P a g e | 7 Islam: Faith And Practice Marius LAZAR Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
[email protected] Abstract: The article proposes a brief overview of the main Islamic doctrinal themes and religious rules. It examines the fundamental themes that define the essence of the Islamic faith (aqīdah) and, accordingly, religious sciences developed around them. It also analyzes the key aspects of Muslim ethos, managed mostly by what is called Sharī'a and which are incorporates in two main categories of norms and obligations: those which regard the cult (ibadāt) and those which establish the human condition within society (mu’āmalāt). Finally, the paper provides an overview of issue of religious authority in Islam, topic that generated countless doctrinal, ideological, political disputes inside the Muslim societies, until today. Key words: Islam • Quran • Sharī'a • Allah • Muhammad • Hadith • Fiqh • Sunna • Shi’a Emerging at the beginning of the seventh century, Islam is regarded as the last religion of humanity. The term ‘Islam’ means ‘submission’, from which as correlation, the Muslim is the ‘submitter’, who follows the divine norms and who assumes the most loyal ethos towards the principles instituted by the Quran and by the ulterior theological and lawful Islamic evolution. There exists a traditional ambiguity in regards to the term Islam, which comes to mean, both in common language as well as in the academic writings, that of Muslim religion, as well as that of the civilization(s) bloomed on the Muslim doctrinarian, intellectual, spiritual, aesthetic, ethical, political principles and ultimately, in the geographical sense, that of the societies or the territories inhabited by communities of Muslim confession.