, there is a cognate root and so it shares the same root as words such as peace or wholeness, but it's the proper name of the religion itself. Parallel to that is the term Muslim. So a Muslim is the title for somebody who follows the religion of Islam. It is, let's jump in ahead just a little bit here, technology works with you and against you sometimes. So a Muslim is one who surrenders to God and by doing so is able to attain a peace within themselves, a wholeness spiritually by surrendering to God. So when we surrender ourselves to God, we thereby attain an inner serenity and wholeness. So a Muslim can be from any walk of life, any ethnicity, any background. It is not particular to any part of the world. Once it starts to behave, I will share with you a couple of pictures and hopefully highlight that. So who's that right there? We got a couple of faces. Are you guys able to make those out? Stevens, Muhammad Ali, Dr. Azz, people very different ethnicities, very different walks of life all share the fact that they follow the religion of Islam. So they would be called Muslims, even though none of them are Arab or Indian or Pakistani, but from different ethnicities. The third definition that I'd like to cover is the term that you might hear often, which is Allah. Allah is simply the Arabic name for God. It's actually used by Arabic speaking Jews and Christians as well. In fact, this right here, this image I have is from an Arabic copy of the Bible. And that says right there, it says Genesis. And it says, fil bedi khalaq Allahu, right Allah, right created in the beginning. Allah created the heavens and the earth. So there you have what is very common in all of the churches in the Middle East that are Arabic speaking that they use Allah in their churches as well. So it's not a specific God, but it's the God of Abraham. And we believe it's a God who sent Noah and Isaac and Jesus, etc. It's all the same Allah. And it's not a different it's a different language and a different name, but referring to the same deity. So what we believe as Muslims is that God sent an entire succession of prophets. We don't believe that religion began with the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. We believe that all of God's prophets were sent in a succession and they all had a purpose and they all helped to build towards the culmination of the message. Islam doesn't see itself as something new, but as a completion and a restoration of previous messages sent by God. So for example, we hold that all of God's prophets were in a state of submission to God. And so Muslims will sometimes say Islam with a lower case I, because if we think of Noah building the ark and obeying God's commands to do so, he was in a state of surrender to God. And so in that sense, he was in a state of Islam, even though he wasn't following the religion Islam, which gets revealed several millennia later. There's a famous tradition from the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, that I think summarizes all of this beautifully. He says that God's message to humanity is like a large, beautiful building that's been built. And people are walking around and admiring the beauty of the building. And they say, what a wondrous structure, except it's just missing that one brick. And he says, I am that final break. And so he sees himself as building upon what his brethren from the previous dispensations brought and not someone who comes to replace but rather to complete and to restore. And so part of the Muslim tradition is that God has sent over 124,000 prophets to humanity. We don't know them all. There are 25 that we know named in the Quran and these are the household names when we talk about Noah and Moses and Isaac and Ishmael and we name these names. But we don't know who else God sent. God sent many. We are told in the Quran that he did not leave a people except with someone who told them to worship God. And history sort of holds up to this. Every culture has a belief in a one great divine behind the creation of the universe. So whether it's a Native American tribe or the aboriginals in Australia, we would believe that some form of God's message reached them and that he would not have left them without a basic teaching. So there are three dimensions to the religion. And this all begins with is best told by a story. There's a famous event in the life of the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him where he is sitting before the Kaaba which is the sacred house in Mecca. How many of you have seen a picture of the sacred house? Large black cubic structure. So that was actually built by Abraham and it's there in the Bible. Becca with a B instead of Mecca with an M. The B and the M are cognates in the Semitic language, right? In Becca, he and Ishmael build this temple to worship the one creator. And of course, as time goes on, it becomes overridden with polytheism and idols until the coming of the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him. But one day he's sitting with his companions and a man comes to him. And this is a stranger, none of his companions know of who this person is. But he asks him a series of questions. And these questions become the answers to them become what we call the three dimensions of the religion. So these three dimensions are what the quiz will be on. Just just just given good hints here. All right. So the first and they can be summarized in faith, conduct and character. These are the three basic building blocks of the faith. It's faith, conduct and character. So the first are actions to be formed to be performed. Our conduct has a basic set of devotions to God that serve as the basis for all other conduct in life. So this is what is famously called the five pillars of Islam. Has anybody here heard that phrase before? So those are the only the pillars of conduct. We still have faith, and we have character. But so the first is the two testimonies of faith. This is the means by which a person formally becomes a Muslim. You simply testify and believe that there's nothing worthy of worship save God. And that Muhammad is the final messenger in this long succession that includes Jesus and Moses and Abraham, etc. And anybody who utters these two phrases, these two statements is by definition a Muslim. Once a person considers themselves a Muslim, they have to perform five daily prayers. These are devotions that serve as the foundation of our of our relationship with God. So five different points throughout the day based on the position of the sun. There's one that's right at the crack of dawn. There's one right as the sun moves past its zenith. There's one right as sort of in the afternoon, one just after sunset and one when it's complete night. And at those five points in the prayer, we wash in a particular way, ablution, and we face the house built by Abraham and we pray to God. We also pay what's called a purifying charity or a poor tax. Every Muslim who's above a certain poverty line is to give 2.5% one 40th of our savings. So if you have unused wealth, which you know, many of us don't sometimes and that's fine. But if you have wealth that stays over from year to year unused, that's considered surplus beyond your needs. And one 40th of that should be distributed to the poor and the needy. That's a minimum. And then fasting the month of Ramadan. This is a month. It's a lunar month. So it kind of moves throughout the year. It currently is about like Mayish. And this is from dawn until sunset. We abstain from food, drink and intimacy. These are the three most basic desires of a human being. They are part of the animal side, if you will, of what it means to be a human being because we're part celestial, meaning our soul, but then we're very terrestrial. There's an animal side to us. And taming that side is part of the purification process. And the final is a pilgrimage to Mecca. That house that we've talked about now a couple of times built by Abraham, once in your life, if you are physically and financially able. The second dimension, faith, these are not actions that we perform. Rather, these are realities that we must affirm in our hearts. The first is obvious. You have to believe in one God. Islam has what's called radical monotheism. You don't simply believe in one God, you actively negate any other divinity beside him. So this is very almost Old Testament like that. There's nothing divine other than God. And we also believe that God has creatures that he's created in an unseen dimension that interact with us angels. And then we have to affirm that God communicates with his creation through messengers. And at times he even sends scripture with them. So there are four scriptures that minimum that Muslims must affirm the Torah, the Psalms of David, the Gospel of Jesus, and the Quran sent to Muhammad, peace be upon him. We also have to affirm that God sends messengers and we have to affirm particular messengers. This is a point of difference, I think between Trinitarian Christians and Muslims, and I'm sharing this more for education's sake. Muslims believe Jesus closer to early Unitarian belief. So that that Jesus, you know, you had the monophysites, divasites, you had all these debates. Muslims hold that Jesus is the awaited Messiah. He was born of a virgin birth. He will return at the end of time there. They share all we share all of those things, except that he was not divine. So he was the son of God in a metaphorical sense, meaning a holy man or one who is completely in in in consonance with God, but not literally God the son or God incarnate. So Muslims would hold him to be a mortal creation of God, who was God Lee in his behavior and his mission. We also believe in a day of judgment that we are will all be resurrected to be judged before our Creator and that nobody gets away with anything truly in the end. And the final and sixth aspect of our divine belief in our beliefs, sorry, is a belief in what's called divine decree that nothing in the cosmos happens outside of God's direct will and guiding it. So our gathering here today, this collection of souls in this room is something that was decreed by God before the universe was a twinkle of dust. That this is something that God, we still have free will and there's a tension between that we have free will, but we have to work within what God decrees. So when things happen to us, we know that it couldn't have been any other way. This is what God decreed for us, and that there is a great wisdom behind it. There's a famous poet of the Islamic tradition, Rumi, who tells a story of an ant that's crawling across a big Persian rug. Have you guys seen those those magnificent Persian rugs? And as this ant is crawling, he says, he looks down, he notices it's red suddenly and then it just becomes green and then blue and seems very random to him. And he says, what kind of a carpet maker just has a bunch of different colors going on? And Rumi says, Oh, little ant with your short sight, if only you could step out and see the magnificent design of the carpet maker, you would just stay in awe and wonder of his majesty. And that's about sort of the the carpet of life. Sometimes we don't really see what's happening. And then when we're older, we look back and we say, you know, that was probably the best thing that happened to me, even if it seemed tragic at the time. The third dimension, faith, conduct and character. All right, people are awake. I like it. Before we get into character, I've got to touch just a little bit on the Islamic view of humankind of humanity. So on the one hand, we believe that God created us with what's called a primary nature. This is our God given nature that every human being, if left to their natural state, and I mean, no trauma, people are abused and they go through difficult things and that that can alter it. But we have an innate knowledge of right and wrong. And we have an innate inclination towards everything that is good, and true, and beautiful, that there is no healthy soul that doesn't look at a sunset and say like, wow, that's amazing. And that that natural inclination of what we go towards will eventually guide us to God. All of us have this internal compass that's pointing towards the divine. In fact, we see causation behind things, because we know we're always looking for the cause of the universe and the cause of our lives. So that's us on the one hand. On the other hand, we also have a selfish ego. We have a capacity, perhaps even a thirst for our carnal desires and to be utterly selfish, right? This is the side of us that leads to road rage, which is such a strange phenomenon. Same people are just totally calm and the and you know, and if you bump into them in the mall, and then they get behind the wheel and there's just something about my lane and my speed and my destination, right? So that's we have both of these realities to us. We're complex beings. We're composite beings. And so part of the development of character is the purification of the soul. It's a process by which we are to resist the urges of our carnal desires and our selfishness and our ego on the one hand. And then we are to augment and to embellish that primary nature. There's an aspect to children if you see them that can be incredibly giving. And then there's an aspect to children that when somebody touches their toy that they haven't even seen in two years, they suddenly want it, right? And so part of life is to learn to sort of trim away those aspects while enhancing and augmenting the other aspects. And when we do that, we have a purification of our souls that develops where we will get over our anger, our jealousy, our envy, our, all of these things that contempt we have for people, the arrogance in our hearts, all of these things can be purged. And this is also attained on the one hand by a way of engaging in the world in which we do don't we do not become worldly. So the world is here as our sort of the battleground of the soul. And it's a temporary place. And this was actually one of the great messages of Jesus piece upon him, that he came to remind us that this is just but a bridge to the afterlife. And you don't make this your permanent home. And if you do, you sort of have lost a certain vision of the reality of life, right? That this is a fleeting world. And if you use it right, you can attain eternal salvation and an enlightened soul. But if used for selfish desires, it will bring you to peril. As one Muslim sage put it, it's to have the world in your hand, but not in your heart. And at the end of this story, so this this is a series of three questions that was asked to the Prophet Muhammad, what is what is Islam, which is the pillars of conduct? What is faith? And then what is spiritual beauty? And he answers, with those three sets of teachings. And at the end, this man who's asking the questions, he leaves. And the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him, he turns to his companions and he says, Do you all know who that was? And they said, No, we've never we don't know who that is. We've never seen him. And the Prophet Muhammad responds, that was Gabriel, he came to teach you your religion. So this phrase is why, in Muslim teaching, this has become the great summary of faith, that any faith that has that has conduct that focuses on the external, like the law without the spirit will be imbalanced. If we focus on spirit without law, there's an imbalance. If we're all faith and there's no need for for works, that's an imbalance. So all three have to harmonize in order to have a complete expression of the religion. So again, just to recap here, Islam sees itself as a culmination of previous religions. If one surrenders to God, one can attain peace and harmony within themselves, within their homes, within their communities and eventually with the world. And Islam sees itself, this phrase, the middle road actually comes from the Quran, the holy book of the Muslims, Muslims see themselves as a middle road in which they merge the rich legal teachings of the Torah and the higher spiritual calling of the gospel. So again, faith, conduct and character. And if you notice here, there's a body component with our acts, there's the mind that which we believe and conceive, and then there's the soul. So it is a mind body soul surrender to God that is complete. And to do any two without the third or any one without the other two, again results in imbalance. So these are the three core teachings of the religion. Thank you for listening and look forward to some questions.