Islam sees itself not as a new faith but as the original one, completed
About 2 billion people follow Islam, the world's second-largest religion. Muslims do not regard it as something invented in 7th-century Arabia. They believe the same primordial faith was revealed again and again, through Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus, and that the revelation to Muhammad was its final, complete form.
The word itself comes from an Arabic root, S-L-M, that yields many words tied to submission, safety and peace; islam means surrender to God, and a Muslim is one who surrenders. Quranic scholar Mohsen Goudarzi has proposed a different reading of the scripture's own usage, in which islam means monotheism and a muslim is a monotheist. The old English label 'Mohammedanism' has fallen away and can offend, since it implies that a man rather than God stands at the centre of the faith.
At the core is tawhid, God's absolute oneness. God has no partners and no division into persons, and attributing divinity to anything else is the sin of shirk. So God is not depicted in images but addressed through names, most often the Entirely Merciful and the Especially Merciful, which open most chapters of the Quran. Allah, a word with no plural or gender, is also used by Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews. No clergy are needed as go-betweens. Muslims regard the Quran as God's literal, unaltered word and Muhammad as the Seal of the Prophets, the last of them.
Practice rests on the Five Pillars: the declaration of faith, daily prayer, almsgiving, fasting through Ramadan and the pilgrimage to Mecca. The creed adds belief in angels, revelation, prophets, resurrection and divine predestination. Angels in Islamic teaching record human deeds, carry revelation and take souls at death; Gabriel and Michael are named in the Quran.
Islam began in Mecca around 610 CE, when Muslims believe Muhammad received his first revelation through Gabriel, and by his death most of Arabia had converted. The Rashidun and Umayyad caliphates carried it far beyond. A dispute over who should succeed Muhammad later separated Sunni Muslims, some 87 to 90 percent today, from Shia Muslims, though both share the faith's foundations. Muslims are now the fastest-growing major religious group, chiefly because of younger populations and higher birth rates.
Source: Islam
