Coming in 2025
Speaking The Truth With Love
Volume One of a new book from Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah
First Teaching of the Last Message:
The Divine Science and Its Six Pillars
This eight-volume compendium is meant to be a reliable, wide-ranging, and in-depth reference to the six foundational Pillars (Arkan) of Islam’s timeless and universal Prophetic Message. Given its scope, the work’s subject matter is designed to explain in the fullest sense the fathomless meanings explicit and implicit in Islam’s two-part Prophetic testimony of faith.
Lā ilāha ill-Allāh
There is no god but God
Muḥammadun Rasūlu-Llāh
Muhammad is God’s Messenger
In Arabic, the word Islam refers to the act of freely rendering submissive obedience to God. All aspects of Islam—inwardly and outwardly—are included in this two-fold creedal witness.
The six Buttresses of Prophetic credence are belief in God, the Angels, the Revealed Books, the Prophet-Messengers, the Resurrection, Last Judgment, & Hereafter, and Providence & the Foreordination of all things, including good and evil.
In The First Teaching, Islam’s six Pillars are presented from two complementary but quite different perspectives:
Basic Creedal and Doctrinal belief from the standpoint of the individual responsibility (farḍ al-‘ayn)of each believer of sound mind and body.
Sound non-Creedal and non-Doctrinal understanding and conviction within the much broader scope of comprehensive belief and enlightened vision as they pertain to the societal obligation (farḍ al-kifāya) of the entire World Community of Islam (al-Umma)—but fall more specifically on the shoulders of an adequate number of qualified Muslim Scholars—who must correctly answer the relevant faith-related questions of our generation.
The second aspect, which falls under the heading of broad societal obligations, is by its nature vastly more extensive in scope. But, at the same time, it is less rigorous in its epistemological and demonstrative demands. Ultimately, this broad second category takes in all faith-related matters—big and small, essential and non-essential—that concern the entire World Community of Islam and present-day humanity today as a whole.
Given its scope, The First Teaching is attentively fixed on this second all-inclusive perspective of Islamic belief, and that focus accounts for the compendium’s detail and length, which go far beyond Islam’s basic Creedal and Doctrinal demands. Thus, the majority of what is written in this book falls under the broad heading of such overreaching needs and interests in any healthy contemporary society, culture, and Civilization (al-‘Umrān).
The First Teaching seeks to respond as effectively as possible to the primary issues and burning controversies of our era, as well as engaging the reigning doubts, flawed paradigms, and fallacies of Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
