HIS 101 WEEK 8: ISLAM
Reading Assignment for the week:
- Read the appropriate pages in the
textbook (pages 204-208 in chapter 9 in the 7th or 6th ed. of Perry).
- Read the Hadith
excerpt (You may wish to participate in an Online Discussion of this reading.).
-
Listen to some further information about Islam
as a Realaudio file
or as a wav file. You can also read the information as
a txt file.
Questions to
Consider while studying this week's material:
- How did Islam continue the
traditions of Christianity and Judaism?
- Was the Islamic world a
revised version of the Roman empire?
Key Terms to study
while reading the textbook:
- Muhammad
- Prophet
- Khalifa (caliph)
- Qur'an (Koran)
Suggested Websites for further study:
- The University of Southern California's
Compendium of Muslim Texts has some
good explanatory material about some important Muslim principles.
- For extra credit please suggest to your instructor a
relevant website for this unit of the course. Send the title of the site, the url and a
brief explanation why you find the information interesting and applicable to
the material being studied this week.
Submit the Islam Paragraph:
Read the Hadith
selections (along with the document background notes
and the questions to consider).
Answer the following
question in a paragraph: Did the Hadith describe an ethical
religion?
Your paragraph should be about
one-half page in length, double-spaced with one-inch margins, font size 10 or 12; it should
contain a concise topic sentence that directly responds to the assigned
question (no need to define terms or cite a dictionary) and use
direct, quoted material to support your points. Do not spend time repeating
what happened in the document; spend your time providing analysis to
answer the assigned question.
This assignment should be sent by e-mail according to the Electronic Submission
Information instructions.
Please remember to consult
Charlie's History Writing Center for
specific information on the writing requirements of this course.
You may also wish to post or respond in the
Blackboard online discussion forum
for this assignment. Please review the instructions for
Using the Blackboard
Discussion Forums, if necessary.
The Islam Paragraph is worth a maximum of
25 points.
Notes:
Islam, which originated on the Arabian
peninsula in the seventh century, grew to become the third major monotheistic
religion in the West. Much like Christianity, Islam owed its origins to a
single man and was extremely small and persecuted when it began. But
the religion, and the armies that spread it,
fanned out from the Arabian Peninsula and soon controlled
most of the Near East and North
Africa, and even some of Europe. Although Islam spread with the sword,
conversion to the
religion itself was not at sword point. As Islam grew into a world
religion, it simultaneously became part of a new world empire. As such, it
is often not realized that Islam inherited much
from its predecessors, the Ancient Roman and Greek worlds. (Christian Europe later
in the Middle Ages also learned much from the Islamic community.)
Unfortunately, many people in the West
today do not recognize Islam as a major component of Western civilization. Instead,
the tendency is to view Islam as a religion of some distant desert
people, but Islam is very much Western. Muhammad was a prophet, as Jesus,
Moses and Isaiah had been, and claimed to put right a faith gone wrong. Muhammad,
in fact, recognized most of the previous Hebrew prophets. In
addition, Muslims came into contact with, and borrowed much from, the Greek
intellectual and scientific heritage and from Rome's political history.
Please remember that the Qur'an is not
the "Muslim bible." There is a distinction. According to Muslims, the Qur'an
is the exact word of God, delivered through Muhammad and recorded in Arabic. The
bible, however, is only the inspired word of men; it is not God's word. The
Hadith are not part of the Qur'an, but are, instead, "traditions" associated
with the life and teaching of Muhammad that shed light on the writings
in the Qur'an. Most of the Hadith are short incidents from Muhammad's life
that help to explain the purposes and ideas of the new religion.
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