Islamic Theology

And my last bit of news is that a small number of junior fellows and I have succeeded in organizing our own directed study in Islamic Theology!! We meet once a week to discuss with a teacher from school to discuss any thoughts or questions we have on our assigned readings-presumably, either text or article excerpts . We've only met once and we still don't have our reading for our next meeting, but I'm very optimistic. For one thing, we're lucky enough to have the head of the department of ethics, religion, and philosophy teaching our class. She has a bachelor in Islamic law and a ministry issued certificate in Quranic reading and recitation. But I'm really optimistic about this directed study because our first meeting went so well. Our teacher began the lesson by teaching us that Islam's mission is to make the world a better place and that the "core of Islam is how to be good to others". We then moved on to talk about the six articles of faith-faith in God, faith in angels, faith in prophets, faith in books, faith in judgement day, and faith in Khudr (fate and predestination I think). Anyway faith in God basically means faith that God deserves to sole worship from Mankind for his benevolence and power. Faith in angels basically means faith that angels exist, are completely obedient to God, are made of light, don't have survival needs, and assist God in numerous ways. Iphrael, for example signals the end of time when he blows his horn. And the Angel of Death holds the souls of dead until this time when God judges them. One interesting thing about the Angel of Death is that he comes to a dying person in either a good form or a bad form, depending on how that person led his/her life. Another interesting thing is that the Angel of Death has no name, not even the name, "Azrael"(apparently this name originates from The Old Testament, but I'll have to research that). We talked a little about Faith in Prophets but not in enough detail because class was ending when we reached this article. Anyway, I'm exited to see where this goes.