How to Relate With Non-Muslims As a Muslim

It's appropriate for a Muslim to know how to relate with his non-Muslim friends, relatives or neighbors in today's heterogeneous world of ours. Non-Muslims - Christians and Jews - have been the companion of Muslims right from the inception of Islam. In Mecca and Medina; for example, we have seen how our noble Prophet Muhammad (Peace and Blessing of Allah be Upon Him) relates with them kindly. Therefore, knowing how to engage and interact with them, be it at work, at home, or in your neighborhood is not anew; it's a fourteenth century sociology found nowhere but within the Quran and Sunnah. Following are five important relationship guides that can help you interact peacefully and lawfully with non-Muslims:

1. You Must Deal Justly with Them

Non-Muslims must be treated fairly by Muslims. Christians and Jews aren't enemies to Muslims; therefore, Muslims must deal with them justly. The Holy Quran says: "Allah forbids you not, with regard to those who fight you not for (your) faith nor drive you out of your homes, from dealing kindly and justly with them: for Allah love those who are just" (Quran 6:8).

2. You Can Give Zakaat (Almsgiving) to Non-Muslims

There is nothing wrong in helping the non-Muslims; in fact, there is a huge reward in sympathizing with them and helping the poor and the needy amongst them. Giving charity and alms to non-Muslims is a good virtue of Islam that helps tremendously in drawing the non-Muslims to Islam. The Quran says: "Zakaat is only to be given to the needy, the poor, those employed to collect (the funds); and to attract the hearts of those who have been inclined (towards Islam)... " (Quran 9:60).

3. You Can Congratulate and Exchange Gift with Them

You can congratulate your Christian friends, neighbors, or colleagues during their festive occasions. In fact, you can even exchange gifts with them (on condition that these gifts are not unlawful such as being alcohol or pork). You can greet them on their X-mass or New Year gala. This becomes more so an obligation, especially if the non-Muslims offer their greetings to your Islamic occasion such as Eid Mubarak or Ramadan Kareem. The Quran says: "when you're greeted with a greeting, greet in return with what is better than it or at least return it equally... " (Quran 4:86).

4. You Can Eat From Their Food

You can accept and eat the food of your non-Muslim friends or neighbors. There is nothing wrong with that in Islam. The Quran says: "... The food of the People of the Scripture (Christians and Jews) is lawful to you and yours is lawful to them... " (Quran 5:5).

5. You Can't Participate in Their Religious Festivities

You can congratulate the non-Muslims of their festivities, exchange gift with them, and even eat from their food; but you can't participate in their religious commemorative. This is haram (unlawful) because Islam doesn't endorse such festivities. Ibn Taymiyah and his student, Ibn-ul-Qayyim, "adopted stringent measures and restricted the permissibility of Muslims' participation in non-Muslims' occasions".

The relationship between Muslim and non-Muslim is a healthy one. A Muslim never takes other religious adherents as his enemies; he considers them as his fellow humans who deserve to be treated fairly, judiciously, and equitably.

The Certainty Delusion - Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Believe in Everything

Do you believe in God? Ghosts? Free will? Evolution? Intelligent design? Ancient aliens? Life after death? Oblivion? I do - and I don't. You see, I've devised a new belief system as likely to fox a magistrate as it is a four-year-old child. It occurred to me how irrational it is to believe in anything totally, especially since the laws of physics have broken down and renowned physicists don't know whether we are living in a universe of our own imagination or whether we are the play-things of a higher intelligence. And apparently, our steady old reliable universe is now a layered multiverse.

According to hirsute Japanese-American theoretical physicist, Dr Michio Kaku, I may be sitting in my office right now, but I could also simultaneously be in the middle of a desert and at the bottom of an ocean with flesh-eating monsters swimming around - and through - my unsuspecting head. Luckily I wouldn't be able see, hear, touch or smell these monsters, nor they me, as their atoms would be vibrating at a different frequency from my own.

If all this is true, you are probably thinking to yourself, then could there not be a blue cheese moon occupying the same space as our own moon? It's possible, but that's not for here.

So where does all this uncertainty leave Belief? For me, the solution is simple. I no longer say I believe in one thing and disavow another. I give a percentage of credibility to each and every idea. If an idea seems plausible, I may give it 60% credibility, if it sounds outlandish I'll merit it with a lowly 12%.

Needless to say, once I got into this new mode of thinking, the world became a far more unreasonable place. I found humans, with their unconditional faith in one thing and rejection of another, were having trouble fitting in with me. And some began really to rub me up the wrong way.

Geneticist Richard Dawkins wrote a very interesting book called The Selfish Gene. I even read most of it. Later, he went off the rails, academically speaking, and wrote The God Delusion. And I can only assume it was Satan himself who possessed Dawkins to write this book, likely in order to discredit all his previous scientific work and bring humanity back to religion and the belief in God and His nemesis, the Devil. But I'm speculating.

Professor Dawkins' argument, as far as I can recall, is that God doesn't exist because the Old Testament stories are crazy fairy tales featuring grossly immoral people masquerading as saints. Since the book's publication, Dawkins has popped up all over the place preaching fanatically about the inexistence of the reality of an abstract concept. The man is like a dog with a bone. He will not let it drop. If only Dawkins had adopted my system, he could have saved himself much polemical angst. But the question remains: what exactly is accountable for the man's fundamentalism?

Perhaps Dawkins believes in the trite and erroneous notion that religion is at the root of all war, and that by campaigning against the former he can help to eradicate the latter. You could thus argue that it is he who is suffering from a God delusion. And most wars that I know of were fought over land and resources, or the fear of domination by the other. 'War is a Racket', wrote Major Gen. Smedley D Butler. And if religion does play a part, it is simply a convenient way of identifying the enemy.

No, Dawkins cannot be that shallow. I sense a psychological defence mechanism brought on by the cabin fever and monomania to which many scientists are prone. Theoretical physicists, on the other hand, get out and about, metaphysically speaking.

Nobel Prize winner, Max Planck wrote:

'There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind.'

Then there's the measurement problem, which seems to confirm the above. What this means, as far as I can fathom, is that atoms behave differently when being observed by people; or, you could say, influenced by consciousness. In short, consciousness affects matter and may even be responsible for its existence. Therefore, if you are keen on the idea of an afterlife, your best bet would be to believe in it.

Now, Dawkins may have got a theological bee in his bonnet, but we can be sure that when he closes his eyes at night and drifts off into fairyland, there will be one Being notable for His absence. You see, I have never met anyone who has dreamed about God. I'm sure there are those who claim to have done, but I would give their story a feeble 2% credibility. It would be counterproductive to create beings with free will and then allow them to dream about you since they would constantly be trying to interpret what it was you wanted them to do.

There is one exception to my new custom of affording percentages of credibility, and that applies to God Himself. In the case of His existence I prefer to afford 100% credibility. After all, His belief in me may be holding my atoms together. I would rather err on the side of caution just in case He is a vengeful God - and I'd say there's a good 50% chance of that.