Why Submission Is Essential To Islam

Submitting yourself to God doesn’t bring redemption from sin in quite the Christian sense. While God is ultimately the source of all events—and Muslim and non-Muslim thinkers alike differ with regard to the role and extent of predestination in Islam—he has created man as a free-willed creature who invites evil on himself and his fellows. Man’s relationship to God isn’t that of a rebelling son, but that of a servant or slave who has lapsed due to weakness, forgetfulness, or lack of resolve. God’s self-disclosure through the Qur’an isn’t a way to understand the nature of God but of his will or law, with the practical intent that people obey the revealed precepts. Submission is intended not only to please God but also to promote the welfare of humans as the pinnacle of creation, to help them achieve personal and social health consistent with the natural goodness God has given them. Belief must issue in the 5 Pillars of Islam: confession of faith, prayer, almsgiving, fasting, and pilgrimage. Though this appears fairly easy, each of these must be performed in a carefully prescribed manner. Beyond these externals, the Muslim is supposed to live a perpetually God-conscious life in order to be in right relation vertically—toward God himself—and horizontally, toward others. Therefore, justice joins submission as a corner stone of Islam. Submission reflects the willingness to try to see things God’s way, while creation gives the opportunity for ethical living. This is the theory, in any case, along with a belief that theremustn’t be any separation between religious and non-religious aspects of life, sacred and profane. Hence, Islam doesn’t provide for a separate Sabbath day, though Friday—the day when public prayers are conducted and a sermon presented—has evolved into something of a separate day for Muslims who are able to treat it as it was meant to be. Prayers are said five times daily, requiring brief interruptions of the person’s activities, after which he or she returns to it. In predominantly Muslim locales, one can see people will pray almost anywhere: the janitor in the school, the taxi driver beside his vehicle, the chef in his kitchen. Though salvation is ultimately a GIFT from God, an act of grace rather than a product of good works, the unrighteous need not expect it, while the righteous might reasonably hope for it. The similarity to Christianity is obvious, and indeed Muhammad didn’t regard himself as an innovator, but rather as someone given the job to recover the original Abrahamic monotheism, to dispense not only with rank paganism, but also with the overlay of Jewish and Christian corruptions which had muddied the waters of the true religion. Innovation in religion is thought to be a grave sin in Islam. Regardless of how much his critics might think he himself had complicated things, Muhammad seems to have considered himself as someone who clarified things; and although Islam has since developed its own diverse strains of thought and its own yammering, clashing sects, an unyielding allegiance to its own clear-cut monotheism and its sense of its own archetypal authenticity remains normative within Islam. Regardless of the efforts of modernists—some sensitive, others less so—and a full philosophical heritage, traditional doctrines have withstood the tests of time. Muslim modernists complain that traditional doctrines have held up all too well, in the sense that they have hardened into something dry, lifeless, and disconnected from the realities of contemporary life. The ordinary Muslim is less likely to think in such terms than to change to meet the demands of the day as he sees fit, while rarely, if ever consciously questioning or dismissing tradition. Today’s politicized radical Islam has been conditioned by both modernists and archaists, the former with their demands for rationality and immediacy while the latter locate their norms in a past based on myths, righteousness and orthodoxy. By combining the past and the future though processes, political Islam considers itself as a revolutionary movement like many others -- Nazism and Soviet Communism for instance.

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