Islam

What is Islam?

Islam is a monotheistic Abrahamic religion that emerged in 7th-century Arabia. The word itself means “submission” or “surrender” — specifically, submission to the will of God (Arabic: Allah). A person who practices Islam is called a Muslim: “one who submits.”

Islam holds that God revealed his final, complete message to the prophet Muhammad through the angel Gabriel beginning around 610 CE. These revelations were compiled into the Quran — regarded by Muslims as the literal, unaltered word of God, superseding all previous scriptures. Muhammad is considered the last and final prophet in a lineage that includes Abraham, Moses, and Jesus.

Islam is now the world’s second-largest religion with approximately 1.9 billion adherents, constituting about 24% of the global population. It is the majority religion in 50 countries and spans every inhabited continent.

Muhammad (مُحمّد)

Born around 570 CE in Mecca (in present-day Saudi Arabia), Muhammad was orphaned young and raised by his uncle. He worked as a merchant and developed a reputation for honesty, earning the epithet Al-Amin— “the trustworthy.” Around age 40, during a period of meditation in a cave on Mount Hira, he reported his first revelation from the angel Gabriel.

He began preaching monotheism in polytheistic Mecca, attracting followers but also fierce opposition from the city’s powerful merchant class. In 622 CE he led a migration to Medina (the hijra), which marks year one of the Islamic calendar. Over the following decade, he unified much of Arabia under Islam through a combination of diplomacy and military conquest. He died in 632 CE.

For Muslims, Muhammad is the perfect model of human conduct — not merely a messenger but the exemplar whose behavior (sunnah) is binding on all believers. This is a central source of tension in conversations about Islamic reform: the historical record of Muhammad’s actions, including military campaigns, the taking of slaves, and marriage to a nine-year-old girl (Aisha), is considered by many scholars to be incompatible with modern ethical standards, yet it cannot be criticized without challenging the religion’s foundations.

The sacred texts

The Quran (القرآن)

Islam’s central scripture, compiled shortly after Muhammad’s death and standardized under Caliph Uthman around 650 CE. Muslims regard it as the verbatim, uncreated word of God — not an inspired text, but a direct transcription. It is organized into 114 chapters (suras) of varying length and covers theology, law, morality, and eschatology.

The Hadith (الحديث)

Collections of sayings and actions attributed to Muhammad, compiled in the centuries after his death. Along with the Quran, hadith form the basis of Islamic law (sharia). Different Islamic traditions recognize different hadith collections as authoritative, which is one source of the Sunni-Shia split.

The Sunnah (السنة)

The normative practice of Muhammad — how he lived, worshipped, treated others, and governed. Derived from the hadith, it serves as a practical guide for how Muslims should conduct their lives.

The Five Pillars

The five obligatory acts of worship that define Muslim practice, regardless of tradition or school:

Sunni and Shia: the central division

The largest division in Islam emerged from a dispute over Muhammad’s succession. Sunnis (roughly 85–90% of Muslims) hold that leadership should pass to the most qualified member of the community; they recognize the first four caliphs. Shia Muslims (roughly 10–15%) believe leadership should have passed directly to Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali, and that his descendants constitute the rightful line of authority. The conflict began in the 7th century and has shaped Islamic history ever since — including contemporary geopolitics across the Middle East.

The case for reform

A growing body of critics — many of them Muslim-born — argue that Islam, unlike Christianity and Judaism, has not undergone the internal reform that would make it compatible with liberalism, pluralism, and equal rights for women and minorities.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in her book Heretic (2014), identifies five specific doctrines she argues must change: the semi-divine, infallible status of Muhammad and the literal reading of the Quran; the belief in afterlife rewards that devalue earthly life; sharia as a comprehensive legal system governing private behavior; the practice of enjoining good and forbidding wrong (used to justify vigilante violence); and the imperative of jihad. Her argument is not that Islam should be abolished but that these specific elements are incompatible with modern civilization.

Critics of this view argue that Islam is diverse and that reform is already underway in many Muslim-majority communities. Reformers like Maajid Nawaz and Irshad Manji work from within the tradition to distinguish Islamism (the political ideology) from Islam (the faith), arguing that the two need not be conflated.

Apostasy

Leaving Islam — apostasy (ridda) — is classified as a capital offense under classical interpretations of sharia. While enforcement varies widely by country and community, apostates in many parts of the world face real risks: imprisonment, family expulsion, violence, or death. A 2013 Pew Research survey found that in several Muslim majority countries, a majority of Muslims supported the death penalty for leaving Islam.

This is not a fringe position in Islamic jurisprudence — it is the majority opinion across the main schools of classical Islamic law. It is also one of the sharpest points of incompatibility between traditional Islamic doctrine and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which protects the right to change one’s religion.