2/23/18: Who is a Prophet? A wonderful Interfaith Dialogue at Sacred Heart Church in Dearborn!
Who is a Prophet?
A wonderful Interfaith Dialogue at Sacred Heart Church in Dearborn!
Professor Robert Fastiggi represented the Catholic Theology, Professor Howard Lupovitch from the Judaic Studies Center and Imam Elahi represented the Islamic House of Wisdom.
The diverse nature of the audience, their enthusiasm to learn, and the variety of the questions made our interfaith conference an exemplary and inspiring one. The conversation, Q&A took over two hours.
Some of the points Imam Elahi made on the subject include:
In the Islamic teachings, a prophet is a heavenly ambassador, assigned by God to guide, teach and revolutionize people's reason.
Receiving revelation, infallibility, and miracle ability are of the main proofs of a prophet.
Imam Sadeq (as) mentioned ten moral characteristics for every prophet.
Modesty, patience, generosity, gratitude, courage, honesty, trustworthiness, humbleness, dignity and integrity.
The main mission of the prophet was to educate people about God's character, oneness, love and wisdom, the only One who deserves our worship and also to promote love, justice, truth, freedom, peace.
The Quran mentions at least 25 prophets by names, out of them 5 are Olul-Azm, with higher responsibility and universality. They are Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Mohammad!
The Quran uses the word Al-Mizan (balance) as part of the prophets' mission!
That leaves no room for extremism in prophetic traditions. That means KKK mentality, extremist settlers in the Palestinian territories; Isis and Al-Qaeda have no place in the teachings of Jesus, Moses and Mohammad (pbut).
Imam Elahi also talked about the evil of Islamophobia and talked about dialogue as the best exit from the world current mess, chaos, corruption and oppression.
Since the message of the Divine prophets is the same, we all need to do only one thing: just practice what we all preach!