#5 Religion: a Continuing Message of Reminder

Religion, as understood in the Quran, is God’s continuing message of reminder. It helps man remember his true condition on Earth and what he must do to return to God with a pure heart. A person of faith is he who believes in One God, the Last Day, the angels, prophets and revealed scriptures, who gives of himself for those in need, who is constant in prayer, true to his promises, and patient in misfortune.

According to Islam, this basic message has been restated throughout human history. God promises that every community has been given a “messenger” (the literal Arabic translation of “prophet”), and that 124,000 messengers have been sent to every part of the world, in every period of human history. Prominent messengers include Adam, Noah, Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David, Solomon, John the Baptist, Jesus, and Muhammad (may peace be upon them all).

In studying the Prophetic messengers, a basic pattern appears. Human societies follow God’s guidance and are prosperous. Yet after a period of material affluence, people forget to be grateful to God and consider themselves self-sufficient. Their attitude changes from humility to arrogance. Those with power view their strength as a personal possession, rather than responsibility; hence the strong abuse the weak.

Other social vices also appear, including intoxicants, gambling, and the breakdown of marriages and families.

Corruption appears in religion as well. Guidance is replaced with superstition or legalistic ritualism, and the worship of One God gives way to various forms of idolatry. Humans are always tempted to replace an All-Powerful–yet invisible–God with gods that appear more accessible. Hence they deify ancestors, significant places and symbols, angels, and human prophets. Even the earlier revealed scriptures start to absorb the deviations of their societies.

Societies past and present may advance in technology, military might and impressive architecture, yet they are in moral decline as they fall further and further away from the message of guidance. And this downward descent continues until God sends a new prophet to correct these deviations and restate His basic message of guidance to humanity.

According to Islam, this cycle of prophetic reminders culminates in Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) as the last prophet, through whom God has transmitted a final, “protected” scripture, the Quran. Muslims understand this scripture to contain the same basic message of truth revealed to previous prophets, yet corrected of human intervention, and societal and religious deviations. Muslims continue to find guidance for all spiritual and societal needs in this latest, comprehensive restatement of God’s continuing message of reminder.

From the history of the prophets, however, we learn that arrogant individuals and misguided societies do not want to hear a restatement of God’s simple message. This is equally true for those societies in the past that “stoned the prophets” as it is in the present, when many turn a deaf ear to restatements of the same, basic truths conveyed in revealed religions.

We may not worship idols of wood and stone, yet in the present, non-religious stages of human society, people continue to worship many less-than-divine idols, giving blind obedience or misplaced reverence to things such as media superstars, money, science or human technology.

The rich and powerful do not want to be reminded of their responsibilities to the poor and dispossessed. And human beings do not want to accept that their life on earth is a temporary loan and test from God, Who–on the Last Day–will ask them to account for the ways in which they used His gifts.