MEANING OF ISLAM AND MUSLIM

The Quran

This day [the day of the Prophet's 'Farewell Address' on
which the last verse of the Quran was revealed] have I
made perfect for you your religion, and have completed
My favour towards you, and am satisfied with Islam for
you as your religion. -- V:3

Do not dispute with the people of the Book [Jews,
Christians, Sabeans], unless it be in a way that is
better, save with such of them as do wrong; and say: We
believe in that which has been revealed unto us, and
revealed unto you; our God and your God is One, and unto
Him we surrender. -- XXIX:46

Muhammad Asad, The Message of the Quran

. . . the Quran cannot be correctly understood if we read it
merely in the light of later ideological developments, losing
sight of its original purport and the meaning which it had - and
was intended to have - for the people who first heard it from the
lips of the Prophet himself. For instance when his contemporaries
heard the words islam and muslim, they understood them as denoting
man's "self-surrender to God" and "one who surrenders himself to
God," without limiting himself to any specific community or
denomination - e.g., in 3:67, where Abraham is spoken of as having
"surrendered himself unto God" (kana musliman), or in 3:52 where
the disciples of Jesus say, "Bear thou witness that we have
surrendered ourselves unto God (bianna musliman)." In Arabic, this
original meaning has remained unimpaired, and no Arab scholar has
ever become oblivious of the wide connotation of these terms. Not
so, however, the non-Arab of our day, believer and non-believer
alike: to him, islam and muslim usually bear a restricted,
historically circumscribed significance, and apply exclusively to
the followers of the Prophet Muhammad. -- Foreword, p. vi

Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Science & Civilization

In its universal sense, Islam may be said to have three levels of
meaning. All beings in the universe, to begin with, are Muslim,
i.e. "surrendered to the Divine Will." . . . Secondly, all men who
accept with their will the sacred law of the revelation are Muslim
in that they surrender their will to that law. . .

Finally, we have the level of pure knowledge and understanding. It
is that of the contemplative, the gnostic . . . The gnostic is
Muslim in that his whole being is surrendered to God; he has no
separate individual existence of his own. -- p.23 (Http://media.isnet.org/)