Syria and Islam
I will write about my birthplace Syria. Syria is home to diverse ethnic and religious groups, for example: Arabs, Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians, Kurds, Mandeans and Turks. Religious groups also include Sunnis, Christians, Alawites, Druze, Mandeans, Shiites, Salafis and Yazidis. Sunni Arabs make up the largest population group in Syria.
Syria is located in Southwestern Asia, north of the Arabian Peninsula in the Middle East, at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. It is bordered by Turkey on the north, Lebanon and Israel on the west, Iraq on the east, and Jordan on the south. It consists of mountain ranges in the west and farther inland a steppe area. In the east is the Syrian Desert and in the south is the Jabal al-Druze Range.
The former is bisected by the Euphrates valley. A dam built in 1973 on the Euphrates created a reservoir named Lake Assad, the largest lake in Syria. The highest point in Syria is Mount Hermon (2,814 m; 9,232 ft) on the Lebanese border. Between the humid Mediterranean coast and the arid desert regions lies a semiarid steppe zone extending across three-quarters of the country, which receives hot, dry winds blowing across the desert. Syria is extensively run short, with 28 percent of the land arable, 4 percent dedicated to permanent crops, 46 percent utilized as meadows and pastures, and only 3 percent forest and woodland.
Syria is divided into fourteen governorates. The governorates are divided into a total of sixty districts, which are further divided into sub-districts. The capital Damascus is the second largest city in Syria, and the metropolitan area is a governorate on its own. Aleppo, which is my city, is the largest city in northern Syria. Al Ladhiqeyah along with Tartus are Syria's main ports on the Mediterranean sea. The area includes about 185,180 square kilometers of deserts, plains, and mountains. North of the desert ranges and east of the Al Ghab depression lie the vast steppes of the plateau, where cloudless skies and high daytime temperatures prevail during the summer, but frosts, at times severe, are common from November to March[i].
Nowadays Islam is one of the most fast spreading religion in the world with over 1 billion Muslims around the world. Islam is the belief that there is one god and only with neither a mother nor a son; God made everything and created the world in seven days. Reaching this level of belief to me makes you reach happiness and satisfaction in life. Islam derives from two Arabic words for ‘peace’ and ‘surrender’: surrender to God (the one and only) and life in peace. Islam carries the peace message in the Quran, the miracle of Islam, which was written 1400 years ago and still works and can be applied in our everyday life.
Quran for me is a way of life which I stick to with my friends at school, my family at home, and even apply to myself. Islam teaches us how to love each other, help each other, and care for each other. This is what real Islam means; it is not what we hear now on media or see as demonstrations from a specific group of people who aim to destroy the real meanings and messages Islam carries to humanity. Islam is totally not what they want people to believe about it; Islam is totally innocent of all those atrocities done in its name.
Those people basically aim at distortion of what real Islam is. Islam is the most peaceful religion on earth; it is against murder and killing and any other crime against life and morality. It is our responsibility to think carefully and find the truth before judging people according to their religion, and it is always totally dangerous and wrong to generalize and treat people according to what other people from the same religion have done!
