I would hate for anyone to feel excluded. How about followers of these schools of thought? What are their views on alien lifeforms?
(list from religioustolerance.org)
Baha’i Faith, Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Jainism, Judaism, Shinto, Sikhism, Taoism, Voodoo, Asatru (Norse Paganism), Druidism, Goddess Worship, Wicca, Witchcraft, Caodaism, Damanhur Community, Druse, Eckankar, Elian Gonzalez religious movement, Gnosticism, Roma, Hare Krishna - ISKCON, Lukumi, Macumba, Mowahhidoon, Native American Spirituality, New Age (a.k.a. Self-spirituality, New Spirituality, etc.), Osho ® (followers of Rajneesh), Santeria, Satanism, Scientology, Thelema, Unitarian-Universalism, World Church of the Creator, Zoroastrianism, Teachings of Dadaji, Deism, Falun Dafa and Falun Gong, Goths, Objectivism
Wasn’t their a thread in the GD on how alien life would effect various religions awhile ago?
DreadCthulhu, I started a thread on that topic on Great Debates. Here’s a link if you’re interested.
In Suratul Fatihah, (The Opening), a verse of the Qur’an every muslim probably recites like 15 times a day, we say:
“Alhamdulillahi Rabil-Al-Amin” or, “Praise to Allah, Cherisher and Sustainer of the worlds”
Yup…Plural
It’s Arabic, so there are many shades of meaning and interpretation possible. Nothing in Islamic Cosmology rules out the possibility of life elsewhere, AFAIK.
Marti(a)n
Is that the same question as, “How do they know which direction to face when they pray?” If so, that’s what I thought this thread was going to be about. Would they just pick an arbitrary direction, or look at the diagram of ship as if it were a map, pick a spot on the right-hand side and say, “That’s east”? How about once they make landfall? If they’re supposed to face Mecca, and it’s (leans back and points up at a star) up* there*, how does that work?
Prince Sultan of Saudi Arabia managed to pray five times a day while he was on the Space Shuttle. He prayed according to Meccan ground time, since the shuttle keeps orbiting the earth and a “day” is what, a couple hours? He came up with some solution for the qiblah too, but I don’t remember what it was. Whatever direction you start in, it would change constantly on the shuttle, so you have to have some adapability under space conditions.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Red Mars had Arabs, Muslims, Sufis colonizing Mars. I don’t remember if he worked out a solution to what they would do about prayer times and qiblah while on Mars, but they did continue to practice their religion up there.
I looked in the Library of Congress bibliographical database and found five science fiction books in Arabic:
‘Abd al-Malik, Jamal. al-‘Asr al-ayyuni min qisas al-khayal al-‘ilmi. (The ionic [?] age in science fiction.) Tunis, 1981.
‘Awad Allah, Muhammad Fathi. al-Fada’ fi khayal al-udaba’. (Space in the speculation of the authors.) Cairo, 1978.
Ghannam, ‘Azzah. al-Ibda‘ al-fanni fi qisas al-khayal al-‘ilmi. (Artistic creativity in science fiction.) Cairo, 1988.
Talawi, Muhammad Najib. Qisas al-khayal al-‘ilmi fi al-adab al-‘Arabi: dirasah fi ta’sil al-shakl wa-fanniyatih. (Science fiction in Arabic literature: a study in the genealogy and artistry of the form.) Paris, 1990.
Thabit, al-Hadi. Jabal ‘illiyin: riwayah fi al-khayal al-‘ilmi. (The mountain of Paradise: a science fiction novel.) Tunis, 2001.
This proves that Arabs and Muslims are no strangers to SF. They translate the term ‘science fiction’ as qisas al-khayal al-‘ilmi, literally ‘scientific imagination fiction’ or ‘scientific speculation fiction’.
As far as Muslims in Space and devotions, I beleive it is not so much the direction they face, but the earnestness in doing so that matters.
Oh, BTW, I didn’t mean to imply that Arabic science fiction is limited to only five books. These are just the ones I was able to find in a Library of Congress database search, where the cataloger happened to include the phrase “science fiction” somewhere in the record. Usually, LoC catalogers do not add subject headings for fiction, so the works of science fiction themselves would not be found so easily by a catalog search. There have got to be plenty more, considering that most of these books are lit crit. For lit crit to have something to write about, there’s got to be plenty of original source material. If you just google the phrase “Arabic science fiction” you’ll find several more authors not mentioned above.
I did some more looking around in the LoC database and found a book on the Islamic law of space travel by a Shi‘ite author named Muhammad al-Sadr, Fiqh al-fada’ (Beirut, 1998). So there are some Islamic thinkers who have applied themselves to the question in the OP.
I found a biography of Prince Sultan, Amir al-fada’!!: al-rihlah al-tarikhiyah li-awwal ra’id fada’ ‘Arabi … (The Prince of Space!!: the historical journey of the first Arab space pioneer), written by ‘Abd al-Karim Niyazi (Mecca, 1986). I found plenty more books in Arabic on space flight and space travel (rihlat al-fada’), too many to list. Hmm, here’s an odd one: Zawaj ahl al-ard bi-ahl al-fada’ (Earth people getting married with space people), by Shihatah Muhammad Shihatah, a book on interplanetary sex (Alexandria, 198-?) — it’s classified under UFOs in the nonfiction classification. I know there are more Arabic SF books out there, it’s just that LoC cataloging makes it hard to do a subject search for fiction.
Well… I will welcome our alien overlords.
d&r
Wait just a second here. Since when is “Goth” a religion?
Actually, the Goths followed the Arian version of Christianity. You can look it up.