Islamic view of angels

Angels (Arabic: ملائكة‎ malāʾikah; singular: ملاك or مَلَكْ malāk) are heavenly beings mentioned many times in the Quran and hadith. Unlike humans or jinn, they have no free will and therefore can do only what God orders them to do. Believing in angels is one of the six Articles of Faith in Islam. Just as humans are made of clay, and jinn are made of smokeless fire, angels are made of light.

Metaphorical view

The astrophysicist Nidhal Guessoum in his book "Islam's Quantum Question" has pointed to modern Islamic scholars, like Muhammad Asad and Ghulam Ahmed Parwez who have emphasized a metaphorical reinterpretation of the concept of angels. For example, Asad highlighted the following words in the Quran as evidence that the aid provided by angels in the Battle of Badr was not literal: "and God ordained this only as a glad tiding."

Angel hierarchy

There is no standard hierarchical organization in Islam that parallels the division into different "choirs" or spheres, as hypothesized and drafted by early medieval Christian theologians. Most Islamic scholars agree that this is an unimportant topic in Islam, simply because angels have a simple existence in obeying God already, especially since such a topic has never been directly addressed in the Quran. However, it is clear that there is a set order or hierarchy that exists between angels, defined by the assigned jobs and various tasks to which angels are commanded by God. Some scholars suggest that Islamic angels can be grouped into fourteen categories as follows, of which numbers two-five are considered archangels. Not all angels are known by Muslims however, the Quran and hadith only mentions a few by name. Due to varied methods of translation from Arabic and the fact that these angels also exist in Christian contexts and the Bible, several of their Christian and phonetic transliteral names are listed:

Angel (company)

Angel.com Incorporated was an American telecommunications company supplying interactive voice response, call center technology, and voice applications to businesses over the internet using the software as a service model. Angel was acquired in 2013 by Genesys and rebranded as Genesys Cloud.

History

Angel was developed by the CEO of MicroStrategy Michael J. Saylor, in 1997 as DSS Telecaster and DSS Broadcaster and were then merged into Angel.com. Moving away from the original telecaster idea, the company signed its first small business customers at the end of 2001 as a provider of hosted interactive voice response.

Angel.com was incorporated on April 30, 2008. In 2009, Dave Rennyson, former VP of Sales at Angel, was named President and COO replacing long-time CEO Michael Zirngibl. In 2011, Angel introduced Voice for Twitter Voice for Facebook, and Voice for Chatter, applications that add voice capabilities to the popular social networks and Salesforce.com's internal social network, Chatter.

Angel (Angel album)

Angel is the first album by the rock band Angel. "Tower", the keyboard-heavy opening track, was used widely during the late 1970s and early 1980s by album rock radio stations in the USA for various advertising purposes. The track is also on K-SHE radio's Classic List. This album can be seen as representing the band's early progressive roots, with Helluva Band seeing the group starting to move towards an increasingly hard rock-oriented sound. Tracks 6-8 segue to form a 10-minute mini suite.

Track listing

Personnel

References

Angel (season 5)

The fifth and final season of the television series Angel, the spin-off of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, premiered on October 1, 2003 on The WB and concluded its 22-episode season and its television run on May 19, 2004. The season aired on Wednesdays at 9:00 pm ET. This was the first and only season of Angel to air following the finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Season synopsis

Islam (disambiguation)

Islam is a major world religion.

Islam may also refer to:

People with the surname

People with the given name

See also