Who was Muhammad?
Goal:
To learn about the life of Muhammad
Activities:
Read or enact the skit “The Story of Muhammad.”
The Story of Muhammad
Muhammad was born in 570. His father died around the time of his birth and his mother died when he was 6 years old. Muhammad was raised first by his grandfather and later by his uncle, who was a tribal leader at the time. In those days, most people living in Arabia were nomads. Families, or clans, were organized together into tribes. Sometimes the animal herds of a tribe was insufficient for its needs and one tribe would raid another for goods.
The only people more powerful than tribal leaders were poets. Poets were believed to be possessed of spirits that inhabit the natural world known as "jinn." Arabs believed jinn could work good and evil, so keeping the spirits happy was important: Most tribes also believed in other gods and goddesses, including Allah (the creator of the universe) and his three daughters. Each year local tribesmen visited Mecca to see the KaBah, an area built around a mysterious and sacred black stone (possibly a meteorite) that contained a sanctuary dedicated to these goddesses.
With these annual pilgrimages, Mecca became an important commercial center as well as a religious center. During Muhammad’s early adult life in Mecca, Arabian society began to become more concerned with individual prosperity than clan and tribal community. At age 25 Muhammad married an older, wealthy merchant woman. He became involved in commerce and traveled frequently to areas north of Mecca, where Christitanity and Judaism (both monotheistic religions) were prominent. No one knows how much his travels among Jews and Christians influenced Muhammad, but he certainly gained a broader wider view.
Muhammad was only mildly happy with the comforts that wealth brought and he was quite concerned about the decline of traditional values and community. He began to spend a lot of time alone in meditation and prayer on these concerns. Our story begins with one such event, in the year 610.
For the skit, you will need one person to be the narrator and others to pantomime the underlined action in each scene. Gather props and costumes and have fun!
Characters:
Muhammad
Young boy
Gabriel (angel)
Khadijah (Muhammad’s wife)
Meccan merchants
Abraham
Moses
Jesus
Pilgrims from Medina
Meccan assasins
Abu Bakr (close advisor)
Scene 1: Gabriel’s First Visit
Muhammad was traveling home one night when he passed a young boy sitting idly on the road, staring blankly out in the night. It seemed like he had no where to go, no family even to care for him. Muhammad thought about how things were changing in Mecca. More and more people seemed concerned only about themselves, tribal wars were increasing, and in Mecca itself money and commerce seemed more important than religion. He worried when he heard stories of people less fortunate than himself. Now, this young boy was a reminder of those worries. When he arrived home he decided to go to one of his favorite caves just outside Mecca. He would spend the night there, fasting and reflecting on the changes that were happening all around him.
He gathered a few belongings for the night and headed off for a time of quiet and meditation. As he sat in silence a strange vision appeared to Muhammad. It was an angel Gabriel in human form. Gabriel reached out and held Muhammad tightly in his arms and ordered him to recite a short set of words. When Muhammad did so the angel released him and disappeared.
Muhammad was convinced that he was either losing his mind, or the jinn had possessed him, so he fled from the cave. Part way down the hill he heard a voice behind him say, "Oh, Muhammad, you are the Messenger of God. and I am Gabriel."
Scene 2: The revelations
When Muhammad got home, his wife, Khadijah, saw that he was disturbed and asked him what happened. Muhammad told her what he had seen and heard and said that he was afraid he was losing his mind. But the visions of Gabriel continued and each time Muhammad was asked to recite certain words before the vision would let him go. Khadijah was sure the words had come fiom God and that Muhammad had been chosen by Gabriel to be a messenger of God, just as the angel had said. Slowly Muhammad began to share the words he had heard with Khadijah and a few followers. It took Muhammad several years of experiencing the visions to come to believe they were truly revelations fiom God.
By 613, Muhammad was preaching openly in the streets. The message he preached was a simple one: he declared that there was only one God, Allah, and that there was nothing like him. He preached that Allah was all-powerful and that a day of judgment would come to all people. To worship any other gods, or jinn, was to violate the absolute oneness of Allah. The merchants and leaders in Mecca saw Muhammad’s ideas as threats to the established religious system that kept them wealthy and in power. Slowly hostility against Muhammad grew until his life was in danger.
Scene 3: The Miraculous Occasion
In 619 Muhammad moved his family and supporters away from Mecca to nearby Ta’if for refuge. But the main tribe there refused to let them stay, so they were forced to return to Mecca. That same year, both Muhammad’s wife and his uncle Abu Talib died. In the middle of his sadness and troubles, Muhammad had the most remarkable experience of his life.
One night, Gabriel came to Muhammad in his sleep. But instead of talking to him, he flew with Muhammad on a winged horse to Jerusalem, where from a large rock, they ascended to heaven. In heaven Muhammad met with the great prophets of Abraham, Moses and Jesus. At the end of his journey, it is said that Muhammad stood before God. (This night, called Isra & Mi’raj, is celebrated each year on the 27th day of the Islamic month of Rajab.)
Scene 4: Journey to Medina
Muhammad’s followers increased and so did the hostility against them. He knew he had to find a safe place outside Mecca for himself and his followers. The answer came one day when a group of pilgrims from Medina who had heard of Muhammad and his teachings, sought him out in Mecca. They were looking for someone to come to Medina to help bring peace among the tribes of the area. Muhammad saw an opportunity to start a new community of Muslims and he began urging his followers to move to the northern town.
One night, in 622, Muhammad received word that a group of Meccans were planning to kill him. He arranged to leave Mecca that very night with his closest fiiend, Abu Bakr. They gathered a few things for the journey and made their way to a cave outside of town. There they hid for three days. According to legend, the mouth of the cave was covered with a fine spider’s web just moments before the Meccan assasins rode by. When they saw the delicate web covering the entrance they were sure no one could have recently gone inside.
With travel safe again, Muhammad and Abu Bakr made their way to Medina where they were greeted joyfully by the Muslims who had already moved there and other people of Medina. Muhammad was safe and, most importantly, the first Islamic community was formed. This journey, known today as Hijrah, was so important to Muslims that they used it to mark the beginning of the Islamic calendar.
A Musician and His Trumpet: A Story from India
From Long Ago and Many Lands
In order to answer the soldier’s question, Kassapa told this story.
In olden times a certain musician, carrying his trumpet under his arm, stopped to rest on a bench in the market place of a small village. He laid his trumpet down on the ground beside him. Nobody else seemed to be anywhere around, for all the villagers were at home having supper.
Being lonely, the musician picked up his trumpet and began to play. He blew it three times, and then set it on the ground again beside him.
When the villagers heard the trumpet blowing, they were puzzled, for none of them had ever seen or heard a trumpet before. They said to one another:
“What is it that is making that charming and delightful sound?”
They rushed out of their houses and gathered in the market place. There they found the musician. They asked him :
“Sir, what was it that made that charming and delightful sound?”
“Friends, it was this trumpet that you see lying on the ground here beside me that made that sound.”
One of the villagers then picked up the strange instrument which had been called a trumpet. He looked it all over. He put it down on the ground again so that it stood up on its large round end. He called to it:
“Speak, O Trumpet! Speak, O Trumpet!” But the trumpet did not make a sound. Another villager turned the trumpet over and put it down on its side. He also called:
“Speak, O Trumpet! Speak, O Trumpet!” But the trumpet did not make a sound. Another man put the trumpet down on its other side and spoke to it. Another shook it this way and that way and called. The crowd began calling too:
“Speak, O Trumpet! Speak, O Trumpet!”
But no! The trumpet did not make a sound! The trumpeter smiled and thought to himself:
“How foolish these villagers are! How can they hope to hear the sound of the trumpet by trying other ways to play it than the right way?”
Finally, with the villagers watching him, the musician picked up the trumpet and again blew it three times. After this he walked off with the trumpet under his arm, and disappeared down the path.
The villagers were left to think things through for themselves. Everyone began talking at once. Finally, they agreed on the right answer to their puzzling. This is the way one of the men explained it:
“When the trumpet was connected with a person who blew his breath into it, it made a sound! But when the trumpet was not connected with a person and no breath was blown into it, then the trumpet made no sound at all.”
Kassapa then turned to the soldier and said:
“It is precisely so with us and our bodies. When the body is not connected with Life then it can not walk forward or walk backward. It can not stand or sit or lie down. Then, too, it can not see things with its eyes, or smell things with its nose, or taste flavors with its tongue, or touch things with its hands. Then it can not understand with its mind. We say the person is dead.
Open Your Circle
What is Prejudice? Prejudice is a word that describes the way people sometimes feel toward other people. It is a liking or, more often, a dislike of one person over another without reason.
Prejudice gets started in a person for lots of different reasons, but usually it has to do with feelings that person has about himself or herself. In the story Mark and Paul, we met a boy, Mark,who felt good about himself and what he thought was right. He didn’t need to be a part of the group who teased Paul to feel good about himself. In fact, his strong and caring action led others to see their prejudice — their negative feelings about Paul — as unfair and hurtful.
Your circle grows.
When we are born the circle of people around us, the group we belong to, is very small. As we grow,this circle grows too. Some of that growing is like getting bigger feet — we have no control over it! But some of it we do have control over. At different points along the way we open our circle to let new and different people in, or we close it. It is when we close others out of our circle that prejudice has a chance to grow.
Keep Your Circle Open
In the story Mark and Paul, one way of thinking about what Mark did is that he "opened his circle" of friends to include someone who was different from himself. If your circle is closed it is easy to develop negative feelings for those outside it. You may feel afraid of them or confused by their behavior because you don’t know it very well. If you open your circle to include new and different people, it is very difficult for prejudice to grow.
Usually ideas about a person or group of people, which are not true, are used as reasons for the feeling of prejudice.These ideas are called stereotypes.
For example:
Blonds have more fun.
Black people are better at sports than White people.
Fill in the next page and see how your circle has grown already!!.
The Origins of Easter
On Palm Sunday, we told the story of how people greeted Jesus and his friends as they came into the city of Jerusalem–waving palm branches and shouting their welcome to him. Jesus was so popular with the people that the leaders of the city, particularly the priests, were afraid that the people would try to put Jesus in charge and make him king of the Jews. The priests tried to prove that Jesus was breaking the laws, so that they could arrest him.
The celebration of Passover began on Thursday night. After Jesus and his friends ate their Passover meal, they went to pray in the Garden of Gethsemane. After awhile, the priests’ guards came, arrested him, and took him away.
On Friday morning, the priests turned Jesus over to the Roman governor, Pilate, saying that Jesus was trying to be named king of the Jews. The priests knew the Roman rulers would not like this, for they had appointed the king. Pilate knew the priests were jealous of Jesus, so he offered to let him go. But the crowd of people,whom the priests had incited against Jesus, was shouting for Jesus to be crucified. To crucify him meant to hang him on a cross until he died. Pilate had Jesus whipped and then handed him over to the soldiers to be crucified.
The soldiers put a crown of thorns on Jesus’ head, made fun of him, gave him his cross, and sent him up a hill to be crucified. The crowd circled around him. By nine o’clock in the morning they had put him on the cross and by three o’clock in the afternoon he died.
A friend took Jesus’ body and placed it in a tomb which was a little cave and a heavy stone was rolled across the entrance. On the third day after he died, two women came to the tomb and were surprised to find his body was gone.
Some of Jesus’ friends said Jesus came to them after he died—that they saw and talked with him. Others said this couldn’t be so.
How can God be “our father?”
Goal:
To consider the Jewish and Christian concepts of God as like a father of the family of people.
Preparation: Read Background
Activities:
1. Read “God is Like a Father”
2. Engage in conversation about the story using the following questions as a guide:
In this story God is like a man, a father. Do you think God could be like a man?
Is it hard to love someone who is different? Why?
Sometimes people argue with each other. Is it hard to love someone you argue with?
In the sotry God wants us to love and care for all of God’s children. What are some of the things we can do to care for the people of God’s family?
Background for Passover
Passover (Pesah) is an ancient Jewish festival which celebrates the Exodus of the Hebrew people from slavery and oppression in Egypt. The name Passover is taken from the Exodus story found in the Hebrew scriptures in the Book of Exodus: "During the tenth and final plague inflicted on Pharaoh to break his will, God passed over the Jews and struck down only the Egyptian firstborn. It was that night that the pharaoh finally agreed to let the Jewish people go. Ever since then, Jews gather together on that night to commemorate and contemplate the meaning of freedom.
The central meaning of Pesah is liberation– from slavery to freedom–and so is called the "season of our liberation." But Pesah has an- other name–the holiday of spring celebrating the liberation of the earth from the grip of winter. Therefore, the holiday of liberation is the holiday of spring with the themes of hope and rebirth. Pesah proclaims the possibilities of liberation and renewal, reminding us that freedom is as intrinsic to human nature as blossoming trees is to the natural world.
After the destruction of the Temple, Pesah became a home festival, its observance kept alive through the generations even under great oppression and persecution. The last supper shared by Jesus and his disciples was a Passover Seder (ritual meal). When appropriate, either at Passover and/or Easter, tie the Jewish and Christian scriptures together recognizing the source of the Christian mass and communion service with the Jewish Seder. In contemporary Judaism, Passover is sometimes celebrated in community Seders.
Many Unitarian Universalist churches (and many Christian churches) now observe Passover with a Seder. Through participation in an age-old tradition, we connect with our Jewish heritage. Although there ate Jews who believe it really happened as it is written in Exodus, there are others who believe that some parts of the story are true and some are not. There are some Jews who say they cannot believe in a God who would kill the first-born child of every Egyptian family or break the laws of nature to save certain people. But no matter what the many beliefs ate about the story, this is a celebration which speaks to all who value freedom.
Pesah acknowledges the universal human yearning for freedom and expresses compassion for all the people in the world who are not free. The Seder is a time of hope and gratitude celebrated with family and friends. It is a time for each person to rededicate themselves to the cause of liberty and justice.
What is Passover?
Goal:
To learn about the exodus of the Jews from Egypt and how important freedom is to them, and to us.
Preparation: Read Background
Activities:
Read “A Free People” or find the following in your local library:
Festival of Freedom: The Story of Passover, re-told by Maida Silverman
The Four Questions, by Lynne Sharon Schwarts
Jewish Days and Holidays, by Greer Fay Cashman
Jewish Holiday Fun, by Judith Hoffman Corwin
Passover, A Season of Freedom, by Malka Drucker
A Picture Book of Passover, by David A. Adler
How Are People Made?
Goal: to help children appreciate the uniqueness in each person and to give children a sense of their connection with the long chain of human evolution.
Preparation:
1. Collect some books from your local library such as: Where Did I Come From? by Peter Mayle, The Facts of Life, by Jonathan Miller and David Pelham, Where Do Babies Come From? by Margaret Sheffield and Sheila Bewley, and Me and My Family Tree, by Paul Showers. Have them available for your children to browse through.
2. Gather the following photos from family albums:
• Yourself as a baby, young child and at later ages (as you have them)
• A sibling of yours as a baby, child, teenager, adult
• One of your parents as a baby, child, young adult
• Your own children when they were babies
• A few non-family members—as children and adults
Activities:
• Read Some Wonderings of Our Own
• Family Snapshot Matching Game
Spread the photos you’ve collected on the floor or table. Try to match the baby/child pictures with the adult ones. Then identify similarities and differences in the physical attributes of members of your family.
Why do people pray?
Goal:
To consider some ideas about the nature of prayer.
Preparation:
Read Background for Being With God in Prayer.
Activities:
Introduce the story:
In our Unitarian Universalist church people have many different ideas about God. For some people God is what’s really real, for some God is what’s most important, and for some God is what’s most mysterious. But there are also some UUs who have ideas about what’s most real and most important and most mysterious but they don’t call those things God. They use other words, like Universe, Life, or Love. In our church we each decide for ourselves which words to use and what we believe.
The stories I’m going to read were written to help kids decide for themselves what they thing about God. Here’s one of them.
Read: “Being With God in Prayer.”
Discuss:
What do you do when you have a problem?
Have you ever shared a problem with God? Did you ever get help for a problem in a dream?
What are the 3 things the story suggests we remember about prayer?
Make up a body prayer:
In the story the girl mentioned that she had seen people use their bodies in different ways when they prayed. Have you ever seen this? Let’s try some of the ways we’ve seen other people use their bodies when they pray.
Discuss what it feels like to do these different body motions. Try making up your own body movements to express a prayer. Talk about what you are “saying” with your body.
