Y do christians & muslims invalidate the teachings of other religion,Y can't they appreciate it,For e,g, in

Question

Buddhism & hinduism there are some beautiful philosophical & wisdoms in it, which are applicable to day to day life

what makes u think they are satan worshipers

I am not generalizing,but majority in Y.A. seems to be, fanatics

Answer 1

We do respect other religions, their believes and practice and believe in their religious freedom !!!

Answer 2

Christians and Muslims do not invalidate the teachings of non-monotheistic groups. Buddhism and Hinduism are philosophies -- not religions. We should look to the good that is in all peoples. On the other hand, Catholicism is about Truth....it is the guardian of all things handed down to us beginning with the apostles.

Answer 3

I'm a Muslim and I certainly dont invalidate Christianity. Why? They are free to believe what they want as am I. True what you say about Buddhism and Hinduism but the same can be said about many things in the Bible and the Quran. The difference is they worship Idols and false Gods. Which as a Muslim I dont, but they are free to follow what they want it does not affect me and my life in any way at all. Live and let live. Or does that not suit whatever Muslim stereotype you have? Oh well tuff luck.

Answer 4

Sherzade hit it on the nose. In fact, if you do a bit of research, the majority of Muslims live in the south Pacific and pan-Indian continent, where Islam has been blended with previous faiths and traditions. Islam has long been known as the religion for all humanity, and the Prophet (s) said that Muslims must respect all religions that came before Islam, since they too were once based off of the religion of a one God and have since been changed.

Hmmm, anyone want to speak for Christianity?

Answer 5

We respect other faiths,with all due respect generalizing as you are is not fair.

Answer 6

Islam recognises that Christians and Jews are recepients of divine revelations - this is stated in the Quran


The prophet Muhammed said that there had been 140,00 prophets sent before him so there is nothing in islam to say that for example Buddha , Krishna, Zoraster etc werent Prophets, provided they preached monotheism and we should respect them in case they were . However no prophet be he Jesus Buddha Muhammed or Zoraster was divine

So any righteous person before Prophet Muhammed who preached the oneness of God could have been a Prophet -if he's mentioned in the Quran then he definetly wast

Muslims are obliged to believe in the 25 prophets mentioned in the quran - but wherever they went Muslims (unlike Christians) always respected other religions and local culture

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In discussing prophethood in Islam, what is the Sunni position on the possible prophethood of ancients like Krishna, Buddha, or Confucius?

Walaikum assalam wa rahmatullah,

It is very probable that many of the great religious figures of other traditions were true prophets. Similarly, we see traces of monotheism in the beliefs and practices of such traditions.

However, we do not affirm prophethood or Divine Origins for any prophet or religion that the primary texts of the Qur’an and Prophetic sunna have not affirmed such for. However, we also believe that the origin of religions is monotheistic, and they corrupt towards polytheism.

Shaykh Umar Faruq Abdallah’s paper One God, Many Names on www.Nawawi.org has some excellent insights.

Wassalam,

Faraz Rabbani
http://qa.sunnipath.com/issue_view.asp?HD=1&ID=3971&CATE=91&redirect=yes

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Perhaps no less extraordinary than this contrast is its interesting concomitant: Christianisation brought Europeanisation. Islamisation did not bring Arabisation. The churches built by the Puritans or the Conquistadors in the New World were deliberate replicas of churches in Europe. The mosques constructed in the areas gradually won for Islam are endlessly diverse, and reflect and indeed celebrate local particularities. Christianity is a universal religion that has historically sought to impose a universal metropolitan culture. Islam is a universal religion that has consistently nurtured a particularist provincial culture. A church in Mexico City resembles a church in Salamanca. A mosque in Nigeria, or Istanbul, or Djakarta, resembles in key respects the patterns, now purified and uplifted by monotheism, of the indigenous regional patrimony.

No less remarkable is the ability of the Muslim liberators to accommodate those aspects of local, pre-Islamic tradition which did not clash absolutely with the truths of revelation. In entering new lands, Muslims were armed with the generous Qur'anic doctrine of Universal Apostleship; as the Qur'an says, ‘To every nation there has been sent a guide’. This conflicts sharply with the classical Christian view of salvation as hinging uniquely on one historical intervention of the divine in history: the salvific sacrifice of Christ on Calvary. Non-Christian religions were, in classical Christianity, seen as demonic and under the sign of original sin. But classical Islam has always been able and willing to see at least fragments of an authentic divine message in the faiths and cultures of non-Muslim peoples. If God has assured us that every nation has received divine guidance, then we can look with some favour on the Other. Hence, for instance, we find popular Muslim poets in India, such as Sayid Sultan, writing poems about Krishna as a Prophet. There is no final theological proof that he was one, but the assumption is nonetheless not in violation of the Qur'an.

Even among Muslim ulema who had not been to India, we find interestingly positive appraisals of Hinduism. For instance, the great Baghdad theologian al-Shahrastani, in his Book of Religions and Sects, had access to enough reliable information about India to develop a very sophisticated theological reaction to Indian religion. He accepts that the higher forms of Hinduism are not polytheistic. He notes that that although the Hindus have no notion of prophecy, they do have what he calls ashab al-ruhaniyat: quasi-divine beings who call mankind to love the Real and to practice the virtues. He names Vishnu and Shiva as examples, and speaks positively of them. He focuses particularly on the veneration of celestial bodies: the sun, the moon, and the planets. The reason why he fixes on these practices is that they seem to situate Hinduism within a recognisably Qur'anic paradigm. The Qur'an mentions quite favourably a group known as the Sabeans, who were by the second century identified with various star-worshipping but still vaguely monotheistic sects in Mesopotamia. The Sabeans are tolerated in Islamic law, although they are less privileged than the Jews and Christians, a position reflected in the ruling in Shari‘a that a Muslim may not marry their women or eat their meat.

Shahrastani explicitly assimilates many Hindus to this category of Sabeans. They are to be tolerated as believers in One God; and will only be punished by God if, having been properly exposed to Islam, they reject it.

Another example is supplied by the great Muslim epic in China. Those who believe that Muslim communities can only flourish if they ghettoise themselves and refuse to interact with majority communities would do well to look at Chinese history. Many of the leading mandarins of Ming China were in fact Muslims. Wang Dai-Yu, for instance, who died in 1660, was a Muslim scholar who received the title of ‘Master of the Four Religions’ because of his complete knowledge of China’s four religions: Islam, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. Many of the leading admirals in the navy of the Ming Empire were practising Muslims.

In China, mosques look very like traditional Chinese garden-temples, except that there is a prayer hall without idols, and the calligraphy is Qur'anic. In some of the most beautiful, you will find, as you enter, the following words in Chinese inscribed on a tablet:

Sages have one mind and the same truth. In all parts of the world, sages arise who possess this uniformity of mind and truth. Muhammad, the Great Sage of the West, lived in Arabia long after Confucius, the Sage of China. Though separated by ages and countries, they had the same mind and Truth.

In these examples from India and China, we see a practical confirmation of Islam’s proclamation of itself as the final, and hence universal, message from God. In a hadith we learn: ‘Other prophets were sent only to their own peoples, while I am sent to all mankind.’ It is not that the Qur'anic worldview affirms other religions as fully adequate paths to salvation. In fact, it clearly does not. But it allows the Muslim, as he encounters new worlds, to sift the wheat from the chaff in non-Muslim cultures, rejecting some things, to be sure, but maintaining others. In Islamic law, too, we find that shara‘i man qablana, the revealed laws of those who came before us, can under certain conditions be accepted as valid legal precedent, if they are not demonstrably abrogated by an Islamic revealed source. And Islamic law also recognises the authority of urf, local customary law, so that a law or custom is acceptable, and may be carried over into an Islamic culture or jurisdiction, if no Islamic revealed principle is thereby violated. Hence, we find the administration of Islamic law varying from country to country. If a wife complains of receiving insufficient dower from her husband, the qadi [judge] will make reference to what is considered normal in their culture and social group, and adjudge accordingly.

http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/ahm/british.htm