Mainers studying tenets of Islam

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BANGOR – Dana Sawyer’s class wasn’t supposed to study Islam until the end of the semester.

But as Americans struggled to understand last week’s terrorist attacks by men believed to be Muslims, Sawyer’s students at Bangor Theological Seminary were anxious this week to learn what Mohammed, the prophet who founded the religion called Islam, said about violence, war and terrorism.

They wanted to learn about the similarities and differences between Christianity and Islam. Not surprisingly, much can be found in the Quran, the book that is as holy to a Muslim as the Bible is to a Baptist.

“Like the Bible, the Quran is an ocean so big, you catch any fish in it you want to,” instructor Sawyer told his students. “Just as different denominations of Christianity and movements of Judaism interpret the Bible and the Torah differently, so do followers of Islam. There are many more verses in the Quran that contradict the behavior of terrorists than support it.”

Christians, Jews and Muslims all are monotheistic, or faiths of one God. They trace their spiritual family trees to the same man, Abraham, Sawyer told his class. Jews and Christians are spiritual descendants of Isaac, Abraham’s son with his first wife, Sarah. Muslims are spiritual descendants of Ishmael, the son Abraham had with his second wife, Hagar. At his wife’s insistence, Abraham banished Ishmael and his mother from the tribe after Isaac’s birth.

Mohammed, regarded by Muslims as the last and final prophet of Allah, or God, was born in A.D. 570. As a young man, he sought solitude in a cave on the outskirts of Mecca, in what is now Saudi Arabia. There, according to Muslim belief, Mohammed received revelation from God.

Those revelations are contained in the Quran.

Sawyer said many of the passages used by extremists to justify violence refer to the prophet’s advice to his followers, who lived in Medina, another community within what is now Saudi Arabia. The advice was given when his followers were defending themselves against attackers from Mecca.

“Mohammed was having a hard time getting the religion started in his hometown of Mecca,” Sawyer explained Tuesday in a phone interview. “Some businessmen from Medina who believed he was a prophet invited Mohammed to their city. In Medina, the religion caught on, grew …. Raiding camel caravans from Mecca came to Medina and there was a war. The prophet said the religion had a right to exist and its followers a right to defend themselves.”

Sawyer told his world religions class Monday that painting all Muslims with the terrorist brush was equivalent to associating all Christians with those who bomb abortion clinics in the name of Jesus Christ.

The Most Rev. Joseph J. Gerry, bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, expressed similar sentiments Thursday. Gerry, whose diocese encompasses all of Maine, spent the summer of 1991 in Rome studying in a program for Catholics who were thinking about and talking with Muslims.

“From my interfaith work and in particular my exposure to Eastern faiths,” he said in a statement, “I can say that I see nothing in these traditions that would ever justify acts of violence such as those inflicted last week. Muslims are people who cherish peace. The acts that wreaked havoc on September 11, 2001, were acts of brutal violence and an ultimate display of disrespect for human life.”

The word Islam is most often translated to mean “surrender to God’s will.” The weekly congregational prayer services, or jumma, are traditionally held at noon Friday in mosques and worship centers around the world. Following the opening prayer, or raka’ah, the taslim, or peace greeting, is repeated twice. A similar prayer called “the passing of the peace” is offered every Sunday in many Catholic and Protestant churches.

While residents of New York and Washington may know and work with Muslims, fewer than 300 Muslims are estimated to be living in eastern Maine. The majority are students and faculty at the University of Maine or converts who live in Greater Bangor, according to Mahmoud El-Begearmi, a longtime leader in the local Muslim community who works for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension.

“You could take from any book any passage out of context and use it to justify whatever,” he said. “We are taught that the Quran must be read in context and that when we teach Islam, everything has to be taken in context.”

Consequently, El-Begearmi has a special copy of the Quran he lends to people who express an interest in his Muslim faith. Printed in Saudi Arabia, it is a version of the holy text complete with notes, in which the English translation is printed alongside the Arabic. He often lends it to colleagues and people who ask him questions about his faith.

One week after the terrorist attack, El-Begearmi cautioned that it was unrealistic to assume that every person in the world who says he or she is a Muslim is automatically devout. Just as many Christians attend church services only on Christmas and Easter and many Jews observe only Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Passover, many Muslims visit a mosque or recite prayers only during Ramadan, the ninth month of the Muslim year, a period of daily fasting from sunrise to sunset.

At a 1998 service in Orono at the end of Ramadan, Ibrahim Khuwaiter, then-president of the University of Maine Muslim Student Association, urged those attending to follow the teachings of Mohammed year-round.

“Do not return to disobedience,” he said. “Do not lose what you have established during Ramadan. … We must look to ourselves to see how many of us only know Allah during Ramadan.”

Just as there are movements within Judaism and denominations within Christianity, there are divisions in Islam.

About 850 million people in the world are Muslim. Although Arabic is the language of the Quran and of Muslim prayers, not all Arabs are Muslims and not all Muslims are Arabs.

The major divisions, however, arose over questions of leadership, not over issues of teaching.

Mohammed died in A.D. 632. The earliest Muslim spiritual leaders had been close companions of Mohammed. But when one was murdered in A.D. 656 and replaced by one of Mohammed’s sons-in-law, a civil war broke out between the factions.

Two large branches of Islam in the world today grew out of this civil war. The Sunni branch includes about 85 percent of the world’s Muslims. Nations where the majority of Muslims are Sunni include Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The other large sect is the Shiite. Iran is the only nation with an overwhelming Shiite majority. There are further denominational divides within the Shiites.

As Americans struggle to come to terms with last week’s events, Mainers apparently are turning to encyclopedias, history books, biographies, textbooks and the Quran itself to understand what the majority of Muslims believe.

Gig Weeks of Book Marc’s in downtown Bangor said Wednesday the store had sold all but one copy of the Quran and every book it had about the Taliban – the dominant Muslim organization in Afghanistan – and Islamic fundamentalists. She said several of the titles are on back order until publishers can reprint them. Staffers at Borders Books, Music and Caf? in Bangor reported they had sold five copies of the Quran since Sept. 11, compared with the two copies that had been sold between Jan. 1 and Sept. 10.

A great deal of information about the practice of Islam is posted on Web sites. An article posted at www.islamfortoday.com , a Web site designed for English-speaking converts to Islam, includes a quote identified as the Muslim “Rules of War.”

Abu Bakr was the first caliph, or successor to Mohammed. Bakr established a detailed set of rules for Islamic conduct in war and gave these instructions to an Islamic army.

“Stop, O people, that I may give you ten rules for your guidance in the battlefield. Do not commit treachery or deviate from the right path. You must not mutilate dead bodies. Neither kill a child, nor a woman, nor an aged man. Bring no harm to the trees, nor burn them with fire, especially those which are fruitful. Slay not any of the enemy’s flock save for your food. You are likely to pass by people who devoted their lives to monastic services; leave them alone.”

Sawyer compared the rules Mohammed set down for warfare to the Geneva Convention, an 1864 international agreement that established a code for the care and treatment of prisoners, the sick and wounded.

“The people who perpetrated these crimes were going against the will of the Quran,” said Sawyer. “What they did directly contradicts the teachings of Mohammed.”

Teachings of Islam

The five major teachings, or pillars, of Islam are:

. shahada, belief in and recitation of the profession of faith, “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is the prophet of Allah.”

. salat, prayer offered while facing Mecca five times a day ? at sunrise, midday, mid-afternoon, sunset and before going to bed.

. sawm, fasting during Ramadan, the month when the Quran was revealed to Mohammed.

. zakat, contributing financially to the Muslim community, similar to tithing in some Christian denominations.

. hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in each Muslim’s lifetime, if physically and financially possible.

The origin of ‘Jihad’

“Jihad” became part of America’s vocabulary when hostages were seized at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979. The word has since become a commonly used expression.

While the accepted meaning of the word has become “holy war,” Muslims and religious scholars insist this is not a literal translation.

“Jihad comes from the root ‘jahada,’ which means to strive in the name of God,” Dana Sawyer told students in his world religions class at Bangor Theological Seminary this week. “When Muslims pray, that is jihad. If they read the Quran, that is jihad.”

Military action is a small part of jihad and not its totality, he explained. After defending Medina, Mohammed told his followers, “This day we have returned from the minor jihad to the major jihad.” According to Sawyer, the prophet believed what many Muslims believe today: the religion thrives when people strive in the name of Allah, not when they strive with a sword.