ISLAMS GIFTS TO THE WORLD [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Islam and Ideologies

Islam and Nationhood

obligations by the force of morality and faith, even in
matters where he is seen by no one save by God alone.
Armed force is only needed to control the tiny minority
of criminal-minded hypocrites. Islam thus pays due regard
both to inner purity of heart and to outward purity of
action. It calls those deeds good, laudable and
meritorious which spring from sincerity and faith.

USA's Attorney General, in his introduction to his
book on Islamic Law , wrote: American law has only
a tenuous connection with moral duty. An American may be
accounted a law-abiding citizen even though his inner
life is foul and corrupt. But Islam sees the fount of law
in the Will of God as revealed to and proclaimed through
His Apostle Muhammad. This Law: this Divine Will, treats
the entire body of believers as a single society,
including all the multifarious races and nationalities
which go to make it up in a far-scattered community. This
gives religion its true sound force and makes it the
cohesive element of society. No bounds of nationality or
geography divide, for the government itself is obedient
to the one supreme authority of the Qur'an. This leaves
no place for any other legislator,. so that no
competition or rivalry or rift can arise. The believer
regards this world as a vale of soul-making, the
ante-room to the next : and the Qur'an makes perfectly
plain what are the conditions and laws which govern
believers' behaviour to each other and towards society;
and thus makes the changeover from this world to the next
a sure and sound and safe transition.

Despite Westerners' small acquaintance with Islam, and
their often mistaken ideas, far removed from reality, a
comparatively large number of their thinkers grasp some
of the depth and profundity of Islamic teaching and do
not conceal their admiration for its clear exegesis and
estimable doctrines.

A Muslim scientist's respect for Islam's laws and
ordinances is no surprise. But if a non-Muslim savant,
despite his slavery to his own religious bigotry, yet
recognises Islam's grandeur and greatness and its lofty
leading, that is a real tribute, especially when it is
based on a recognition of the progressive nature of
Islam's legal systems and their legacy to mankind. This
is why this book quotes foreign verdicts on Islam. We do
so, not because we need their support, but because they
can help to open the road for seekers and enquirers so
that who reads may run its way.

Dr. Laura Vacciea Vaglieri, Naples University
professor, wrote: In the Qur'an we come across
jewels and treasures of knowledge and insight which are
superior to the products of our most brilliant geniuses,
profound philosophers and powerful politicians. How can
such a book be the product of the brain of a single man -
and that of a man whose life was spent in commercial, not
particularly religious, circles - far removed from all
schools of learning? He himself always insisted that he
was in himself an ordinary simple man like other men,
unable, without the help of the Almighty to produce the
miracle of such work. None other than He whose knowledge
compasses all that is in heaven and earth could produce
the Qur'an.

Bernard Shaw in his Muhammad, Apostle of
Allah said: I have always held the religion
of Muhammad in the highest esteem simply from the marvel
of its living vigour. To my mind it is the sole religion
capable of success in mastering the multifarious
vicissitudes of life and the differences of culture. I
foresee (it is manifest even today) that, man by man,
Europeans will come to adopt the Islamic faith. Mediaeval
theologians for reasons of ignorance or bigotry pictured
Muhammad's religion as full of darkness, and considered
that he had cast down a challenge to Christ in a spirit
of hatred and fanaticism. After much study of the man, I
have concluded that Muhammad was not only not against
Christ, but that he saw in Him despairing mankind's
saviour I am convinced that if a man like him would
undertake leadership in tile new world, he would succeed
in solving its problems, and secure that peace and
prosperity which all men want.

Voltaire, who at the beginning was one of Islam's most
obdurate opponents and poured scorn on the Prophet, after
his 40 years of study of religion, philosophy and history
frankly said: Muhammad's religion was
unquestionably superior to that of Jesus. He never
descended to the wild blasphemies of Christians, nor said
that one God was three or three Gods were one. The single
pillar of his faith is the One God. Islam owes its being
to its founder's decrees and manliness; whereas
Christians used the sword to force their religion on
others. Oh Lord! if only all nations of Europe would make
the Muslims their models.

One of Voltaire's heroes was Martin Luther. Yet he
wrote that Luther was not worthy to unloose the
latchets of Muhammad's shoes. Muhammad was a great man
and a trainer of great men by his example of virtue and
perfection. A wise lawgiver, a just ruler, an ascetic
prophet, he raised the greatest revolution earth has
seen.

Tolstoi wrote: Muhammad needs no other claim to
fame than that he raised a barbarous bloodthirsty people
out of their diabolical customs to untold advances. His
Canon Law with its intelligence and wisdom will come to
be the world's authority.

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.