What is Islam?
What the word Islam means, what Muslims believe, where those beliefs come from, and who the world's Muslims actually are.
Start with the word. Islam is Arabic, and it means submission: handing your life over to God willingly rather than under duress. The same three-letter root gives Arabic its word for peace, salam. Someone in that state of submission is a Muslim. So the name of the religion describes an act, not a founder and not a homeland, which is the first thing worth knowing about it.
At the centre of that act is a single claim: there is one God, with no partner, no offspring and no equal, and He alone is worth worshipping. Muslims call Him Allah, which is simply the Arabic word for God. Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews use the same word in their own prayers and their own Bibles. Everything else in the religion hangs off this one point, and Muslim writers return to it constantly.
The second half of the claim concerns how anyone could know any of this. Muslims hold that God has sent prophets to every people in history, each carrying the same instruction to worship God alone, each speaking to the particular conditions of the people he was sent to. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David and Jesus all appear in the Quran as prophets, and a Muslim is required to believe in all of them without setting one above another. Muhammad, peace be upon him, who lived in Arabia in the seventh century, is understood as the last in that line. On this reading Islam did not begin in the year 610; it is the message every prophet carried, given its final and unchanging form.
What Muslims believe, and what they do
Belief is usually summarised as six articles: God, His angels, His prophets, the books He revealed, the Day of Judgement, and divine decree, meaning that nothing occurs outside God’s knowledge and will. Practice is summarised as five pillars: the declaration of faith, prayer five times a day, an annual payment to the poor called zakah, fasting through the month of Ramadan, and the pilgrimage to Mecca once in a lifetime for anyone able to make it. Each list has its own page here.
Between the creed and the ritual sits a great deal of ordinary guidance: honesty in trade, kindness to parents, care for neighbours, restraint in what you say about people. Muslim scholars have long described the aim of divine law as the protection of five things, namely religion, life, reason, property and family. That framing says something about how the tradition understands itself. It is less a list of doctrines to sign than a way of living that is supposed to hold a household and a society together.
Who Muslims are
Most Muslims are not Arab. Roughly four in five live outside the Arab world, in communities running from Nigeria to Bosnia and from Morocco to Indonesia, with large populations in India, China, Central Asia, Russia, Europe and the Americas. Arabs themselves are not uniformly Muslim; some are Christian, some Jewish, some of no religion.
Becoming a Muslim is not a long administrative process. A person says, with understanding and sincerity, that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is the messenger of God, and that is the threshold crossed. The pages that follow unpack what that sentence carries with it.