Aspects related to the hereafter were popular vehicles for elaboration, especially as they were incorporated into a traditional story about the night journey of Muhammad from Mecca to Je
Trang 1Fasting (sawm or siyam), the fourth pillar, takes place
during Ramadan, the ninth month of the Muslim lunar
cal-endar The Muslim cannot eat or drink during daylight hours
for the 30 days of that month The fast ends with a major
festi-val of the Muslim calendar that involves prayer and a feast It
is considered especially meritorious to read the entire Koran
during the month of fasting
Finally, every adult Muslim is expected to make a
pil-grimage, or hajj, at least once in a lifetime if possible The
hajj is a journey to Mecca and incorporates various
activi-ties in and around that town Many of the activiactivi-ties
re-call actions believed by Muslims to have been done by the
patriarch Abraham when he, along with his son Ishmael,
founded the Kaaba in the center of Mecca A small stone
building in the court of the Great Mosque, the Kaaba is the
sacred center of Islam, and Muslims face in its direction
during prayer (as indicated by the mihrab in a mosque)
Pilgrims perform rituals at the Kaaba, including walking
around the building seven times and touching of the black
stone lodged in its corner
sTories
The Muslim imagination developed the religion in many ways
during the medieval period Aspects related to the hereafter
were popular vehicles for elaboration, especially as they were
incorporated into a traditional story about the night journey
of Muhammad from Mecca to Jerusalem and his heavenly
ascension, understood to have occurred in about the sixth
year of his prophetic career Known as The Ascension of the
Prophet, these stories, both oral and written, emphasized the
qualities of Muhammad as a prophet but also satisfied the
popular need to know more about the life to come after the
judgment day
One example is the very popular work attributed to Ibn
Abbas (d 687) but probably dated from the 10th century The
story relates that one night Muhammad was taken on the
back of a winged horse, called Buraq, from his home in Mecca
to Jerusalem, where he ascended a ladder to the worlds above
(which are described in the Koran as a canopy over the earth,
structured like a tent) As he climbed up through the seven
heavens, he met the prophets of the past—Adam, John, Jesus,
Joseph, Enoch, Aaron, Moses, and Abraham—who were
liv-ing in paradise He was also given glimpses of the
punish-ments of hell, featuring endlessly burning fires and various
tortures appropriate to the particular crimes committed by
people during their lives These images are often understood
to be the source of medieval European pictures of the
after-life, having been incorporated into the European
imagina-tion through such writers as Dante as a result of Arabic works
on the topic being translated into Latin
Stories of the prophets of the past were also subject to embellishment by popular preachers as vehicles for moral exhortation Starting with the basic stories recounted in the Koran, preachers added details from the Bible and from me-dieval Jewish and Christian elaborations Further elabora-tions emphasized Islamic tenets and the social and historical assumptions of the religion In the most famous example of its type, the book by al-Thalabi (d 1035), commonly referred
to simply as The Stories of the Prophets, takes its readers into
the world of the past through a narrative about God, the devil, and the prophets who deal with the common aspects
of human nature Starting with the creation of the world and ending with the year of the birth of Muhammad, 46 biogra-phies are told, with the Koran forming the basic framework
of all the stories
sufism
The mystical side of Islam, Sufism, had a significant role in Is-lamic life in the medieval period Often seen to be a vehicle by which the domination of the legal side of the religion was bal-anced, Sufism encouraged personal experience of the divine Major early figures capture this experience in two descriptive ways Al-Junayd (d 910) is often credited with establishing a system of mystical speculation in Islam He enunciated the
doctrine of fana, the goal of the mystic in which one “dies
in one’s self” and is “absorbed” into God Baqa, the continu-ance, is the existence of the mystic after fana, when he or she
lives in God Along with this theory, al-Junayd emphasized the ethical responsibility of experienced mystics to return to community life and fulfill the obligations of Muslim life and
to display to their contemporaries the impact of divine expe-rience A contemporary of al-Junayd, al-Hallaj (d 922), was famously condemned to death for blasphemy He proclaimed,
“I am the Truth,” suggesting that individuals could recognize their own godlike nature through mystical experience This was taken to mean that al-Hallaj felt himself to be divine When the mystical experience overwhelms the individual self
to the point that human existence has no meaning, that Sufi
is termed intoxicated, compared with the sober mysticism of
al-Junayd, in which life takes on its important ethical value The outcome of this emergence of significant mystics was the institutionalization of Sufi practice, with accomplished and experienced mystics becoming the models and masters
of their followers Traditions became established by which religious experiences, under the guidance of the master and his disciples, could be obtained Out of this grew belief in the power of the masters to influence events in the world and in the hereafter Practices emerged that involved the visiting of shrines devoted to individual saints to receive blessings and
to pray for marvels or miracles Such acts were deemed
inap-religion and cosmology: The Islamic World 851