"Can God Lie?" Article Reflection

I thought this was a very captivating and interesting article written here. The thought never really came to me of whether God could be lying to us or not. Based on the ethics of mostly every religion, it's required and ethical to listen to our God and what he teaches us. When God speaks, people need to listen, but what if what he is saying isn't the truth? The article took on multiple perspectives of different philosophers and theologians from the past.

A 14th century Oxford theologian named John Wyclif feared that if God did happen to lie to us, he could give us false visions of the world and reduce reality to just its appearance and reduce our knowledge of the world. No one besides Martin Luther ever had the idea or assertion that God could lie. A man named Augustine argues that God can neither deceive or be deceived. If God is the almighty being that he is, then there should not be any thought of him lying to us or what he is preaching about the world isn't truthful. The same argument is made by French philosopher Rene Descartes. If God was the all-powerful force of the world, then it would be impossible that he could be a deceiver.

However, there are a couple of cases where some philosophers say that God could possibly be a deceiver. A 14th century Dominican theologian named Robert Holkot claims that there could be a number of places within the Bible where God deceived demons, sinners, and even the faithful ones. He argued that God deceived Abraham when he ordered to kill his son Isaac only to revoke that order at the very last moment as Abraham held the knife over his trembling and tied up son. A couple of centuries later, John Calvin also reached this same idea. The argument could go many ways, but in all, it would be impossible for God to be a deceiver because he is the almighty ruler of the universe and it he lied to everyone, then he would not earn that distinct title.

Huston Smith Part 4

What is Sufism and how did it come about?

• After Muhammad's passing, those still in the Islamic community were known as Sufis.
• Every message presented in the Quran is significant.
• Sufis wanted to see God directly.
• Not very well understood by many.
• One principle method of Sufism is symbolism.

How has the importance of following Muhammad's teachings changed in Islam?

• The practice of Islam tends to be replaced by constantly changing ideals in society that are influenced by the world.
• Only one God.
• Muslims have been influenced by the words of Muhammad. His words determine their own actions. 

Huston Smith Part 3

How do Muslims live according to their religion?

• Attempt to follow the right path with no disruptions along the way.
• The religion of Islam has a very specific and defined set of ways to lead a righteous life and Muslims view this as an advantage.
• Fasting in the month of Ramadan.

How does Islam guide its followers in decision making?

• The feeling of family and brotherly love among followers of Islam as a way of compassion.
• The Koran guides the actions of its followers.
• The world requires nourishment to create the sentiment of responsibility for others.

Huston Smith Part 2

What are the basic theological concepts of Islam?

• God: Begins with the concept of Tawhid, which means 'oneness'. Tawhid begins with the idea that there is one God (monotheism), and teaches that oneness is central to the nature of Allah. So according to Muslims, Allah: has no partners.
• Creation: Creation is perfection, as the world is created by Allah.
• Humanity: We forget about origin or where we originally came from and end up taking it for granted. 
• Judgement Day: On this day, Muslims focus on their individuality and freedom as people. 
• Souls face reckoning for all of their past actions, good and bad; as well as their commitment and loyalty to Allah.

Huston Smith Part 1

What is the significance of Islam in History?

• As far as size and cultural diversity go, the Islamic empire was dominant over the Roman empire. 
• The subjects of Islam adapted to their culture well because of their previous faith.
• Religious zeal was a significant contribution to the spread of the Arabic empire.
• The expansion of the Arab empire was mainly driven by the religion of Islam.

How did Muhammad become a prophet and spread God's word?

• He was the last of the Prophets.
• He was more superior than everyone else.
• The opposition he faced in the Mecca was harsh.
• Despite this opposition, his teachings began to spread. 
• He was told to proclaim several times in his retreat.

What happened during the height of Islam's expansion under Muhammad and why is it significant?

• He left the Mecca and was welcomed and became the magistrate.
• The whole area was greatly unified as far as culture and geographics go thanks to Muhammad. 
• His skill as a leader helped helped spread the teachings of Islam and bring all of the Arabian tribes together.
• Forgave his enemies and focused on his teachings in his return to conquer Mecca.

What is the "Standing Miracle"?

• The Koran is widely considered to be a miracle because it was written by Muhammad and he was illiterate. 
• Most memorized book in the world.
• Recited countless times.
• The words are considered to come from God and each sentence is recognized and interpreted as as a revelation.

Learning Objective 1.5

Sufism

The substance of Sufism is the Truth and the meaning of Sufism is the selfless experiencing and actualization of the Truth. The practice of Sufism is the intention to go towards the Truth, by means of love and devotion. This is called the "tarigat", the spiritual path or way towards God. The sufi is one who is a lover of Truth, who by means of love and devotion moves towards the Truth, towards the perfection which all are truly seeking. As necessitated by love's jealousy, the sufi is taken away from all except the Truth. Sufism is a school for the actualization of divine ethics. It involves an enlightened inner being, not intellectual proof; revelation and witnessing, not logic. 

"What Is Sufism? | The Nimatullahi Sufi Order." What Is Sufism? | The Nimatullahi Sufi Order. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Mar. 2015. <http://www.nimatullahi.org/what-is-sufism/>.

Learning Objective 1.4

NPR 5 Part Series Outline

Part 1: Origins

• The Shiites are concentrated in Iran, southern Iraq and southern Lebanon. But there are significant Shiite communities in Saudi Arabia and Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India as well. 
• Shiites take up 10 to 15 percent of the Muslim population. Although Sunn--Shiite origins are portrayed as violent, they had peaceful times together.
• The original split between Sunnis and Shiites occurred soon after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, in the year 632. Most of the Prophet Muhammad's followers wanted the community of Muslims to determine who would succeed him. A smaller group thought that someone from his family should take up his mantle.
• And thus they were the partisans of Ali, his cousin and son-in-law. Sunnis believed that leadership should fall to the person who was deemed by the elite of the community to be best able to lead the community. And it was fundamentally that political division that began the Sunni-Shia split.
• The violence and war split the small community of Muslims into two branches that would never reunite. The Shiites called their leaders imam, Ali being the first, Hussein the third. The significance of the imams is one of the fundamental differences that separate the two branches of Islam. 
• Over the next centuries, Islam clashed with the European Crusaders, with the Mongol conquerors from Central Asia, and was spread farther by the Ottoman Turks. In the 20th century, that meant a complex political dynamic involving Sunni and Shiites, Arabs and Persians, colonizers and colonized, oil, and the involvement of the superpowers.

Part 2: Mideast Turmoil/Rise of Shiites

• The Shiites of Arabia were under the authority of Sunni tribal leaders. In Persia, the monarchy and the Shiite clergy coexisted so long as neither ventured into the other's realm.
• In Persia, Reza Pahlavi, a military officer, seized power in a coup in 1925 and declared himself shah. Pahlavi changed the name of the state to Iran and set about creating a secular government, much to the dismay of some of the Shiite clergy.
• The young shah's reign was also marked with instability. In 1953, political turmoil broke out in Tehran, forcing the shah to flee the country, only to be returned to power in a CIA- and British-engineered coup that ousted the nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh.
• After that, the shah clamped down, creating a merciless secret police that sought to destroy all efforts to challenge his rule. In 1978, a popular movement exploded in the streets of Iran's cities, aimed at overthrowing the shah.
• The revolution in Iran was a tempest of conflicting ideologies, mixing communism, anti-imperialism and secular pluralism with Khomeini's ideas about an Islamic state. In the midst of the chaos, Khomeini oversaw the writing of a constitution that gave most of the state's power to the supreme religious leader.
• These events in Iran would have a powerful effect on the wider Islamic world.

Part 3: Sunni Reaction

• The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Sunni Muslim fundamentalists seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, and the Ayatollah Khomeini led a Shiite revolution that swept the Shah of Iran from power and put in place the modern world's first Islamic republic.
• So, to win over the wider Arab public, some Sunni leaders, especially in Saudi Arabia, sought to sharpen the differences between Sunnis and Shiites. The result was the emergence of new and far more dangerous Sunni fundamentalist groups. 
• The most violent reaction to Iran's Shiite revolution came from Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Iraq invaded Iran in 1980 to seize its oil fields and destroy Khomeini's revolution. But Saddam did not cast the conflict in sectarian terms.
• The war killed hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides. It was fought initially in Iran's oil-rich region, then on the other side of the border in southern Iraq, where Iraq's Shiite population was concentrated.
• In 1982, Israel launched an all-out invasion of Lebanon, ostensibly to stop guerrilla attacks from the Palestine Liberation Organization. But the conflict would have unexpected and profound repercussions for the Sunni-Shiite divide and for the security of the United States.

Part 4: Iraq War Deepens the Divide

• When the United States invaded Iraq four years ago, on March 20, 2003, it didn't set out to deepen the Sunni-Shia divide in the Islamic world. But that may be one of the most important outcomes of the war. Until the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the Shia never governed a modern Arab state. They were in control in Persian Iran, but the Sunnis led most Arab states in the Middle East
• The Sunni insurgency first targeted American troops, but soon, with the involvement of al-Qaida in Iraq, it attacked the Shia as well. The targets: Shiite holy sites; Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad and elsewhere, and ordinary Shiite civilians, thousands of whom have been abducted and murdered.
• And then a year ago came the bombing of the Askariya Shrine, a mosque directly connected to the story of the Twelfth Shiite Imam, the messianic Hidden Imam. In 2006, the Shia fought back through militia attacks and murder. Shiite-Sunni violence now predominates in Iraq.
• Iraq's senior cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, although born and raised in Iran, advocated a political future for Iraq that is far different from the Iranian model. Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran created the model of the Islamic republic with all power resting in the hands of the clerics. Although this has been the government of Iran for more than a quarter century, there are doubters — in Iran, Iraq and throughout the Shiite world. 
• Twice in 2004, street fighting broke out in Najaf, with the Shiite militia known as the Mahdi Army attacking American troops. Sistani mediated an end to that fighting, but since then this militia has spawned neighborhood defense forces as well as anti-Sunni death squads.
• It also catapulted its leader, the young firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, into a prominent role in the Iraqi government. The escalating sectarian violence in Iraq has become a great concern for the Saudi monarchy, fearful that it may spread to the kingdom's own Shiite minority, which lives near some of the most valuable oil fields in eastern Saudi Arabia.

Part 5: Shia/Sunni Conflict Forces U.S. Shift in Iraq

• When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, President Bush declared that the aim was to overthrow Saddam Hussein and bring democracy to Iraq. The president also made clear that he had wider ambitions in the Middle East — to spread democracy and fight the war on terrorism.
• Over the years as U.S. policy ran into reality in Iraq — as the sectarian conflict between Shia and Sunni deepened — U.S. aims have changed. Now bringing stability to Iraq is the goal, while preventing Shiite Iran's emergence as a regional power.
• Undoubtedly there have been some benefits that the U.S. invasion set in motion, most importantly a political process that has fostered majority rule in Iraq. There seemed to be little awareness in Washington of the potential for such sectarian conflict.
• That may be especially true now that the Bush administration is focusing its attention on Iran. But the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq removed Iran's two most dangerous neighbors and enemies. U.S. policy has worked against the containment of Iran.
• U.S. policy is further complicated by the close relationship between the Bush administration and Israel, and lack of progress on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Despite the pre-invasion claims of some in the Bush administration, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein has proved of no benefit to that issue.

Learning Objective 1.3

Rules on dress reflect communal identity to a large extent because whatever the rules are for how a person will dress, the members of that particular will follow it. If the majority of that group wears a specific set of clothing frequently, then that is how any outsiders of that group will view them or identify them as. Anyone can identify a Muslim by seeing them wearing a Hijab because that is what they wear. Also people can identify a Jew by seeing them wear a yamika. So yes, community dress reflects a group's identity to a large extent.

Learning Objective 1.2

NPR Article

• The focus of the article is that a few Muslim women discuss changes that need to be made within the Muslim community and stop the constant wearing of the Hijab.
• The women in the article are against wearing in Hijabs in public places. "When you wear hijab and you walk into a room, everyone notices you; everyone stares at you; everyone makes assumptions about you," says one Muslim women and feels like it's too much responsibility to represent a whole community and it's not mean't for everyone. "I was going through a lot of difficult things. Perhaps I thought taking it off would just be one less thing to worry about," she says. "I never took it off saying, like, it was the right decision. I just took it off because I wanted to do it. I wanted to see if my life would be different — if I would feel any better about the problems that I was going through."

Huffington Post

• The focus of the article is how women are slowly starting to move away from the Hijab since it's technically not a part of the Five Pillars of Islam./
• "Within Islam, perspectives on veiling vary. Middle East scholar Marnia Lazreg argues that hijab is not one of the pillars of Islam and that the resurgence of veiling has been systematically driven forward as a matter more of politics than piety." So basically these women claim that Hijabs are just a cultural thing and not actually a requirement by religious law.  

Learning Objective 1.1

The Muslim Dress: Key Concepts and Terms

Parts of body that need to be covered:

• Mahram- a person, man or woman related to a particular individual by blood, marriage or breastfeeding. One he or she is not permitted to marry, such as the father, nephew, uncle, etc.
• Haya- natural or inherent shyness and a sense of modesty.
• Hijab- another term for hide, conceal, and screen. Refers commonly to a woman's headscarf and in more broader terms to modern clothing and behavior. 

Woman's Hijab 

Serves the purpose of covering the awrah and awrah varies in different situations and groups. 

Conditions:

1. Must conceal entire body and face.
2. Not translucent.
3. Not attract attention of the opposite gender.
4. Not worn to gain popularity or fame.
5. Not perfumed.
6. Not resemble the clothing worn by men.
7. Not resemble the clothing worn by Non-Muslims.

Men's Dress Code

Overlooked, but must be addressed, Some are similar to women.

1. Part of the body from naval to knees must be covered.
2. Not resemble clothing specific to Non-Muslims.
3. Not resemble the clothing worn by women.
4. Not tight or see-through.
5. Not permitted to wear garments made of silk, or jewelry made of gold,
6. Forbidden for men but permitted to women; gold and clothing made of pure silk.

There is no "awrah" between a husband and wife. They are allowed to wear any clothing that pleases them both when the woman is alone with her man. 

Mahram men can have anything visible uncovered.

Task Check In: 3/4/15

1. I have completed 0 out of the 9 concepts so far.
2. I will try to complete, but work on my Huston Smith Chapter Readings and my Buddhism/ Hinduism paper. Not the objectives quite yet I need to catch up.
3. I put about an 8 effort in this class because I really need to get stuff done but I was not fully focused.