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A Muslim ( pronounced Muslim, not Muzlim) is an adherent of the religion of Islam. The feminine form is Muslimah ( ). Literally, the word means "one who submits (to God)". Muslim is the participle of the same verb of which Islām is the infinitive. Muslims believe that there is only one God, translated in Arabic as Allāh. Muslims believe that Islam existed long before Muhammad and that the religion had evolved with time from the time of Adam until the time of Muhammad and was completed with the revelation of verse 3 of Surah al-Maeda:

This day have I perfected your religion for you, completed My favour upon you, and have chosen for you Islam as your religion.

Most Muslims consider making ritual prayer five times a day a religious duty (fard) (see the section on Ismāˤīlīs below for exceptions); these five prayers are known as fajr, dhuhr, ˤasr, maghrib and ˤishā'. There is also a special Friday prayer called jumuˤah. Currently, the number of Muslims is estimated to be 1.3 billion.

Etymology

main: S-L-M

Arabic muslimun is the stem IV participle of the triliteral S-L-M "to be whole, intact". A literal translation would be "one who wants or seeks wholeness", where "wholeness" translates islāmun. In a religious sense, Al-Islām translates to "faith, piety", and Muslim to "one who has (religious) faith or piety".

The feminine form of muslimun is muslimatun ( ).

Other words for Muslim

The ordinary word in English is "Muslim", pronounced /'mʊs.lɪm/ or /'mʌz.ləm/. The word is pronounced /'mʊslɪm/ in Arabic. It is sometimes spelled "Moslem", which some regard as offensive.

Until at least the mid 1960s, many English-language writers used the term Mohammedans or Mahometans. Many Muslims argue that the terms are offensive because they allegedly imply that Muslims worship Muhammad rather than God.

English writers of the 19th century and earlier sometimes used the words Mussulman, Musselman, or Mussulmaun. Variant forms of this word are still used by many Indo-European languages. These words are similar to the Turkish, Bosnian, Kurdish, Persian, French, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Hindi and Portuguese words for "Muslim".