(Webmaster's Note: The following is excerpted from a yet-to-be-published manuscript, The Pocket Guide to America's Religions. Terry Muck, a Presbyterian minister, teaches at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky.)

Islam is one of the fastest-growing religions in the world in the past 50 years, with a growth so pronounced that there are more Muslims in the United States than there are Episcopalians or Presbyterians.

One of the three monotheistic religions with roots in the Middle East, like Judaism and Christianity, Islam traces its history to worship of the one God (Allah) instituted by Abraham in the second millennium B.C.

Muslims claim for this common history the traditional prophets and leaders of Jewish and Christian history such as Adam, Noah, Moses, Abraham and Jesus, but believe that this line of genuine prophets ends with Muhammad, a man born in Mecca, in present-day Saudi Arabia, in 570 A.D.

Muhammad is called the "seal of the prophets," the one to whom Allah revealed that last and most authoritative of his revelations, the Koran, the Muslim holy book.

Muhammad began to receive the revelations that eventually made up the chapters of the Koran while wandering in the rocky hills outside Mecca. A voice from the heavens, the angel Gabriel, gave Muhammad the revelation, commanding him to learn and recite the message to others. After receiving each of these audible revelations, a process that lasted many years, Muhammad would then return to the streets of Mecca and preach them to his compatriots.

His standard sermon had three points: the uniqueness of Allah; the need to care for the poor, orphaned, and widowed; and the inevitability of a final judgment. Each of these three points, however, seemed to alienate segments of the Meccan populace.

By stressing the uniqueness of Allah, Muhammad threatened the various tribal and clan gods, a threat that had not only religious but economic overtones in a city that had become something of a religious pilgrimage site for followers of the many tribal gods. By advocating the need to care for the poor, Muhammad was calling for social welfare at a time when the trading fortunes of Mecca had taken a downturn and money was tight. By predicting a judgment at the end of time, Muhammad alienated whomever he had not alienated with the first two points - no one likes to be told their current lifestyle could lead them to the fires of hell.

After several years of reciting these revelations and interpreting them for the citizens of Mecca, Muhammad had only a handful of followers and was in danger of losing his life.

At this crisis point, a delegation from Medina, a town 200 miles northeast of Mecca, came to town looking for a leader. Medina was a town divided by rivalry between a fairly large Jewish population and an indigenous population that held to the belief in tribal gods.

Muhammad's message proved to be a bridge between the two. Muhammad saw himself as a legitimate prophet in the Jewish-Christian tradition; yet the name he gave to the God of Abraham and Jesus, Allah, was the name of an Arab tribal god. As unpopular as Muhammad's message was in Mecca, it was popular in Medina.

After building a secure base there, Muhammad began to incorporate the surrounding areas into his fiefdom, eventually incorporating all of Western Arabia, including Mecca. Many have seen Muhammad's political skills as important as his religious message. Muhammad's message has often been summarized as five basic duties, sometimes called the Five Pillars:

1. The Creed (Shahada);
2. Prayer (Salat);
3. Alms giving (Zakat);
4. Fasting (Sawm);
5. Pilgrimage (Hajj).

The Creed: The basic requirement for calling oneself Muslim is to be able to say the creed with conviction of its truth: "There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger."

Prayer: An observant Muslim prays a standardized set of prayers five times a day: at dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, dusk and evening. The prayers are said either alone or in community. Friday noon is the traditional time for a communal service at the mosque, the Muslim building of worship, facing Mecca, with accompanying physical postures and movements. The prayer content is almost exclusively praise of Allah taken from various chapters of the Koran.

Alms-giving: Required alms-giving, Zakat, is a once per year "loan" to Allah of an amount of money based on one's net worth. However, Muslims are also encouraged to give regularly throughout the year to the mosque for the support of the poor in the community.

Fasting: During the lunar month of Ramadan, observant Muslims practice a daylight fast: no food, drink, smoking, nor sexual activity. In the evening and predawn, the fast may be broken.

Pilgrimage: Once during every Muslim's life, if he or she is physically and financially able, pilgrimage during the official three days of the Great Hajj should be made to Mecca's holy sites.

The Five Pillars are the basic practices of Islam, and most of the theological thinking of Islam is readily apparent in the practices: the oneness of Allah, the praiseworthiness of Allah, the importance of the Prophet Muhammad, and the requirements of membership in both the local and the larger Islamic community.

Other key theological tenets include a belief in spiritual beings (both angels and more ambiguous spiritual beings called jinn), the centrality of the Koran and the importance of its purity in the Arabic language, a literal belief in heaven and hell, and the importance of establishing sharia law in order to unite the secular and religious communities.

Sharia, or the "Islamic Way," is the legal code of Islam and is derived from the teachings of the Koran and other Islamic religious texts.

This last tenet - the importance of sharia law - has shaped much of the interaction of modern Islam with the non-Islamic world. Muhammad himself set the tone for this debate in that he was as much a political leader as he was a spiritual leader. By incarnating both roles in his singular leadership style, Muhammad managed to unite, or set the stage for his immediate followers to unite, much of one of the most politically fractious geographies on earth, the Middle East.

In the early days of Islam, from the 8th to the 19th centuries, this has taken the form of a number of waxing and waning dynasties. With the coming of the colonial powers -- Britain, France, and the United States - and the peace accords after World War I, this dynastic structure gave way to the nation-states of the 20th century.

The Orthodox Islamic Sects
Sunni and Shiite
Although Muhammad was a marvelously skilled political leader, he died without naming either a successor or establishing a process by which his successor should be named.

As a result, two opinions developed among his followers regarding who should lead this increasingly powerful religious community. Some thought the leader should come from Muhammad's family. Others thought that the leader should be elected through a process of consultation and consensus.

The second opinion carried the day, perhaps in part because Muhammad had no sons survive him, and the only viable candidate from his family was a son-in-law, Ali, husband of one of Muhammad's daughters, Fatima.

The three leaders that directly followed Muhammad, then, were called successors or caliphs: Abu Bakr (632-634), Umar (634-644), and Uthman (644-656). The party advocating that leadership come from Muhammad's family finally succeeded in getting their candidate appointed in 656 when Uthman was assassinated and Ali was named head of the Islamic community.

Controversy continued, however. Ali was considered the fourth caliph by those advocating that process of choosing a leader, but was considered the only rightful heir of leadership, an imam, by those who considered the first three caliphs usurpers. The controversy raged and eventually led to Ali and his son, Husayn, being assassinated.

The importance of this controversy for understanding modern-day Islam cannot be overestimated. It represents both the historical and ongoing division between the two largest Muslim sects, the Sunni and the Shiite. Sunni Muslims, by far the largest of the Muslim groups accounting for approximately 95 percent of worldwide Muslims, were the champions of the caliphate system. Although the caliphate per se no longer exists, the caliphate principle of choosing leaders through consultation and consensus was adapted to the dynastic structures that ruled Islam through the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century.

Shiite Muslims, accounting for perhaps 3 percent of the worldwide Muslim community, still advocate the imanate, the descendants of Muhammad as the rightful heirs of the leadership mantle.

The important point to remember is that this modern division is largely a division over polity: how the community should be led. It is not primarily a division of either belief or religious practice, except where belief and practice relate to theories of leadership and political questions.

Otherwise, both Sunnis and Shiites practice the same Islam taught by Muhammad. It does account, however, for much of that division that exists in the Muslim world, especially surrounding the difficult questions of sharia law. Both Sunnis and Shiites agree that some form of sharia law should be established but differ widely over the means to accomplish it.

Questions
As a result of the above questions, Muslims in today's world present the non-Islamic population with several difficult questions.

1. Politics: Are Muslims democratic or authoritarian? In a sense, the Islamic world is out of step with the current political trend of moving toward pluralistic democracies. These democracies, fashioned largely after the United States model, have as one of their key characteristics the separation of church and state. This is not a congenial model for Muslim countries where the ideal is not separation of church and state but the identification of the two under a single, Muslim dominated leadership structure. In other words, in the Muslim world, President Bush and Pope John Paul would be the same person.

Given this difference in viewpoint, the question is whether a form of political leadership congenial to Islamic theological views and non-antagonistic to democratic ideals can be developed.

2. Jihad: Why are Muslims so intense about their religion? Muslims, like Christians and Buddhists, have a very powerful missionary tradition, a theological mandate to spread the influence of their religion worldwide. This practice is included in a wider mandate to fully realize the injunctions of the Koran called jihad. Because Muslims do not have a strict separation between the theological and the political spheres, this missionary mandate is often indistinguishable from the political aims of Islamic governments. In practice this means some of the tools of statecraft - political negotiation, economic leverage, and military might - have sometimes been employed in the spreading of religion. In practice this is not much different from some of the methodologies used by Christians and Buddhists. In Islam, however, the theological warrant for such practices is much clearer and less controversial.

3. Religious Pluralism: Traditional Islamic teaching has no place for secularism and polytheism and merely tolerates the other monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism. This religious/political exclusivism is at odds with the notion of different religions enjoying equal freedoms under secular pluralistic democracies.

4. Human Rights: Islam has often been called a communitarian religion, not an individualistic one. This means that when it comes to balancing individual rights with community responsibilities as defined by religious teaching, the community responsibilities usually win out. This puts many Islamic moral and ethical emphases at odds with Western individualism.

Connections
Muslims find themselves in agreement with many positive features of United States culture:

* Human Rights: Despite their communitarian emphases and drive to extend the sway of Koranic teaching, Muslims are not anti-human rights. They believe all humans are created by Allah and as such deserve respect. This is particularly true of the disadvantaged of society. One of Muhammad's main points in his preaching was the need to take care of the widows, orphans and poor.

* Anti-drugs: Observant Muslims do not use any mood-altering drugs, including alcohol.

* Pro-family: Muslims have very high ethical ideals particularly where they relate to family members. One of the difficulties immigrant Muslims in the United States have, for example, is the relaxed mixing of the sexes in schools and the unchaperoned dating common to most teen-agers.

* Monotheism: Thinking of God in the singular is natural to Muslims. This is a point of contact with Americans, many of whom are strongly influenced by the Judeo-Christian tradition of monotheism.

Other aspects of Islam

* Holidays: Muslims celebrate two major holidays: Eid ul-fitr is the celebration at the end of Ramadan, the month of daylight fasting. It lasts three days. Eid ul-adha is the celebration at the end of the Great Pilgrimage to Mecca. Those who do not go on the pilgrimage celebrate at home with a four-day feast. Both of these major feasts are times of joy and praise of Allah.

* Dress: Perhaps no feature of modern Islam is more publicly evident than the way some Muslim women dress. The full-length chador and face veil are not required.

These are cultural expressions that actually have their roots in Persian culture. They are worn in some Muslim cultures, for example Saudi Arabia and Iran. Two general principles of dress apply: modesty and cleanliness. For women these two general principles mean that covering the hair in public is required. It also means the neck to knees should be covered, thus the hemlines of dresses should fall below the knees.

* Food: In Islam there are two kinds of food: halal, or allowable foods, and haram, or prohibited foods. Haram foods fall into two categories: The first category prohibits foods based on the way they were killed. Animals killed by any means other than the single approved way of killing - a single knife stroke across the jugular while saying a prayer - are not allowed, nor are animals that kill: birds of prey, animals with claws and fangs, rodents, reptiles and insects with the exception of locusts are all haram. The second category foods prohibits foods by what they are. The two main groups here are pork and the blood of any animal.

* Worship: The primary worship service is Friday noon prayers. Shoes are removed at the door of a mosque. Most mosques have an entryway with racks for shoes. The main room of a mosque is the prayer room. Men and women pray separately. After a ritualized purifying washing, worshippers enter the prayer room and sit in rows facing a mark on the wall that signifies the direction they are to face while praying, toward Mecca. The service is made up of regular prayers, a series of memorized prayers done in a standing, bowing, prostrate series of bodily positions. Prayers will be followed by a sermon or homily on a Koranic passage, perhaps followed by announcements.

The entire service will take less than an hour.

* Marriage: Marriage is very important to Muslims; everyone should get married unless physically or financially unable. The ceremony at the mosque lasts from 30 minutes to an hour and guests are invited.

* Death: Muslims have a strong belief in an afterlife, heaven for the righteous, hell for the unrighteous. The funeral ceremony is held two or three days after death, usually in a funeral home. The funeral service is simple, less than an hour with interment following. There will be no open casket. Muslims bury their dead - no cremation is allowed. Mourning may last up to but not exceeding 40 days.