Muhammad Ibn Abdullah: Good or Bad? You Decide
Many centuries ago, a very significant event in the Muslim tradition occurred. More specifically, this occasion occurred in the later part of the mid sixth century. In about the year 570 AD, Muhammad ibn Abdullah was born in Mecca. Just six weeks before his birth, his father had passed away. He continued to live in Mecca where he was cared for by his foster mother; a Bedouin woman named Halimah. Unfortunately, she died when Muhammad was only six years old. He then went to live with his grandfather Abdul Muttalib, whom also died just two years later. Finally, he went to live with his uncle Abu Talib, a merchant. These tragic losses made him a very sensitive person who would always emphasize the need to be especially kind to orphans, women, and the weak in society. These are also a few of the basic building blocks of the Islamic faith, which would eventually become the second largest religion (in numbers of followers) due to its beliefs and its founder, Muhammad ibn Abdullah. This religion, although very popular and rapidly growing in size, would turn out to be forced on people more so than allowing them to adopt the beliefs for themselves.
When Muhammad was in his youth, religion meant numerous gods and goddesses that were often worshipped through trees and stones. Also, the tribal code encouraged the notion of muruwwa, manhood, which was the glorification of tribal chivalry. Female infanticide was also very common among these times. The society in which Muhammad lived in was very unstable and on the verge of anarchy and disorder. This rough period for him and many others was known as Jahiliyya, or, the age of ignorance.
Muhammad ibn Abdullah was a very unique and incredible man. He was not a mythological or semi-divine figure, but instead, lived just like other people. He had such gentleness, compassion, and piety which would help explain why for Muslims, that he is simply called insan-i-kamil; the perfect person. This is most greatly shown in the year 610, when Muhammad was about forty years old. He had heard the voice of the angel Gabriel. It ordered him to recite some of the divine verses of Quran, which contains the messages of God. It was then the Quran was revealed, and the world would know Muhammad as the Prophet of Islam.
The Prophet was a very modest man, living like the people that surrounded him.
Elijah Muhammad, son of a sharecropper, was born into poverty in Sandersville, Georgia, on October 7, 1897 (biography.com). After moving to Detroit in 1923, he met W. D. Fard, founder of the black separatist movement Nation of Islam (biography.com). Muhammad became Fard’s successor from 1934-75 and was known for his controversial preaching (biography.com). Muhammad faced many challenges during his life span. He declared that Fard had been an incarnation of Allah and that he himself was now Allah’s messenger (biography.com). For forty-one year’s Muhammad spread the word of the Nation of Islam, slowly but steadily attracting new members (biography.com). Muhammad built the religion from a small fringe group into a large and complex organization that attracted controversy along with its new prominence (biography.com).
Born in Georgia, the leader of the Nation of Islam was a man named Elijah Muhammad. He has often been portrayed as a saint by his peers, but during World War II, Elijah Muhammad expressed support for Japan, on the basis of its being a nonwhite country, and was jailed for sedition. On August 24, 1946 Muhammad was released from prison in Milan, Michigan. According to the journal named The Black Scholar by Claude Clegg, Muhammad’s time at Milan had done more for him than ever before and after his release, Muhammad had unquestionably become “the premier martyr of the Muslims” (Clegg 49). From his speeches on the radio and in newspapers, Muhammad was also thought of by many people as a fierce man, one of thes...
Secondly, Muhammad is a person who received the Koran’s revelations and founded Islam as a prophet. Muhammad was born in Mecca, and when he became 12, he followed his uncle, and served as a caravan trader. While
family and considering embryo reproduction. New medical and science technology in the embryo industry across the nation provide opportunities for childless couples to utilize technology advancements to assist with reproduction but with religion, moral and legal considerations when selecting this extra-ordinary process in today's society. All four sources function with detailed information regarding embryo reproduction and the impact and process effecting many couples with fertility issues. These sources provide valuable information for couples and prospective donors covering various topics critical to decision making during the embryo reproduction process.
...uring his later years; he painted almost no people in his work as he physically ripened. Both these artists’ lifestyles largely affected the aesthetic principals in their works. Degas depicts incredible detail on his subjects foreground and faces in particular while leaving the backgrounds of his works slightly hazing; therefore rendering them almost unimportant to his works. An example of this would be one of Degas earlier works: “Achille De Gas in the Uniform of A Cadet” c. 1855. However, Monet varied his work much more than Degas did. The evolution of Monet’s artistic style was extreme.
Unlike Christians, Muslims believe that the Prophet Muhammad spread their religion throughout the world. Islam began in the year 610, when the prophet Muhammad started receiving messages from Allah, through the Angel Gabriel. He started spreading the word to others and that is how the Islamic faith began. The Prophet Muhammad was born in 570 AD in Saudi Arabia, Mecca. Both of his parents passed away by the time he was 6 years old and he was raised by his uncle. Muhammad’s first job was a camel driver and later he started managing caravans for many merchants. In doing so, he was employed by a woman named Khadija. They soon got married and it was said that she made his life easier because Allah was through her. When Muhammad was in his 30’s, he would go to Mount Hira to be alone and pray.One day on the mountain while in solitude an angel came to him saying he was chosen to spread the word of Allah. At first, Muhammad said he was not the right one to do this mission however, the angel persisted. He went home to tell his wife and through his wife he found the courage to follow what the angel told him. Khadija was his first follower. In the first three years, he only converted 40 people in Mecca. It was only a small amount of people but it caused a lot of chaos in Mecca. Many of his followers were sentenced to death and Muhammad was next. As persecution was rising, Muhammad found out that he had followers in a city
Throughout his life, the Prophet Muhammad proved to be exceptionally adept at uniting diverse groups, negotiating a series of alliances and loyalty arrangements that spanned religious, tribal, ethnic, and familial lines (Berggren 2009). Among other things, this ability enabled Muhammad to forge a shared identity and found a nascent Islamic state from a diverse and even heterogeneous community (Rahman 1982; Ernst 2003, pp. 87-93). This diversity proved to be both a source of strength and conflict for Islam, and following the death of Muhammad early Islamic communities engaged in extensive debates not only about the nature of his teachings or how to carry his legacy forward, but also about the terms that should be used to define his authority. Although this debate produced a colorful array of movements within the tapestry of early Islamic civilization, this essay offers a critical examination of two particularly distinct perspectives on the nature of prophetic authority: namely, those articulated
Reproduction is the ability of a species to perpetuate and in the human species it is looked upon as a right in today's society. Males and females alike feel pressure that in order to be fully male or fully female they must procreate (Conrad, 1997). While this is not true of all men and women, for many married couples the ability to have children is important. It is only recently that infertile couples have been provided with options that would allow them to conceive a child. These options include the various forms of reproductive technology that have been developed over the past 20-25 years. While these technological advances have brought joy and hope to many infertile couples, the advances have also brought along a myriad of moral and ethical dilemmas as well. It is necessary for everyone to become educated about reproductive technology in order to be better equipped to deal with the moral and ethical issues that this new technology brings to today's world.
Muhammad was born after the death of his dad in 570ce (Gabriel 53). He was born in the town of Mecca, which at the time, followed mostly a polytheistic religion (Haleem x). At the young age of six years old Muhammad’s mom passed. Orphaned at this age and his grandfather took care of him till he died as well, two years later. Finally, at the age of eight years old, his uncle took guardianship of Muhammad. Muhammad, being orphaned, had no one to educate him, so he lived an illiterate but very
Poverty is an important issue to discuss and know more about for many reasons. More than 48 million Americans live in poverty and 15.9 million of those are children. More than one for every seven people currently lives in poverty all across the United States. A full time working parent working for minimum wage earns $14,500 a year and the official poverty line for a family of two children and one parent is $17,568 a year. 20 million children receive free or reduced priced lunches every school day and only half of them get breakfast those days. Only ten percent of those kids have access to food during the summer. 14.5 percent of families can’t even afford to put food on the table. Over 8,200 people are infected with HIV/AIDS all over the world and can’t afford the treatment. More than 2.6 billion people over 40% of world do not have basic sanitation and more than one billion people have unsafe sources of drinking water. Because of this five million people mainly children die every year from water-borne diseases.
Test tube babies have long been stigmatized by society as the unnatural results of scientific dabbling. The words `test tube baby' have been used by school children as an insult, and many adults have seen an artificial means of giving birth as something perhaps only necessary for a lesbian woman, or a luxury item only available to the elite few. The reality is that assisted reproductive technologies (ART) have been helping infertile couples have children since 1978.1 The methods of in vitro fertilization, it's variants, and the other ART procedures are ways for persons that would otherwise have no hope of conception to conceive and, in a rapidly growing percentage of cases, give birth to healthy babies. As the technology has developed, the quality and range of assistance has developed as well. At present, the means of assisted reproduction and the capabilities of these procedures has grown at a somewhat dizzying pace. However, thought to the repercussions of the applications of ART are being disregarded to some extent while the public's knowledge and the understanding of embryologists and geneticists surges forward. It is possible given consideration to things such as the morality of these techniques, the unexplored alternative uses of these procedures, and the potential impact they posses that further development is unnecessary and possibly dangerous.
Aldous Huxley’s dystopia Brave New World is more than a warning against the dangers of technology; it is a prediction for the future that rings eerily true. Today we understand that many of the fantastical devices and practices imagined by Huxley are coming to life. Most notable is the practice of in vitro fertilization, something that was a mad scientist’s dream during Huxley’s time, is today a commonplace practice. According to the National Institute of Health, in vitro fertilization is “the joining of a woman’s egg and man’s sperm in a laboratory dish” (Storck). The procedure was first performed successfully in 1978 and since has become widely used today by couples that desire a child and are unable to conceive by “natural” means. The idea of in vitro fertilization originated in the works of British geneticist and Oxford professor JBS Haldane (Milner). Haldane imagined the practice of “ectogenesis”, or pregnancy hosted in an artificial womb, in his 1924 book Daedalus (Rosen). Haldane’s book was the inspir...
The idea of bettering the human race and one’s family has been around since the 1930s and 1940s that was later dismissed when the Nazis attempted to change humanity to create the Arian race (Dr. Nicholson); however, the process of IVF and test tube babies are much more recent (Baird). Embryologist Jacques Cohen was one of the first people to pioneer a new technique that would eventually lead to what we use today, which is IVF (Shannon). This new form of IVF will be the slippery slope to eugenics, creation of siblings to become a spare part back up, trait selection from a shopping cart, and tampering with the building blocks of life.
...s I believe that without his role as a statesman, a religious leader, a Warner and a warrior He would not have been recognised as the man or the prophet that He was. “He was a prodigy of extraordinary merits, a paragon of virtue and goodness, a symbol of truth” who shon in all areas of his life and duties. I conclude that Muhammad had many roles in his life and that his role of a Prophet which is what many believe He was sent from God to be was possibly his most influential role as the changes He has made have affected individuals and groups world wide. But we have to remember that God is all knowing and therefore knew that Muhammad would also be a “shrewd military strategist” etc proving that God chose him for more reasons than to merely be a Prophet. In conclusion I believe that Muhammad was more that just a Prophet, He was “an ideal religopolitical leader”.
The prophet Muhammad is a very significant individual in the lives of all Muslims. This essay will focus on the book The lives of Muhammad by Kecia Ali on the first chapter of The Historical Muhammad. Further discussion on early sources about Muhammad, Muhammad throughout the centuries and non-Muslim sources will be touched on throughout, as the author will provide insight on different perspectives of Muhammad as a true prophet.