What Muslims Believe

The word islam comes from an Arabic verb meaning to submit or surrender to God, and it names both a person's submission to God and the community of all who submit.¹ In a report in Sahih Muslim, a Sunni collection of Hadith, Muhammad lists belief in God, his angels, his books, his messengers, the Day of Judgment, and the divine decree of good and evil. The scholar Jane Smith notes that such lists are generally taken as the key components of Muslim creeds.²¹ Twelver Shia Muslims sum up their doctrine in five principles of religion: God's oneness, his justice, prophecy, the imamate (the line of twelve leaders after Muhammad), and the hereafter: the soul's survival, judgment, and reward or punishment.³

Ibadi Muslims form a third branch, found mainly in Oman and parts of North and East Africa.⁴ Ahmad al-Khalili, the Grand Mufti of Oman, describes Ibadis as people of steadfastness on the straight path, who join sound tradition with clear reasoning.⁵ He names three teachings for which critics have condemned Ibadis, while noting that others hold them too: God will not be seen; the Quran was created; and those who die unrepentant of major sins stay in the Fire forever.⁵

Schools of theology also differ. Among Sunnis, the Ash'ari and Maturidi schools defend belief with reasoned argument (kalam), while traditionalists, among them the followers of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, opposed philosophical theology.⁶⁷⁸ The Sunni writer Nazir Khan uses the term scripturalist (athari) theology for the position Ibn Taymiyya defended.⁹ Another school, the Mu'tazila, stressed reason and God's justice. The scholar Josef van Ess reports that from the middle of the ninth century it was gradually driven into the position of a heresy in Sunni lands, while Zaydi and Twelver Shia theologians took up many of its ideas.¹⁰ See also Branches and Christianity vs Islam.

What is ultimate reality?

Muslims teach that ultimate reality is one God, unique and undivided, the creator of all things. The scholar Vincent Cornell defines this oneness, tawhid, as God being one and not divisible into persons or incarnations. Allah is the Arabic word for God; Muslim scholars have offered many readings, among them a proper name, like the English word God, or as a contraction of al-ilah, meaning the God.¹¹ A short chapter of the Quran, which Cornell calls a summary of tawhid, reads:

Say: He is Allah, the One! Allah, the eternally Besought of all! He begetteth not nor was begotten. And there is none comparable unto Him. (Quran 112:1-4)¹²

The schools agree that God is one but explain his attributes, such as knowledge and power, differently. Ash'ari theologians recognize seven principal attributes: life, knowledge, will, power, sight, hearing, and speech.¹³ Al-Maturidi (died 944), for whom the Maturidi school is named, also held that the attributes the Quran names subsist eternally in God's essence.⁷ Mu'tazili thinkers answered that God's essential attributes, such as knowledge and power, are identical with God himself.¹⁰

The same debate touches the Quran itself. Ash'ari theologians hold that the Quran is God's uncreated speech, though a reciter's voice and a written copy are created.¹³ Traditionalists also held that God's word is eternal. The Mu'tazila taught that the Quran is created, since an eternal Quran, they argued, would stand beside God and violate his oneness.⁸¹⁰ Ibadis, al-Khalili writes, also hold that the Quran was created.⁵ Twelver Shia teaching, the scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr writes, stresses justice as part of God's very nature.³ This page does not cover Twelver views on the attributes or the created Quran.

What is a human being?

Muslims teach that a human being is a creature made by God with a natural inclination to know and worship him, entrusted with responsibility on earth. The Quran tells how God announced to the angels that he would place a deputy (khalifa) on the earth:¹⁴ Lo! I am about to place a viceroy in the earth (Quran 2:30)¹².

The key term is fitra, the inborn nature God gives every person. The Quran speaks of the nature with which God created people (30:30, paraphrased here). The Sunni Hadith collection Sahih al-Bukhari records Muhammad's teaching that every child is born on the fitra, and that parents later make the child a Jew, a Christian, or a Magian (Zoroastrian).¹⁵ A paper from the Yaqeen Institute, a Sunni research center, links this nature to a covenant God made with every person before the world was created.¹⁶ The Quran describes that covenant:

And (remember) when thy Lord brought forth from the Children of Adam, from their reins, their seed, and made them testify of themselves, (saying): Am I not your Lord? They said: Yea, verily. We testify. (Quran 7:172)¹²

Shia hadith reports teach the same. In al-Kafi, one of the four main Shia collections of Hadith, an imam explains the fitra of 30:30 as belief in God's oneness, placed in every person's nature when God made that covenant.¹⁷³

What is wrong with the world?

Muslims teach that people go wrong by forgetting God and turning from his guidance, not by inheriting a fallen nature. The Quran says of Adam: And verily We made a covenant of old with Adam, but he forgot, and We found no constancy in him. (Quran 20:115)¹² Adam and his wife then confess: Our Lord! We have wronged ourselves. (Quran 7:23)¹² God forgives him: Then his Lord chose him, and relented toward him, and guided him. (Quran 20:122)¹²

The scholar Marilyn Robinson Waldman writes that in the Quran, Adam's expulsion from the Garden produced no original sin to be redeemed; each person earns his or her own fate.¹⁸ The Quran states the principle in several places: That no laden one shall bear another's load, (Quran 53:38)¹² a principle the Quran repeats at 6:164 and 35:18.¹²

Muslim scholars teach 'isma, the protection of prophets from sin and error. Waldman and Bruce Lawrence report that by the thirteenth century the doctrine was applied broadly to Muhammad and selectively to earlier prophets.¹⁹ The Shia teacher Moustafa al-Qazwini writes that all prophets, from Adam to Muhammad, and the twelve imams were sinless all their lives. In his reading, the command Adam failed to keep was a recommendation, not an obligation, so his act was not a sin in the legal sense.²⁰

The schools differ on how far human acts are free, though all, the scholars W. Montgomery Watt and Asma Afsaruddin write, hold people responsible in some sense, since God judges their deeds.⁶ Ash'ari theologians teach that God creates each act and the person acquires it (kasb). Mu'tazili thinkers held that God gives people the power to choose before they act, so that their acts are their own and God's punishment is just. The Maturidi school took a middle path.⁶

A chapter of al-Kafi, a Twelver Hadith collection, is titled Predestination, Fate and the Middle Road in Between. In it an imam teaches that God has obligated people on the basis of their freedom and choice: obedience is not compelled, yet God has not handed people power in an absolute sense.²¹

What is the way forward?

Muslims teach that God answers human forgetfulness with guidance: prophets, revealed books, and forgiveness. Waldman and Lawrence describe a chain of prophets from Adam through Abraham, Moses, and Jesus to Muhammad, all with one message of surrender to God.¹⁹ The Quran calls Muhammad the seal of the prophets (33:40, paraphrased here), which Muslims understand to mean that prophecy ended with him.¹⁹

Sunni teachers describe the Quran as God's speech, revealed to Muhammad in wording and meaning.²² The Quran presents itself as continuing earlier scripture: And unto thee have We revealed the Scripture with the truth, confirming whatever Scripture was before it, and a watcher over it. (Quran 5:48)¹² Shia Muslims add the imamate. Twelvers hold that God chose twelve imams, beginning with Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law Ali, to guide the community and interpret the Quran without error. The imams bring no new revelation or law, and the twelfth, the Mahdi, is held to be alive in hiding until he returns.¹⁹³

A person responds with faith and good works. One short chapter says that humankind is in loss Save those who believe and do good works, and exhort one another to truth and exhort one another to endurance. (Quran 103:3)¹² For those who have sinned, the Quran holds out God's mercy: Despair not of the mercy of Allah, Who forgiveth all sins. (Quran 39:53)¹²

What happens after death?

Muslims teach that every person will be raised, body and soul, on the Day of Judgment, judged by their deeds, and sent to the Garden or the Fire. The Quran says little about the time between death and the end, Waldman notes, and Sunni teaching, drawing on the Hadith, describes it in detail. In classical thought the barzakh, a word the Quran uses rarely and only for a barrier, came to mean the time and place of waiting between death and resurrection.¹⁸ The Sunni creed of al-Tahawi affirms that two angels, Munkar and Nakir, question the dead in their graves.²³

At the judgment, deeds are weighed: And whoso doeth good an atom's weight will see it then, And whoso doeth ill an atom's weight will see it then. (Quran 99:7-8)¹² Many Sunni commentaries, Waldman reports, teach that believers who sinned may fall into the Fire for a time, while unbelievers stay there. Muhammad may intercede for some believers.¹⁸ Ash'ari theologians affirm his intercession, with God's permission, for believers who sinned.¹⁴ Twelver Shia teaching holds that the imams, as well as Muhammad, intercede for believers.³ Al-Qazwini writes that intercession comes only by God's permission, for those of good belief who fell short in some duties.²⁴

The branches part on two questions. The first is the fate of a believer who commits a major sin. Al-Tahawi's creed teaches that such believers, even if they die unrepentant, may be forgiven or punished in the Fire, but not forever.²³ The Mu'tazila held, and Ibadi teachers hold, that if the sinner dies unrepentant, the punishment is eternal.¹⁰⁵ Van Ess notes that the Mu'tazili teaching was softened among the Twelvers.¹⁰

The second is whether the blessed will see God. Al-Tahawi's creed teaches that the people of the Garden will see God, without their vision encompassing him and without its manner being known, and it cites a verse about the faces of the blessed:²³ That day will faces be resplendent, Looking toward their Lord; (Quran 75:22-23)¹² Al-Maturidi, the scholars R. Marston Speight and Ibrahim Kalin note, accepted that the blessed may see God but rejected the specification that this is by the eyes, in some ways endorsing the Hanbali position of affirming it without asking how (bi-la kayf).⁷

Al-Khalili writes that Ibadis hold seeing God to be impossible in this world and the next, and he counts the Mu'tazila and the Zaydi and Imami (Twelver) Shia as agreeing.⁵ Al-Qazwini gives the Shia reason: God has no body, and the Quran says, Vision comprehendeth Him not, but He comprehendeth (all) vision. (Quran 6:103)¹²²⁵

How should a person live?

Muslims teach that a person should worship God alone and follow the Sharia, the path God has laid down for all of life. The scholar Ann Elizabeth Mayer explains that the word first meant a path to water; for Muslims it is the way that leads the righteous to Paradise. It covers worship, such as prayer and fasting, and dealings between people, such as family life and inheritance.²⁶

In the Sunni report of Gabriel's visit, Muhammad names a stage beyond practice and faith, ihsan: to worship God as if one sees him.²¹ The Quran joins worship to kindness toward others: Lo! Allah enjoineth justice and kindness, and giving to kinsfolk, and forbiddeth lewdness and abomination and wickedness. (Quran 16:90)¹²

Muslims agree that they are bound by the Sharia but interpret it through different schools of law. Sunnis follow four: the Hanafi, the largest; the Maliki; the Shafii; and the Hanbali.²⁶ Twelver Shia follow the Jafari school, named for Jafar al-Sadiq, and draw on the sayings of the imams as well as of Muhammad.³ Ibadis keep their own legal tradition, which puts more weight on the Quran and less on the Hadith than other branches do.⁴ Practices are covered on the Practices and Holy Days page.

Key terms

Term	Meaning
Allah	The Arabic word for God.11
Tawhid	God's absolute oneness.11
Fitra	The inborn nature, oriented to God, with which every person is created.1517
Imamate	In Twelver Shia teaching, the line of twelve leaders chosen by God after Muhammad.3
Barzakh	The time and place of waiting between death and resurrection.18
Shafa'a	Intercession on the Day of Judgment, by God's permission.2414
Sharia	God's law and path for all of life.26