It’s A Gray Area:

The response to the column about Judaism and Christianity was good, and many people requested to be informed about the time and date of our session in which I have invited my friend Rabbi Marc Rubenstein of Temple Isaiah in Newport Beach to further discuss Judaism. That will be 5 p.m. Tuesday in room 109 of Heath Hall at Vanguard University. Please join us.

So now continuing our short series about some of the world’s great religions, we turn our attention to the religions of Islam and Hinduism.

The religion of Islam — which is the world’s second largest religion, after Christianity — is monotheistic, which is to say that there is only one God. And Islam, like Judaism, traces its roots to the prophet Abraham. Moses is believed to have descended from Abraham’s son Isaac, and Muhammad is believed to have descended from Abraham’s other son, Ishmael. Consequently, due to lineage, one will find commonalities among Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

The word “Islam” means “submission,” or total surrender of oneself to Allah, which is the Arabic word for God. A person who follows the Islamic religion is known as a Muslim, which means one who submits to God. Muslims believe that prophets were chosen by God, and those prophets include Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus, among others. All of these prophets were human and not divine, though some were able to perform miracles to reinforce their claims.

Muslims strongly believe that God revealed his final message to the prophet Muhammad, who is so revered that when his name is spoken, it is almost always followed by the phrase “Peace be upon Him.”

Muslims also believe that on numerous occasions during the period between 610 and the date of his death in 632 BCE, Muhammad received the Koran orally from God through the archangel Gabriel. Then Muhammad passed God’s words on to his companions who, in turn, wrote them down. Because these literally are considered to be the words of God, the Koran, which means “recitation,” is the central religious text of Islam.