Islams Gifts [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Islam and Ideologies

Our world is split into two blocs. They hold contradictory ideologies, each
backed by its own scientists and savants who, in a spate of pamphlets and books,
prove it right and its opponents wrong. Each claims to be the sole sure road to
happiness, and says its adversary is the sole cause of confusion and
catastrophe.

Both cannot be right. Both may be wrong! Each may be missing a vital point.
Yet both have made large contributions to human progress through the brilliance
of some of their scientists and technologists. Progress in one field is no proof
of equal progress in every field of human life, any more than an individual's
possession of one set of talents indicates a competence in all occupations. An
outstanding physician is not ipso facto a brilliant musician! Nor does
technological advance ipso facto imply equal advance in thought, wisdom,
religion, government, morality .

Dr. Alexis Carrel writes ("Man, the Unknown" p. 27 and 28) : "The
applications of scientific discoveries have transformed the material and mental
worlds. These transformations exert on us a profound influence. Their
unfortunate effect comes from the fact that they have been made without
consideration for our nature. Our ignorance of ourselves has given to mechanics,
physics and chemistry the power to modify at random the ancestral forms of life.
Man should be the measure of all. On the contrary, he is a stranger in the world
that he has created. He has been incapable of organising this world for himself,
because he did not possess a practical knowledge of his own nature. Thus, the
enormous advance gained by the sciences of inanimate matter over those of living
things is one of the greatest catastrophes ever suffered by humanity The
environment born of our intelligence and our inventions is adjusted neither to
our stature nor to our shape. We are unhappy. We degenerate morally and
mentally. The groups and the nations in which industrial civilisation has
attained its highest development are precisely those which are becoming weaker,
and whose return to barbarism is the most rapid."

The perfection and subliminating of man in a whole series of different areas
requires a body of sound and universal teachings based on realities of human
life and free of all faults and errors. Such is only to be found in the
teachings of the prophets of God to whom revelation was granted concerning the
origins of the world's being.

Morality, to rely on sanctions higher than the natural and to be inspired by
what is beyond the material, must build solely on fundamental and basic
instructions.

From the moment that man was set upon the globe and laid the groundwork of
civilisation, a cry rose to heaven from his inward depths.

This cry we call religion. Its truth is indissolubly connected with a moral
order.

Inhumanity, faction, inequity, tyranny, war, all testify to the truth that
governments and their laws have never sufficed to control the sentiments and
beliefs and feelings of man nor to establish an order of justice, happiness,
peace and quietude in society. Science and knowledge can never solve the
problems of human life nor prevent its derailment except in alliance with
religion.

Will Durant, American sociologist and philosopher, writes in his "Pleasures
of Philosophy" (pp.326/7): '"Has a government such power in economic and ethical
matters to preserve all the heritage of knowledge and morals and art stored up
over generations and woven into the warp and woof of a nation's culture? Can it
increase that heritage and hand it on to posterity? Can a government, with all
the modern machinery at its disposal, bring the treasures of science to those
depressed classes who still think of scientific utterances as blasphemy and
witchcraft? Why is it that such small men govern America's biggest cities? Why
is our administration conducted in such a way as to make one weep over the lack
of noble policies and true patriotism? Why do corruption and deception enter
into our elections and make havoc of public property? Why has government's basic
task dwindled today to an attempt merely to prevent crime? Why do governments
not seek to understand the causes of war and the conditions of peace? Churches
and families ought to undertake the imposition of civilisation on such
governments."

Western society can only continue to tolerate moral confusion and its ways
of destruction because of its limited powers to take reform into its own hands.
But the continuation of this state of affairs already tolls a warning bell.
Peril lies close at hand, for civilisation stays stable only so long as there is
a balance between ends and means, between authority and aspiration. When this
equilibrium breaks down, such violence ensues that no goodness can stop it. It
rushes headlong to an inevitable disruption. You will find no nation throughout
human history which survived the corruption of indulgence and permissiveness.

Rome perished. The glory of Greece collapsed. France, because of the
indulgent lives of its citizens, turned soft and gave way to the first Nazi
assault. One of their most famous generals himself wrote that the reason for
their weakness was the inner erosion of character.

Spengler foresaw the downfall of Western civilisation and said that other
lands would in the future see great cultures arise. Perhaps the East will be one
of the first to return to its ancient heritage. This will not come by
worshipping at the false shrine of misguided civilisations. But the decline of
one civilisation can awaken men to the divine plan and inspire them to follow
it; and so, by means of this sublime truth, to found an entirely new social life
on sound foundations.

Islam and Nationhood

Today, alas, the symptoms of an inferiority-complex over Western industrial
prowess and its deadly consequences mark everything in Eastern nations' life.
Many a Muslim is so impregnated with Western ideas that he wishes to see
everything through Western spectacles, in the belief that progress demands
manners and morals, laws and legislation, which copy Western styles. This total
surrender welds the ring of slavery in our ears. We spread the red carpet of our
self-respect, our material and moral wealth, our religious and national heritage
of good-breeding, before their feet. This is what saps Muslim nations' strength,
both physical and spiritual. Muslims they may be: but they have lost the art of
thinking on Islamic lines, cast aside their Muslim outlook on world events,
alienated themselves from Islam's creed and culture, and want to Westernise all
Muslim ways. Mankind's greatest problems are not those which can be solved in
the laboratory.

Shall a foreign force prevent our taking our place in civilisation's
caravan? Suppose we follow neither the capitalist nor the communist trail.
Suppose perfect social justice rules the interior of our land, and wins us an
international regard, restoring our ancient prestige amongst the assembly of
national governments. Might this not save us and mankind from further horrors of
wars?

Why do we not let our religion's laws and statutes solve our internal
problems? If it can prevent us occupying the seat of a beggar at the table of
humanity, and instead install us as masters in that house to the benefit of all,
is this a small thing? Can a rich and generous giver turn beggar? Can a man born
to command turn submissive, cringe and crawl as an inferior, and give up his
right to choose the road he knows is proper?

Our inherited treasures have blessed humanity in the past. Neither West nor
East dare disregard that fact, and despise us as backward and helpless, however
much they strive to turn our confidence into confusion and our hope into
hopelessness, so that we fall easy prey. Our long experience over three thousand
years of history has left us tired. We have culled habits, thought, laws,
manners from here and there over centuries, and donned them in indiscriminate
combination, so that we make ourselves more like figures in a ridiculous
carnival procession than the dignified personalities that we should be, wearing
our own national garb with distinction and consuming our national dishes with
conscious nobility.

Take our present constitution. We first copied French models : then those of
other European nations were added ; and later, on each occasion when new
legislation was called for, sought our mould in some other place again, so that
there is an endless conflict between the spirit of the laws which we have
borrowed from outside, and the national spirit for which the laws are made. As a
result, a transgressor of the law gains national renown, hero-worship, and help
unstinted in every way. Why? Through ignorance in the community? Not so! For the
educated do not respond to the laws. No! It is the inconsistency between the
national spirit and the borrowed laws, unrelated to social needs, historical
antecedents, national consciousness, personal convictions that emerged from an
environment entirely alien to the spirit of our people. Each borrowed law came
from a community with its own history, religion, needs and peculiar realities.
Yet none of them can even give a wholly positive answer to its own people, as
continuous insurrectionary conditions show.

Professor Hocking of Harvard in "The Spirit of World Politics" writes:
"Islamic lands will not progress by merely imitating Western arrangements and
values. Can Islam produce fresh thinking, independent laws and relevant statutes
to fit the new needs raised by modern society? Yes! - and more! Islam offers
humanity greater possibilities for advance than others can. Its lack is not
ability - but the will to use it. In reality the Shar'iya contains all the
ingredients needed."

Iran's national daily "Keyhan" on 14th Dey, 1345 reported: "Yesterday,
anniversary of the martyrdom of the Imam Ali, all Tehran practised Islam's laws
100%. Result: - no crimes; forensic offices unemployed; no murders; no violence;
no ripple on the calm surface; borough officers and police untroubled by any
calls; even family quarrels within the homes were quickly hushed in reverence
for the martyred Leader of the Faithful."

The Persian "Reader's Digest" (No. 35, Year 25) corroborated this, saying.
"The average number of corpses in Tehran mortuaries on any one day of last year
was 6 - fewer of course on religious holy days and more on some other days. Last
week's anniversary (Dey 13th) of Ali's martyrdom was total peace - a proof of
the persistent strength of religious conviction, and of the calm and sanity
society attains on days when sale of alcohol is banned and amusement houses are
closed." Such is the result of Muslims practising their religion's laws for 24
hours. Could a single Western city report, if not 24 hours, even 60 minutes,
without an accident, a theft or a murder? When will mankind attain the adult
maturity to learn the simple lesson from which so easily comes the peace, the
quiet, the unity that all want? It is plain serendipity for us for, in the
poet's words,

"I round the globe in search of Heaven did roam:

Returned, and
found my Heaven was here at home."

Islam and Economics
(1)

Man has always had to wrestle with the task of exploiting nature's resources
to extract his livelihood therefrom. In the primitive centuries, as Aristotle
said, life organised itself socially "to make it possible to live: and
continued, to make it possible to live well." In the last four centuries a
"science of economics" has been deduced from the statutes regulating human
relations and the exchange of goods which developed through this social
organisation. Faced with the vast expansion of a technology and affluence, this
"science" has broken into two opposing camps.

On the one side "Capitalism" or "free enterprise" believes that nature
should take its course in economics, so that an enlightened self-interest causes
the genius of some finally to level out to the benefit of all. This is the
doctrine for which the Western bloc stands.

On the other side "Communism" holds that the means of production must be
controlled by a proletariat state, so that a just and equal sharing of all the
benefits of human endeavour is imposed on society.

The rivalry for absolute power between these two ideologies hangs over the
modern world with a menace like the sword of Damocles.

We must ask Marxists whether their "classless society" can be ensured by the
single measure of making the means of production joint property and abolishing a
moneyed class, when in fact a diversity of classes exists arising from other
than economic causes. While in Soviet Socialist Republics no bourgeois
propertied class exists, other classes distinguished by occupational and
environmental differences do exist: e.g.

factory-workers, agriculturalists, civil servants, clerks, party officials
and numberless others. Do physician and nurse receive equal pay? Or navy and
engineer?

There are yet other differences amongst people which exist in reality-
Lenin's "reality in which we have to orient ourselves." People differ in age,
sex, inclinations, tastes, physical strength, appearance, reasoning powers,
ideas and outlooks.

A Soviet economist recently wrote ("Economics" Vol. 2, p.216): "It is
impracticable to impose absolute equality right across the board. If we were to
pay professors, thinkers, politicians and inventors exactly the same as manual
workers, the only end-result would be the abolition of all incentives to
brainwork of any kind."

Capitalism claims that only by private enterprise and personal property can
an economy be achieved such that the standard of living of all classes
constantly rises and the difference between rich and poor constantly diminishes.
Against this claim must be set the report of an enquiry arranged by Walter
Reuther, President of the U.S.A. United Auto Workers Union, in his capacity as
chairman of the "American Society to Combat Hunger." This committee affirms that
ten million Americans suffer from undernourishment; and asks the president of
the republic to declare a state of emergency in 256 cities, situated in 20 of
the states, where the danger is most grave. As causes of this undernourishment,
the committee cited the aftermath of World War II coupled with a number of
defects in America's internal economy The Secretary of Agriculture took extreme
measures to purchase from abroad and commandeer from within all foodstuffs he
could lay hands on to fill the gap (UP).

We are bound to ask, therefore, how far any regime, whatever its claims, has
succeeded in equalising the classes, eliminating differences and building a
sound and just society?

Both Socialist and Capitalist regimes base their systems on theories which
are reverenced without any regard to moral and spiritual values. The aim of each
is to increase affluence, and nothing more.

Islam's philosophy reverences the whole man in his world setting. It orders
society's material behaviour and benefits, while at the same time legislating
for moral virtues, spiritual perfections, and a higher standard of living. By
this it means, not simply the material, but the mental, the spiritual, the
moral, the altruistic, the philanthropic standards which enable all men to live
each for all and all for each.

Western law supports property-rights and gives preference to those of
capitalists over those of workers. Soviet law, in their own words, exists to
strip the individual of all property rights and to extirpate capital as a
personal possession, giving preference to the workers' group throughout. Both
systems are grounded in human reasoning and judgment.

But Islam's law is grounded in Divine Revelation. Its legislation is not a
human expedient. It does not set class against class; but helps each group to
respect the excellence of other groups. Dictated by the Lord of all creatures
for the general good and for the good of all, it permits no class to lord it
over others nor allows injustice to break in. A ruler is in it only an ordinary
person with a particular set of duties, himself under law, wielding power solely
to ensure that the Divine commandments are obeyed in society. Since confidence
reigns that God's Law is sovereign, peace and quiet obtain.

Islam on the one hand opposes Capitalism's doctrine that the rights of
property-ownership lie outside the limits of state control, and its permitting
"free enterprise" to exercise aggression and tyranny of the stronger over the
weaker in an exaltation of the rights of the individual to the detriment of the
rights of society as a whole: and, on the other hand, does regard the sanctity
of property as a fundamental.

Prosperity is the stone on which independence and freedom are built within a
social order. The common good must be the regulating principle governing
personal ownership of property. Islam therefore equally opposes the Communist
total rejection of private enterprise and property, which entrusts the key of
bounty to the state, reducing the individual to so subordinate a position that
he is left with no intrinsic value in himself as a person, being regarded as a
state tool - a stomach for the state to fill and thereafter exploit, as a farmer
does his horses and cattle.

Communists hold that private property is not natural to man. They aver,
without advancing evidence to support the thesis, that the first communities of
primitive man held all things in common in cooperation, love and brotherhood,
neither did any man say that aught that he had was his own. The human
"community" started as communist with everything in common and parted to each as
his need required. The claim to personal ownership of anything, they contend,
only developed by slow degrees until it reached the terrifying excesses it
manifests in today's world.

Their utopian "Golden Age" is, alas, a pipe-dream : for the facts show that
personal ownership is not a result of the development of acquisitive tendencies
in a particular environment. Property is coeval with the appearance of man on
earth: it is as germane to human nature as all the other innate urges, and no
more to be denied than they are. Modern economists say that the universal sense
of ownership of property, which is found in every tribe on earth and in every
epoch, can only be explained if it is a primal instinct. Man wants to be the
sole master of the goods that minister to his needs, in order to feel truly free
and independent. Further, a man feels that goods which owe their existence to
the hard work of his hands are in a way an extension of himself, deserving of
the same respect as he demands for the integrity of his personality. Finally, he
feels the inner urge to build up a store to ensure his future and that of his
family, developing thereby a thrift and economy which make him lay up a
provision against a rainy day: This store he thereafter guards jealously as "his
own". The community's wealth grows with the increase in private property and
productivity, for a social unit subsists by the industry of its individual
members. The incentive to hard work lies in its rewards in personal ownership
and in increased ease of living. Wherefore society must concede to the
individual the right to own what his toil has created, since society's own
welfare is itself a product of that toil.

Islam, with its practical and realistic approach to man as he is, recognises
the importance of the urge to own as a creative factor for all social progress;
and therefore legislates to secure a man possession of all that his hand has won
for him by proper and lawful means, regarding his productivity as the guarantee
of his right to ownership.

Islam rejects the contention that oppression, exploitation and violence are
inevitable concomitants of private ownership; for they only appear where the
legislative power is held by the richest class, and by them, as in Western
lands, directed solely to the protection of their own interests. Since Islamic
Law derives solely from the supreme overarching Authority of God, it is wholly
impartial : so no law can be devised by it with the aim of protecting the rich
or injuring the poor. From its inception, Islam has recognised private property,
but always only under such conditions that violence and oppression are ruled out
of court. Islam holds that it is wrong to wrest factories out of the hands of
those who founded them and who, by patient endurance of hardship and toil, built
them up to give labour to many, goods to society, and, of course, also profit to
themselves. For Islam holds that such resort to violence in removing the means
of production from the hands of men of initiative is injurious to social
security and to respect for the rights of the individual. It discourages the
spirit of invention and initiative and enterprise. Nonetheless the government
can and should so control the administration of great industries and the
establishment of factories that social justice, equity in profit, public
benefits and the government's own finances are properly cared for.

In sum, Islamic economics gives joint primacy to both individual and
community. It equably balances the interests and rights of these two elements by
guaranteeing a free economy while safeguarding the freedom of the individual
member and the benefit of the whole community simultaneously by certain
reasonable and necessary regulations on private ownership. The urge for such
ownership it recognises as innate, and therefore germane to human nature, so
that the only limits which may be imposed upon it are those dictated by the
general interests of the whole society, which of course contains the best
interests of each single member. Islam regards the instinct to possess as an
incentive divinely implanted to inspire men to hard work for the improvement of
the means of livelihood and of their increased production: yet regulates the
expression of this incentive with conditions that obviate violence, oppression,
exploitation, extortion and other forms of misuse of freedom. These conditions
safeguard the interests of society and are limits on individual independence in
no way injurious to liberty, since both communal living and individual freedom
must impose those limits on behaviour which will guarantee the survival of both
individual and community. and must therefore outlaw profiteering, embezzlement,
malversation, hoarding, miserliness, avarice, usury, forcible seizure of other
people's property and all similar criminal and anti-social methods of amassing
capital.

Islam and Economics
(2)

Economic historians tell us that at its inception the capitalist system was
simple and beneficent : but that the habit of granting loans at interest step by
step grew to its present harmful excess. With this came the bankrupting of small
concerns and their amalgamation into huge complex companies and financial
structures. Islam labels such usury '"sin", as it does also the crises of boom
and slump inseparable from the system.

Islam has legislated for a payment of "Zakat" (the Poor Rate) of 20% on
capital gains by the rich for the support of the indigent. This helps to level
out differences, to draw economic extremes closer together and to curb excessive
piling up of wealth. Another Islamic regulation with the same aim and same
results is the government's right to tax wealth for national finances, since
Islam holds that God has put His good gifts into this world for the benefit of
all, as may be seen by the forests, reedbeds, pastures, desert lands, mountain
ranges, mines.href="islams_gifts">up

Estates, too, become public either through the intestacy of a deceased owner
or because they are paid as fines in restitution; so that they are as much the
property of all as God meant all things to be. Islam's testamentary laws also
curb undue accumulation of property in the hands of one family from generation
to generation.

The conditions, therefore, by which Islam limits its respect for the rights
of private ownership, are those which are dictated by the need to assure that
the individual's privileges never menace the wellbeing of the Islamic community.
Therefore, in emergency or disorder, the just Islamic government can employ the
legal powers put at its disposal both to avert dangers which threaten the future
and also so to administer society as to meet the needs of the Muslim masses, any
time it sees fit.

A country's land may not fall into the possession of a small handful of
proprietors. Indigence and malnutrition of the masses may not be ignored. These
points are fixed principles, frankly and firmly, faithfully and forcefully,
propounded by Islam. The Faith condemns the injurious intrusion of modem
capitalist practices into the Muslim world and bans the greed and avarice which
lead to enslavement, war and imperialism.

In the Qur'an it is written (Sura 59-"Al-Heshr"-"The Gathering of Troops"
verse 7 in part):

"The dispositions we have revealed
for the distribution of property . are ordained that capital may not merely
circulate round the group of capitalists amongst you."

In addition to the legal enactments which ensure the correct use of finances
and resources by punishing transgressions, Islam also brings entirely new
motives to bear, as our Qur'anic quotation hints, by directing men's aspirations
towards God. It therefore streamlines their conduct within the confines of the
road that leads to Him. This road has moral fences on either side over which the
aspirant desires not to stray. The road is paved with philanthropy, affection,
and sentiments of charity and self-sacrifice, which mean that no Muslim will
voluntarily be a party to courses of action which lead to injustice to others.
Thus the individual's conscience refuses to pile up excessive capital, and the
employer refuses to use tyranny or oppression to compel his workers to produce.

This lofty spiritual challenge, directed towards helping the individual come
to a knowledge of God and so to love of his neighbour, is deeply planted within
the conscience, so that a man finds his pleasures and his treasures in pleasing
his Creator; and these excel all other values for him.

In truth it is the decline of faith today, and the diminution of belief in
doomsday and judgment, which led to the greed and cupidity and maleficence and
the forms of injustice and oppression which we see around us. Unless men's
relationships are right with God, their relationships will not be right with one
another. A revolution of conscience produces a revolution in the soul, in
society, and in the world. Such is the lesson of history in practice, as well as
the doctrine of religion.

The same considerations apply to the ideology of Communism, and it will be
readily seen that Islamic lore is superior to both the Western and Eastern
materialist excesses.

Modern philosophers like William James, Harold Laski, John Strachey, Walter
Lippmann, criticise Communists' total abrogation of personal and social affairs
in favour of the state authority, saying that the individual's personality and
initiative are suffocated in such an ambience. While on the other hand
capitalist democracy over-emphasises individual freedom to the detriment of
social progress. This creates an oligarchy of the rich, making them masters of
the means of production and turning all men into slaves of economics. From
opposing angles they come to a common conclusion that individuals must impose an
inner discipline on themselves if they are to enjoy true freedom, contradictory
as that may seem, and that the welfare of society depends upon the responsible
exercise by its members of that self-disciplined freedom. What is their
conclusion other than a restatement of the doctrine which Islam has been
preaching for 14 centuries? It is time that the lessons of history, the
conclusions of the philosophers and the doctrines of religion were made the
guidelines for the conduct of men and communities everywhere.

In AD 1951 the Paris College of Law devoted a week to the study of. the
Islamic "Feqh" (Canon Law). They called in experts from Islamic lands round the
world for elucidation of particular points, e.g.:

1. Islamic Canon Law on property;

2. Conditions for filing deeds of
exchange on property to preserve the welfare of society and the public;

3.
Criminal responsibility;

4. The reciprocal influence of Islamic faith and Canon Law
on each other.

The head of the Parisian Lawyers' Society chaired the conference and summed
up at the end thus: "Whatever our earlier ideas about Islamic law and its
rigidity or incompetence in documenting transactions, we have been compelled to
revise them in this conference. Let me sum up the new insights - new I think to
most of us - the conference has given us, in this week devoted particularly to
the Feqh, Islamic Canon Law. We saw in it a depth of rock-bottom principle and
of particularised care which embraces mankind in its universality and is thus
able to give an answer to all the emergencies and events of this age. In our
final communique we say. 'Islam's Canon Law should be made one of the formative
elements of all new international legislation to meet present-day conditions,
since it possesses a legal treasure of stable universal value which fits its
Feqh, amongst the modern welter of religious views and pronouncements, to cope
with the exigencies imposed by the new forms of living arising in the modern
environment'."

* The arid sunbaked expanses
of the Islamic belt of territory which stretches from the Mauritanian Atlantic
coast nearly 6,000 miles through the Soviet Muslim Republics of the Western
Gobi, can support only a scant human population, while the paucity of vegetation
forces a nomad migratory way of life upon livestock-owners, if they are to find
pasturage. Hence our author's list of the publicly owned benefits of God's gifts
: while his omission of sunlight and rain. which are natural in the thought of
Westerners as free for all, are not mentioned because that belt has always too
much sunshine and too little rainfall (Translator's note)