Common questions

These come up more than any others, so they get plain answers.

Is Allah a different god?

No. Allah is the Arabic word for God, and Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews use it too. Open an Arabic Bible and it appears wherever an English Bible says God. Muslims understand themselves to be worshipping the God of Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus. The word survives untranslated in English partly out of habit and partly because Arabic has no plural and no feminine form of it, which keeps the meaning tighter than the English word can.

Do Muslims believe in Jesus?

Yes, and it surprises people. Jesus, Isa in Arabic, is one of the greatest prophets in Islam and the Messiah. Muslims believe he was born to Mary while she was a virgin, that the birth was a miracle, and that he healed the sick and raised the dead by God’s permission. Mary has a chapter of the Quran named after her. Where Islam parts company with Christian belief is on divinity: Muslims hold that Jesus was a prophet and a servant of God rather than God or the son of God, and that he will return before the end of time. Muslims are also required to speak of him with respect, and there is no version of Islam in which disparaging him is acceptable.

What is sharia?

Sharia is the whole body of guidance Muslims believe God gave: how to pray, fast, marry, trade, inherit, eat, treat parents, treat neighbours. Most of it governs private worship and personal conduct, and a Muslim in London or São Paulo follows nearly all of it without a court ever entering the picture. Muslim scholars describe the purpose of that guidance as the protection of five things: religion, life, reason, property and family. Anything that safeguards those is counted as part of what the law is for; anything that endangers them is what it prohibits. The English-language argument about sharia is usually about criminal statutes in a handful of states, which is a small and heavily disputed slice of a large subject, and not what a Muslim is thinking about when they use the word.

Does Islam permit violence against civilians?

No, and the sources are specific rather than vague about it. Muhammad, peace be upon him, forbade the killing of women and children in war, forbade breaking a treaty, forbade excess, and forbade punishment by fire. He said that anyone who kills a person under a treaty with Muslims will not so much as catch the scent of Paradise, and he ranked murder second among the gravest sins. Bombings, hostage-taking and attacks on people going about their lives break Islamic law rather than express it, whatever the person committing them says about their motives.

What about women?

The Quran says that whoever does right, male or female, receives the same reward. Islamic law gave women the right to own and control wealth in their own names, to run a business, to earn, to inherit by fixed shares, to initiate a divorce and to keep their own family name. Asked who most deserves a person’s good company, Muhammad ﷺ answered “your mother” three times before he said “your father”. Practice across Muslim-majority countries varies enormously, and things regularly defended as Islamic are local custom that predates or contradicts it; forced marriage and honour killing are the usual examples, and the sources here name them as exactly that. Head covering, the hijab, is a religious obligation in mainstream Muslim understanding, and the women quoted in these sources describe wearing it as a decision they made rather than one made for them.

How do I learn more?

Read the Quran in a translation, ideally more than one, and see what the text does rather than what people say it does. This site links to translations in several languages with their translators named. If you would rather talk to someone, most mosques will show a visitor around and answer questions without any expectation attached.