folio

The comment by the second anonymous under my recent post entitled “Conspiracy” threw me a little bit:

“you and I are set on conquering this land” Well, technically, muslims are meant to work for just this to happen – not just “this land”, but to create a world-wide ummah. The fact that other people take your religion’s tenets more seriously than you do is hardly surprising. 28 June, 2006 08:56

I suppose it’s because “tenets” isn’t really in the Muslim vocabulary, at least as far as I can tell. We talk about aqida, about the Five Pillars of Islam and about the Six Articles of Faith. My quick Google search this evening revealed that Christians are talking about the “Tenets of Islam”, but my search of Muslim sites was not particularly fruitful. I had to check the meaning of a “tenet”; AskOxford defines it as follows:

tenet /tennit/ • noun a central principle or belief. — ORIGIN Latin, ‘he holds’.

…which I guess is what aqida is… and I have been looking up the Sunni aqida as viewed by the different schools of fiqh this evening.

“It (Iman/faith) is to affirm your faith in Allah, His angels, His Books, His Messengers and the Last Day, and to believe in the Divine Destiny whether it be good or bad.”

The tenets I am familar with are described as the Five Pillars thus: (1) The profession of faith in Allah (Shahadah) – the declaration that there is none worthy of worship except Allah and that Muhammad is his messenger; (2) prayer (Salat) – establishing of the five daily prayers; (3) the paying of alms (Zakât), which is distributed amongst the poor; (4) fasting (Sawm); and (5) the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Hajj).

The Six Articles of Belief are (1) belief in God (Allah), who alone without partner is worthy of worship (tawhid); (2) belief in all the Prophets (nabi) and Messengers (rusul) sent by God; (3) Belief in the Books (kutub) sent by God; (4) belief in the Angels (mala’ika); (5) belief in the Day of Judgement (qiyama) and in the Resurrection (life after death); and (6) belief in divine decree(qadar).

Those are what I consider the tenets of my religion. We have many other beliefs, it is true, but are they the tenets? Not according to the books I possess. Still, the search goes on.