El Trecer Blog

Posted by: idk2012 on: February 7, 2012

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Last week we were taken through history as the story of Muhammad’s life developed. I found it very interesting that many of the stories of biblical characters are very similar as well as the way Muhammad developed into a prophet. Compared to the Christians’ Jesus, his story is significantly different with similarities to the fact of being loved and feared at the same time.

Reading personal piety, I admired the dedication Muslims have towards the WWMD (What Would Muhammad Do?) concept. It talked about the ways to follow Islam, the same way the prophet did. I also started reading the Hadith, it is an extremely complex reading for me. It is difficult with all of the new terms, the language differences in names etc. However, the book gives a ton of information for those who have never studied before, and it slowly but surely, I am beginning to put the pieces together….or at least I would like to think so…

I have really never paid much attention to Muslim or Islam customs but from reading the previous blog posts and changing my sense to get a better perception I have found myself noticing different things. I tend to agree with everyone that the community tends to stick together  at Loyola, but it is the same for almost any group of people, we tend to go with what we know. Also, a man at my job, is muslim and every evening he takes a break and goes into the back room. I never really paid much attention but come to find out he is doing his prayers, I truly admire that type of dedication.

In response to 195Theo; I too went to Catholic school my entire career from pre-school up, and of the various schools I attended I found that though ‘accepting’ of various religions, everything was catered to a certain type of ideology, the teachers tended to teach about only ‘our ways of doing things’ and when questioned about other religions, whether ignorant or catho-centric (there might be a real word for that), they never really gave us the option,  to study other religions in school, besides a 1 semester class of all the other religions of the world, including other forms of Christianity. Also, they seems to make it unlikely that people of other religions would attend the schools because throughout the 12 years you had to take a religion course every semester and attend church every week, no matter what religion you are you had to attend all activities. Which may have hindered the religious diversity of the institutions.