There was no idol representing the God of Israel. There were five main things Allah liked. By 650 AD, the followers of Islam had already split into two main kinds. During the 600s AD, Islam spread across Egypt and then the rest of North Africa, and in the 700s AD it spread into Spain, in Europe. Then in the 1400s the Ottoman Empire conquered most of eastern Europe, and many people converted to Islam there, too. People converted to Islam south of the Sahara Desert in Sudan and all down the coast of East Africa. Many people converted to Islam in West Africa, and in Chad. Many of those people were Zoroastrians before they became Muslims. What did Muslims believe? To make sure Muslims prayed five times a day, Muslim mosques had men call them to prayers five times a day. Allah liked you to pray to him five times a day, facing toward his most holy place at Mecca, in the Arabian peninsula. If you followed the religion of Islam, you couldn’t drink alcohol, or make pictures of people, and especially not pictures of holy people like Mohammed.

Like other world religions after about 500 BC – like Christianity, and medieval Judaism, later Zoroastrianism and Buddhism – Islam generally did not have animal sacrifices. I have lived in many different places, met many new people, and have fought for what I know is true in different ways at each of them. After the Islamic Empire conquered the Sassanian Empire, many Muslims lived there, in what is now Iraq and Iran. The metropolis flourished, gradually becoming the seat of an empire. The diversity of Islam is a part of and a testament to its strength: its message has proven viable and adaptable across the boundaries of time and culture. Since the time of the Prophet, communities of faithful Muslims have responded to God’s word, following the path of Islam in each new century and throughout many cultural contexts. Shia Muslims have their own council, the Jaafari Affairs Council, to manage Shia affairs, including overseeing mosques and community activities, managing financial affairs, and hiring preachers.

Nigerian Muslims in the UK are represented by several community organizations, including the Nigeria Muslim forum, which is affiliated with the Council of Nigerian Muslim Organisations in UK and Ireland (CNMO) and the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB). Non-Hausa groups residing in southern regions of Nigeria are marginalized by the republic, treated as second-class citizens, and denied their entitlements. Bruner hypothesizes. While cartoons and caricatures stir up conversation about a given topic, they can also be misappropriated to escalate tension between opposing groups. Given its long history and its rich geographical and cultural diversity, any single portrait of Islam would inevitably be incomplete. But human beings are said to have been given a choice: each individual is personally responsible for choosing to follow or to reject God’s will, as revealed in the Qur’an. According to Muslims, God’s final prophet and messenger was Muhammad, and God’s final word the Qur’an. Practiced by more than one billion people in the world, Islam recognizes God the Creator; Muhammad, the final messenger; and the Qur’an, God’s final word.

Sufis believed in a direct relationship between people and God. They believed that Moses and Jesus were important holy men. The Quran is the holy book of Islam, like the Bible is for Christians or the Torah for Jews. And they believed that Mohammed was another holy man in the same line. Muslims believed that if you did things which pleased Allah, you would have a good life on earth. The Shiites believed that their religious leaders were going to come save them like the Messiah. Phrases like oy vey (difficult to translate, but something like saying “alas”) and words like kvetch (to complain) and nosh (to have a snack) come from the Yiddish language. Some of the ambiguity involved in defining atheism arises from the definitions of words like deity and god. So a lot of old Zoroastrian beliefs and holidays, like the holiday of Nowruz, also became common among Muslims. The ancient Greeks planted some crops, but only about 30% of the land was suitable for growing things like barley, olives and tomatoes. People called these things the five pillars of Islam. Other parts of the Quran explain how people should behave: they should be kind to each other, build community, and help the poor.