I just read an article about the Islam religion. After reading it, one would conclude that the words “Islam” and “Muslim” are interchangeable.
So what is the difference between “Islam” and “Muslim”? Do they mean the same thing?
Islam is a religion. A muslim is someone who follows that religion.
Analogy: Muslim is to Islam as Christian is to Christianity
Crafter Man:
Islam = the religion itself.
Muslim = a follower of that religion.
Simple as that 
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- Tamerlane
Thanks. I guess it was sort of a dumb question, but I just never had it explained to me…
Muslim (aka Moslem) is one who submits to Islam.
Most of you probably aren’t old enuff to remember but the press would routinely refer to them as Mohammadians (sp?). Which would imply they worshiped Mohammed. Which of course they don’t.
Most educated people in European-oriented societies were aware that “Mohammedans” were no more likely to worship Mohammed than Lutherans were to worship Luther.
However, as the world expanded and more people from Europe, North America, Australia, etc. encountered more Muslims (often through immigration), they became aware that the followers of Islam preferred the term Muslim and the word Mohammedan was generally dropped from use.
Over the protest of one H. K. Fowler – but such are the risks faced by a linguistic prosciptivist. 
I know Islam literally means “submission”; submission to Allah. What I am wondering is, what does the word muslim mean?
I never heard of Muslims until Clay became Ali and a black Muslim . I had heard of** Moslems**before that however. Sometime since then the term “Moslem” completely disappeared.
quasar, the term “muslim” literally means “one who submits”.
Muslim vs Moslem simply represents the normal shifts of pronunciation and spelling that occur as different dialects of languages gain or lose ground in the public consciousness when the alphabets are totally different. The same sort of thing has happened with the former royal family of Russia, alternating between the Romanoffs and the Romanovs.
In Chinese, we have seen Peiping, Peking, and Beijing all used in the last 100 years.
Much earlier, in English, Muslim was rendered as Musselman (although I suspect that that was a really bad, if popular, rendering).
Both Islâm and muslim derives from the verb aslama ‘to submit, to surrender, to resign oneself, to commit oneself’. This verb is from the triliteral root s-l-m. The basic verb from this root is salima, ‘to be safe and sound, be at peace’. The source of the noun salâm, ‘peace’.
This is why you hear people saying “Islam is peace.” More accurately, it means ‘a commitment to peace’. This is explained by the saying of the Prophet: “A Muslim is one from whose hand and tongue others are safe,” i.e. one who will not harm you, steal from you, or talk bad about you. All these words, anything with the consonants s-l-m, are related to the core meaning of being safe and sound.
Islâm is the noun of the verb aslama, i.e. the name of the action, ‘submission’. Muslim is the active participle of aslama, meaning the one who does that action, ‘submitter’, as pennylane correctly stated. Since Semitic languages are verb-based, an active participle like muslim practically has the force of a verb, meaning one who is actively accomplishing that action.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the word “mussulman”, although it’s now obsolete in English. It is simply the word for Muslim in the Persian language: musalmân. It is altered from the Arabic word with a Persian suffix added.
<< …than Lutherans were to worship Luther. >>
I thought they worshiped (Lex) Luthor, Superman’s arch enemy, and thus were Evil. But maybe I’m thinking of the OTHER synod.