spoiler
It's the seal of Muhammed, used at the end of the letters he sent
That's the seal of Muhammad. I've been into flags for a long time so basically the moment Daesh started showing up in the news when I was maybe 13 or so I was already hearing about the symbolism of its flag, including that the little circular symbol was the prophet's seal, which I believe reads "Allah's prophet Muhammad" -- as opposed to the Shahada which says "Muhammad is the prophet of Allah". The reason for the flipped word order compared to the Shahada is so that Allah's name is literally above Muhammad's, which I think is pretty cool.
All in all the seal of Muhammad is a pretty striking, interesting, historic symbol, but now most non-Muslims only really associate it with Daesh or similar groups. I was at the library recently and saw a book called To søstre whose cover was literally just the seal of Muhammad in order to convey that it was a book about Daesh (specifically about two teen girls who were radicalized into joining). I thought that was a poor choice of cover, that played into basically what ignorant non-Muslims associate with the symbol rather than what the symbol actually means.
Edit: OK so the word order isn't actually reversed from that on the Shahada per se, it's just that you read the words in reverse order.
I'm currently going through something but the point I'm trying to get across is:
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It says Mohammed Rasulallah from bottom to top. It's part of the Shahada, which is the core of the Islamic faith and which people have to recite in order to become a muslim. No negative feelings about it. This font seems to be the one ISIS uses though, and I don't like them.
(But am learning Arabic so I'm not representative of non-muslims as a whole.)
Idk... all I know is it reads "Mohammed is Allah's messenger", but the font looks like Daesh made it...
I know it's something of some significance in Islam, or the culture around it, and that it was recently most prominently used by daesh but I think it has been used in other places historically as well.
As a non-Muslim, the first thing I though about was ISIS ngl
I can only recognize allah. I think the nottom says muhammad, so maybe gods messenger muhammed?
I recognize it but I don't remember why.
After spoiler: shit I really should have known that.
You recognize it because if you invert the colors it's the symbol on the Daesh/ISIS flag
Yeah not just that, my dumb ass took comparative religion so I've seen the symbol in context.
my kneejerk lizardbrain reaction would be thinking it's from ISIS, but from my prior research I know it as the seal of Islam's Prophet - which has often been co-opted by varying groups throughout the ages for varying purposes.
I'm not good at reading arabic without vowel markers but the text says Allah rasool Muhammed
Means nothing to me specifically. I think the only symbol I sort of get is the crescent moon, although I don't actually know why it's important to muslims.
When I was a kid I learned that the crescent represented the moon at the start of Ramadan, but in truth the symbol is actually pretty arbitrary and tied up in Ottoman history and not something that all Muslims even like to use.
