Islamic mythology

Islamic mythology is the body of myths associated with Islam. Islam is a religion that is more concerned with social order and law than with religious myths.[1] The Oxford Companion to World Mythology identifies a number of traditional narratives as "Islamic myths".[1] These include a creation myth and a vision of afterlife, which Islam shares to some extent with the other Abrahamic religions, as well as the distinctively Islamic story of the Kaaba.[1] The traditional biography of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, which plays a central role in Islamic teachings, is generally recognized as being largely historical in nature, and Islam depends less on mythology than Judaism and Christianity.[1] However, the canonical narrative includes two key supernatural events: the divine revelation of the Quran and the Isra and Mi'raj — the night journey to Jerusalem followed by the ascension to the Seventh Heaven.[1] In addition, Islamic scriptures contain a number of legendary narratives about biblical characters, which diverge from Jewish and Christian traditions in some details.[1]

Religion and mythology

The discussion of religion in terms of mythology is a controversial topic.[2] The word "myth" is commonly used with connotations of falsehood,[3] reflecting a legacy of the derogatory early Christian usage of the Greek word muthos in the sense of "fable, fiction, lie" to refer to classical mythology.[4] However, the word is also used with other meanings in academic discourse. It may refer to "a story that serves to define the fundamental worldview of a culture"[3] or to stories which a given culture regards as true (as opposed to fables, which it recognizes as fictitious).[5] In the preface to The Oxford Companion to World Mythology Devid Leeming writes:[2]

I have treated the sacred narratives of the "great religions", including the monotheistic Abrahamic religions, as myths, not to deprecate those religions, but simply because to a believer in one religion the stories -- especially the supernatural ones -- of another religion tend to be seen as myth rather than history.

Biblical stories in the Qur'an

The Prophet and his companions advancing on Mecca, attended by the angels Gabriel, Michael, Israfil and Azrail.

Islam incorporates many Biblical events and heroes into its own mythology. Stories about Musa (Moses)[6] and Ibrahim (Abraham)[7] form parts of Islam's scriptures. The Qur'an retells in detail the Jewish tale of Joseph, who was sold to an Egyptian,[8] and the Christian tale of Mary, the mother of Jesus.[9] In both cases, it adds original details and an Islamic interpretation: for instance, in the Islamic version, Jesus speaks while he is still an infant,[10] and he is a miraculously-conceived human prophet, not the incarnation of God.[11]

Islamic creation narrative

According to the Qur'an, the skies and the earth were joined together as one "unit of creation", after which they were "cloven asunder".[12] After the parting of both, they simultaneously came into their present shape after going through a phase when they were smoke-like.[13] Some parts of the Qur'an state that the process of creation took 6 days,[14] Other parts provide detail about creation. 2 days to create the Earth,[15] 2 days to create the mountains, to bless the Earth and to measure its sustenance, total 4 days,[16][17] and then 2 more days to create the heavens and the stars.[18] In the Quran, the word "day" is used loosely to mean era, for example Surah 70 verse 4: "The angels and spirit will ascend to Him during a day the extent of which is fifty thousand years".

The Qur'an states that God created the world and the cosmos, made all the creatures that walk, swim, crawl, and fly on the face of the earth from water.[12] He made the angels, and the sun, moon and the stars to dwell in the universe. He poured down the rain in torrents, and broke up the soil to bring forth the corn, the grapes and other vegetation; the olive and the palm, the fruit trees and the grass. Traditionally, the earth is held to be inhabited by several other creatures, like the Jinn, before God created human.[19]

God molded clay, earth, sand, and water into a model of a human. He breathed life and power into it, and it evolved into life. And this first human was called Adam. God took Adam to live in a Paradise. God taught Adam the names of all the creatures, and then commanded all the angels to bow down before Adam. All of them bowed but Iblis refused to obey.

God placed Adam in a beautiful garden in Paradise, telling him that he could eat whatever it wanted except the fruit of a forbidden tree. Satan tempted Adam to disobey God, and eat the fruit. When Adam had disobeyed God, God cast Adam of Paradise. Muslim scholars are divided whether the Paradise from which Adam was expelled is the paradise in the heavens awarded to the righteous at the day of judgement or a paradise on earth.

Islam breaks somewhat with Judaism and Christianity in that Eve is not mentioned in the quran and in explaining why Adam ate the forbidden fruit. In the Hebrew account in Genesis, a snake tempts them Adam and Eve to eat the fruit. While the Genesis creation narrative does not explicitly identify the snake with Satan, that Satan and the snake are the same being is claimed in the New Testament, in Revelation 12:9 and 20:2. In Genesis, Eve was tempted but Adam was not.[20][21] In contrast, the Qur'an states explicitly that Shaitan (Satan) tempted Adam to eat the fruit.[22] Unlike Christian traditions, which sees Satan as a rebelling angel, Islamic tradition identifies Shaitans disobedience as an result of his superior nature out of fire, in contrast to the nature of humans,[23] since angels in Islam do not rebel against God.[24][25] God cast Iblis out of his paradise, and Iblis vowed to tempt Adams generations to corruption and to disobey God.

The Kaaba

According to Islamic mythology, God instructed Adam to construct a building to be the earthly counterpart of the House of Heaven. This was the giant black stone cube that Muslims call the Kaaba, the mosque revered in Islam as being sacred. Islamic literature states that the Kaaba was destroyed in the flood of Nuh (Noah).[26] Later, Ibrahim (Abraham) and Ismail (Ishmael) were instructed by Allah to rebuild the Kaaba on the old foundations.[27][28] As Ismail was searching for a stone to mark a corner with, he met with the angel Jibrail (Gabriel). Jibrail gave him the Black Stone. According to the hadith, the Black Stone is reported to have been milky white after being descended from Heaven but was rendered black due to the sins of the people, who had touched it. Another story may be that the black stone was stolen and along the way it broke and to fix it, the glues turned it black.

The Kaaba was originally intended as a symbolic house for the one monotheistic God. However, after Ibrahim's death, people started to fill the Kaaba with pagan idols. When Muhammad conquered Mecca, he removed the idols from the Kaaba.[29] It now stands as an important pilgrimage site, which all Muslims are supposed to visit at least once if they are able. Muslims are supposed to pray five times a day while facing in the Kaaba's direction.[30]

Beings

Places

Events

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 David Leeming (2005). "Islamic Mythology". The Oxford Companion to World Mythology. Oxford University Press. pp. 207–211.
  2. 1 2 David Leeming (2005). "Preface". The Oxford Companion to World Mythology. Oxford University Press. p. vii.
  3. 1 2 Grassie, William (March 1998). "Science as Epic? Can the modern evolutionary cosmology be a mythic story for our time?". Science & Spirit. 9 (1). The word 'myth' is popularly understood to mean idle fancy, fiction, or falsehood; but there is another meaning of the word in academic discourse. A myth, in this latter sense of the word, is a story that serves to define the fundamental worldview of a culture
  4. ↑ Eliade, Myth and Reality, 1968, p. 162.
  5. ↑ Eliade, Myth and Reality, p. 1, 8-10; The Sacred and the Profane, p. 95
  6. ↑ Qur'an 17:2
  7. ↑ Qur'an 14:35-52
  8. ↑ Qur'an 12:7-100
  9. ↑ Qur'an 19:16-33
  10. ↑ Qur'an 19:30-33
  11. ↑ Qur'an 19:35
  12. 1 2 Quran 21:30
  13. ↑ Quran 41:11
  14. ↑ Quran 11:7
  15. ↑ Quran 41:9
  16. ↑ Quran 41:10
  17. ↑ "Were the heavens and the earth created in six days or eight? - islamqa.info".
  18. ↑ Quran 41:12
  19. ↑ Brannon Wheeler Prophets in the Quran: An Introduction to the Quran and Muslim Exegesis A&C Black 2002 ISBN 9780826449566 Page 16
  20. ↑ 2 Cor 11:3
  21. ↑ 1 Tim 2:13, 14
  22. ↑ Qur'an 7:20
  23. ↑ Qur'an 7:11-12
  24. ↑ Amira El-Zein Islam, Arabs, and Intelligent World of the Jinn Syracuse University Press 2009 ISBN 9780815650706 page 45
  25. ↑ "The Muslim Belief in Angels".
  26. ↑ M. J. Akbar. The Shade of Swords: Jihad and the Conflict Between Islam and Christianity. p. 5.
  27. ↑ "Kaaba Ka'aba Ka'ba". Archived from the original on 27 October 2009.
  28. ↑ "Kaaba: Brief History". at-Tazkirah: التذكرة.
  29. ↑ "Cmje".
  30. ↑ http://www.blessingscornucopia.com/Islam_Muslim_Islamic_Sunnah_The_Holy_Kaaba_and_Makkah_of_Islam.htm
  31. ↑ The Jewish view of Jesus
  32. ↑ Original Sin - Catholic Encyclopedia
  33. ↑ For a discussion of the Islamic opinion about original sin, see here. See also Quran 6:164.

Sources

Media related to Islamic mythology at Wikimedia Commons

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