Word: muhammad
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...young man, Muhammad was exposed to the currents of religious debate then swirling through the Middle East. He would listen avidly as Jews and Christians argued over their faiths. Those discussions may have fed his dissatisfaction with the traditional polytheistic religion of the Arabs, who believed in a panoply of tribal gods and jinn, headed by a deity known as Allah, Says Muhammad's French biographer, Maxime Rodinson: "Both Jews and Christians despised the Arabs, regarding them as savages who did not even possess an organized church...
...Muhammad accepted a marriage proposal from Khadijah, a rich Meccan widow 15 years his senior, for whom he had led a successful caravan. With his financial security assured by Khadijah's wealth and business, he began to venture into the desert, to contemplate and pray, as had other Arab holy men before...
Eight words in Arabic sum up the central belief of the world's 750 million Muslims: "There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God." Five times a day, from Djakarta to Samarkand to Lagos, this shahada (confession of faith) is recited by the devout as muezzins (callers to prayer) summon them to worship...
Muslims believe that God decrees everything that happens in the cosmos. Some critical Western scholars contend that this doctrine leads to a kind of passive fatalism, but Islamic theologians strongly deny that qadar (divine will) negates a person's freedom to act. It merely means, says Muhammad Abdul Rauf, director of the Islamic Center in Washington, that "when some misfortune befalls us, we resign ourselves to it as something coming from God, instead of despairing...
...with Moses and Abraham, Jesus is revered by Muslims as one of the 25 scriptural prophets of God, and Islam accepts both his virgin birth and his miracles. But Muslims believe that Christian faith in the divinity of Jesus is polytheism. They resent being called "Muhammadans," which suggests that Muhammad's role in Islam is similar to that of Jesus in Christianity. The Prophet is revered as God's final Messenger to mankind, but is not worshiped as a divine being...