The words of the Quran all seemed strangely familiar yet so unlike anything I had ever read before,’ he told us. He embraced Islam in 1977, and changed his name to Yusuf, the Arabic for Joseph. ‘I identified with the story of Joseph in the Quran,’ he said. ‘His brothers sold him like goods in the market place.’ Yusuf felt the music business had treated him not like an artist but as a commodity.
“Purify your intentions, your inner being, your heart and be sincere in your actions,’ he wrote. ‘God looks into your heart, not at your outer form. He looks at what lies behind the clothes … He looks into your private sphere, not at your public show.
Kristiane Backer was one of the very first presenters on MTV Europe. She gained a cult following and became a darling of the European press, but something was missing from her life. A fateful encounter introduced her to a completely different world to the one she knew, the religion and culture of Islam. After reading the Quran and traveling widely in the Islamic world she knew that she had discovered her spiritual path and she embraced Islam. This private memoir tells the story of her conversion and explains how faith at last gave her inner peace and the meaning she had sought
If islam was a religion of violence everyone would have been died..AND NON-MUSLIMS WON'T NEVER ACCEPT INDEED THEY ACCEPT ISLAM AS A GUIDANCE FROM ALLAH
ALLAH GUIDES WHOM HE WILLS.But wait! Neither is it a “religion of violence” or the heinous acts ISIS gins up hoping to generate YouTube views and goad the United States into war. While I laud former president George W. Bush for his helpful PR announcement following 9/11, it’s a conceptual error to think of a — indeed, any — religion as inherently peaceful or inherently barbaric. Instead, as is the case with any religious tradition, a vast majority of Muslim people are peace-loving, and there are a few really bad apples.
Whenever someone makes an argument that a tradition is or is not a particular way, what you are really hearing is his or her own interpretation of the tradition. Clearly, there are other ways to think about the same faith, as human history too well illustrates.
Stick with me through a bit of philology: Arabic works on a consonant system, usually in sets of three. Thus, the root word of Islam is “salaam” — meaning “peace” — with the root consonants of s, l, and m. The addition of the i changes the noun into a verb. The prefix mu means, essentially, “one who has,” so a muslim — noting the same consonant base — becomes “one who has surrendered.”
The surrender or submission, in the context of this word, implies surrender to God’s will and word. Hopefully, this brings the adherent peace — both for herself and her neighbors — although what one does with that submission is always a matter of interpretation.
8. Sharia ought not be a scary word.
After all, it just means “legal reasoning” or “canonical law.” There are, at least, five classical schools of sharia (including the Shiite), and they differ radically in in their relationship to both sources of authority and interpretive methods.
For example, the Qur’an enjoins one not to be drunk when you pray, not to get drunk, and not to drink fermented date wine. So, what of a cold beer? It likely won’t get you drunk, nor is it made from dates. Is it allowable? Sharia is the means by which this question gets answered, and those answers vary from no alcohol whatsoever to, quite literally, no date wine that leads to drunkenness. Across the Muslim world, you’ll find the whole spectrum of positions.
And, just as with Catholics and birth control, you’ll find many Muslims who ignore the prescription regardless. Muslims are people, too.