ISLAMS GIFTS TO THE WORLD [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Islam and World Peace

By Sayyid Mujtaba Musavi Lari

A peace imposed by an imperialist power controlling
the masses for its own benefit is no peace. 'Divide
and Rule generates no peace. Conferences, agencies
and idealist slogans beget no peace. The U.N. Security
Council debates limitations of armaments and gets
nowhere. The Eastern bloc and the Capitalist camp both
say they want a worldsystem: but they cannot agree on its
shape. Class differences rage in both their camps. Both
err in thinking that economics is the sole cause of
divisions, and in believing that economic measures will
by themselves suffice to eradicate conflicts and
substitute peace.

For Islam, peace is only one among many ingredients in
the effective recipe for human happiness. People must be
free to think what they will as they will, to weigh all
possibilities, and. having thought them through in the
light of reason, to decide on the best way to live
together. This is the Qur'anic prescription as laid down,
for instance, in verse 256 of the Sura II (Baqara-
The Heifer) In religion is no
compulsion. Truth stands out clear from error etc.
or Sura VI: Ana'am -The cattle (verse
104): Proofs from your Lord come to you. He that
hath eyes to see, let him see. Whose will see will do so
for his soul: Whose refuses, does so against himself. I
am not your guard or warder. Or again in verse 22
of Sura LXXXVIII: Al-Ghashiyya -The
Overwhelming Events. Admonish! Thou art for
admonition, not for surveillance, of them!

Conviction and faith are matters of heart. No
compulsion can force the heart to conform. Education,
training, instruction, logic, demonstration, can help.
But whatever the lips say, the heart remains unmoved.
Even Galileo murmured. Eppure si muove
after his recantation! or so we are told. Only his lips
and his pen recanted, in effect.

Christian propagandists sedulously spread lying
reports that Muhammad forced his religion on people by
the sword. They cite the Prophet's proclamation of the Jehad,
and his raids from Medina. We have shown how false is
this misinterpretation.

What of their own religious wars and nationalist wars
and imperialist and expansionist wars? What of the
pressure brought by the Inquisition on non-Christians and
on Christians suspected of heresy? Were they better than
the Tartar barbarism of the ant-like hordes of Genghiz
and Tamurlane?

One item of the pact of Hudeibiyya made between the
Prophet and the Qureishi idolaters of Mecca read:
Any Qureishi who shall flee from Mecca without the
permission of his superior and join the Muslims and
accept Islam, the Prophet of Islam binds himself to send
him back to the Qureish. But if a member of the Muslim
forces flees to the Qureishi side, the Qureish are not
obliged to return him to the Muslims.

Some of the Muslims, rendered uncomfortable by this
clause, asked the Prophet: Why do we have to return
refugees from the Qureish while they are not obliged to
return a fugitive to us? The Prophet replied:
Any so-called Muslim who is ready to desert the
banner of Islam in favour of idolatry, and to prefer an
inhuman religion and idolatrous environment to the sound
sane environment and religion of monotheistic Islam,
simply proves that he had never entered into the
inwardness of Islam and that his faith had never been so
real as to satisfy his soul. Such are not the Muslims we
need. Whereas we are quite sure that the Lord of Heaven
will Himself take measures for the salvation of anyone
whom we may hand back to the Qureish, if he was sincere
in his flight from them.

So true was this prophecy and so shaking the series of
events which occurred amongst the Qureish on behalf of
Muslims who had been sent back to them, that in terror
the Qureish themselves very soon requested that this item
be annulled, and that no more of their refugees be sent
back to them to become conscious missionaries or
unconscious instruments of divine action in this world.

Islam condemns the territorial and commercial wars of
modern great powers, with their merciless involvements of
the innocent. Islam demands that ethical values, humanity
and respect for the rights of others, in submission to
truth and to what is right, shall be made regnant over
the thinking and living of all mankind, and insists that
until that demand is realised the world can never find
its way to peace and quiet.

The more progress technology and the material side of
civilisation makes, the more men quote the maxim
Si vis pacem, para bellum as a pretext
for an arms race not merely in quantities but also in
destructiveness, the more obvious is the truth made that
humanity stands at a crossroads of choice between mass
suicide or salvation by faith, annihilation or acceptance
of ethical principles, the brutal dictatorship of a man
or the merciful government of God. When man wakes up to
this situation - and the very horrors which face him may
themselves open his eyes - we pray that the light of
reason and of heavenly wisdom will lead him onto
'the good road, the road of those to whom God is
gracious, not the road of those who continue to grope in
darkness. It is our conviction that mankind will
choose this superior way.

On the warp of individual change Islam weaves the woof
of social structure. It brings to human living the
delicate feelings of brotherhood and of belonging
together. It designs a beautiful pattern of
longsuffering, gentleness and goodness in the hearts of
people; and omits all the ugly tears and rents and
weaknesses that injustice and the pulling and hauling of
rival interests cause in a fabric. The result is a
harmonious whole like that of the most beautiful carpet
in which every colour and shape is fully itself and the
ensemble so fitly joined together that it presents a
perfect picture.