5) The fifth Pillar is the Pilgrimage or Hajj to Mecca

At least once in a lifetime, every adult Muslim who is physically and financially able is required to sacrifice time, wealth, status, and ordinary comforts of life to make the Hajj pilgrimage, putting himself totally at God’s service.  Every year over two million believers from a diversity of cultures and languages travel from all over the world to the sacred city of Mecca to respond to God’s call.

The Branches of Islam

Who are Muslims? The Arabic word “Muslim” literally means “someone who is in a state of Islam (submission to the will and law of God)”.  The message of Islam is meant for the entire world, and anyone who accepts this message becomes a Muslim.  There are over a billion Muslims worldwide.  Muslims represent the majority population in fifty-six countries.  Many people are surprised to know that the majority of Muslims are not Arab. Even though most Arabs are Muslims, there are Arabs who are Christians, Jews and atheists.  Only 20 percent of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims come from Arab countries.  There are significant Muslim populations in India, China, Central Asian Republics, Russia, Europe, and America.  If one just takes a look at the various peoples who live in the Muslim World - from Nigeria to Bosnia and from Morocco to Indonesia - it is easy enough to see that Muslims come from all different races, ethnic groups, cultures and nationalities.  Islam has always been a universal message for all people.  Islam is the second largest religion in the world and will soon be the second largest religion in America. There are different trends within Islam - Shiites, Sunnis and Sufis.

The Sunnis are more liberal in their interpretation of the Koran, while the Shiites are more orthodox. The division first occurred over the issue of who was to be the rightful heir of Muhammad. Today there are 700 million Sunnis compared to about 90 million Shiites.

The sunnis (from sunna – oral tradition of Koran`s interpretation) believe that the leader, the caliph should always be elected, but not handed down by heredity.

The Shiites (meaning partisans) claim that the legitimate heir of Muhammad was his daughter’s Husband. So caliphs are descendants of Muhammad.

The Sunnis tend to accept a belief in predestination, so man does not have a freedom of choice. The Shiites stress more the idea of free will, and a power to direct one’s destiny.

The Sufi group expressed their displeasure with the wealth and worldliness of many Muslims by retreating to the desert, where they lived as wandering ascetics, giving up from the worldly pleasures and dressing themselves in woolen robes, called Sufis. The goal of Sufis is to clean human soul from self-love and replace it with god – love. The ego aspects of human nature must be minimized. The path of salvation has seven stages: repentance, abstinence from pleasures, isolation from the world, solitude, poverty, patience, and self-surrender to God. They seek to know God by the meditation.

What message did Muhammad preach? It was message that common illiterate masses could understand. There is only God, Allah. He has neither human attributes neither can be depicted in any form in art: “true piety is this: to believe in God, and the Last Day, the angels and the Book, and the prophets, to help orphans, the traveler, the beggars, to perform prayers, to pay alms - these are truly god-fearing” (sura 2).

Islam in Ukraine

The majority of Muslims in Ukraine are ethnic Crimean Tatars living in the Crimean peninsula. There are about 456,000 Muslims in Ukraine who constitute 1% of the total Ukrainian population. While ethnic Ukrainians are predominantly Orthodox and Uniate Christians, Muslims have lived in the territory that makes up the modern Ukraine today for centuries. Muslim settlement in the country is concentrated in the country's southern half, particularly in Crimea. At the time of the Russian Revolution, Muslims were one third of population in Crimea. Nearly all major cities there were mostly populated by Muslims. The Crimean Muslims were subjected to mass deportation in 1944 when Stalin accused them of collaborating with the Nazi Germany. Nearly 200,000 Crimean Tatars were deported to Central Asia, mainly Uzbekistan, but also to Kazakhstan and some regions of Russian SFSR. The main deportation occurred on May 18, 1944. It is estimated that about 45% of all Crimean Muslims died in 1944–1945 from hunger and disease. The property and territory abandoned by the Crimean Tatars were appropriated by mostly ethnic Russians who were resettled by the Soviet authorities. This led to demographic changes in Ukraine with huge impact in the future. Although a 1967 Soviet decree removed the charges against the Crimean Tatars, the Soviet government did nothing to facilitate their resettlement in Crimea and to make reparations for lost lives and confiscated property. The repatriation of the Crimean Tatars to their homeland began only in 1989. Today the Muslims are divided into various ethnic groups, but the majority is of Tatar origin, of one particular clan or other. There have also been settlements by Chechen refugees in Crimea and other parts of Ukraine but the proportion is not significant.

Basic concepts and categories

Original sin, sometimes called ancestral sin, is, according to a doctrine proposed in Christian theology, humanity's state of sin resulting from the Fall of Man.

Redemption is an element of salvation that broadly means the deliverance from sin. St. Paul uses the concept of redemption primarily to speak of the saving significance of the death of Christ Theologically, redemption is a metaphor for what is achieved through the Atonement. Therefore there is a metaphorical sense in which the death of Jesus pays the price of a ransom, releasing Christians from bondage to sin and death.,

Communion (fr. Latin “communion” meaning sharing in common). The corresponding term in Greek is often translated as "fellowship". In Christianity, the basic meaning of the term communion is an especially close relationship of Christians, as individuals or as a Church, with God and with other Christians.

Ecumenical council (fr. Greek - the inhabited world) or general council is a conference of the bishops of the whole Christian Church convened to discuss and settle matters of Church doctrine and practice.

Purgatory is the condition or process of purification or temporary punishment in which the souls of those who die in a state of grace are made ready for Heaven. This is an idea that has ancient roots and is well-attested in early Christian literature, while the conception of purgatory as a geographically situated place is largely the creation of medieval Christian piety and imagination,

Divinization (fr. Greek “apotheosis "meaning to be made divine) refers to the exaltation of a subject to divine level. The term has meanings in theology, where it refers to a belief, and in art, where it refers to a genre. In theology, the term apotheosis applies to the idea that an individual has been raised to godlike stature. In art, the term refers to the treatment of any subject (a figure, group, locale, motif, convention or melody) in a particularly grand or exalted manner.

Karma is the concept of "action" or "deed", understood as that which constitutes the entire cycle of cause and effect, originating in ancient India and treated in Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist philosophies.

Nirvana is a state of being free from suffering. In Hindu philosophy, it is the union with the Supreme being. The word literally means "blowing out" - referring in the Buddhist context, to the blowing out of the fires of greed, hatred, and delusion.

Samsara literally meaning "continuous flow",- is the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth (i.e. reincarnation) within Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and other Indian religions.

Revelation is the revealing or disclosing, or making something obvious through active or passive communication with supernatural entities. It is believed that revelation can originate directly from a deity, or through an agent, such as an angel. One who has experienced such contact with or communication from the divine is often called a prophet.

Ramadan (also Ramadhan, Ramadaan) is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar. It is the Islamic month of fasting, in which participating Muslims refrain from eating and drinking from dawn until sunset.

Jihad (fr. Arabic” jihād” meaning struggle) is a religious duty of Muslims. Jihad appears frequently in the Quran and common usage as the idiomatic expression meaning "striving in the way of Allah". A person engaged in jihad is called a mujahid; (the plural is mujahideen). Jihad is an important religious duty for Muslims. A minority among the Sunni scholars sometimes refer to this duty as the sixth pillar of Islam, though it occupies no such official status.

Sharia ("way" or "path") is the sacred law of Islam. All Muslims believe Sharia is God's law, but they have differences among themselves as to exactly what it entails.