Signs Of Islam's Truth
ALL THESE ARE THE SIGNS OF ISLAM’S TRUTH
Although all major religions have a bit of a core of truth in them Islam has the whole lot. But there is one more merit in the body of Islam to which other religions have no credible answer: its mysticism, namely Sufism is the strongest and most ascendant among all the mystic traditions of other faiths. We will see why and how that is so in a moment.
SUFISM. Sufism is a viewpoint in Islam focusing on Islam’s subjective possibilities for the satisfaction of pious hearts whose central aim is pleasing Allah. In terms of human psychology this amounts or boils down to enjoying a constant Presence of Allah in one’s consciousness, feeling very strongly that Allah is breathing down one’s neck all the time, the breath becoming incomparably sweet when one entertains good intentions and produces good acts leading from them. The breath disappears and something evil and vile replaces it when one dares to succumb to one’s lower and darker desires and wrongful acts may not delay much as a result. In this bad state the Sufi is not entirely lost because Allah hasn’t the habit of abandoning a servant just because the servant is a bit failing himself: the servant has some credit with Allah and so long he does not fall into a too big overdraft Allah will haste to give him a rap on the wrist and wake him up to a realisation of his lapse and to repentance.
In other words Sufism is making one’s relationship with Allah a personal and loyal one which will delight Allah enough to take the servant into more intimacy with Himself both by way of making His Presence more constant, commanding and gracing and by way of introducing the servant to other friends of Allah and their accomplishments. The introductions can be in this physical world or the spiritual twin of it where all souls good or bad have an additional and timeless and sometimes also effective presence. For example the good Sufi may be rewarded with a vision and a session of companionship with another dead or living friend of Allah and ultimately that of the Prophet (S). Such experiences are not historical events but experiences in the spiritual realms of existence where the only resident is consciousness interacting with other consciousnesses in the same medium. The dead are constantly in this realm and that is why as far as the physical world is concerned they are seen as extinct for good even when their bodies are well preserved. In other words death is the separation of one’s consciousness from one’s body in an unexpected way that is difficult to imagine. It is like waking up from a dream and realising that life was a dream and that the consciousness has just moved from that world to a more real and permanent one. Both Allah’s Book and His Messeneger’s teachings verify this. But Sufi does not seek these; what he seeks is companionship with Allah here and now so that he finds Allah welcoming him there and thereafter as his most loyal friend.
Therefore o Sufi, abandon all idle and trifling concerns of this world and attend only to the opportunities this world may present for you to cultivate more and closer friendship with Allah thinking all the good thoughts and doing all the good acts and conducting yourselves most impeccably at all times. Amen.
13. MANNERS AND MORALS
PRELIMINARY REMARKS
“Man is a moral animal” is another in a series of sayings about distinguishing us from the rest of animals. And it is true again. And the cause of this distinction is again the incomparable superiority of man’s mind to other animals. The most telling element of this superiority is our imagination: all science, technology, literature, religion, morality and civilised behaviour spring from that and nowhere else. The Creator must have had qualities which had had to be the cause of these gifts in us and that must mean the reason behind the teaching in the Qur’an that He created us as His deputies on earth and the hadith that He created us in His form (suratihi). As always, these should not be taken literally but metaphorically, for Allah has no likeness anywhere among His creatures.
As for the basis of morality we identify our conscience, that control and command centre in us which develops in the course of our social experiences, especially our interactions with our parents, other relations, neighbours, friends, authority figures like teachers and the like and even total strangers. Each encourage for and discourage us from certain behaviours, some also punish or reward and a lot give advice to and set an example for us until our memory is saturated with their moral contributions and conditioned by their collective message. Cast in the all-important religion and you have a man or woman entangled in a strong web of moral influences which he or she may defy at his or her peril. The best or worst thing about this- best and worst depending on your temperament and inclinations- is that once set in stone like, this moral influences exert tremendous effects on our happiness and otherwise: break the rules of morality and you land in an inner torture chamber and satisfy the rules and you are the happiest and proudest of persons in your own eyes and often in the eyes of many others.
It is believed that the word ‘religion’ derives from the Latin verb ‘religare’ which means to tie up, to restrain. So religion means restraint, constructive self-control, piety. It should be so because religion is about regulating our thinking, feeling and behaviour by scruples designed to that end. The chief and most indispensable element or the kingpin of this regulatory system is God without which all fail to impress and work. Psychologically speaking God is the farthest horizon of what we would like to become and this explains why It is taken to heart with such total commitment, such glorious emotion and such seriousness by the truly religious. In such people (who are rather rare) ‘becoming God’ in the sense of moral perfection is an ambition no other ambition can rival even by a far margin and only such people end up either as prophets or at least saints. However prophets are born and not made and no amount of preparation and posturing can make a man a messenger of God if the right and very rare genes are not there: an impostor however he may be. These right genes became extinct after Muhammad (sws), a fact amply borne out by all historical evidence so far. To this effect Allah said:
“We indeed sent Noah and Abraham and put among their offspring the Scripture and prophecy although a lot of them have strayed away (57: 26)
“Muhammad is not the father of any of your men but the Messenger of Allah and the Seal (the last and final one) of the prophets. Allah has been Knower of all things” (33: 40).
Why prophets ended with Muhammad? History gives the answer: since him, times have increasingly brought science forward for men, who have been learning about things and finding their way by additional means, additional to faith. Not that science can ever replace religion as man’s compass: religion is an instinct as strong at least as scientific curiosity; what is more it deals with a issue science has hardly room for or competence in. In fact religion itself is a science in the sense that it is the science of our those inner states which have a bearing on our moral development and spiritual ennoblement and existential consolation. As such it is the most comprehensive and nutritious of mental foods and a lack of it must have some regrettable consequences for even the most hard-headed and hard-nosed men. I have seen gangsters breaking down miserably at the funeral of their children and begging for religious consolations from around them and going home deeply in thought, crest-fallen and chastened. Some, though a minority, never ‘recovered’ and ended up as regulars or semi-regulars of congregational worship as well as philanthropists.
Death is the greatest challenge to man’s ignorant pride as it is the greatest equaliser. For most, death is the greatest fact causing them to seek for answers and beg for a Power Which or Who shall remove its terror. This fear is put to the very best use by religion: it is converted into purest moral gold.
THE UNBREAKABLE LAW OF PSYCHOLOGY
Since time immemorial men observed that to control behaviour reward and punishment need be used with consistency and discrimination until the lessons are internalised by or became internal controls of the subject himself whose control is sought. Children are raised like that and so can adults be sculpted into more social citizens. This mechanism works equally well in animals in whose case the term ‘carrot and stick’ is coined which then has been extended to men.
Governments control us similarly; normally the authorities treat us well when we obey their rules and bad when we do not. The taxman deals with us in a polite and helpful way when he sees that we are honest and forthcoming in our presentation of our financial affairs and becomes critical and irritated when we are not. Same with the police: when a citizen is respectful and apologetic about an instance of him breaking a law the policeman normally responds equally respectfully and sometimes lets the citizen off with a mild warning while if the offender puts up an arrogant and disrespectful defence or, even worse, verbally or physically attacks the policeman he is in for great trouble- he may end up behind the bars in fact. If he has sense he learns from the experience and tries to behave better next time. More interestingly once he learns and warms up to better behaviour he begins to criticise and disdain others who behave badly as he was behaving before. What happened? Why, the man internalised his experience and made it another brick in the building up of a conscience, his inner censoring authority. Now please hear this: real civilisation is based on a conscience in people so that less and less laws and external checks become necessary.
Obviously for law to create a conscience, legal punishments are indispensable: law that does not punish stops being persuasive. Another defect of law in civilising people is that it does not provide enough rewards to balance its image as a punisher. Law has no emotional content and emotions are the real tools in the building of conscience in people. Here religion cuts in and takes or should take over.
Religion sentimentalises morality and therefore can find a willing ally in people’s hearts. When a prophet or similarly motivated and capable preacher moralises on sentimental lines, people, at least those large numbers who have sensitive hearts can be enough moved emotionally to review and modify their values and behaviours. Read if you wish:
“No doubt in this (message the Qur’an) is a powerful reminder (of his responsibilities) for one who does have a heart and gives ear and has the presence of mind” (50: 37), or “When they hear what was sent down on the Messenger you see their eyes flow with tears because of the truth they recognise and they say ‘Our Lord, we believe this, therefore please write us alongside the witnesses” (5: 83).
In this context it is too well known how religion achieves the build-up of a sensitive conscience in true believers: it employs appeals to emotions among which fear and hope are the most fundamental and constant. In other words religion has been the oldest and most methodical educational vehicle to build up an effective conscience in man and in achieving this it freely employed, among other things, this unbreakable law of psychology. We can only neglect this law to our peril.
THE PATHETIC CASE OF SECULAR MORALITY
The West, at least as from the Middle Ages, has been gripped in the spasm of extremism in the sense that people and their issues are seen in extremes like black and white. From the acceptance or imposition of Christianity in the extreme form of what West had made of it to the cataclysms of the French, Soviet and Fascist revolutions almost the last two thousand years of the West has been a story of extreme views and movements fighting opposite extreme views and movements. As far as religion is concerned it in the end lost to secularism and since then, having learnt and put to its place it is licking its wounds and trying to appease secularism by being a good girl in the middle of many secular sisters of modern issues. Let it try to reassert herself and hell may break loose.
Schools, especially the public lead the anti-crusade against religion. I taught part time in many British schools and colleges until relatively recently and have not yet meet a single teacher I have had some familiarity with to have a positive opinion about religion. I did not hear anybody whether pupil or teacher utter the word ‘God’. The word is almost obscene while what are called four-letter words are more than commonplace at least among the pupils of both sexes.
With religion in such low profile existence and sharp and apparently irreversible decline what do you think is taking its place if anything?
Well, anything and many things but still all these replacements bear the psychological features of religious faith- stated in absolute terms, obedience is demanded and against rivals fighting to death- so to speak- embraced. It seems ‘black or white’ or fight to death extremism is surviving from the Christian days having been firmly embedded in the cultural genetics of the West.
Beginning with the most popular issue of the Westerners since the advent of Christianity from about two thousand years, namely sex, one of the new battles is being waged between normal hetero- and aberrant homosexuality. Not that the latter was ever absent in the West or for that matter anywhere else- homosexuality has always been a universal aberration thanks to the equally universal ban on marrying too early in the face of economic difficulties awaiting the too young. In the face of this dilemma religions sought to impose sexual self-discipline for each and every age and sex group in forms peculiar to each. Sex before and outside marriage was taboo and banned. The pressures of sexual frustration were dealt with by ameliorations and consolations from moral and spiritual habits and beliefs. Apparently these worked on most people; breakers of the taboos were far less than today when we find very many people reject the taboos to begin with. Taboos were also buttressed by legal sanctions and bodily punishments prescribed under them. Such taboos have been universal but nowhere and at no time they have been as extremist or lax as under the Western civilisation: until a century ago they were taken very seriously here while nowadays they could not be treated with more contempt or broken with more relish.
For example, we are told that incest takes place in one of three British homes. People are becoming so sexually shameless that defies belief. In one school, while in the class supervising pupils one girl of about fifteen told me point blank that she loved very much to have sex with her brother while others who heard her could not care less! Many were drawing obscene drawings and caricatures and waving the same at each other without being worried at all that I was there. Then our media report and ‘worry’ about the explosion in sexual abuse of children (all below 16 are regarded as children!), the rapid spread of proliferating venereal illnesses, prostitution and crimes related to sex and its exploitation ignoring the fact that they themselves (especially the tabloids and most glossy magazines) have themselves a lot to answer for. Who can fail to observe the total reversal of attitudes towards sex in the West, namely from that of pious Christian demonization of it to its total liberation and vulgarisation when even incest becomes almost innocent if not legal yet? With birth control so easily and universally available this last fading taboo may soon be history! From where to where! What an exchange of extremes!
Taboos on lying, cheating, stealing etc remain. That at least is a consolation. What is forgotten however is that morality, if based on anything, is based on self-control. The issues on which self-control is necessary are legion and each such issue to be important needs the reasons for it to be investigated. Why sexual self-control is important? At least for two reasons- one, preservation of the health of the sexually capable individual and two, the preservation of both physical and mental health of all other persons who may be involved with him sexually or be affected by his sexual acts consequences, like becoming pregnant by and being born of it. Even totally consensual unmarried sex is very dangerous, especially when either too near relations or else total strangers are involved. The first destroys for good any remaining honour and respect between the incestuous couple on top of the totally unacceptable prospect of a child from it since it has a very high likelihood of genetic degeneration, especially in the slightly longer run. Habitual inbreeding among many races, despite the relations of first degree being excluded leads to genetically problematic offspring as all geneticists know. In commercial and research applications on species other than human this may be acceptable but not on humans since our general good as a human society necessitates as good a breeding policies as we can get. In other words if we do not want the equivalents of dog types like the bulldog, the terrier or the Dalmatian among humans with some tall as electric poles while others as tiny as chimpanzees we need genetically compatible individuals to be involved and healthy and rather uniform quality children to be born. When we have free sex on top of unmarried we open the floodgates to genetic degeneration on top of all the other risks from VD proliferation to many crimes from prostitution to abuse and rape and incest. And all these are facts today, only too much so. Add to these, abortions from the morning-after pill to bloody removal of a baby halfway advanced in foetal development just because the sex was wanted while the product not.
Obviously secular morality is not working and actually many acts allowed under it are anything but morally sound. As we already pointed out morality is about self-control in the face of risks to our society and secular morality is far more about self-indulgence than the control. Lastly true human greatness itself depends on adequate self-control and the present secular mode of morality can only produce more moral dwarfs and lepers as evidenced by soaring crimes and shames among all classes of our society and the prisons bursting at their seams with the result that many offences requiring custodial sentences are waived thanks to the lack of prison places. Bravo to the secular morality.
Before we leave this subject an observation on the habits of history may be in place: time and again we find the material success of a society leading them to drop their standards of morality and increasingly switch to self-indulgence as a result of which they go downhill morally while others hungrier and more virile at the wings build themselves up to become imperially ambitious and capture the ground from under the feet of the society – the self-indulgent have-beens. Historically the upcoming races are called barbarians and it is the barbarians who eventually win only to repeat the mistake. Nowadays the Pacific basin is the upcoming ‘barbarian’ climate slowly but surely capturing the ground from under the feet of the West. Japan has already done its bit while China and India, for example, seem to be the near future masters of the world. Soon blood may flow in the streets of the West, I mean economic decline and social chaos while the Pacific nations and India begin to attain the higher status.
Because secular morality arose as a reaction to religious morality it began denigrating many of the moral precepts and prescriptions of religious morality and took an especial satisfaction in rejecting its sexual morality. This surely betrayed the main basis of proposed secular morality: liberalisation of sexual conduct! Such a desire was surely based on indiscriminate and irresponsible sexual lust as amply and unambiguously proven in practice- that of the breaking down all taboos of the past irrespective of their any merits. But because the revolutionaries could not advance as fast and as comprehensively as they would like they acted gradually and selectively choosing to break this taboo today and another tomorrow and when confronted too dangerously pay lip service to any surviving and too strongly defended taboos until such time the immune system of the traditional morality began to break down in that area as well.
Increasingly obscene novels and other products of arts, two-step-forward-one-step-back tactics in literature and the media (initially the press and print), subversion of school curricula as well as costumes (in a school I was teaching decades ago girls were made to shorten their skirts until their legs a few inches above knees were constantly exposed to the delight of the boys while sports shorts gradually shrunk from slightly above knee well into the groins, i.e, ending up almost as bikinis! Why this was pressed for is anybody’s guess. Then sex lessons were made universal and experiments among pupils and some among teacher and pupil began to proliferate. While the old-fashioned police under old-fashioned laws continued to pursue and prosecute adults using ‘underage’ girls for sex underage boys and girls were not only left free to use each other but helped with pills and abortions without questions asked. If this was not a cynical and ruthless drive to rubbish and discard all the mostly useful sexual taboos of the past and leave people to act less responsibly and carefully than lower animals what it was? We here in the West fell in a position where all girls above a certain age, say 12 upwards are routinely invited to subject themselves to cervical smear and other tests as epidemic tendencies undulate lest they remain undetected and get cancers! Add to this the constant taking of the pill or use of the urged condom and the proliferating venereal illnesses topped by AIDS and evaluate the balance sheet to see whether all this impious fuss, this sexual fascism masquerading as sexual liberation has been worth all the cost so far incurred. National fertility rates are plummeting, one-parent families often created by promiscuous practices are soaring while prostitution, instead of dying out being replaced by consensual sex is making an unprecedented comeback in the form of false industries like escort agencies, sauna and massage salons and lastly plain if concealed brothels which work like copulation moving belts.
All such corrupt needs and diversions necessitate more and more money, as drugs and other abuses do, and to afford such filthy and slovenly luxuries money crimes are soaring alongside other forms of crime. Bank accounts are being milked on the internet, cash machines defrauded and even removed in total to empty them and fraudulent health and ‘beauty’ products are swamping both the internet and the mail order. More and more luxurious homes, cars and holidays are being pursued by more people as standards of higher social status and sense of self-worth. To satisfy the demand for those ever-proliferating demands and tastes, production and provision amounts must keep pace with them which in turn contribute to the nowadays much deplored global warming and general deterioration of the environment. Whole species are being wiped out while most are being modified in dangerous ways. All for what? All for the satisfaction of that utterly un-satisfiable human flesh!!!
This unstoppable social and environmental evolutionary catastrophe is all because of this wrong re-enactment of the adventure of Prometheus who was rebelling against wrong and false gods, unlike the true God of our world’s three great monotheisms Who is all about decency, responsibility, self-control, justice and charity and all the rest of all such time-honoured values and institutions. That the flesh can never be satisfied except temporarily and in a very fragile way is explicit from the verse:
“Beware that only by the inner celebration of Allah hearts can find lasting satisfaction” (13: 28). True religion must make a good comeback or our future is very much in danger. And that true religion can only be Islam simply because it is Islam which both retains all the best in other religions and adds to them all that is good which have been missing or corrupted in them. Amen.
MORAL ENCOURAGERS AND DISCOURGERS OF RELIGION ARE INDISPENSABLE
Both Allah and His Messenger (S) prolifically employed encouraging and discouraging messages to satisfy the unbreakable law of psychology. Some threats were meant to be potentially operational in this world while some others were reserved for the Hereafter which did not made them less effective as far as believers were concerned. What distinguishes Divine punishments and rewards from the profane is the fact that the Divine is always just and God is always above error and blame. Hence the Muslim saying “The finger the Law of God cuts will not hurt”. This of course means that the culprit will at least have the consolation that he had not only deserved it but it was definitely going to help him in the Hereafter. Not that we want anybody to be punished even by God in either this world through servants He allowed to rule and implement the punishments nor in the hereafter. However since punishment is part and parcel of each regime be it religious or secular, so long as it remains, it better-off be Divinely prescribed. Some Divine penal prescriptions are more severe than some modern equivalents but they are also more waivaeable.
Both Allah and His Messenger gave every indication that their threatened punishments are more about scaring than implementing and quite a few convicted under the Prophet (S) were encouraged to invent excuses and express regret and get away with the offence on the basis of sincere repentance. If things went as far as the actual punishment being inflicted the Prophet’s sadness and grief were to be seen to be believed. All good governments and their good judges throughout the history of Islam saw and emulated the Prophet’s avoidance of severe corporeal and especially capital punishments- it is said that throughout the reign of the Ottoman Empire which lasted more than six centuries the number of adulterers stoned to death or thieves whose hands were amputated did not exceed the number of fingers on a hand or two. Otherwise these offences were not too rare and if the sanctions were applied strictly the numbers punished could run into many thousands. Lastly our rulers occasionally banned the application of such drastic punishments on many grounds. We know that great Umar who ruled for ten years after Abu Bakr’s two, suspended all amputations on the grounds that Islam was expanding too fast for every new convert to perfect himself and if amputations were carried out Muslims could not find enough able men to serve Islam. Since then a rule to the effect that Muslim government can suspend corporeal and capital punishments if they will harm the interests of Muslims as a whole as well as a political entity was installed. All later great Islamic governments have been careful about it since, until modern revolutionary self-styled mullahs emerged.
Lastly, it is easy and fashionable to disparage Islamic Law on the grounds that some of its penal provisions are ‘barbaric’. They surely look like that in our age- but let us look more carefully at the modern penal codes and practices originating in the secular and increasingly permissive west.
Here we are having an ever escalating numbers of serious and often also violent crime and criminals committing them. Now let us make a balance sheet of loss of life and limb in the West and what those numbers could be under a mature and discriminating Islamic rule. Which is better- having 100 murderers in each year on the average who are responsible for 150 deaths and 500 woundings or having only 2 murderous criminals who between them killed three and maimed 6? Which comes cheaper in every sense?
Why secularist modernists are so much against capital and other bodily punishments? I suspect that they themselves devoid of serious self-control while too full of a desire to avoid death are perhaps subconsciously trying to ensure that should they somehow kill somebody they are spared capital punishment. In other words modern paranoid death-evaders are prepared to allow serious and occasionally lethal crime victim numbers to climb fifty fold instead of remaining very low thanks to the deterrence provided by stronger penal provisions. Not a conscientious choice.
The falsity of the scruples about human life in the case of punishing very bad criminals by death penalty is given away when it comes to shooting the suspected potential criminals. A very sad and scandalous case is the shooting of a totally harmless middle-aged man by police about some years ago. Police explained that they received information that the man was carrying a long gun in a bag and was on his way to commit a murder. They duly spotted the poor chap; he was walking leisurely and nonchalantly a black refuse bag in his hand in which was a broken table leg he was taking for repairs. Without asking a single question let alone challenging him properly they shot him dead there and then. They were not punished for even manslaughter but just mildly disciplined. More recently, in the atmosphere of hysteria brought about by terrorist bombings on the part of self-styled Muslim fighters police lost so much nerve that not properly investigating a reported threat to the London underground system they pursued and shot dead a totally innocent electrician.
So, capital punishments are still on but for far less scruples. In both cases the policemen involved were not too much inconvenienced let alone punished. Nor in such cases definite and adequate financial compensation is an automatic entitlement as is the case in Muslim law. Long and labyrinthine inquiries and inquests are to be carried out and the High Court have to be involved to grant a paltry amount to the family of the victim at hundred times the cost of the said procedures to the public purse. In what way such confused and confounding policies and procedures are superior to Islamic Law in dealing with criminals and victims of crime is to be wondered about. Officials involved usually get away lightly; apparently when it comes to its own, law looks after them well. Where is this cavalier attitude to citizens’ lives and where is the extremely cautious and compassionate attitude towards the likes of serial killers, rapists and robbers and even unspeakable terrorists whose ‘human rights’ come before the rights for compensation and vengeance of their victims. Mind you, vengeance is not a crime or luxury- it is a healing device all animals and men are entitled to if they feel like they must have it. If that is not the case why victims and their families and friends and in fact the whole decent public feel somewhat relieved when their oppressor is sent behind the bars for a long stay. What is more, if the culprit has any humanity left in him he also will feel sadly satisfied- “I brought it on myself”.
All in all pitying the wrong person while treating the victims as faceless statistics is no humanism but demonism wearing an unconvincing human mask. Allah said “In retaliation there is life for you” (2: 179) meaning that it saves more lives and limbs in the long run although the actual victim’s or his relations’ waiving the retaliation is also encouraged which then can be transmuted to financial compensation. But the threat should stay there and has to be at least occasionally implemented. But again, a Muslim government can suspend corporeal punishments indefinitely when it thinks it is in public interest and in the present age this may be the case. Allah knows best.