Western Civilization Through Muslim Eyes

Sayyid Mujtaba Musavi Lari - XKP

Published: 2012
Tag(s): islam xkp industry economics racism race jehad war lari mujtaba ali civilization muslim west western childhood life europe iran map

Chapter 1 FOREWORD

By

HAJ ABU'L-FAZL HAZEGHI

Sayid Mujtaba Musawi Lari was born in AHS 1314 (AD 1934) in Lar, capital of the southern Iranian province of Laristan. Both his father, Sayid Ali Asghar Musawi, and his grandfather Haj Sayid Abdulhussein Musawi, were amongst the most eminent scholars in Islamic theology. Sayid Abdulhussein was also one of the great revolutionaries at the inception of Iran's struggle to throw off the tyranny of the Qajars and start ber Fogress towards the freedom and prosperity upon which she is now entering.

Our author studied in the schools of Lar, following the classical programme of education, and also undertaking specialist Islamic studies.

In his eighteenth year be moved to the holy city of Qum, famous for its golden- domed mosque which houses the shrine of the daughter of the Imam Musa al- Kazem, Fatima al- Ma'sume, who died there in AD 816, while she was on her way to visit her brother the Imam Ali-ar-Reza at Tus. At Qum he pursued his studies of Islamic theology for ten years, by which time he had attained the very highest grade.

Unfortunately the water of Lar which in those days was unrefined and carried a high level of pollution, had infected him with serious digestive disorders that resisted all attempts at cure in Iran. Finally, at the age of twenty-nine, on the recommendation of his doctors, he went into hospital in Germany. A prolonged stay in that country under medical care failed to eradicate his ailments. But, with the courage that many who suffer from a partial physical disability manifest, he has risen above the infirmity and devoted his great talents of intellect, patriotism and dedication to the service of his country.

Works of his already published in the Persian language include:
1. A Survey of Moral and Spiritual Problems.
2. Western Civilisation seen through Muslim Eyes.
3. The Role of the Moral Factor in Human Evolution.

These books were received with such enthusiasm that three editions of each have already appeared.
He has been a regular contributor to the monthly review published by Qum Islamic leaders, "The Maktab-i-Islam", as well as to many other periodicals dealing with Islamic principles. He has initiated the foundation of a number of public institutions; and enjoys such great public confidence that large numbers have rallied to his aid in the creation of these foundations. They include schools, health clinics, centres for religious training, and mosques, most of these in his native city of Lar. He also organised a charitable trust to help the needy, the sick, orphans and indigent students. Many lives have been saved by these efforts of his, and many people have been helped to advance both their own lives and those of people for whom they were responsible because of the assistance given them by this trust.

The family came originally from Dezful in Iran's southwest province of Khuzistan. Sayid Mujtaba's grandfather, Haj Sayid Abdulhussein, took up the fight for Iran's freedom which originated in those parts of the country. The movement forced the Qajar ruler, Muzaffar-ud-Din, to accept a democratic constitution in December 1905. The National Assembly opened for the first time in October 1906 and drew up a Constitution which was signed and ratified both by the Shah Muzaffar-ud-Din and by his son and heir, Muhammad Ali Shah, who succeeded his father in January 1907. The new Shah, however, was far from welcoming his people's forward march towards liberty, and unwisely showed his hand at his coronation by refusing to invite the National Assembly Deputies. He also encouraged his Viziers in their refusal to appear before the Assembly and answer questions. The newly kindled flame of freedom burst into a furnace of belligerent outrage.

Haj Sayid Abdulhussein, already the inspirer of a great following not only throughout Khuzistan but also Laristan and Fars, the two neighbouring provinces, raised a thousand guerilla fighters from the area, many of them from my own town of Jahrom, and with them joined the march on Tehran against the despotism which was seeking in its own interests to keep the Iranian people in the chains of feudalism. A bloody struggle ensued in which the Shah did not hesitate to employ guns and cannon against his own subjects.

On November 12th 1907 Muhammad Ali Shah for the fourth time swore fidelity to the Constitution in the Assembly. But on December 15th he threw the Prime Minister, Naser-ul-Mulk, into prison, from which the British Legation promptly rescued him. The national rage forced the Shah to take the most solemn oath available, by sending a sealed Qur'an with an oath to observe the Constitution, thereby exposing himself as a proved perjurer. But he was still not dethroned, a fact which Sir Percy Sykes attributes to the recently signed Anglo-Russian agreement, in which each power assigned to the other "a sphere of influence" in Iran. But in February 1908 a bomb was thrown at the Shah's motor-car. In June he established martial law, and on June 23rd ordered his mercenary brigade of Cossacks to attack the freedom leaders gathered in the Assembly building behind the Sepah-Salar mosque and the Beharistan Square in front of it. However, in July 1909 a great force from the southwest led by the Bakhtiaris captured Tehran and compelled Muhammad Ali Shah to abdicate on July 16th. In this triumph the guerilla force from Fars led by Haj Sayid Abdulhussein played a valiant part.

Sayid Abdulhussein's great influence was due not only to his learning and piety, which had earned him the position of a Mujtahed, highest grade of the Shia' Ulema, but also to his civic services. For soon after the turn of the century he set up a local government in Laristan, presided over by an executive body amongst the members of which were prominent religious personalities; and under his presidency this body protected his fellow citizens from injustices at the hands of arrogant feudalist landlords. He forbade the people to pay taxes demanded by the central government or by the official provincial government. People gladly gave contributions to support whatever expenses his new independent administration required. He even printed special postage stamps in the name of "the Laristan Government". These are now great rarities highly prized by collectors.

After the successful coup d'état of 1909, and Muhammad Ali Shah's abdication in favour of his son the twelve-year-old Sultan Ahmad Shah, Sayid Abdulhussein returned to his task with the Laristan government and performed many further services for his people.

Local feudalistic opposition against him rose to increasing heights of virulence. In the midst of this the people of the town of Jahrom invited 8aj Sayid Abdulhussein to leave Lar, which he had chosen as his administration centre, and move to their city, which is also my own j native home. He accepted the invitation, withdrew from Lar and was given a most warm and respectful welcome in Jahrom.

There he became the accepted religious leader. He inspired a large , circle of youth to practise all that a profound faith in God and desire to serve their country would demand. He encouraged many in the study of theology. His public services in the mosque on Fridays drew thousands to hear his eloquent preaching and to join in his fervent prayers.

As a child I was one of those who most eagerly participated in these services. I can still see the huge crowds which gathered for them; and remember the large numbers that followed him back to his house to talk over lunch, a meal which had from early morning kept numbers of cooks busy in a huge kitchen to prepare for so many.

On his death there was no one in Jahrom who failed to be present at the services of mourning and of memorial held in all the mosques and theological colleges. For three days the bazaar was closed, and business was at a standstill out of respect for his memory.

He left three sons: Sayid Abdulmuhammad; Sayid Ali Akbar; and Sayid Ali Asghar Musawi, our author's father born in 1907 in Lar. Sayid Ali Asghar attended theological college in the city of Najaf, scene of the martyrdom of the Imam Ali's sons in Iraq, where he attained the highest degree in theology. From thence he returned to Lar where he remained.

The second brother, Sayid Ali Akbar, accompanied his father to Jahrom and set up his home there. The eldest son, Sayid Abdulmuhammad, set up his house in Shiraz, where he died, lamented by all, in 1973.

Sayid Ali Asghar was a great leader-not only in the people's religious, but also in their social and political life. A faithful guide, a wise leader, a skilful organiser of welfare organisations, he was a great help to the nee a brave fighter against injustice. He taught his disciples; he ran many charities; he wrote a number of valuable works : of these perhaps the most important was 'Mankind's Need of Prophets and Religious Leaders" of which I had the honour of undertaking the publication just after my first election as representative of the people of Jahrom in Iran's Parliament nearly 30 years ago. He did my wife and me the honour of making our home his own whenever he came from Jahrom to stay in

Tehran for a period. He was of such a compelling faith, infectious integrity and bounteous quality of life that we always loved to be with him, and greatly grieved when he passed away. He now lies buried beside his father in Jahrom.

But he has left us a priceless heritage not only in our memories of him and in his own writings, but also in the fruits of the marvellous training he gave his children; of whom the author of this present book, Sayid Mujtaba, is the eldest. Readers of this book will see the great width of Sayid Mujtaba's reading, the meticulousness of his observation the profundity of his judgement, the penetration of his understanding of human beings and of society, and the wisdom of his counsels for the future welfare of men and nations.

This book is a worthy tribute, and will I am sure, draw the same sort of attention as that which is given by the crowds who flock every Thursday evening and Friday morning to pay their respects at the shrine of his grandfather and father where they lie buried in Jahrom. These tombs and their sanctuary are safeguarded by a Vaqf, or charitable foundation, entrusted with funds to keep the shrine in perfect order for pilgrimage.

It was Sayid Mujtaba's own personal request that Mr. Francis Goulding, whose acquaintanceship with Iran goes back some 47 years should translate this book and so make it available for reader in that Western civilisation whose features are so artistically, often amusingly, and always interestingly, drawn by the distinguished author.

 ABU'LFAZL HAZEGHI

Tehran 1997

Chapter 2 TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

Too seldom does any power "give us the gift to see ourselves as others see us". In this book just that gift is given us by an eminent Muslim Divine.

Our author credits General Eisenhower with having said: "An age which has split the atom must heal humanity's splits or perish." A genuine reciprocal desire to explore each other's minds, to appreciate each other's backgrounds, to comprehend each other's viewpoints, is the first prerequisite for achieving mutual understanding. It is as an illuminating insight into the viewpoint of a large section of the humanity with whom we share this globe that this translation is offered to the English-speaking world.

For some people various of the asseverations of our author may be rebarbative. Others may carp at factual errors, misinterpreted information or partisan attitudes. But neither angry argument, belligerent bigotry, furious fanaticism nor inflexible insistence on our own conviction of what is true and right will obliterate the actuality of opposite beliefs held equally firmly by others.

Antinomies and contradictions will only be reconciled on earth when the effort has first been made to grasp what the other man thinks and says, and to penetrate to the underlying experiences which make him so think and say. Everyone is justiled in affirming on the basis of their own experience: "I have tried, tested and proven certain truths and found that they work: so that I know I am right." But should he go on to say: "Therefore you must be wrong" he moves outside the pale of propriety.

This translation endeavours to reproduce the exact sentiments of the author. For this reason his quotations from Western authors have been retranslated from his Persian rather than excerpted from the original. It seems more important to reflect what our author considered he had read than to repeat the quoted writer's original words. The sole exception to this rule is the quote from page 270 of Alexis Carrel's "Man, the Unknown" where the original is cited and our author's divergence from it given for a basis of comparison. It will be seen that he has read widely in collecting his material and has observed shrewdly all that was presented to him during his European sojourn.

The wise and prudent will not be offended by strictures on aspects of Western conduct or creeds : but weigh what is correct in order to improve. weigh what they think mistaken in order to reach understanding; and weigh what seems valuable in order to follow the advice of Francis Bacon Lord Verulam to "prick in some flowers of what he has learned abroad into the customes of his own country".

A reverend mullah in Tehran once provided me with a multiple, if covert, laugh, when he complained that a Western general had behaved insultingly, even obscenely, by conveying food to his mouth with his left hand: "But I showed him how I despised him by waggling the bare sole of my left foot at him!" Here was a fantastic farrago of ignorances and incomprehensions. The general had no idea that his eating habits were obscene! He did not know that to waggle the bare sole at someone is an insulting sign of contempt. The mullah did not know that the general did not know these things. All the same, that general would have got farther in his work in Iran if he had spent a fraction of his care to study military dispositions and strategies on also studying national manners, ideas and attitudes and adapting his own behaviour to fit.

Too many of us disregard and write off others' customs and age-old ideas. For an African it is an insult to walk behind a person. So that in South Africa a black will walk between two persons in conversation on the street rather than pass just behind one of them. Many an untutored white resents what he, from his own background, feels to be rude, and kicks the black intruder, who, of course, does not understand the reaction and is filled with hurt, pride and hate. Quotations from the Qur'an are given in the form "Sura I: Al-Fatih

'The Opener' v. l": i.e. first the number of the Sura in Roman numerals, denoting its place in the arrangement of the Qur'an. then the Arabic name by which it is regularly cited by Muslims, with the English translation of that name; and finally the verse. This is in order to enable readers to compare the translations given in this book with any or all of the many English versions of the Qur'an which now exist. Dates are quoted as Anno Domini, in some cases with the Persian Muslim equivalent, i.e. the date in solar years dating from the Hejra, or Flight of the Prophet and his adherents from Mecca to Yathrib, the city 200 miles north of Mecca which after that event proudly changed its name to "The prophet's city" or "The City" (Arabic "Medina") par excellence. These solar post-Hejra years are quoted as AHS (Anno Hejratis Solari). AHS I starts on March 21st AD 622. Arabic lunar post Hejra dates are labelled AHL (Anno Hejratis Lunari).

Most technical terms are explained in the text as the occur, but for ease of reference a brief Glossary defining a few is added at the end of the book.

F. J. GOULDING

Guildford 
January 1977

Part 1
PHYSIOGNOMY OF THE WEST

Chapter 3 Genesis of Human Life and Civilisation

Every advance in scientific research into the origins of life on this planet pushes the date of its first appearance further back into remoter ages while increasing the riddles to unravel and the puzzles to solve.

Despite the comparatively recent appearance of human life proper an infinitesimal fraction of the period for which the planet has nourished living matter-much uncertainty obscures the etiology of its production. Nonetheless scientists and palaeontologists have, by excavations and the discovery of artifacts, corn and other relics of human handicraft, been able to trace the course of man's upward progress through a series of stages in history thus :

1. Palaeolithic - marked by the use of simple weapons to kill animals in self- defence or for food : stones, sticks and similar hunting savagery and brutishness in constant fear of the beasts: use of caves and holes in the earth as shelter from voracious carnivores and from the dark. Primacy went to the most capable hunter: all human effort was bent to the conquest of foes-whether hostile nature or animals or humans.

2. The Later Palaeolkhic - man's first step up from the use of existing objects as tools was to fabricate for himself, e.g. by binding a stick to a stone to make a hammer, or manufacturing a sharp edge by percussion of flints; from which he was led on to the discovery of the art of kindling a to the cooking of food; and the overcoming of night and fire; and so centuries were spent on this series of developments until the dark. Long Palaeolithic stage was finally surmounted, and:

3. The Neolithic Age - saw manifold and varied changes in human living. Artifacts were still made of stone and wood, but the crude clumsy devices of the Palaeolithic were replaced by beautifully regular, exact woven wood plastered with and polished tools. Huts were made to live in, dried first in the sun and mud. Mud was moulded into crocks and pots, later on the fire. Crops were grown and the soil cultivated in primitive fashion; certain animals were domesticated. Man learnt which grains to sow for food, which trees to protect for fruit and timber. He invented the bow and arrow and so rid himself of some types of dangerous beast; and spears to catch fish. Arrowheads, spears and axes were still of sharpened stone. But skill increased over the centuries (which have left their relics for us to find and so reconstruct their life) and finally led them out of the for Stone Ages into:

4. The Bronze Age - with the use of metals came the birth of civilisation justly so- called. For CIVI-lisation is from the same root as "City" and connotes "social living". So does also "Ta-maddun" the Arabic, from the root M-D-N - city or community life. so do also "policy" and "police" from the Greek "polis". "urbane" from "urbs" and so on. For with it human life assumed a novel aspect and entered a new phase. Man was no longer a mere hungry animal always busied with the quest for food. From concentration on his belly and its needs he emerged to dreams and visions and an objective consciousness of the world around him. The more victories he gained in his struggle with nature, the more his desires and needs increased. Emerging from barbarism he found the final road toward civilisation: freed from the trammels of ignorance and dullness imposed by his conditions, he set out on the pursuit of learning and science.

The human animal's progress was distinguished from other species' stagnation by a spiritual factor. An internal quality we call intellect or reason, the most amazing of all phenomena, gave man hindsight and foresight, to assess the past and improve on it, to be alert to fresh methods and to innovations. Every forward step he took imprinted itself on the memory banks of the race. A sense of dissatisfaction over imperfections spurred him on to correct them. Thus unfolded the effects of this - invisible, indescribable, marvellous phenomenon called "mind". Its light causes him to observe objects and events, reflect on them, learn from experience and store the information for future use in that astounding computer called "the brain" as "memory", where it is available for the construction of new hypotheses, visions, experiments and advances.

Two other revolutionary products of human ingenuity arose in the mists of prehistoric antiquity:

1 . The invention of the WHEEL for transport - at first mere rolling of heavy objects on logs-to the axle-tree between two roundels-to the developed cart, set between true wheels with axle, hub, spokes, felloes and tire: and

2. LANGUAGE- noises accepted as means of conveying the impulses in one human mind to another-mutual agreement to interpret certain sounds each time uttered as of the same significance the grunt of fear or warning-the roar of rage-the coo of love-and so to the names of objects-to phrases-to orders like "come", "go", "fetch" "run" and finally to abstractions, concepts, ideas, projects, worship of the forces controlling capricious nature. With language, social living and so true civilisation came to birth. When signs were accepted as representing the arbitrary sounds that represented ideas, prehistory emerged into written history.

Prehistory is traced from vestiges and evidences dug up and interpreted. History starts when there are written records to consult. This invention of writing was the most revolutionary stroke of genius. It started with inventories of property, bills of exchange, composed by drawing pictures of the objects (sheep, cattle, vessels, grain-measures) then with a series of dashes to indicate number. then with symbols to indicate the nature of the transaction-the names and addresses of parties to it - and so gradually to symbols for every observed phenomenon, for relationships between them, and, finally, for abstractions like colour, shape and concept. Some races like the Chinese stayed in the pictographic stage, like the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic. Other races moved on to analyse the sounds which composed words and to adopt signs to represent always the same sound regardless of its meaning. It is these which carry all we know of the past 6 millennia of humanity's history.

Meantime masonry also made great advances. Exact measurement became possible. Men learnt to extract ores from rocks by smelting, and then to mould and temper them - at first the softer metals like tin and copper and their alloy bronze. When the same arts were applied to the harder iron, the Bronze gave way to the "Iron Age" - the true start of modern times.

Four thousand years ago true religion dawned through the obedience of the Patriarch Abraham to the call of Almighty God in Babylonian territory. The world's Creator charged Abraham with the task of leading Babylon's society out of darkness. His was the first apostolate as God's spokesman to rally mankind out of superstition and wrongdoing. Naturally he met with opposition and resistance from those with vested interests in falsehood and evil. But Abraham's prophetic proclamation of Monotheism and ethical worship raised a force of followers far superior to the united front of his adversaries, the advocates of Ahriman and the would-be despotic tyrants on the spirit of man. Abraham obeyed the call to leave his ancestral home, and finally after many thousand miles of nomad travel found haven in the Hejaz where with his son Isma'il he set up Monotheism's central shrine.

Seven and a quarter centuries before Christ, Rome was founded; and m the succeeding centuries extended her rule far and wide. Not long after Rome's foundation, Zoroaster (Zardusht) arose in Iran and substituted for the magic of Magianism a rational and moral relationship between man and the God of Good in the eternal battle against Evil. In almost the same century Confucius and Lao-Tse in China and Gautama the Buddha in Hind laid the basis of the philosophy which was developed by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in Greece during the succeeding century. All this found consummation in the Birth and Life of Jesus Christ, who proclaimed the call to reform human society, to rescue mankind from the pollutions of Judaistic materialism, to extirpate corruption and internecine combat, and raise humanity towards ethical and spiritual purification. This age was marked by the growth of intercommunication, of industries, and of building and medical skills. AD 476 launched the Mediaeval period in Europe. The Church added temporal power to its spiritual leadership and became ruler of the thinking and living of society, while Europe fell into the dark ages of barbarian invasion, ignorance, bloodshed, nationalistic and tribal rivalries.

Meantime in the East, Islamic civilisation established its sway (see Part 2). In AD 1453 Sultan Muhammad Fateh captured Istambul and a new age began. In Europe the new independent nations-England, France, Germany, Austria-vied with each other for expansion. The magnetic compass enabled ships to cross the Atlantic Ocean and find America. A Renaissance of thought and science swept over Europe and established more orderly international relations, until the French Revolution of AD 1789 ended the Age; and the Industrial Age took over the 19th century and changed the face of Europe. Invention followed invention. Discovery pressed on the heels of discovery. European history entered its newest and modern phase.

Chapter 4 Evaluation of Modern Occidental Civilisation

The world we live in has been making giant strides, entailing a revolution in thought because of science's daily advance in the study and the satisfying of man's needs. Science and industry have unloaded the work that yesterday imprisoned man in hard labour onto machine-tools. These set man free to enjoy life's luxuries in ease and leisure. They liberated his mind and spirit from the bonds of business to expand into limitless research into Creation's mysteries.

So swift has been this progress that developments which took centuries of the olden "time" measured in "nights and days" take only minutes or even seconds of modern "time". Ships which took months and years to cross oceans by the force of winds on ails, now by steam or electrical power take days for the distance. Land transport, once dependent on beasts of burden, now moves on trucks, trains and planes with djinn-like speed. Man's gaze, no longer earth-bound, explores our galaxy and outer space, plumbs sea-deeps and penetrates to the earth's core. Old ignorance of this marvellous planet yields to fascinating new knowledge of the facts of nature, from infinite space to the atom's infinitesimal components, magnified a million times and made visible by electronic microscope. Modern Western civilisation's productivity, affluence, comfort and leisure cannot be denied or decried. Advances in health and welfare, childcare and maternity have cut infant- mortality, increased longevity, produced cures for diseases deemed incurable, swept the plagues and pestilences of the past into oblivion.

Nonetheless, although science and technology have moved mankind farther and faster in the last century than in 10 previous millennia rolled into one, we of the Jet, Atom and Space Age know we have only started to learn the ABC of the writings in nature's mighty Book of Truth which await perusal.

It must be regrettably acknowledged that Western civilisation's short comings and weaknesses are no fewer than its advantages. Despite the leisure and ease which knowledge and culture provide for society, despite the new pages of history turned, human happiness has not increased nor have social ills diminished.

Technology and industrialisation have reached a zenith while moral and spiritual life have sunk to their nadir. While science climbs, thought declines, divisions proliferate, and the West, rejecting spiritual and moral values, has bowed its neck under the yoke of worship of the machine. Machine-worshippers will never lay hands on joy or peace or happiness. Science imposes an order on life which provides affluence but not happiness, since happiness is outside its competence. Science does not distinguish benefit from harm, nor ugly from lovely, but only true from false. The order imposed on human living by science alone will set Hell on fire and must be resisted at all costs. For civilisation draws in the train of its priceless gifts a pernicious and deadly insecurity, breeding-ground of crimes and corruptions. It kindles a fire of lusts and longings that burns warp and woof of soul and spirit. It bans calm of mind, spirit, faith. Far from lighting a lamp to illumine human conduct, science has plunged it into deeper dark and murk.

Science's conquests and victories, like those of war, leave an aftermath of ruin and waste, sadness and suffering beyond the reach of remedy. Beside every flower blooming in civilisation's garden grows a thorn that wounds the soul. Balance the boons of cars, planes, factories, surgery, wonder-drugs and affluence against the banes of bombs, gas, jets and rockets, death-rays, crime and violence. Within its own limits intellect is a good servant. But it cannot grasp the non-material. Hence with the decline of virtue many axioms of ethics have been consigned to oblivion beyond recovery.

The Islamic world, though not in midfield of the disturbances and activities of science, does not escape their manifestations in personal, social, educational or cultural life and the flood of "civilisation" rushes upon us. For ideas and ethics know no national frontiers; they infiltrate from land to land-good as well as bad. Man's inclinations being what they are, the evil and corrupt go quicker and deeper. Hence, though our society cannot compare in scientific or technological advances, it manifests the complete pattern of Western decadence.

A society can suffer no worse disaster than the loss of the power to distinguish good from bad; no society that has suffered this loss can attain welfare or wellbeing.

Too many see only the fascinating externals of "civilisation" but are blind to the painful tragedies and the moral crisis of the modern age. The "civilised" world displays its superficial charms, so that persons who briefly sojourn there willingly abandon their discernment and judgment and shut their eyes to unpleasant facts and wrongdoings, feeling that the slightest difference in their own manners of habits or talk from those that obtain in the West is shameful; and instead of seeking the causes of Western progress and the means of reaching such ends, bring home as gifts a load of moral degeneracy and spiritual degradation. Such self-deception is the worst of defects, causing the loss of personality, of independence of thought, and of appreciation of the treasures of national culture, religion and nationhood.
This misleads thought away from religious conviction. It robs people of the power to assess and analyse events by a deep and universal doctrine that distinguishes good from bad. By this means many a truth is obscured.

Chapter 5 East-West Interaction

The nations of Europe have been able to arrive at their modern welfare states without rejecting their religion and manners. Japan, too, has made notable progress while preserving her creeds, customs and characteristics: and has with lightning speed soared up towards a high level of civilisation. From being, through centuries. one of the world's backward lands, Japan has, in a mere 60 years, entered the ranks of progressive nations. Japan never leant towards the West, nor fixed eyes and ears on Europe as a model to copy. She has clung fanatically to her heritage and nationhood. Cherishing the traditions of the great men of her history, she has continued to act as for centuries past, still preserving her ancient "Shinto" and 'Buddhism" and pursuing vehemently her own forms of worship - however light-minded a sensible person might consider that worship.

But revolutionary freethinking gives no basis for diagnostics. It cannot analyse or unravel even the most obvious of social problems. Yet it welcomes every form of protest against, or criticism of religion, with respect and joy, as being tokens of "enlightenment". Such negligence will never be able to face life's realities with a free mind.

The vast extension of scientific exploration into all aspects of material life has enabled human living to make an astounding leap forward. But while scientists busy themselves laying bare nature's powers and channelling their discoveries into technological industries, they fail to notice that they are only occupying one corner of a vast laboratory and neglecting all but the physical side of human nature. Could this be the deep cause of the mounting tide of license and excess?

The perfecting of material science has not been accompanied by increasingly profound ethical insights. In fact the two disciplines proceed on different courses - so different that progress along one course may even precipitate retrogression on the other, from sheer satiety.

Recently a European professor said to a science conference held in Tehran: .'In the field of morals the West envies the East. For the East's moral achievements are richer and finer than the West's. While the East profits from Western science and industry, the West needs to profit from Eastern ethical achievements."

To keep alive, human society need other principles alongside industrial and technical culture. When the political and social set-up cuts the human community off from its basic philosophy of living so that life is bereft of altruistic ideas of mutual help and turns into a monotonous unremitting pursuit of enough to eat, the masses tall prey to the type of violence which the poet called "man's inhumanity to man."

Unfortunately mankind today is still in the kindergarten stage. We still have to attain an adult intellectual level if we are to make full use of the priceless reserves hidden in the heart of nature and at the same time to invest our spiritual capital in ways that yield dividends of happiness of heart and enhancement of spirit. Infant mankind is childishly at the mercy of passing moods and passions instead of obeying the dictates of mature common .sense. The bulk of humankind fails to recognise its prejudices and superstitions as idols, but worships them as much as "progressive" people worship "science".

Millennia of unpalatable experiences, and constant fresh mis adventures, must finally drive man to realise that the only alternative to inevitable annihilation is self- committal to the Road of Right and of Divine Guidance.

Stahwood Cobb the sociologist writes, in his "Lord of 2 Ka'abas" (p.1): "Each vital facet of Western society's life, organisation and culture is marred by some extraordinary crisis. Its whole body politic and soul are sick. Its nerves are on edge because the world is teetering on the brink of the divide which separates the moribund age of materialist scientific glory from the dawning age of tomorrow's moral culture. We are experiencing the thoughts and deeds of the last minutes of a 6-centuries-old materialist civilisation; and glimpsing the first faint rays of the new. They are still too weak to sustain a sure hope. The long dark shadows cast by the old as it sinks below the horizon dim nascent brightness, making the road towards the new even more difficult to descry. Human culture is experiencing that longest night of the winter -solstice as it broods over our past culture, and torments our spirits with nightmares and bogies and phantoms, ghosts and ghoulies and gooseflesh and horrors. Yet beyond that night lies the morning of the new culture, truly universal and moral, awaiting its chance to bless mankind."

We boast our "realism". But it is highly unrealistic blindly to accept, to follow and copy, the manners and customs, the institutions and formulae, of others. Such imitativeness merely binds a yoke of obedience on its own neck. Initiative is the fount of independence. Imitation is the parasite that devours independence.
The confusion in our ideas and ethics is due to the torpor caused by imitation. Nor does our turning our back on our own historical and spiritual traditions in favour of Western habits help us towards clarity.

In his book, "Islam and Others" (p.42) a great Islamic thinker wrote: "We do not ask for intellectual or social seclusion. We do not draw aside from the course which history compels civilisation to follow, for we are fellow-travellers and partners in mankind's caravan. But we have been Muslims and, as such, have given great treasures to human culture. The positive achievements of our great past laid the foundations of the modern world edifice. Yet we fail, alas! to give this pioneering due credit, and to preserve its esteem and dignity. When we learn to value our past successes properly, we shall free our hearts of the inferiority complex which bows the neck to tyranny! and take up the pure reasoning of free men. Instead, like beggars cap-in-hand on the rich man's threshold, we accept gifts when we should throw them back in his face - or act so nobly that we win him to imitate us. In fact, for us civilisation has a two-fold significance.

It comprises, first, our own far from undistinguished share in founding civilisation, which we must not consign to oblivion but preserve in the stable practices and personality, the bright and shining extension of human experience provided by our people's way of life. and, in the second place, those fascinating manifestations of others' culture, prepared and matured by them for themselves, from which we must choose such a selection as will suit our needs without damage to our heritage. "Civilisation" derives from the same root as "city", and belongs to the sublime side of human thought. To debase its creativeness for mere epigonic imitation is to reduce whole communities to mere monkey-life."

Chapter 6 Materialist Europe's Religious Practice

So far has the materialist spirit infiltrated civilised peoples that today you will find hardly one European with any aim in life loftier than scratching up a livelihood. Nonetheless many hold religious beliefs, and cling to their inherited Christianity, however adulterated it is with heresies, and incapable of meeting anyone's spiritual or moral needs. It may seem odd that such a religion can still exercise any authority in this "progressive" world: yet it has shaped and still shapes the spiritual and ethical mould of Western civilisation. On Sundays shops and secular institutions are closed. Church bells ring out on all sides with their distinctive clanging.

Congregations of all social classes gather and attentively listen to sermons. The TV gives special religious broadcasts supervised by the churches. The religious take their babies to church to be christened at the priest's hands, and affirm their faith before him. Religious leaders are respected and called "Father" i.e. spiritual father of the community.

During the long centuries of the Church's ascendancy, while all Europe's economy was based on land-ownership, a tithe of all agricultural produce was exacted to support the heavy expenses of religious institutions. During the last 200 years or so, with the increasing secularisation of society and the shift of the economic base to industry and commerce, one land after another has abolished the system of "tithing" and of the parson's "Glebeland". But huge endowments have remained, while the faithful make regular voluntary contributions, often under a system of "stewardship". This is how Christianity's spiritual leaders come to command an adequate budget for their vast undertakings.

A committee on printed matters controls publications, and in this the Church plays the leading role. The Church supervises educational planning for nursery and primary schools. For all nine years of their schooling, pupils are obliged to attend church on Sundays for services specially prepared with religious instruction suited to their age-group. Strangest of all, innocent babes have to go into the confessional and admit their sins to a priest.

Films may not be shown without the permission of a board consisting of church leaders, doctors, sociologists, economists and psychologists; and the angles of religion, psychology, sociology and economics are all taken into account.

Chapter 7 An Iranian in Europe

The writer had the misfortune to require medical aid in Europe. I was taken into a Catholic hospital in Germany. I was welcomed and accorded the attention they give to religious who come as patients; in my room, as in all rooms, was a statue of Jesus and a painting of the Virgin and Child. Regular prayers were offered in the chapel for the cure of the sick! One day I saw them lighting candles before the statue of Jesus in one of the large halls of the place. Fancy that! Lighting a candle in broad daylight beside a man-made statue - and that in the hub of science and learning! What an outcry there would be if a simple peasant in Iran were to light a candle on a dark night at the shrine of a saint! How our "lessoned" youth would mock him and his "old-fashioned" ways!

I shall never forget one occasion when blood was needed for a transfusion. The head of the hospital asked me: "What sort of blood does Islam allow for transfusions? May Muslims accept non-Muslim blood? We will prepare blood for you according to Islamic principles!"

Developed countries set voluntary limits in the true interests of freedom. For the limits are intended to prevent misuse of the products of civilisation. Thus the TV shows sports matches, holds teaching sessions, pictures the life of distant lands, and, in brief devotes the major part of its screenings to educational programmes.

In the name of freedom it is prohibited for anyone to turn up his radio so loud that it bothers neighbours or passers-by. No-one may give parties that last on into the small hours if they disturb his neighbours. In fact, when you are in the streets you never hear a radio. Though it is true that I did once hear a radio noise that made the welkin ring. I was just leaving my hotel and was astounded, for this was the first time I had ever heard anything like that in Europe. And what type of sound fell on my ears?… Irani music! I decided to investigate. Next day I chanced to meet an Iran who had taken up residence near the hotel. In the course of conversation I casually mentioned the event. Putting his finger to his lips, he confessed with a smile that it was he who had perpetrated the noise on the day before just to see what would happen!

It is truly sad that in Iran we have not mastered the right use of modern amenities. This is because we have deviated from the track traced for us by our ancestral principles, and plunged into disgrace. Everyone knows the undesirable effects of TV's presentation of life. Much of the blame for the decline of the morals of society lies at its door. All that viewers gain from such films and programmes is an increased urge towards moral corruption and mayhem.

Everywhere in Iran radio noises reverberate from every side in nerve-racking volume.

Industrial discoverers and inventors never meant to guarantee the sort of profits now obtainable from the exploitation of their brain-children nor could they have offered any such guarantee, for nothing was further from their thoughts than the idea their products, conceived for a rightful use, might one day fall into the hands of people who would turn them to purposes which are positively harmful and, for the population of a country like ours, threaten mortal peril.

Without exception, all the phenomena of industry, its tools and its products alike, are capable of falling victim to the process by which mercenary profiteers squeeze personal advantage out of public demand. The natural unreason of man, the tendency to mistaken attitudes, rapidly makes selfishness epidemic, so that people compete in technological profiteering to the tragic loss of others. The root of this tragedy must be sought in the fields of learning and wisdom rather of ignorance and folly! For a Muslim to desert the humaneness and courtesy which his religion enjoins is surely a moral blemish of shocking proportions! God forbid that in our country such unbridled self-seeking and wrongdoing should be allowed in the name of "Freedom" to spread its evil disease unchecked.

Chapter 8 Reasons for Christianity's Advance

Two sorts of religion exist - "Revealed" and "Natural". Today both suffer from such deformities that nearly all their manifestations not only have ceased to grow but in fact daily dwindle towards extinction. Apart from Islam, Christianity is the only exception, since it makes such enormous efforts on a world-scale that it is expanding all the time, and therefore is coming to confront the almost equally widespread Islam all over the place.

A conjunction of factors favours Christianity's spread. The world climate is propitious. Popular thinking is easily influenced by skilful propaganda to move in any desired direction. This is due both to mankind's innate suggestibility and also to the subliminal effects of modern advertising techniques. The social renascence of recent centuries has made these techniques a life-and-death matter. In this crisis Christian leaders have launched a global campaign, with the full weight of the various Christian bodies behind it, to put Christianity within reach of everyone everywhere.

While waves of religious propaganda thus flood over these civilised peoples, lust for the brilliance of materialism sets limits to men's thinking and robs them of the ability to go deep into moral and spiritual questions. Men are so fascinated by the manifestations of material prosperity that they are turned aside from the pursuit of truth and from the quest for the treasures of the spirit.

All the factors enumerated above have combined to help Christianity flood the world with the irrational tenets that are so ineradicably rooted in Western minds and spirits.

It cannot be said that our own Islamic efforts at propaganda have been either energetic or effective. We have been so unschooled in the elementary essentials of successful publicity that we have nothing to declare. Yet the shining force of Islam's holy doctrines could be made to meet the crying needs of man, if we changed.

For centuries, Islam has made no noteworthy effort at propaganda. After the first outburst of its revolutionary uprush from the Arab homeland, Islamic landowners and viziers have preferred to maintain the status quo for their own comfort. Meantime schism split Muslim unity. As a consequence Islam lost political supremacy in world affairs, and its various portions fell victims to Western imperialism piecemeal.

Chapter 9 Church Resources and Organisation

Christianity was launched without any definitive social principles, laws or system for .running affairs. This deficiency long prevented Christian spiritual leadership from interfering in social, political or governmental matters. So it continued until the sixth century of the Christian era. On Christmas Day AD 800 the king of the Franks was crowned "Caesar" and transferred some of his territory to the overlordship of the Pope. With this began the epoch of Christian leadership's supremacy and glory. The Church grew in power and wealth. Conflicts over the control of power arose between political and religious leaders. Europe fell prey to the oppressive wars of Popes and Emperors.

People who regarded the Church as the manifestation of the spirituality of Christ were stubborn partisans of the clergy. and by their help the Church's temporal power and influence increased daily until its unrivalled hegemony was fastened upon the nations of Europe. In early days, before deep rifts split Christianity, each Christian city had its " Bishop" ; and groups of neighbouring cities were jointly administered by an "Archbishop" or "Patriarch". The Bishop of Rome gradually came to assume supreme authority as Pope (which means "papa" of all Christians). He interfered in all religious matters, including the appointment and dismissal of Bishops and Archbishops. Finally this became too much for the "metropolitan patriarchs" of Constantiyya (i.e. Byzantium, Constantinople, Stambul), and they decided to withdraw from Papal jurisdiction and set up a separate domain of their own, in recognition of the fact that the imperial capital of the Empire had been moved from Rome to Stambul. After a series of violent clashes between the Pope and Stambul Patriarchs, final separation occurred in AD 1052. Christianity split into two camps. Eastern Europe was subject to the Constantiniyya clergy, self-styled "Orthodox". Western Europe from Poland to Spain remained obedient to the Pope as self-styled "Catholics" These two religious bodies followed different rites and hurled charges of heresy at each other.

In the early 16th century a third body formed itself in Europe, initiated by Luther and styled "Protestant" Luther and his followers started by opposing the Pope's habit of selling sites in heaven together with "indulgences" remitting sins : and went on to attempt to reform the whole Church and purge it of errors and corruptions. They only succeeded in creating another split in the unity and simplicity of Christ's religion: the huge number of people who followed Luther in rejecting papal authority and sacerdotal dogma became a third sect including most of northern Europe.

The Pope's absolute power in Catholic Europe of the 12th and 13th centuries provoked its inevitable reaction. A number of heretical movements arose promoting doctrines condemned by the Papal Office. So great became the anxiety of the Pope and of the Catholic party about these insurrectionary movements that in 1215 AD the Pope set up the "Inquisition" to combat and eradicate such heresies. The Inquisition had branches in every city of France, Italy Germany, Poland, Spain and other Christian lands. Persons accused of heresy were hauled up before the inquisitors, and, if condemned, suffered severe penalties.

This institution used its excessive powers in such a way as to suppress all freedom of thought. Anyone suspected of ideas and opinions regarded as contrary to those held by the Church was subjected to hellish tortures. These courts even sometimes passed sentence for heresy on the dead, ordering the disinterment of their coffins - a process described by Will Durant in his "History of Civilisation" (vol. 18, p.35) thus : "The 'Court for the Inspection of Ideas, Laws and Religion' had a legal procedure all its own. Before a local assizes of the Court was held, the 'Faith-act' (Auto da Fé) was read from all Church pulpits, demanding that information be laid against anyone suspected of atheism, irreligion or heresy. and that such persons be haled before the Court of Inspection. Neighbours, friends and relatives were encouraged to turn informer Informers were promised complete secrecy and protection. Anyone who harboured an atheist, or failed to denounce him, was himself incarcerated, and threatened with the church's excommunication, curse and ban. Sometimes the dead were charged with atheism and blasphemy. Special ceremonies were employed for their judicial condemnation. Their property was confiscated : their heirs were stripped of their inheritance. From 30 to 50% of the property of a deceased person who was condemned were given to the successful accuser. Trial by ordeal assumed different forms in different times and places. Sometimes the accused man's arms were bound behind his back and he was suspended from them. Sometimes he was so bound that he could make no movements and then water was poured down his throat so that he died of suffocation. Sometimes ropes were tied so tight round arms and legs that they cut through flesh to the bone."

So powerful did the Christian hierarchy become in Europe that no fewer than ten kings and political leaders of Germany and France were excommunicated by Popes. Some great landed proprietors lost all. Some were compelled to do public penance. Thus in AD 1075 Pope Gregory VII excommunicated the Emperor of Germany, Henry IV, for disregarding a Papal Firman, and told him that he must give up his throne. Henry promptly donned penitent's garb and hurried to the Papal Court, where the Pope kept him waiting three days before receiving him, accepting his repentance and granting him absolution.
In 1141 Pope Innocent II excommunicated Louis VII. In 1205 Pope Innocent II excommunicated King John of England for attacking certain bishops.

Finally John felt compelled to send a message to the Pope saying: "An angelic messenger bade me supplicate Jesus and His Apostle, our benefactor Pope Innocent, and his catholic successors, on behalf of England and Ireland. From henceforth we hold these kingdoms as Viceroy of the Pope and the hierarchy and have commanded that the sum of £1,000 English be paid to the Roman ecclesiastical coffers annually, in half-yearly instalments of £500 each, in silver. Should 1 or any of my successors on the English throne transgress against the purport of this decree, we forfeit right to the English sovereignty." (Marcel Cache "Social History," Vol. II). The same author (Vol. II, p.123) writes: "During this period 5,000,000 people were punished for offences against orthodox thought, or contravention of a papal decree. They were hanged on the gallows; or left in the pitchy dark of well-like dungeons. In the 18 years, 1481-99, the Inquisition burnt 1,020 people alive, sawed 6,860 asunder, tortured 97,023 to death."

Victor Hugo wrote : "The real history of the Church will be read not on the pages but between the lines, of the official annals. The Church caused Parnili to be whipped within an inch of his life for declaring that 'stars do not fall from their appointed paths.' The Church cast Complained into prison 27 times for claiming that innumerable other worlds besides earth exist. The Church tortured Harvey for the crime of proving that the blood circulates through the arteries and veins of the body. The Church incarcerated Galileo for claiming that the earth orbits round the sun, in contradiction of theories put forward in the Old and New Testaments. The Church imprisoned Christopher Columbus for discovering a land not mentioned by St. Paul. They claimed that it was sacrilege to discover laws of the heavenly bodies, or the orbit of the earth, or an unforeseen continent not foretold in scripture. The Church excommunicated Pascal and Montey for immorality, and Muller for sacrilege and immorality." ("History of Free Thought", p.147).
The Church also exercised her power against Islam. On the pretext of treeing Jerusalem, she launched campaigns of bloodshed and atrocity in what she called "Wars for the Cross" or "Crusades", during the years 1095 to 1270.

Although the prime cause of these wars was the hatred and jealousy of Islam nursed by the Pope and the hierarchy, they stirred up the common people to enlist by false promises of loot and by ingenious calumny against the Muslims. Pope Urban II called a congress of clergy and religious leaders to decree a war against Muslims : at which the Pope ordered all bishops and clergy to enlist men for the battle against the Muslims, and himself led the recruiting campaign in France.

So vast was the first army that started out for Jerusalem that it seemed as if all Europe were afoot toward Asia. Some say there were as many as a million men on the march. En route these plundered, burned, mutilated and drowned the local citizens. They slew soldiers and civilians alike, women and children included. When they finally took Jerusalem in 1099, three years after the start, only 20,000 survived out of the original million. Civil wars and pestilence followed this "Christian" sacrifice of myriads of their own and of other nationals.

In the words of Gustave Le Bon ("La Civilisation lslamique et Arabe" p.407): "The atrocities committed by the Crusaders against friends and foes, against soldiers and innocent peasants, against women and children, against old and young, give them top place in the annals of savagery. One of their number, Robert the Monk, wrote : 'Our army raged through alleys and piazzas and over the flat roofs of adjoining houses like a mother lion robbed of her whelps, rampaging, tearing children to shreds in savage delight. We put old and young to the sword.

To speed up the work we used one rope's loop to hang many people together. Soldiers stole anything that came to hand, even ripping open the bowels of corpses in their search for jewels or coins. Whatever they found they pocketed. Finally, Bohemond assembled all the survivors men and women, maimed and helpless, together - in the castle, and butchered them all, saving only the young for sale in the Antioch slavemarket.' And Godfrey Hardouinville reported to the Pope: 'In Jerusalem Muslims who fell into our hands were slain by our people in Solomon's porch until the temple precincts flowed knee-high with blood'."

The Inquisition's torture of the learned and thinking class of its day roused an inevitable reaction against the Church. Independent-minded scientists pushed on with their work, despite severe censorship, until Church bigotry was compelled to beat a retreat and leave the road open for enlightened study and investigation. But by now scientists had come to regard all religion as the partisan of superstition, of ignorance, and of the suppression of science and erudition. The atrocities of the Crusades and barbarities of the Inquisition aroused abhorrence and suspicion in the popular mind against every form of religion.

In Russia, too, the Church's neglect of the poor and destitute, and patronage of the rich, roused a reaction which aided the rise of the communist movement, and caused its leaders to declare war on religion, stigmatising the religious as "capitalist lackeys and exploiters of the working class," and declaring that it was only "by obliterating the myth of God from the mind of man" that the revolution of liberty, equality and fraternity could be realised.

Ferdof, in his book "Religion in the U.S.S.R." (p.7), writes: "In Czarist Russia the Church owned vast properties in lands, buildings and furnishings, with millions of roubles in gold in the banks. She drew an income from forests, pastures, fisheries, commerce, industry and much else. In fact, the Church was the biggest capitalist of all, the biggest landowner, the biggest banker of Russia. She mercilessly exploited merchants, small and large. She made no attempt to improve industrial working conditions. So great was the hatred this conduct aroused amongst working and shopkeeping classes that the clergy were called .wolves in priests' clothing'."

Christianity, in its day the preserver of ancient manners and customs, the conservative reactionary, has today learned to strengthen its own foundations by adding to its brilliant historic past all that science and culture has to offer to modern genius.
The Catholic Church alone wields 4,000 propaganda organs spread all over the globe. Their budget enables them to extend their efforts at conversion to darkest Congo, to remotest Tibet and to the most primitive tribes of Australia.

The annual budget of the Church of England is well over 900,000,000 tomans.
Such figures, when compared with the pittance at Islam's disposal, pain the heart.

The Gospel has been translated into more than 1,000 languages. In 1973 the American "Society for the Publication and Distribution of the Gospel put out 24 million copies.

The Vatican publishes its own newspaper "L'Osservatore Romano" with a daily circulation of 300,000. It produces some 50 monthly periodicals with a total circulation of several millions per month. It runs 32,000 primary schools, universities and hospitals. Four powerful agencies despatch missionaries to the other continents.
Christianity employs three methods of propaganda:

1. translation of the books of the New Testament;
2. erection of churches and places of worship;
3. despatch of missionaries to all parts of the world.

Protestant sects likewise exert remarkable efforts at spreading their faith. "The Reader's Digest" wrote: "The revolutionary foundation of the Protestant Church of America was a revolt against efforts in Europe to renew the exaction of the 'tithe' which has been the Church's ancient right. Yet from 1950 on, the movement of 'stewardship' has been taken up increasingly so that many congregations have doubled or trebled their contributions, and thus made possible hundreds of new church buildings, and the reinforcement of missions at home and abroad. Most important, congregations and their members have realised the joyful results and unexpected rewards of the revival of this ancient custom."

Chapter 10 Christianity and Islam in Africa

The Christian religious establishment has no fears of Judaism, Hinduism or Buddhism, since these are religions of national groups which exert little influence outside their native environment. So the only danger which they feel to be menacing is Islam. For it has an ideology and way of thought which they know, some as friends, some as enemies. The "Suddeutscher Zeitung" reported the Pope as saying to the bishops assembled at the Vatican Council*: "Islam constitutes a more serious threat in Africa to Christianity than does Communism."

Although Islam's missionary efforts are practically nil, its sheer breadth of culture and emotional power win many converts in a number of places, particularly in Africa, where oppressed blacks find its inclusive brotherhood so attractive a refuge that the Church cannot fail to take note of the numbers which it draws.
"Belgian Institutes" reports that, at the start of the 20th century, there were 4,000 Muslims in one province of the Congo, and that by the 1960s in Maniyema and Stanleyville and Kivu this number had increased to 236,000.

The Paris periodical "Peru" quotes Marcel Corder European expert on Islam in Africa, as saying: "Islam, once the religion of chiefs and princes, has recently become a faith of the masses, who like rushing floods are on the move toward a better, quieter life. and, carried on this tide, the realism and urgency of Islam spreads from the north of Africa to the south with irresistible speed." "The Revue de Paris" assessing Islam, paganism and Christianity in Africa, says: "Islam is advancing at a phenomenal rate, winning on the average half a million new adherents annually, not on the ground of its ancient roots, but of the new conditions of life developed in the last century, so that a conservative estimate might reckon 50% of black Africans as in some measure Muslims… In 1950 four graduates of El. Azhar opened Muslim schools in Mabaku, which were making lightning progress until the French government stepped in and swiftly closed them down."

Dr. L. V. Vaglieri, Professor at Naples University, writes: "What is the reason why, despite the considerable freedom allowed to non-Muslims in Islamic communities, and the total lack of any Muslim missionary work nowadays, and the general weakness of all religions everywhere, Islam has nonetheless been making great advances in Asia and Africa in recent years? Today it is not the sword which compels acceptance. Indeed, many lands once ruled by Muslims are now under non-Muslim governments which push their own religions at the Muslim populations - yet in vain! What is the power hidden in this faith? What in the inmost nature of humanity finds contentment and satisfaction therein? What profound , element in the human spirit is moved to respond to Islam's call with so enthusiastic and glad a shout of 'Here am I'?"

Christians stop at nothing in their efforts to destroy Islam. Professor Muhammad Qutb writes: "A shipping line of English origin runs establishments in South Africa. It once employed many South African Muslims on its ships, but, being a Christian company, decided not to employ Muslims. To achieve this end it paid part of its employees' earnings with alcoholic drink. Since alcohol is forbidden to Muslims, nor may they sell it, they lost this part of their wages. A Muslim lawyer learnt of their plight and advised them to refuse to receive this form of payment, unknown anywhere else in the entire world, and to take the company to court if it objected to their protest. The company, as soon as the protest was made, promptly made it a pretext for firing every Muslim from their employ " Philanthropy indeed!

Muslim missionaries face a wide-open door in Africa. The people of that continent are ready to embrace Islam with heart and soul if we would show any sort of zeal in carrying the message to them. For all Africa is seeking a religion that can harmonise the spiritual and the material, promote social equity and equality, and call all mankind to peace, to quiet and to truth.

Modern Christianity cannot, because of its own poverty and deficiencies, meet this longing. The Church itself is a divisive factor, supporting discrimination, not allowing black and white to worship the same God in the same building at the same time! In fact, the Christian attitude to the blacks is inhuman.

Lumumba, Congo leader now dead, once told a Paris newspaper: "I could never understand why we were taught in our schools that Christian principles merited our respect, while outside our schools Europeans acted in ways entirely contrary to those principles and trod all civilised humane precepts underfoot. The way the Europeans treated the blacks gave the lie to all that their schools taught."

It is not only in Africa that Christianity is being challenged by Islamic advance. In America Islam bids fair to win the allegiance of the black population. Every effort is made to suppress Islamic agencies. The Senate requested the president to ban the Black Muslims and make their activities illegal. But preventive measures only increase Black Muslim membership and strengthen the enthusiasm of their activities. They now run 70 branches in 27 states. Islamic cultural centres exist in Chicago and Detroit : while Islamic centres and mosques have been built in numerous other cities of the U.S.A. The Muslims run a newspaper called "Muhammad Speaks". They stage protest-demonstrations at which they carry banners inscribed: "There is no God but Allah: and Muhammad is His Prophet."

Black Muslims perform their religious duties with exemplary enthusiasm. Their womenfolk wear the veil. They try to buy only meat slaughtered in accordance with Muslim law, stamped with the "Moon and Star" guarantee. The fact that certain individuals have made personal fortunes by monopolising sales of proper dress, foodstuffs and other Muslim essentials in exploitation of the new piety. the fact that a few extremists have resorted to irreligious violence', and the fact that many of the new converts have still only a rudimentary grasp of the theological truths underlying their faith - these facts do not negate the blessings already brought to the converted masses. They are ills which will be cured as instruction and practice deepen the newfound faith. For Black Muslims eagerly learn Arabic and insist on schools and colleges teaching their children Arabic to enable them to read the Qur'an in the original. Amongst them thieves may be executed. Even enemies admit that Islam has brought a change of heart to Black Muslims.

Christian missionaries in Africa do not attempt to assist the Africans to progress to equal the whites. They wish them to remain subject to the white church and state. As Professor Westermann ."Imperialism and the Gospel" writes: "Conversion to Islam raises the convert's social status, increases his self-respect, shows him his possibilities, teaches him to be a world-citizen, defines his relations with Europeans in dignity. The black man who previously carried garbage on his head gains in Islam a status which wins respect, even amongst Europeans. But a black man who abandons paganism for Christianity sees himself a different light from the Black Muslims, since the foundation of our society is different from that in which Africans were brought up. They see the outward benefits of our civilisation, but cannot grasp its inwardness because we have not given them the requisite training to do so. Nor have they grasped their own distinctive contribution and specialities, because we have not understood our duty to study the black cultural background, and to help the Africans progress on lines that are a natural continuation of their historical development to date. Comparing the African background with our own as superficially as the African regards our way of life, we offer our fellow- Europeans an unflattering and one-sided picture of the black man.

We present him as an inferior European. But Islam presents him as a black African to be respected as such by himself and by others. Islam gives him a natural equality which we fail to see. He is a human being with his own history and tradition. But Christians, who think of their present level of culture as natural to man, treat black converts to their religion with the condescension due to poor savages living amid rubble and rubbish. They provoke the blacks to vindicate their superiority. Here the Black Muslims offer them their chance, while black Christians are pushed back into inferiority. For this reason American Negroes surge towards Islam and away from Christianity."

* The Vatican Council draws Catholic leaders from every continent to Rome. where it is held about once a century Its object is to settle issues which may have arisen in any part of the world At the last Vatican Council 7.000 Church leaders assembled under the chairmanship of the Pope. Its discussions on church affairs occupied three series of sessions, each two months long, at a total cost of some 650 million Italian lire!

Chapter 11 Anti-Islamic Propaganda

Church leaders face the advance of Islam apprehensively. To prevent the harmony of Islam's truth reaching men's ears, Christian leaders use smear tactics in a world- wide propaganda of calumny and denigration which stops at nothing.

I saw an example of this on German TV. A Yemeni Muslim described the mosques of Yemen and the worship in them. Then the TV interviewer gave a detailed description of the region's poverty and distress. He blamed Islam for acting as an obstacle to the progress of the Yemeni people. "A bigoted adherence to the tenets and :principles of Islam," he said; "kept the Yemen in primitive backwardness and weakness, lingering two centuries behind the forward strides of civilisation in the rest of the world." This he called an example of "Islam's failure to keep pace with the changes most of mankind are enjoying."

Imagine the effect of such poisonous propaganda, backed by skillfully selected film, on European minds, either uninformed, scantily informed, or wholly misinformed about the nature of Islam! Surely such distortions are a betrayal of humanity.

These propagandists should be asked: "If the Yemen's lack of progress in material living is to be accounted for on the background of their religion, why is the south of Italy so backward when the Pope reigns supreme there? Why do so many leave southern Italy to seek menial employment in wealthier lands? Why is Christian Greece so many Muslim countries? Why did Greece, which before the rise of Christianity pioneered man's upward road, itself go downhill towards ruin after accepting Christianity, until it came under the Turkish flag and started to rise again? Or again, why do the non-Muslim peoples of Asia suffer miseries far worse than any Muslim land knows?"

In Bosnia, where Muslims, Orthodox and Catholics, live cheek by jowl, the Muslims are the better off. In Russia Muslims are no whit inferior to their Christian neighbours. Chinese Muslims are ahead of Buddhists there. Singapore's Arabs enjoy greater material prosperity than any other of that island's inhabitants, including the British.

Most Westerners present Islam in a false light' repeating baseless fabrications which betray blank ignorance of Islam's principles: and churches encourage such errors.

Muhammad Qutb "Islam and Misconceptions of Enlightened Thinkers" (p.298 Persian ed.) writes: "I spent some hours discussing Islamic matters in Cairo with a U.N. delegate. Suddenly he exclaimed: 'All very fine! You have made a powerful case for the rightness and truth of Islam. But I can't give up the benefits of modern progress. For instance, I like flying in supersonic planes… . He added a few other technological advantages until I broke in, astounded : 'But what's to prevent you enjoying modern comforts? He replied : 'Well, I thought you Muslims advocate a return to tent life in the desert, and want me to go back to nomadism and wilderness-living like a savage!"'

In Germany I lodged in a hotel where the manager was a man who had studied in English and French universities, gained high degrees, and even studied Arabic. He said to me: "As a Unitarian I know my God well and have implicit faith in Him. But I cannot accept the God whom the religious establishment bid their followers serve and worship in their buildings. It seems to me wholly alien to the rationality of a Creator to expect His creatures to follow a path which runs directly contrary to enlightened thought and to human nature itself" He added, with the depth of his feelings written all over his face: "The worship of the One God must decide man's destiny, eradicate the evil consequences of misleading ideas, and raise human culture to pure monotheism."

This highly educated European knew nothing of Islam's creed of the pure unity of God, nor of the basic difference between the Holy Qur'an on the one side and the Old and New Testaments on the other. He imagined that the Qur'an resembled Torah (O.T.) and Gospel (N T.) in its presentation of God. So I gave him a book in German on Islam to enable him to learn its principles.

It is unfortunate that some of our compatriots commit acts when abroad which Westerners attribute to Muslims in general, and on them judge Islam, whereas the perpetrator acted (a) as an individual, and (b) contrary to his religion. Indeed, my hotelier, on the ground of the behaviour of a few Iranis, had refused to accommodate any more Iranis, and only made an exception in my case because an old and trusted friend of his insisted. Even then he only agreed to a stay of a few days. In the course of that visit he gained confidence in me, solely because he never saw me overstep the bounds of decency and right, and not because I made any extraordinary effort to win his regard. He praised me (modesty forbids my quoting his exact words), and even demonstrated his emotions and affection with presents. Sometimes a guest came to his full hotel, to whom he gave my room, while offering me his own private room instead, leaving his desk in it, open and piled with documents of value!

Finally the day came that I had to go elsewhere. He took down my new address, and from then on, whenever Iranis asked him for rooms, he at once telephoned me and asked for my character guarantee. I went bail for their good conduct, to save fellow-Iranis' difficulties (for foreigners on their first visit to a foreign city, unless they have had the wisdom to reserve ahead, find much trouble in discovering accommodation in the early hours of the night).

One night the hotelier rang and asked about some newly arrived Iranis on their first visit to Germany. I gave my customary guarantee of their character. But next morning he rang me, and in a voice which betrayed his disquiet and dismay, complained: 'Those people you vouched for last night proved shockingly bad guests." I shamefacedly apologised, and decided: "Never again!"

The present world crisis gives Muslims a prime occasion for opening the hearts of the civilised world to the inspiring tenets and programmes of Islam. The conditions for making this holy creed known in wide circles are propitious. True, it is the congruence of a religion with the inmost needs of human nature which insures that faith's spread, but circumstances and environmental needs merit study on a world scale also, for discernment of psychological moments favourable to its proclamation. This study and this proclamation we have not yet, alas, undertaken as we should. Yet without it, individual moves, inadequate actions, hit-and-miss efforts, planless propaganda, uncoordinated institutions, can never achieve a satisfactory result, nor advance far into territories where opposition is traditional and deep-rooted.

We err in not grasping the supreme importance of intelligent propaganda with sound organisation. Despite the admirable force inherent in Islamic culture for a revolutionary advance, and its specialised lore of society, the factors that should realise this have vanished from our midst. For all our heritage of the soundest canons and most rewarding ideology, our plight is desperate, and of itself leaves a wide field of action open to Islam's foes.

Chapter 12 Morals in the West

Life is for Westerners "machine-made". It has lost spirit and warmth. True, many material discomforts, deficiencies and difficulties have been overcome and banished by "civilised" devices. But the social life that results shows no evidence of the glory of the spirit of man.

The glaring divisions and dissatisfactions of modern civilisation must be patent to the merest dunce. The inventions and discoveries made to ease life and advance civilisation fail to ease man's disillusion and disquiet of mind. Social difficulties and dangerous crises may have been averted, but this has not sufficed to confer happiness and joy on the generality of mankind.

Over and above his varied physical needs, man has a moral urge and a spiritual yearning. The attraction of physical delights is no greater than the pull of ethical impulses and intellectual quests. To confine men's minds within the four walls of materialism is an unforgivable sin.

"The pursuit of happiness" is rightly included with "life and liberty" among "man's inalienable rights" The first step towards happiness involves preoccupation with the perfecting of personality, and not of the material environment alone.

Parallel with his astounding advances in industrial and scientific technology man must equally advance his inner resources, his spiritual powers and his force of soul. These have been allowed to fall behind. There can be no true human perfection without equilibrium in life's inner and outer aspects-both. If they are in imbalance, "civilisation" offers no base for hundred per cent happiness.

Modern ethical and social shortcomings demonstrate that the factors which produce human perfection have not been allowed the attention they warrant. Humanity has erred in failing to recognise and study the factors of happiness and well-being.
History contains no nation so impregnated with total corruption in every department of its life that no single sound section remained. So it is with the West today. Alongside moral corruption, good qualities still exist. There are many who faithfully follow the precepts of honesty decency and right. But these virtues do not make up for the sins and wickednesses that abound.

Such virtues may be approached from different angles and practised on different grounds. The West's moral capital has been removed from the Bank of Faith where it belongs. Divorced from its source in religion, it depreciates both in intrinsic value and in interest returns. Where the prevailing motive is profit, righteousness and goodness are judged by their material profitability. Small wonder that they decline in the West!

Chapter 13 Sex in the West

In sexual conduct the West beginnings everyone knew in his heart that purity and continence in matters have a moral value of their own, and that transgression leads else deliberately obliterated from men's consciences by subversives.

Purity has lost its esteem, and been discarded by society, while sanctions for control of morals have been abandoned.

A friend told me that he heard a girl ask for advice on one of Germany's regional radio stations. saying: "For some steady with a boy but in the course of time tired of him and take up with another boy. Can I keep them both? Or should I give up second relationship and stick to the first?"

The Radio Counsellor replied with the guidance (sic!): "Until the of 28 you are at perfect liberty to enjoy the company of, and have intercourse with, one friend or several, without any ties or conditions, so have no scruples or worries in doing what you like!"

Where are we when the media, and other authorities, whose duty it is to protect public morals and ban pollution, themselves recommend fornication, and under the pseudonym of "a special relationship before marriage" promote promiscuity or posing as "champions of freedom" cast off morality and preach revolt against decency and self-esteem and proper pride?!

Will Durant, the sociologist, wrote in his "Pleasures of Philosophy". "City life prevents men from observing the seasons, while sexual passions increase and conditions make indulgence easier A civilisation which makes marriage economically impossible before the age of 30 drives a man to sexual deviation, weakens continence, and reduces purity from its original esteem as a virtue to distant lip-service as an impractical dream. Art enhances human beauties. Men cease to count their sins. Women, claiming equality with men, fall prey to passions. Love affairs unlimited and premarital cohabitation become the rule rather than the exception. The streets may be free of prostitutes - but not through fear of the police! It is because women have bankrupted prostitutes by taking over their business for free!"

Human nature is made to desire control of its powers, so that they are employed justifiably. To trespass on ground abhorrent to humanity's essence cannot fail to raise a crop of undesirable growths. To trample the laws of his own being underfoot in the name of freedom can never yield the peace of heart and joy of mind men seek.

Western permissiveness has made licence public. Has this unbridled riot of wantonness subsided? Crime, rape, neurasthenia, riots, strikes what generates all these but this same sexual "liberty" and licence?

Sweden has given total sexual freedom for a quarter of a century. Such savagery now prevails amongst its youth that professors and responsible authorities suffer from it. A Parliamentary commission was set up to study this outbreak of savagery and its insurrectionary perils. The Swedish Prime Minister frankly said: "We shall need at least a generation to redress the disasters caused by an error lasting twenty years."

Freud examined man's animal nature and traced all human actions to the sex urge. He thus divorced sex from ethics. Chastity went by the board. No one could think up a frontier to stop its downward rush. In its train it dragged many human values. Thus, "The Reader's Digest" reports: "West German statistics show that occupying troops of the victor nations have fathered 200,000 bastards, 5,000 of them black, on German women, all now in care at the German government's charges. And this is 10% of the total number of illegitimate children now a charge on the government, not to speak of the unknown number unborn through contraceptives or abortions. Of East Germany we have no facts, but it is more than probable that the problem there, if not worse, is no better. Nor do other Western nations lag far behind Germany. Most painful is a report from Northampton, in Mid-England, that illegitimate births are 50% of all living births, and that this started when Northampton went over from agricultural to industrial employment." ("Divorce and Modernity" p.34.)

The psychologist, Dale Carnegie, writes in his "Mirror of Success". "Statistics published by an American foundation show that husbands who were known to be unfaithful to their wives were of all classes and all ages. Some 50% of all husbands are unfaithful, some regularly. Most of those who remain faithful do so perforce, through fear of disease or lack of opportunity. Telephone-tapping in New York over a short period revealed that New York wives are equally promiscuous."

'The Encyclopaedia Britannica" (Vol. 23, p.45), says: "Of all U.S. hospitals, 650 specialise in V.D. and half as many more sufferers from V.D. apply for help to their G.P. or local specialist." Kinsey's book on ',Habits of Sexual Behaviour', (p.304), shows that 8,000-4,000 infants annually are born in the U.S.A. with venereal disorders. And the proportion of deaths in the U.S. from these diseases is greater than the total mortality rate of all other illnesses added together-except for T.B.

The Tehran Daily "Ettela'at" (Tehran Journal) No. 10414 reports from "Psychology" of December 1960: "The number of illegitimate births in the U.S. has increased so rapidly that it is a headache for the American government. The statistics for 1957 show more than 200,000 illegitimate births in the U.S.A. - an increase of 5% over twenty years."

"Black, White" (No. 380), reports: "The annual abortions in the U.S.A. exceed 1,000,000. 65% are due to free relationships outside wedlock, and 50% are of unmarried teenage girls."

Dr. Molenz of South London said, according to the Tehran Daily "Kayhan" (No. 535). "Of every five girls attending church in England, one is pregnant. Criminal abortions in London reach 5,000 per annum. One living birth in twenty is illegitimate. Despite the annual improvement in the standard of living, this number increases year by year. Illegitimacy is most prevalent in well-to-do families; and girls in rich families are more prone to become unmarried mothers."

These facts suffice to demonstrate modern civilised man's enslavement to his sexual instincts. Sexual indulgence has reached such a pitch that many moral and human values best learnt in family life have been forgotten, so that people no longer acknowledge any bounds or limits governing conduct.

Some years ago Tehran newspapers reported that in Idaho men exchanged wives for three-week periods, and gave each other presents to "seal their friendship". An outcry arose and the group was indicted in court in order to safeguard future generations and punish fornication.

So much for misconceptions in one area of human life, the sexual.

Chapter 14 Social Drop-outs

In every nation it is the thoughts of their learned men and the way of life of their leaders which shape the convictions of the public and the thinking of the individual by direct influence. "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Corruptio optimi pessima." If the ruling class who are trustees and guides of society promulgate filth, what can be expected of the lower orders? If the salt has lost its savour, what will salt the mass? Lustful desires are natural in man. The example set by the leaders who give such desires free rein overrides all moral precepts. A person raised in the school of unbridled self-indulgence conceives of total personal freedom as unrestrained permissiveness. In this the ideas of chastity and purity have no place; only the impulses of the feeling of any moment decides action.

Those who throw moral standards overboard raise a hedonist insurrectionary posterity helpless and hopeless in the face of elemental carnal urges, turning a deaf ear to the calls of duty sounded by reason and conscience.

Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson of the Mahatma, declared in 1962 in the U.S.A.: "A painful future awaits America, since youth there is sunk in sensuality, unwilling to perform their duties. Of seven young men called up for the draft, six fail their medical because of capacity deficiencies and weakened spirit caused by dissipation."

Khrushchev likewise in 1962 forecast: "The U.S.S.R. faces dangers ahead because of the grip that sexual passions have fastened on our youth." 
Strange that this age of scientific and industrial progress is being driven to its knees by youth's preoccupation with the sexual problem, at the core of a technological society depersonalised by the heartless monotony of a machine-made environment.

The Beatles are one phenomenon the age has thrown up indisciplined, inelegant, imbecile, they draw youth in crowds. Next the hippies, like tares in a cornfield of culture, revolt against the dry materialism of the established environment. Rejecting ethical values and spiritual sanctities as ungrounded superstition, they deride rational living, drop out of society, and run riot; until, when they need a moral standard and spiritual refuge, they find themselves destitute and forlorn.

Such social phenomena, results of youth's emotional derailment, reflected in pollution and corruption, show that modern civilisation, which treats people as cogs in a machine, can never satisfy the innate longings of human hearts, with their spiritual sensitivity and humane sentiments. The rise in the suicide rate is further evidence that material comfort and ease do not suffice.

Germany's annual "Police Report" (p.1974), lists 10,000 suicides in West Germany while over 6,000 men and 7,000 women made unsuccessful suicide attempts.

In France, prime home of intellect, 35,000 suicide attempts are recorded annually.
The consumption of hard drugs amongst American youth is so terrifyingly high that recently New York police found the corpses of 38 youths, aged from 16-35, dead through drug-taking. Some of the victims were drive to such desperation by inability. to get drugs that they slashed their wrists. Heroine addicts are the most numerous- 100',000 in New York alone one addict in every 70 inhabitants!

Among the rich of the U.S.A., addicts rank high. A New York doctor said that one of America's most famous actors injects himself with ten doses per 24 hours at $60 the dose! "Many deaths of highranking personalities, officially attributed to heart failure," he adds, "are, in fact, fatalities due to drug addiction." (Ettela'at No. 13015.)

"The Spirit of Man" (p.32), says: "In the U.S.A. a major crime is committed every 25 minutes; and every 24 hours 3 murders, 5 indecent assaults, 30 major thefts and 3,000 petty larcenies. Four billion dollars is spent on combating crime and upholding law, and of this $100,000,000 is disbursed in New York alone."

Such is the life-style, self-emasculated, yet boasting its brains and culture and elevation, which people seek to emulate, and choose as their life-model!

Chapter 15 Worship

For all their propaganda machines and temporal power, the Western churches' intervention in cultural and social matters, and their religious preaching to refine morality and make men's hearts pure, has had little effect. It has not redeemed the bankruptcy of spirit, nor reined in the untrammelled self-indulgence that besets Westerners. How can a religion which permits its adherents unlimited freedom to commit shameful deeds hope to wrench their collar out of the talons of the subversives' grip on the polluted, or uproot the noxious growths of immorality?

Worship and godliness and true humanity must be approached with the sole aim of drawing near to God in purity of intent. But these practitioners have left the track and been perverted.

Religious leaders, who should constitute a staunch dam to hold back the floods of corruption, have themselves fallen victims to the prevailing fashion of permissiveness. How then can Christianity possibly produce renascence and moral revolution in the West? How can such institutions recall mankind to that purity of heart without which no man can know the Lord? Yet the world can only emerge from its crisis of morals by that road of purity via revolution and renascence.

The "Tehran Weekly Journal" (No. 1089) reported: "Church Fathers entice the errant into the church with dancing and music. The Revd. Francis Mieux of Montreal, Canada, 35 years ordained, is a skilled musician, both as composer and player, author of 1,500 popular melodies, a priest who combines the two callings of religion and art." Surely to perform such works in a place of worship is to make a mockery of religion? Amongst the most solemn pronouncements made by all the prophets of God have been the asseverations that no man can serve both God and Mammon; and that there is no escape from the pollutions of the world, the flesh and the devil except by a resolute concentration of the attention on God. Inordinate attachment to materialist considerations must be set aside in favour of the quest for a personal knowledge of God's being, if human life is to be soundly equilibrated. This is the rock on which to build the house of life. All else is shifting sand.

True worship frees a m an from the bondage of fleshly lusts, and draws him into God's presence and to spiritual joys. Observe how this truth of priceless inestimable worth has been squeezed out by the permissives' preaching primacy of carnal desire.

Islamic worship has many aims. One of them is to rip away the curtains of negligence and ignorance and so to usher in a mighty moral and spiritual re-armament and revolution.

Stahwood Cobb, Christian savant, in his book "Lord of the Two Ka'abas" p.227, compares Muslim and Christian worship thus: "I was," he writes, "allowed to be present in Hagia Sofia Mosque in Stambul to witness a service of prayer and worship there. In such services repeated genuflections (Rukoo) and prostrations (Sujood) play a large part as the accompaniment to fixed forms of prayer and adoration. I was deeply impressed by the solemnity, humility and reverence of the worshippers. It far surpassed anything I have ever met in any Christian church in its sincerity of veneration, depth of self-surrender, and dedicated devotion to the Divine Essence. I shared with other foreigners the privilege of watching the ceremonies of the Night of Power (Leilat-ul-Qadr) on which the Qur'an was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. From a balcony in one of the squinches we looked down on the 5,000 worshippers who crowded Hagia Sofia, performing their rukoo's and sujoods in perfect unison, rhythm and order. The rustle of their bending to genuflect or prostrate themselves, the sound of their hands being placed on the floor before them, their united uprising, made deep quiet waves of reverence fill the vast dome, and ascend heavenward. The sight was splendid, matchless; dignified, numinous, humble, reverent, expressive of a sense of individual freedom, democracy equality, which allowed no discrimination of persons or classes. I saw an itinerant carpet-vendor cheek by jowl with a Pasha in gorgeous robes, in concord, without fear or favour, standing, kneeling, prostrating themselves in common worship, while big-bellied dark-faced Negroes busied themselves with their religious observances alongside the most chic of the Turks of Stambul. For Islam from its inception has pursued a creed of brotherhood which it preserves today."

Western religion's biggest error has lain in treating faith as an individual private affair, unrelated to daily life. This mistaken doctrine casts its shadow over all aspects of Western society. Pollution, national crises, permissiveness, corruption, are all ills directly due to this divorce of religion from practical affairs.

Hence, too, the tug-of-war between inner spiritual values and the outward struggle for a livelihood. A sound creed dictates a man's code of conduct and draws guidelines for him which apply to every practical eventuality of living.

Belief shapes thought and action. Living cannot evade the formative effect of creed. Hence the downright sinfulness of separating religion from practical life. Such a separation runs directly in the face of the law of nature. As Dampierre writes in his book "The Conflict between Science and Religion". "Constantine decreed that Christianity was an official religion of the Roman Empire; and, to please his pagan subjects, permitted many customs of the earlier paganism to be taken up into Christianity. Thus arose the idea, which prevailed in medieval religious days, and still prevails in modern irreligious days, that 'religion is a private matter' concerned solely with the individual soul and its relations with God."

Chapter 16 Alcohol

A frenetic consumption of alcoholic beverages augments our social ills, daily producing sinister perversions in manners and morals, and in religious, psychological and medical health.

No sane thinking person can fail to remark these bitter facts. Hospitals are filled with D.T. patients and with mentally deranged alcoholics, while outside them thousands, under the influence of drink, take to murder suicide, theft, blackmail and character assassination.

Alcohol offers an escape from problems and worries: but always ends by multiplying them. Instead of diminishing life's sufferings, it adds material and moral bankruptcy to them, and crushes rather than relieves the sufferer. It makes the bells of doom and disaster toll even louder in his ears. He flees from their clamour back to his alcoholic solace. He seeks to drown his sorrows, in the hope of enjoying an imaginary paradise where his burdens will roll away, in the brief span of his drunken stupor.

"Be not drunk with wine but be filled with the Spirit" is the motto of a wise man who realises that to resort to means which dull reason may lead to insanity, and to the loss of all those intellectual powers which raise man above the level of the beasts. For alcohol is indeed "the poison that men put into their mouths to take away their brains."

In Hamburg I was able to gain admission to view the inside of a synagogue to which I had been drawn by its splendid exterior. A guide showed us its various parts. To our surprise, these included a special room for wine and cheese parties. In consternation I asked: "Is wine drunk even on these sacred premises?" He replied with serious mien:
"Only by a select group who have the right to drink wine in this room!"

So widespread has alcohol consumption become that universities and health authorities have set up organisations to check it. But they have not yet penetrated to the root of the problem - the cancer at the heart of Western creeds which leaves individual free-will too much rein in matters which should be of social concern, and so allows people to imbibe a poison that breaks up sound family life and ruins nations. The fear is growing that the working classes and the youth of tomorrow will be turned into an alcoholic mob, to the tragic disaster of the sufferers and of the peoples of the world.

Doctors attending the 24th International Congress for the Combating of Alcoholism in France issued the following statement concerning the effects of alcohol on mind and spirit: "20% of women and 60% of men entering hospital are alcohol addicts: 70% of mental patients and 40% of venereal patients were so afflicted as a consequence of misuse of alcohol. In England. experts affirm, 95% of mental cases are due to mental disease induced by alcoholic drinks." ('Health Magazine'). And the same magazine (No. 12, p.5) states: "French newspapers headline as 'shaking. the report of the French Minister of Health on the number of deaths due to alcohol, for it said that in one year 20,000 deaths in France were due to excessive alcohol-consumption, and cited the Secretary General of the Committee for Combating Alcoholism as authority for the statistic that 25% of industrial accidents and 57% of automobile accidents in France were due to alcohol."

The former French President Poincaré was also head of the antialcohol society, and stated in a book on the World War. "French youth! Your biggest enemy is drink! Do more than skirmish with Germany! Take up arms against drink! Drink caused more spiritual and material damage in 1870 than the war with Germany then cost France. The drink which pleases your palate is a deadly poison. It ages you prematurely and robs you of half your lifetime, rendering your body far more vulnerable to the attacks of disease and infirmity of all kinds."

"The Reader's Digest" Persian edition reported that in Germany "in one year some 150,000 cases are tried in the criminal courts on charges arising from misuse of alcoholic drinks." A United States Cabinet Secretary said. according to "Health Magazine" (No. 12, Year 5): "We must keep on eye on the effect of alcoholism on our finances. Experts tell us that their research fixes the cost to the state (apart from private costs) at $15,000,000,000 in one year. Of this one billion dollars goes to hospitalisation, five billion to public assistance and charity. two billion to police and similar costs, seven billion to courts and prison charges. Over and above this must be set the fact that the tax on alcohol only brings in $8 billion to the Treasury."

Nor is the Soviet Union immune. The Tehran Daily "Ettela'at" (No. 13108) reports the institution of severe measures to diminish the dangerous levels of alcohol consumption there, since, the Premier of the U.S.S.R. declared: '«Alcohol has caused an increase in the crime level, a rise in absenteeism from factories, and a fall in production such that the state must perforce undertake a far more severe campaign against this."

The same addiction must be blamed for many air-accidents. The industrial psychology specialist Dr. Clement Korn Gould, in an article in the Persian edition of "The Reader's Digest" (No. 37, Y ear 26), lays the majority of accidents of U.S.A. airlines to this account, both amongst hired pilots and private owners of planes and helicopters. He adds: "Research has established that the majority of air crashes are due to inattention, often due to alcoholic after-effects on the minds of pilots and co-pilots, and this more among Americans than any other nationality.

"Further, investigation has demonstrated that a majority of pilots involved in crashes had imbibed during the flight. The increase in air crashes has made responsible authorities determined to get to the root of the causes; and their researches have shown that a large number of accidents during the last few years have been due to drunkenness in the pilots or to their sexual indulgence before the flight."

Chapter 17 Shortages and Uncharitablenesses

Daily increasing affluence and the technological revolution have produced deep divisions in human living. One group of human beings rakes in huge dividends from investments in trusts or cartels or companies, and seems able to have anything it wants, to such an incredible extent that some even provide luxury accommodation for their dogs and cats. Another group scrapes up a miserable livelihood at subsistence level, hardly able to lay hold of the barest essentials of life.

All thinking people feel pangs of conscience at the desperate sufferings allowed in all parts of the world by modern social conditions. Many misfortunes, which in the past would in a very short time have been alleviated, now fester on as uncured tragedies. No wonder a violent hate against those who enjoy excess riches invades the hearts of the underprivileged!

The developed countries make a global effort' to improve their economic conditions: but with no advantage to the masses- indeed, even to the disadvantage and decline of poorer lands. So the class difference gapes wider. Many lands groan under poverty and famine.

"The Ferdôsi Magazine" of July 28th, 1948, in an article on "Nutrition" makes the following points:

1. Underdeve1oped lands number 2,500 million inhabitants, of whom 500, 000, 000 suffer from undernourishment;

2 1,500 million suffer from malnutrition;

3. As a direct or indirect consequence, 8,000,000 die of hunger annually.

In Brazil alone a quarter of a million infants die annually from undernourishment. In India infant mortality balances the natural increase of population. The food an average American family throws away as waste daily, equals the food of the average Indian family for four days.

Worse, some unscrupulous and frivolous persons cause artificial shortages of foodstuffs in order to raise prices and line their own pockets, hard-heartedly ignoring the fact that these foodstuffs might lengthen the lives of untold millions. Legislation to suppress such inhuman prodigal self-indulgence could end hunger in the world very quickly. So says the periodical "Enlightened Thought" (719): "In 1960 125 million tons of grain for bread disappeared from the warehouses of America. It would have sufficed to fill the bellies of India's more than 500 million inhabitants for a year. America destroys a great deal of her harvest annually simply to keep prices up. Capitalist institutions in the West have deliberately caused starvation to increase throughout the world. America fills silos and warehouses with foodstuffs. They then compel poor nations to purchase at high prices to the detriment of their economy. Thus a few selfish power-hungry persons pile up fortunes while being, in fact, guilty of the murder-no less-of millions of innocent fellow-humans."

Philosopher Bertrand Russell writes : "During the last 14 years America has spent 4,000 million dollars on purchasing its farmers' surplus wheat crops Millions of tons of wheat, barley, maize, cheese, butter have piled up in American storehouses and rotted, simply to keep up prices on the world market: and now they are marking mountains of butter and cheese 'unfit' with a colour-code, to prevent the price of dairy products falling "

Sociologist and philosopher Stahwood Cobb writes in his "Lord of. Two Ka'abas" (p.145/6): "Expansion in technology, industry and scientific instruments has produced a deeper sense of our moral poverty Developed lands cannot boast of ethical superiority over backward nations. Modern materialist civilisation is full of inner contradictions and incongruities, between words and actions, between thought and speech, between reason and feeling. Materialist culture in its various manifestations proclaims the theoretical equality of all human beings; but in practice produces inequities and injustices in the ethical, intellectual, social, spiritual and family spheres, and fanatically vindicates these wrongs.

"Democracy claims to be 'Government of the people by the people for the people'. But at its best it is oligarchy, and soon turns to dictatorship of an individual.

"It claims to aim at 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number'. In fact, it gives rise to frustration, failure, anxiety, misery.

"It encourages altruism and a social conscience in its rhetoric, but its policies are selfishness run riot, with no regard for the fate of others. Individuals and groups that get in the way are trampled ruthlessly underfoot. This age surpasses all others known to history in exploitation, profiteering and power-hunger."

In "Sociology" (p.157), Samuel Konig writes: "The developed lands comprise 25% of the world's population and own 85% of its capital assets; leaving 15% for the remaining 75% of humanity. The lapse of time only widens this gap In affluent lands themselves, wealth is the property of a minority only. A U.S. Senate Committee in 1946 affirmed that 5% of America's great industrial concerns owned 80% of American industrial capital, controlling 60% of the total work force and drawing 80% of the total industrial profits."

The world president of the United Nations' "Farming and Agricultural Organisation" says in an article entitled "Hungry Man" (by Jose de Castro, No. 8, p.24): "Today two thirds of the inhabitants of the earth live in constant hunger; and about 1,500 million people live on the subsistence level, suffering constantly from this most horrible of social ills."

Chapter 18 Savagery in a Civilised Age

Some sociologists hold that war is inseparable from human life, which "was from its inception cruel, brutal and nasty." Other sociologists and psychologists deny this, holding that war can be removed from human life, since bloodshed is caused by ethical derailments, social disorders and economic disruptions; and is not an ineradicable ingredient in human nature. Instruction and education in basic truths, and an equitable ordering of social conditions, can remove the causes of war The terrible and irreparable damage which war brings down on the devoted heads of innocent millions can thus be averted, they say.

The matchless triumphs of science and technology have made the 20th century a bloody holocaust. It is stamped as the age of greed, ambition, insurrection, violence, and of history's most inhuman wars A glance over the first 75 years of the 20th century is enough to make manifest that in that short time our advanced and civilised peoples have perpetrated more crimes than in the whole previous course of human history.

The West possesses industrial techniques and atom bombs. Its knowledge drives man through mud and blood. It turns once fertile lands to deserts. The cry of the oppressed rises to high heaven, bewailing the West's weakness of thought and decline in morals.

The aftermath of two world wars between imperialist powers pursuing conflicting material interests has been dire for all mankind. No excuse can wash the grime of wickedness, heartlessness and cruelty from this century's warmongers' garments.

World War I lasted 1,565 days. Nine million died Twenty-two million were maimed and left unemployable for life. Such are the statistics of casualties on the actual battlefield. The number of deaths and injuries caused in crowded cities as a side-effect of the fighting is incalculable The cost of that war is reckoned as more than $400,000,000,000. The Carnegie Peace Trust, in its report "The Twentieth- Century World", claims that that same sum could have built, at prices of that date, a decent house for every family in England, Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, Germany, Russia, the United States, Canada, and Australia. The survivors weep, like Rachel for her children, "for they are not" and will not be comforted. Its ravages were not repaired before World War II broke out.

Statistics say that in World War II 35 million were killed; 20 million lost a limb; 17 million litres of blood were spilt; 12 million children were born deformed; 13,000 primary and secondary schools, 6,000 universities and 8,000 science laboratories were destroyed; 319 thousand million bullets were fired.

In 1945 America dropped two small atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Hiroshima 70,000 people were vaporised and 70,000 others crippled. In Nagasaki 40,000 died and 40,000 were maimed. Buildings were laid flat. Nor were innocent babes or animals spared. Within five days Japan surrendered unconditionally.

World press reports said that after the war Russian artificial-limb factories placed an order with their American counterparts for 4 million feet, to fit out those who had lost a foot in the war, since such levels of production were beyond the means of their own industrial installations If so many feet were needed in Russia, how many irreparable injuries must have occurred amongst her people, and how many in other lands, for which no statistics can ever be affirmed?

The August 1945 bombs held 235 units of uranium, and 239 of plutonium, the equivalent of 335,000 units of T. N T. An average atom bomb of today is 5,000 times more powerful, and a hydrogen bomb 5 million times more destructive than an atom bomb. Yet one atom bomb would suffice to flatten a city like New York, Paris, London or Moscow. They no longer need manned planes. Guided missiles can deliver them right on target 2,000 miles away. The seismographic echoes of one such explosion can be recorded 7,000 miles from its centre. The Nobel Prize-winning U S. chemist, Dr Linus Pauling, says that in the first hour of a new war 10,000 megaton bombs would wipe out 175 million inhabitants of densely populated lands. The U. S. A. had a stockpile of 24,000; the U.S.S.R. 80,000; England 15,000, at the moment he was writing.

A future war, U.S. Army General Neumann writes, will claim as its victims not so much soldiers as civilians. Entire communities, women and children included, will perish Our physicists have taken war out of human hands and transferred it to fighting machines, which make no distinctions of age or sex, belligerent or non- belligerent. The new theatre of conflict will not be a field of battle or a fortress, but those cities and villages in which manufacturing and commercial centres exist. On these would hail down flying missiles filled with explosives, incendiary devices, poison gas, and disease-bearing bacteria.

These two wars have cast all humanity into the vortex of self-destruction. But their horrors have not had the slightest effect on the moral attitudes of the West, nor changed its intoxication with affluence and alcohol-witness the many regional wars today which might at any moment coalesce into one total war of world annihilation. Civilised nations use their mental, physical and financial powers, not for the proper ends of peace and prosperity for all, but to prepare and stockpile the instruments for everyone's destruction.

Bertrand Russell writes: "Governments competing in sending astronauts to the moon and beyond will between them destroy this world. In past ages sheer want drove tribes to attack their neighbours for the scanty supplies available Today affluent societies commit suicide in competitive insanity."

The "Economic Record" reckons that 400 billion dollars were spent on armaments in the first half of the 20th century - enough to feed every human stomach for the same period and simultaneously provide housing for one-third of humanity- all this in a world where two-thirds of the population live barely at subsistence level in illiteracy and indigence.

The W.F.T.U. estimates that 70% of the world's working personnel are on jobs which have some connection with armament manufacture.

So terrible are modern weapons that a Third World War would leave neither victor nor vanquished, but only a funeral for all humanity.

Sociologist Petrim A. Sorokin writes: "The key question of our day is not the superiority of capitalism or communism, nationalism or internationalism, but the replacement of a materialist culture by a superior philosophy of life. In World Wars I and II, each side claimed that peace would ensue if its rival group were wiped out. In World War I the Allies blamed Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany; while he held that the suppression of England was necessary for world peace. In World War II differing views held that peace could only come by Hitler's resignation or death; by Churchill's removal; by Mussolini's never having been born; by Hirohito ceasing to be the deified ruler of Japan; by Trotsky replacing Stalin in Russia. Yet now that all these persons are departed, the fever of crisis and war still inflames the world; and men's hearts fail them for fear. For it was not the individual Kaiser Wilhelm, or Hitler or Mussolini, or Churchill, or Stalin who caused the 20th century's troubles. They merely headed up the multitude of human passions which would have produced similar leaders with other names in any case. A boiling pot produces scum. The scum can be removed. But fresh scum soon covers the brew unless a purifying element is introduced that eliminates the cause."

True, our age has produced the "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals" and prolonged human lives by heart-transplants. But its deadlier products like atom bombs weigh heavy in the balance. The United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, vindicate the 20th century's claim to be champion of the oppressed and enemy of the oppressor Yet millions starve to death or are killed off in wars between hostile political groups, despite these idealist institutions.

Are the multifarious agencies that condemn war themselves wholly blameless? Are not those who shout that "all differences should be settled by diplomacy", themselves guilty of pressing their views on others by unjust and forceful measures? Are not Christian leaders, who preach "peace on earth and goodwill towards men" and "war shall be no more", merely adding to the cynical disillusionment of the younger generation, who see that violence and bloodshed are still countenanced as instruments of policy, and do not forget how the Roman Church turned a blind eye on the crimes of Nazism and Fascism?

Chapter 19 Apartheid

The theory of apartheid, based on the utterances of some innovating thinker ("philosopher") denies racial equality: Its promoters want "the superior race" to run the world while "weaker Inferior races" serve them.

Such a notion is, of course, totally incompatible with any philosophy of man that professes principles of "freedom", individual and/or social, as basic. Further, it prevents any growth in the weak Most modern investigators regard the doctrine of the superiority of one race of humans over another as unfounded and artificial superstition, when viewed in the light of history and of scientific research.

"No pure race exists. No scientific evidence proves the race theory definitely. An "Aryan" race is a myth History does not relate the actuality of a race which called itself "Aryan" The "Aryan" family of languages is a fact. But there are many instances of different racial stocks employing the same language for communication." ("History of Religion", p.219.)

National Socialism's rise was part cause of World War II. Hitler's Germany's ideology was "One race shall rule"- of course the "German Nordics"-who were to found a strong centre of government in mid-Europe. Its brief brutal regime, by means of Congresses at Nuremberg and elsewhere, and fanatic racial propaganda, drew the loyalty of German nationals who made great, if illusory, profit from their dominance of the neighbouring lands.

Dr Gustaf le Bon in his "Bases of the Spirit of Dictatorship" (p.194) writes: "Racism played a major social role, regarded as pivotal by politicians, so that after much bloody conflict it settled to an armed peace which burst out again in devastating violence Behind all this was the idea that the strongest nation, and that most secure from danger, is that with the largest territories and most numerous population, whereas it is just these nations that live nearest the verge of overthrow."

Today the most advanced nations consider "white" superior to "coloured" and cherish racial superstitions. In the cradle of civilisation "sin" is called "black" and coloured people are bereft of many human rights and liberties In some states of the U.S.A. no black man may marry a white; and schools, colleges, hospitals segregate black and white. So do many associations, hotels, restaurants, public transport lines, and-most shameful of all-even some churches.

"In 1954 the Supreme Court made integration of schools obligatory. But white schools only accepted 4 blacks per 100 students, and the entry of some even of them into their schools was only achieved by force and the use of troops." ("Tehran Illustrated News" No. 1174.)

The whites resorted to brutal atrocity in their struggle to hold back the blacks, reminiscent of the worst barbarities of the Middle Ages.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has not had the power to enforce its principles of racial equality. In the space-age earth is torn by racial conflict based on the colour of men's skins Stahwood Cobb ("Lord of the two Ka'abas" p.198) writes: "I am against Kipling's sentiment; 'East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet' Why not? What human difference exists between one man and another? Christ taught us two millennia ago that virtue and humanity are linked with good intents, good works and love. But 20th century people know better, and say that superiority depends on skin colour! Hitler is called bad for exalting one race: but today's scene is peopled by little Hitlers. Take S. Africa. Take our own America. Apartheid and discrimination everywhere! Take Vietnam. Was there not a racist element in our pressure there, on the basis that 'the Western white race is superior to the Asian yellow'?"

South Africa, where blacks outnumber whites by 7 to 1, has made racial discrimination its law - apartheid makes whites, blacks, Indian immigrants, coloured, live in separate communities The identity cards state which group they belong to. The separation applies in buses, trains, churches, restaurants, telephone- kiosks, hospitals and cemeteries. Interracial marriages are prohibited. A black may not work in a white area nor take up a job of high intellectual or scientific level. Menial tasks are reserved for blacks. Small wonder that sometimes half a million are in prison! White judges preside over cases involving blacks.

"Keyhan" (the Tehran Daily) (No. 7013) reported that a black girl, born in the house of a white S. African family, was only allowed to remain in her father's home as a maid, according to the S. African law, or else go and live in the black section of Johannesburg. The father preferred to move house and home to a land where his daughter could live with her parents, as she should, rather than bow to the inhuman law enforced by the highest instance in S African law

"March 12, 1960, Sharpville was one of several S. African cities where demonstrations protested against the law that all blacks must carry identity cards and show them whenever ordered. Sharpville police fired on a peaceful demonstration walking past the police H.Q., killing 69, and wounding 180." ("Ettela'at" (Tehran Daily) No. 13149.) What is such repression but the enforcement of slavery?

Harry Harwood, in his book on "Freedom", writes: "True, slavery in the old form is abolished; but it lingers on in the form of class enslavement in our society, with the endeavour to keep the blacks on the lowest rung of the social ladder."

Chapter 20 Landslide in Family Life

The family is the community in microcosm. It is the root from which nations grow. It is the basic unit of society. Its climate must be love and its soil character. In it human life begins - and ends! It must be happy a citadel of heart-warming peace and quiet, where affection reigns, which runs on oiled wheels of confidence and trust, security and sincerity. The more firm its spiritual and moral edifice, the more sure its joy and happiness in today's troubled, explosive, insurrectionary atmosphere. Every human being has a greater need than ever for a home and family which will provide a haven of quiet and a refuge for thought and reflection.

The West pursued a simple agricultural life before the industrial revolution. In those days the family was a centre of consideration, caring and constancy. Men went out to the fields to work for a living. Women set the care and upbringing of their little ones above all else. The family circle bounded the lives of all its members.

But industry needed hands. One of the first effects of its need was the dispersal of men, women and children to industrial centres, government offices, commercial houses and other large institutions. Conurbations grew in which the sole object of existence was to increase the outward comforts and luxuries of life.

This break-up of family life weakened the marriage bond. Gentleness and affection grievously diminished. Women felt lost without the single-minded devotion to their family and the upbringing of their children which had been their sole preoccupation in previous epochs. They spent their energy in exhausting factory work. The dual role of factory worker and mother proved too much. The necessary time, the adequate opportunity, for leisure of heart, for ordering family life, was missing. She must clock in at the fixed time at work; and housework lost its charm in the weary hours of exhaustion which were all she had left to give to it.

Further, the new "freedom" was so limitless that it uprooted family life, casting chastity and decency to the winds, leaving disaster and division to replace the morality of family and social unity, which had relied on religion and conscience for their sanctions.

The mounting tide of divorces is sweeping the civilised world on a dangerous course, yet it is helplessly unable to stem the flood.

A petty difference in taste between husband and wife is found sufficient ground for ending a marriage-contract. Minor conflicts and incompatibilities are all treated as evidence that a marriage has irretrievably broken down and that a family unit should be split. The storm clouds of passion and prurience, with hurricane force, blast the and the tender growths of family oneness; and the most sacred inheritance of the centuries falls victim to the violence of the most unstable and ephemeral desires. Yet a modicum of common sense could solve the tiff and quench the fire, while tolerance and unselfishness would stabilise the relationship on a sure foundation of principle, justice and love.

An Irani living in Germany told me that in the last few years all his neighbours, without exception, had ended their marriages in the divorce courts!

The Iranian national daily "Keyhan" (No. 6926), reported that marriage guidance councils had been set up all over East Germany to check the flood of divorces and broken families. Doctors and lawyers, too, had joined the campaign. Newspapers were devoting column after column to the matter. The rising curve of divorce statistics was blamed primarily on the wives' employment in industrial jobs which kept them outside the home. Sheer economic need drove 70% of married women to take a job simply to gain an adequate family income. Of these 60% had children. The toll of the double call on her energies by job and family householding on a woman's nerves naturally is so severe that she and her husband quarrel constantly, until their morale cracks and divorce seems the only solution for an intolerably strained situation.

Tolstoy wrote: "One main cause of the upsurge in the divorce rate is women's excessive freedom of choice, which the capricious and touchy feminine nature cannot carry. Of course it is also true that the machine-age does produce nervous strain, and throws men and women into relationships of intimacy and familiarity which easily cross the bounds of legitimate companionship, and may arouse jealousy within the family. while women's employment outside the house rouses a host of further problems."

Statistics in New York and Washington show that divorce amongst intellectuals (sic!) outnumbers those amongst all other classes; while those in Hollywood were so shocking that the authorities refused to publish them.

"Keyhan" on 28 Farvardin 1339 reported that divorces in the past year in England were a record total - 50% due to unfaithfulness, 50% to other causes.

America's "Wake Magazine" reported that the divorce rate had increased 1,000% in the last ten years.

French courts heard 9,785 suits for divorce, 8,000 on the wives' initiative.

World War I, and World War II still more, increased youth's rejection as an expression of "freedom", of traditional moral standards, and divorces increased in consequence. G. de Pels in his book "Matrimony and Modernity" says: "The excess of divorces over first marriages is due to the effects of World Wars I and II."

"The Reader's Digest", Persian Edition (No. 103, Year 25), reports a request to the French government by the French Family Federation that divorce be prohibited in the first three years of wedlock. England has enacted the same law with two exceptions only: extraordinary brutality by the husband, or extraordinary corruption in the wife.

In the U.S.A., 3,000,000 children's parents are separated (Tehran Weekly Journal "Ettela'at" (No. 1206)). Lawson writes: "Anyone with a grain of philanthropic sense must feel the pain of these terrifying figures and seek, to cure them. Since most separations are due to the women's initiative, both cause and cure must be found in them."

Alas, Iran's own Westernised classes are afflicted with the same divorce-disease. In the last decade in Tehran .alone over 1,000 divorces have occurred because of quarrels over money, and been reported in the papers. Many more went unreported. Of 15,335 weddings in Tehran in 1339, 4,839 ended in divorce - almost one in three. 86% of these divorces were demanded by the wives- all Westernised materialist intellectuals (save the mark!). It is a warning of a menacing peril which must be averted. The type of "civilisation" which destroys the family cannot be left as it is if we are not to see division cleave our people asunder and unbridled passions annihilate our culture. It must be replaced by the practice of Islam's stabilising and constructive social lore.

Chapter 21 Love of Animals

Certain Western nations are dog-lovers to the point of madness. An Iranian scientist who took his medical degree in Germany wrote: "My landlord loved his dog, kissed it and cuddled it. I tried to warn him of the danger of infection with hydrated cysts. He dismissed my remarks as unfounded, so I fetched him a medical book, which he studied with dismay, and then asked me: 'If contact with a dog is so dangerous, why do physicians and university professors keep dogs in their homes?' I replied that there are many habits professionally recognised as harmful to health which medical men indulge in because they like them, making a mockery of commonsense, science and reason, preferring to risk their welfare!"

Iran's National Society for the Protection of Animals, in its journal, quotes an American magazine, which sent a questionnaire to all its dog-loving clients (mostly women), asking:

1. Do you like your dog or your spouse best?

2. If you and your dog were both hungry, with insufficient food even for one, would you give that little to your dog, or eat it yourself.?

3. Does your dog sleep in your bedroom?

4. If your dog died would you shed tears?

5. Do you credit your dog with a personality above animal level?

6. If your dog bit your child and your child hit the dog with a stone and both were howling, which would you rush to comfort?

7. If your dog and your husband both fell sick simultaneously, which would you call the doctor to first?

8. Does your mind frequently wander to thoughts of your dog while you are working at your office?
Of 75,000 replies, the answers worked out as follows:

1. Close on two-thirds loved their husbands when the husband loved the dog. A number roundly stated that their dog was everything for them!

2. 60,000 said they'd give the dog the food, since it mattered less if they starved to death themselves than if the dog should fail to survive.

3. 49,000 had their dog sleeping in the bedroom. "He's better than anyone else," wrote the women.

4. Two-thirds would shed tears if the dog died, and give it a funeral ceremony.

5. Practically all replies regarded their dog as more than an animal, with a spiritual personality.

6. "We'd try to quiet both."

7. "First the vet, then the doctor."

8. "Of course our thoughts frequently turn to our dogs while we're away at work- or anywhere else, for that matter. The dog plays too important a part in life for anyone not to keep on thinking of it."

Fancy crediting a dog with a spiritual personality and mourning its death! These are idealists, who espouse the cause of freedom and independence. Yet they condone the ruthless bombing with incendiaries and atomic warheads of entire nations without a qualm. They let the dog sleep in their bedroom yet they refuse entry into society to millions of fellow -humans, just for the crime of having a black skin. They call the vet as soon as the dog is ill and fix its cure yet they let humans die, in groups, of famine, poverty and disease, without compunction. In America the special shops for dogs stock ten kinds of eau de cologne and even sell toothpaste, cosmetics, combs and all beauty -specialities for dogs!

"Time Magazine" is quoted in "Ettela'at" (No. 13241), thus: "Some of our great cities are literally 'the dog house' -e.g. London, Tokyo' Mexico City. In these, dogs are so numerous that they cause discomfort and dirt everywhere. They bite children in growing numbers and make confusion more confounded. Tokyo has 280,000; Los Angeles 300,000; New York 500,000; London 700,000; Mexico City over a million. Dogs are making a mess of the world."

The French periodical "Animal" reported that American dog-owners spend $300,000,000 annually on beauty goods and garments for their pets. In New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, beauty-shops for dogs do a roaring trade. Their attendants have to take a six or twelve-month course for a "Diploma of Dog-Beautician" to get the job! Most cities have at least one dog cemetery with funeral-rites for dogs.

Meantime, five million unemployed suffer neglect and indigence.

Of course, Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals are maintained by humane and tenderhearted people. Should they not extend their humane care to their own kind? Dr. Alexis Carrel rightly voiced the protest of all sane people against the contradictions tolerated in this world. "This should ye have done; and also not have left the other undone." Meaning "Do the lesser humane work (i.e. for animals) without neglecting the greater humane work for people."

Chapter 22 Childhood Traumas

The physical and biological equipment of a woman fit her for certain creative functions in life, peculiar to her sex, which she is called to fulfil. Her capacity for motherhood carries with it certain emotional, mental and nervous conformations of spirit. She is formed to care for and to bring up children with supreme art and heart. The meeting of an infant's many wants, and the careful nurture of its delicate instincts in the secure climate of a loving home, is, amidst the raging passions and deadly violence prevailing in our modern world, the most vital and basic task offered to any human being. No nursery school, no infants' crêche, however well- equipped or psychologically planned, can supply a mother's place. A child deprived of mother-love suffers psychological injuries.

Western women, busied with jobs outside the home, have abandoned nature's destiny; and diverted the wonderful talents innate in the feminine personality into unnatural and disastrous sidetracks. The materialisms of East and West are alike incapable of changing the ingredients of human nature. Both have removed woman from the role for which she was designed. Untold malformations result-in personalities, in communities, in moral conduct. Juveniles brought up without the proper home-environment suffer incurable traumas. Nurseries run by people whose only motive is to make a living and who lack the passion to bring children up, treat their charges from the start as potential rebels, and thereby rob them of patience and of self-respect.

Dr. Alexis Carrel wrote in his "Man, the Unknown" (publ. Harpers, New York : 50th edition p.270): "Modern society has committed a serious mistake by entirely substituting the school for familial training. The mothers abandon their children to the kindergarten in order to attend to their careers, their social ambitions, their sexual pleasures, their literary or artistic fancies, or simply to play bridge, go to the cinema, and waste their time in busy idleness. They are, thus, responsible for the disappearance of the familial group, where the child was kept in contact with adults and learned a great deal from them. Children brought up in schools with a crowd of other children of their own age [Carrel writes 'young dogs brought up in kennels with others of the same age do not develop as well as puppies free to run about with their parents' Translator] do not develop as well as those living in the company of intelligent adults. The child easily moulds his physiological, affective, and mental activities upon those of his surroundings. He learns little from children of his own age. When he is only a unit in a school he remains incomplete. To reach full strength the individual requires the relative isolation and the attention of the restricted social group consisting of the family."

Tehran weekly "Ettela'at" (No. 1206) quotes a foreign report that in America 25% of women in divorce suits suffer from mental ailments, while 150,000 children per annum fall victims to the ills consequent upon a divided home. Women, after a day's work, go home tired out; while home-life itself is so painful for many that they take tranquillisers or other pills, and frequent psychiatric clinics, in search of relief from nervous debility. Youth psychiatrist Dr. George Mally says: "Many psychological ailments in young people are due to memories of babyhood for which their mothers bear the blame. Lying, torturing dumb animals, delinquency, appear in young people who have lacked a mother's care."

Where affection and love between father and mother is weak, children feel less sense of duty to parents. In some families the members never see each other for years, and children by the age of 17 turn surly and rebellious. Some parents turn the children out of the home to fend for themselves at the earliest age allowed by law. Others allow the children to continue to live at home, if they contribute the expenses of their board and lodging, and replace any crockery they break at once out of their own pocket. Such treatment is worse for girls, who tend to seek solace for the loneliness caused by lack of parental care in undesirable friendships with boys.

Conurbations where machines do so much of the work have banished the ancient warmth and joy of heartfelt affection in family and neighbourly relations.

Townspeople forget what tenderness, unselfishness, fellow-feeling and sympathy are', and come to count those they call "friend" on the fingers of one hand. Civilised living has dried out the wellsprings of humanity with its "new order". On the assembly-line, cooperation is enforced by legal and financial sanctions. But the team-work of heart, by which one person voluntarily helps another who is in difficulties, vanishes amongst the depersonalised crowds of unneighbourly neighbours. "Bear ye one another's burdens", which for our tribal forefathers was normal living, has nowadays become something which few people will do unless they are paid for it.

While I was a patient in that German hospital, my visitors, though few, were more numerous than those who visited native German patients, much to the hospital staff's surprise.

Let me add a true story from my own experience. Some years ago a German university professor accepted Islam under the tutelage of the Hamburg Islamic community. Later the new Muslim fell ill and was hospitalised. When the Islamic leader heard of this, he straightaway went to visit the professor in hospital. He found him unexpectedly dejected and downcast. After a long silence the professor broke out with a sad tale: "Today my wife and son visited me. They had learned that I had an incurable cancer, and said they had come to say 'goodbye' for the last time as they understood I have only a few days more to live. It's not the fact that I am dying that gets me down, but my wife and my son's heartlessness." "Never mind!" said the Imam, "Islam's your family now. And we believers will come and sit around you here and see to your every need until the end and after. To do this is for us a winning of merit in heaven, a sacred duty, a divine command and sincere expression of our brotherly love." This news made the patient's face light up. Thereafter he gradually weakened and died. The Muslim community undertook his funeral and escorted his body to their cemetery. Whilst the cortege was proceeding with due solemnity, a youth rushed up and angrily demanded the professor's corpse. They asked "Why?" He said: "That's my father you are burying - illegally, for I sold the hospital his body for 30 marks some days before he died!" The scandalised Muslims stood firm. After some heated altercation the young man had to withdraw his demand. Asked later what his job was, he replied: "I work days in a factory and evenings in a dog-beauty-parlour . ." To such depths can family love, human feeling and a sense of proportionate values sink in a society that is '"civilised"'.

Chapter 23 Conclusion of Part I

Mankind's downhill rush from moral levels plunges into a materialist flood of social unrest and sedition. The greatest thinkers realise that some way must be found to end the avalanche if the world is not to collapse from its own depravity. Thinkers, as one man, declare that only in a revival of faith and morality can there be found a safe ground on which to build the new society. A change of heart in countless individuals must precede, and lay the foundation for, family, community, financial, national and international renewal. It is a hopeful sign that the masses of ordinary people submerged in the sea of troubles caused by materialist, heartless, machine- made living are beginning to realise the inhumanity and hopelessness of such a way of life and type of society.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, as U.S. President, voiced this realisation in powerful words: "Our affluent society rests on shaky moral grounds. We reach the moon and pollute the earth. We long for peace and go to war. An age that has split the atom must heal the splits in humanity. Empty hands must be filled with work, empty stomachs with food, and empty hearts with satisfaction. To cure the moral crisis that blights our world, each of us need only look to ourselves. If we each listen to the still small voice of conscience we shall soon perceive that simple basic things, like goodness, purity, unselfishness, love, integrity, are our greatest and most priceless treasure. Seek affluence in these, and the tragedies of misused material affluence will end in happiness for all."

Dr. Alexis Carrel in his "Way and Rule of Life" (pp. 15 and 34): "We need a world in which every person can develop their innate talents to the full, with no separation between material and spiritual. We have learnt that life cannot be lived right without a guide and a compass. But too few are alert to the grave perils which await human life if we do not follow that guide's directions. Too many are guided by their fleeting passions, intoxicated by the materialist ease which technology provides, unwilling to renounce even a small portion of those comforts, pursuing pleasure, bobbing like corks on the flood of lust for gain and fun which will soon drop us allover the falls. Instead of letting the assumptions of an orderly universe, on which science bases its work, shape our human institutions, and bear us upward towards supreme truth, we have poured them into the moulds of ideologies which can never satisfy our real need.

Putting the material first, modern man sacrifices spiritual to economic affluence, and abandons peace of heart for hedonism. We think 'freedom' includes independence of nature's laws- Liberalism and Marxism preach doctrines which neglect the fact that man was not made only for 'production and consumption'. He was designed for pure love, religious feeling, intellectual treasures, creative imagination, self- sacrifice and heroic living. To live solely for economics is to amputate a vital part of his personality, and this is why both liberalism and Marxism not merely neglect but actually destroy and cast away the basic elements which nature itself included in man's composition."

To eradicate the causes of these tragedies and miseries, the modern world's sole hope is a return to Divine Truth as revealed by God's inspiration through His Prophets. The next sphere for exploration must be that interior space which is within the mind of man. For this we must first disperse the storm-clouds of passion which darken it: we must loose the fetters of lust which bind the human spirit: we must expel the corruption and filth which confine him in the valley of the shadow by means of a cleansing revolution which refines both thinking and living. Only so can man regain true humanity and enter into his rightful heritage of those spiritual values which should be his distinguishing characteristic, by means of which alone the deep inward happiness Man was made for can grow and expand to all his fellow humans everywhere.

* * *

In Part 2 we will see what Islam has to offer as signposts on that road to a God-given destiny for the world.

Part 2
ISLAM'S GIFTS TO THE WORLD

Chapter 24 Islam

Islam stands for harmony and perfectibility with an unmatched depth and breadth of scope that comprises all aspects of spirit and life. It knows all the roads that lead to blessing and happiness. It has the cure for human ills, individual and social, and makes them as plain as the wit of man can devise or comprehend. It sets out to develop all sides of each person: and therefore perforce includes every reality which impacts human existence. It has not given way, in its doctrine of man, to modern errors or corrupt institutions. It does not set man in God's place. To do so is to leave man with only himself to rely on in all his pride and egotism: or else to reduce him to the slavery of being a beast of burden for his fellows, powerless, will-less, helpless before nature's and matter's tyrannies. This is precisely what modern heresies do with man. But Islam vindicates man's unique nature vis-a-vis all other living creatures, affirming that he is a special creation with a lofty calling all his own.

Islam holds that a man's personality does not cease to exist with death, but is continuous and eternal. "Worldly" and "other-worldly" are an indivisible unity. Body and soul can therefore not be dissolved into disparate elements. Islam, on these grounds, presents both worlds in shining terms. It both trains a man for eternity and also finds the guiding principles for its public institutions on earth in the sublime destiny inherent in man's creation.

Eternity dictates universal principles, unchanging and unchangeable. These Islam proclaims as tenets, convictions, commandments, statutes, in its school of contentment, in its thrust for progress. It offers man the perfection of freedom for thought, for concern, and for exegesis of the divine law on matters of social necessity. It reverts to first principles which provide the sure and unshifting basis of rock-bottom truth in all the chances and changes of this mortal life.

Islam holds that man has certain characteristics which are his link with the material world and certain others which connect him with realities that are non-material and which motivate desires and aims of a more sublime nature. Body, mind and spirit each has its proper propensities. Each must be duly weighed, so that what one of these indivisible elements desires does not conflict with the desire of another. Islam takes all the elements and facets of human nature into account and caters for the compound essence of man's combined material and spiritual propensities. It draws him upward towards the highest without cutting his roots in the material.

It demands absolute purity and chastity without denying the flesh and its needs. Its current flows from pole to pole over a network of live wires - convictions and regulations which preserve the integrity of all the innate human instincts while rejecting the Freudian doctrine of total freedom which treats man as nothing but animal.

Islam is not a mere set of ideas in the world of metaphysical speculation : nor did it come into being simply to order man's social living. It is a way of life so comprehensively meaningful that it shapes education, society and culture to heights none other ever aimed at. It forms a supreme court of appeal and rallying-point for East and West alike, and offers them an ideology which can answer their divisive materialisms. It can replace their inequities and contradictions with a more universal, more perfect and more powerful idea.

Islam does not concede priority of any kind to material affluence or to hedonistic comfort as basic for happiness. It finds its principles in an analysis of man's true nature. With these principles it constructs a plan for individual, social and international living, framed by fixed and all embracing moral standards, aimed at a goal for humanity far loftier than the modern world's limited materialist aims.

Islam does not imprison man in the narrow confines of the material and the financial. It sets him in a spacious and expansive air. There morality, principle and the spirit reign. Its statutes are those which spring from the nature of man himself. They encourage mutual help and team-work. They pursue values outside the straitened boundaries imposed on individual and on community by the petty pusillanimous pedestrian patterns of materialist purposes. Instead it yokes man's strength and striving to the change, advance, progress and perfecting inherent in his creation.

Islamic training sets out to refine and enhance human qualities and to harness them to right and reasonable objectives which direct and dictate every forward step to the desired end. It focuses a man's motives, which arise from his natural desires and basic needs, in such a concentrated and streamlined beam that each talent is called in to exercise its function in due succession and order. Impetuous uncoordinated impulses are thus controlled so that no single instinct overrule commonsense nor momentary urge replace reason. Instead man is made master of his fate and captain of his soul. Excess is obviated and every person is accorded his or her legitimate share in the common triumph of all. In this employment every need of body, mind and soul is met and satisfied.

Whenever in history individuals have united in harmonious pursuit of such aims, persons and communities have found themselves. "What is right" has ruled thoughts, conduct and character; human living has been orderly and secure. Reason dictates this training, and calls to a religion with convictions superstition- free, canons practical, statutes feasible and excellencies virtuous. The God-given human intelligence intuitively and logically perceives their truth.

No man is asked to perform a task above that which he is able. But his powers are put at full stretch. Every possibility within him is expressed to the full. And each is, at doomsday, judged; then the fire itself shall prove each man's work of what sort it is.

Chapter 25 Islam and Political Theory

Modern political theory exalts "the general will" Democratic government attempts to put that general will into practice by making law out of the policy voted for by "the majority" (which need only be 51%) leaving null and void the will of the minority (which may be that of as many as 49% of the voters). The minority is thus not "free" at all, even though in some cases its will may be sensible, and in the circumstances right. But '«Government by the Will of the People" will never voluntarily strip off the sanctity and splendour with which it has endowed "the general will", giving that concept precedence over all other material and spiritual values.

Islam, on the other hand, gives precedence to the Will of the Lord of this world, rather than to the uncontrolled inclinations and sentiments of a majority of humans. Islam refuses to strip the Godhead of control of the legislative and jurisdictional power Islam's conception of Godhead and of divine government is wide enough to comprise everything that goes to make up human life everywhere on this planet. This makes Islam man's unrivalled guardian. It demands total obedience to its statutes on the ground that these are God-given and that therefore no human being has a right to allow his own desires to dictate any action in breach of these statutes and rules of life.

How can God be proclaimed worthy of total commitment by people who arrange their lives on precepts deriving from other sources than God Himself? No person dare claim divine authority for a partner for God, nor substitute another lawgiver for Him. Islam's aim is to champion truth and right in everything in human society, since truth does not specialise exclusively in social, political and financial matters but also clothes the stature of man himself in its most beautiful vestments.

The human physique is fearfully and wonderfully made. So are the rules and rights that govern human living. No-one can claim a complete knowledge of all the mysteries of man's make-up, or of the complicated social structure it generates. For this structure comprises the specialised areas of the body and the spirit of all its individuals as well as of all their relationships with each other Nor dare anyone claim to be innocent of sin, of a shortcoming, a fault or an error. No-one is aware of all the elements which go to make up human happiness and welfare.

Despite all the devoted efforts of scientists to penetrate the mysteries of human being, the area they have succeeded in covering is still extremely limited. To quote Dr. Alexis Carrel again ("'Man, the Unknown" p.4): "'Mankind has made a gigantic effort to know itself. Although we possess the treasure of the observations accumulated by the scientists, the philosophers, the poets, and the great mystics of all times, we have grasped only certain aspects of ourselves. We do not apprehend man as a whole. We know him as composed of distinct parts. And even these parts are created by our methods. Each one of us is made up of a procession of phantoms, in the midst of which strides an unknowable reality."

Without insight into the human make-up man cannot frame laws 100% suited to the human condition, nor justly cure the troubles that arise : witness the bewilderment of legislators, their constant alteration of their own statutes in face of today's new problems and unexpected blind alleys. Motives of personal advantage, self- interest, profit, ambition, power, and even of environmental predilections, intrude to distort the legislators' outlook consciously or unconsciously. Montesquieu said of legislation that "none is ever wholly objective and impartial, for the personal ideas and sentiments of the legislator influence his drafting". Thus Aristotle, because he was jealous of Plato, influenced Alexander to denigrate his great predecessor.

Modern slogans of "Liberty and Equality" and "the Public Will" are empty words used by politicians to win support for their laws, laws which in fact represent the interests not of the masses but of the landowners and capitalists.

Henry Ford wrote of England, which boasts itself "the Mother of Democracy". "We cannot forget the 1926 general strike or the way the government tried to break it with every means in its power. Parliament, tool of the capitalists, proclaimed the strike unconstitutional and illegal, and turned police and army out against the strikers with bullets and tanks. Meantime the media of radio and press declared the government to be the servant of the workers, a plain subterfuge contradicted by the fines imposed on the trade unions and by the imprisonment of their leaders as soon as the opportunity offered."

Khrushchev declared in the 22nd Supreme Soviet Congress: "In the era of the personality-cult (i.e. under Stalin) corruption infiltrated our Party's leadership, government and finances; produced decrees which trod the masses' rights underfoot; lowered industrial output; filled men with fear in their work; and encouraged sycophants, informers and character-assassins."

Thus both Eastern and Western systems of government falsely appear in the guise of the public will, Parliamentary rule, representation of the masses: while capitalism and communism alike frame inequitable laws because they neglect the heavenly decrees which establish fast what is best for man.

Chapter 26 Islam and Legislation

Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote ("Social Contract" Book II: Chapter 6: "The Lawgiver"):

"To discover the rules of society that are best suited to nations, there would need to exist a superior intelligence who could understand the passions- of men without feeling any of them, who had no affinity with our nature but knew it to the roots, whose happiness was independent of ours but who would nevertheless make our happiness his concern, … in fact a divine lawgiver is needed."

By these standards the most competent legislator is the Creator of man Himself, He knows all the mysteries of man's being, makes no profit out of any human society, and needs no man. Hence the principles which can shape equitable social regulations must be learnt from a person who receives direct guidance from the Creator, whose teachings are the inspired revelations of that unique Source, and who is wholly reliant on that Infinite Wisdom.

Human laws aim only at the ordering of human society. They do not stray outside those limits, nor touch non-social matters like personal conditions, attitudes of mind, spiritual excellence. They do not try to cure internal pollutions within the personality. It is only when personality problems issue in social disorder in action that they enter the scope of legal measures. A person may be filthy in thought and spirit and still good in the eyes of Western law, which looks only upon outward acts and not upon the heart. Islam with its wide outlook aims not just at redressing what has been done wrong but primarily at putting individual and society right from inside, regarding the ethical personality as the basic unit, and its perfecting as the priority. Islam aims at an orderly society composed of sound morals, sane thinking, sensible action, serene psyches. It therefore legislates for the inner life of the individual in as much detail as for the outer life of society. It brings order and congruence between large and small in creation, the natural laws and the spiritual, the material and the metaphysical, the individual and the social, creeds and philosophies. It helps man not to come into collision with the natural laws which underlie the orderliness of the universe; disobedience to which collapses and confounds all human affairs.

Man-made institutions pursue performance of the law. but in Islam the trustee for the law's performance is a deep-rooted faith; and a Muslim duly performs his 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."

Chapter 27 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.

Chapter 28 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."

Chapter 29 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.

Chapter 30 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.*

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 communiqué 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)

Chapter 31 Islam and Intellectual Advance

Most Westerners are ignorant of the debt their civilisation owes to Islam, even for modern industrial transformation, scientific advance and philosophical enterprise.

Islam came into the world in the bosom of one of the most backward of peoples. In a very short time it had raised those tribes to pre-eminence in every field.

Its greatest miracle was its appearance as a full-grown adult of the spirit in so degraded and poverty -stricken an environment.

Its second miracle was the raising of that environment, by sheer force of inspiration, without any extraneous aids, to an unmatched destiny.

Its third was to create a cultural focus from which strong waves radiated, stimulating renascence in other peoples of every background throughout the world.

The changes it wrought compose history's greatest revolution so far, a revolution in sense and sensibility, in thought and intellect, in relations of individuals and communities, and indeed in every department of human life.

By the end of its first millennium Islam stretched from the Atlantic coast of Africa in the west to the Great Wall of China in the east, from the Mediterranean to the Sahara in Africa. In Spain its troops took first Andalusia, then all Spain up to the Pyrenees, and even penetrated the south of France as far north as Tours. All the "Jezirat-ul Arab" was of course Muslim. From Muslim Iran and Afghanistan other troops took Sind, the Punjab and the Gobi - and this within a few short centuries.

In all its dominions the principles worked out in the Arab homeland were applied to the new societies under its sway. In particular its justice, equality and brotherhood, humane fruits of its meticulous care for the individual and his place in society, which are the distinguishing marks of Islam, set their stamp on the communities over this entire vast area.

The first task was the overthrow of tyrannies : the second was the establishment of sound Islamic rule and respect for human rights : the third was the illumination of intellect, research and thought: the fourth was the propagating of the faith by its calm appeal to reason and logic and by its profundity and breadth of vision: the fifth - and perhaps the most glorious because the most anonymous-was the infection of other nations, of all creeds and none, with its own superior moral, mental and spiritual outlook.

This last achievement not merely raised the general level of peoples of every religion throughout the world, but also drew many proselytes to itself from the idolaters of Arabia, the animists of Africa, the Magians and Zoroastrians of Iran, and the Christians of Egypt and Syria.

Pre-Muslim Arabia had no trace of culture, no science, no erudition, no economics; for geographical reasons Arabs lived in penury and squalor, the prey of superstitions, isolated from world currents. Islam changed all that, and went on to open the hearts and brains of men everywhere to new possibilities.

In far-off Andalusia a school of scholars, writers, mathematicians, scientific researchers and philosophers arose, inspired by Islam to revive the level of thought reached by the Greeks 1500 years earlier, and to move on up from there to heights never before touched by man.

Modern scholars in every country,. even those whose prejudices would make them prefer to maintain a critical and hostile attitude to Islam, more and more draw attention to the speed of the spread of the Muslim faith, to its beneficent results for mankind's prowess in thought and study, and the progressiveness of the ideas which it brought to other stagnant civilisations.

It should be noted by all our "progressives" everywhere, that this brilliant advance for all humanity was the concomitant of a moral self-discipline, of an eschewing of the dissipation which follows upon loosing the reins of passion, and of a deliberate control of the creative instincts, which channelled them into works of artistic, intellectual, and social creativity worthy of mature human beings. This inner discipline, which man needs, promotes the inner freedom he desires; and it is one cause of Islam's wide dominion over the minds of men of the early Middle Ages. For it offered not merely sounder outward forms of living but reassurance to the inner core of the spirit. It abolished the wild persecutions brought about by purblind bigotry and by narrow-minded fanaticism.

It was for this reason that the Sultan Kemal-ul-Mulk, nephew of Saladdin, talked as man to man, and as scion of the same spirit, to Francis of Assisi when the Saint crossed the lines from the camp of the Crusaders under King Louis, whom the Muslims had halted before Damietta. It was the same universal humanity which caused the vast contrast between Omar's merciful treatment of the Christians in Jerusalem when he conquered it, and the barbarous massacre of Jerusalem's Muslim inhabitants by the European Crusaders who took it back for a brief period 300 years later. Islam replaced such savagery with a constitutional rule, a humanely regulated society, an overarching philosophy embracing all mankind.

In Europe's Dark Ages, while the Church established its power over the different nationalities, and fettered them in restraining bonds in a status quo, Islam was building up a many-sided culture which laid the basis for that flowering of science, knowledge, and artistic and technological creativity which is called the "Renaissance".

This was while the Church was condemning Galileo for confirming Copernicus' theory of the orbiting of the earth round the sun, and forcing him to his famous recantation: "I, Galileo Galilei, in the 70th year of my age (1633 AD), on my knees before your Reverences (the Pope and Bishops) with the Holy Scriptures before my eyes, take them in my hands and kiss them while repenting and denying the foolish claim that the earth moves, and regard that claim as a hateful heresy," even while he muttered rebelliouslysotto voce "Eppure si muove".

Yet 500 years previously our own great astronomer and mathematician Omar Khayyam of Nishapur (floruit 2nd half of 11th century AD, when William the Bastard was conquering England) had provided Iran with the Jalali Calendar which to this day enables us to start our new year not merely on the day, but on the exact hour, minute, and second that the earth terminates one orbit and starts another round the sun at the vernal equinox! How few Westerners know this! They think of him as a poet, though he was an indifferent one, but do not realise that if they had picked up his wisdom they might have avoided all their Gregorian alterations of the Julian calendar, and the loss of their "11 days"!

Roger Bacon (1214-1292 AD) the Franciscans' "Doctor mirabilis", was in the reign of Edward I of England compelled to give up the experimental research into science to which his lectures in Paris on Aristotle's works and in particular on the "Liber de Causis" had led him', and was driven out from Oxford back to Paris to be kept under the Church's eye-an eye too narrow and bigoted to see the wealth of the scientific treasures he was offering them. He was arraigned as a dabbler in devilish and satanic alchemy: and the mob was incited to yell for this sorcerer's hand to be cut off and this Muslim' (!) to be exiled."

Nowadays European and American historians and scholars all recognise and relate the fundamental contributions made by Islam to all modern advances in science, mathematics, technology, philosophy, in many ways of which this brief chapter has only been able to touch the fringe.

Chapter 32 Cultural Revolution

No better evidence of the passion of Islam for the spread of erudition, from its very inception, can be given than the words of the Prophet himself who said, after the battle of Badr and the Muslims' victory, to the huge crowds whom they had taken prisoner, that any of them who wished to buy their freedom but had no cash for a ransom could employ their literacy as their resources; and any polytheist who trained ten Muslims to read and write should win freedom. His pronouncement was put into practice; and it was thus that a large number of his original adherents were started on the road of education.

His nephew and successor, the Imam Ali, on whom be blessing, declared that the spreading of science and knowledge and culture and intellectual ability was one of the merits to be coveted and achieved by every Muslim government. In the record of his words it is reported that he said: "O people! I have rights over you and you have rights over me. Your right over me is to insist that I shall always give you guidance and counsel. and seek your welfare, and improve the public funds and all your livelihoods, and help raise you from ignorance and illiteracy to heights of knowledge, learning, culture, social manners and good conduct."

215 years after the Hejra the Abbasid Caliph Ma'amoun founded a "House of Wisdom" in Baghdad to be a centre of science, and furnished it with an astronomical observatory and a public library for which he set aside 200,000 dinars (the equivalent of some 7 million dollars). He gathered together a large number of learned men who were acquainted with foreign languages and different disciplines, like Honain and Bakht-eeshoo' and Ibn Tariq and lbn Muqafa' and Hajaj bin Matar and Sirgis Ra'asi, and others too numerous to mention, and set aside a large sum for them, dispatching many of them to all the different countries of the world to collect books on science, medicine, philosophy, mathematics, and fine literature, in Hindi, Pahlevi, Chaldean, Syriac, Greek, Latin and Farsi. It is said that the vast collections they sent to Baghdad exceeded 100 camel loads!

Europe had not one university or cultural centre to show for itself in those centuries when Islamic lands had large numbers staffed by experts and specialists in all branches of knowledge. These Islamic centres were beginning to radiate waves of brilliant new thinking to the world at the very moment when the Crusades were launched. In fact it might be said that it was the new learning fostered by Islam which itself furnished the Europeans with some of their new thinking that made possible whatever prowess they achieved in those disastrous wars and fired the passion of jealousy and cupidity which made the West wish to seize for itself the treasures which they saw Islam bringing to the nations under its sway.

Dr. Gustave Le Bon writes on page 329 of volume III of his "History of Islamic and Arab Civilisation". "In those days when books and libraries meant nothing to Europeans, many Islamic lands had books and libraries in plenty. Indeed, in Baghdad's 'House of Wisdom' there were four million volumes; and in Cairo's Sultanic Library one million; and in the library of Syrian Tripoli three million volumes; while in Spain alone under Muslim rule there was an annual publication of between 70 and 80 thousand volumes."

G. l'Estrange in his "Legacy of Islam" page 230 writes: "The Mustansariyya University was furnished with equipment and built in a huge campus with college edifices of such splendour that its peer exists neither in the Muslim world nor elsewhere. Its four law-colleges, each with 75 students and a professor who taught the pupils gratis, paid its professor a monthly salary, while each of the 300 students was given a gold dinar a month. A college kitchen provided the daily meals.

Ibn-el-Farat says that the library contained priceless and unique volumes, on many branches of science, for any student to borrow. Pens and paper were provided for the notes anyone might wish to take. The university had hammams (baths) and infirmaries. Its doctors conducted a daily inspection of the colleges, and wrote prescriptions for any who were ill. The college stores were able to dispense drugs prescribed, immediately. All this at the beginning of the 13th century AD!"

Dr. Max Meyerhof writes: "In Istambul the mosques possess between them more than 80 libraries, with tens of thousands of books and ancient manuscripts. In Cairo, Damascus, Mosul, Baghdad, and in cities of Iran and of India there are other great libraries full of treasures. A proper catalogue of the precious volumes in all these has not yet been published complete in print. Moreover the Escorial library in the Iberian Peninsula contains a huge section filled with books and manuscripts produced by the Islamic scholars of the West, which also awaits completion of its cataloguing."

Dr. Gustave Le Bon writes on pages 55778 of his "Islamic and Arab Civilisation". "The Muslims pursued the sciences with profound application. In any town they took, their first act was to build a mosque and thereafter a college. This led to the production of majestic institutions of learning in a vast number of cities. Benjamin Toole (ob. 1173 AD) said that in Alexandria he found more than 20 colleges at work. Baghdad, Cairo, Cordova, and other places all had great universities with laboratories, observatories, huge libraries and all the other requirements for tackling intellectual problems. In Andalusia alone there were 70 public libraries.

The library of Al-Hakem II in Cordova contained 600,000 volumes and it took 44 volumes to catalogue the library's contents. When Charles the Just, four centuries later, founded the Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris he was only able to assemble a total of 900 volumes, and that after great labours, while one-third of that 900 were books on religion."

The same author on page 562 adds: "The Muslims launched science on the road of exactitude, experiment and forward-looking discovery by hypothesis, with a particular enthusiasm, while producing books and treatises and high schools that spread their intellectual prowess to all corners of the world. They thereby opened for Europe the road to its renaissance. So it is with justification that the title of "Europe's Professor' is given to the newly-arisen Islamic power, since it was through them that the treasures of ancient Greek and Roman science were rediscovered and enhanced and given back to Europe as she began to emerge from the Dark Ages."

Josef Marc Kapp writes, concerning the first centuries of Islam's progress in culture, in his book '"Muslim Splendour in Spain" (p.170). "Even the lowest classes in society were athirst to learn to read; and humble workers limited their expenditure on food and clothing and spent their last sou on buying books. One worker collected such a library that men of learning flocked to him. Freed slaves and the children of slaves entered the ranks of the learned; and men like Vafyat-ul- A'iyan lbn Khalkan laid the foundations for great progress".

Nehru wrote concerning the benefits conferred on social progress and the cultural revolution of the Muslims in Andalusia in his book "A Glimpse at World History" (p.413): "Cordova had over a million inhabitants, a magnificent public park of about 20 kilometres and suburbs stretching40 kilometres, with 6,000 palaces, mansions and great houses, 200,000 smaller houses of beauty, 70,000 stores and small shops, 300 mosques, 700 hammams with hot and cold baths for public use.

There were innumerable libraries of which the most comprehensive and important was the Royal Library, which contained 400,000 volumes. Cordova University was famous throughout Europe and in western Asia. At the same time education was provided for the poor. Indeed one of their contemporary historians writes that nearly everyone in Spain in those days could read and write, while in the rest of Christian Europe, apart from the monks and clearly persons who were educated through religious houses, no one, including the highest members of the nobility, thought it worth his while even to attempt to master basic arts of reading." To illustrate these claims I append eight extremely brief chapters, each on a different branch of science or culture; my debt I gladly acknowledge to Arnold and Guillaume's "Legacy of Islam" (publ. O U.P. 1931) to which I refer any reader who wishes to extend his information.

Chapter 33 Medical Science

Dr. Meyerhof writes in "The Legacy of Islam" (p.132): "Muslim doctors laughed at the Crusaders' medical attendants for their clumsy and elementary efforts. The Europeans had not the advantage of the books of Avicenna, Jaber, Hassan bin Haytham, Rhazes. However they finally had them translated into Latin. These translations exist still, without the translators' names. In the 16th century the books of Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and Avicenna (Ibn Sina) were put out in Latin translation in Italy and used as the basis of instruction in the Italian and French universities."

On page 116 of the same work he writes that after Rhazes' death the works of Avicenna (AD 980-1037) were taken up. His influence on thought and philosophy and general science was profound, and his medical works (based on the works of Galen which he had found in the Samarqand library in Arabic translation) had a sensational outreach. Other scientists followed - Abu'l-Qais of Andalusia; lbn-Zahr of Andalusia; Abbas the Irani; Ali ibn-Rezvan of Egypt; Ibn Butlan of Baghdad- Abu Mansur Muwaffaq of Herat. Ibn Wafeed of Spain; Masooya of Baghdad; Ali Ibn-Esau of Baghdad; Ammar of Mosul; Ibn-Rushd (Averroes) of Andalusia, whose works translated to Latin were used in European universities. Europe knew nothing of the cholera bacterium when Islam entered Spain, and the people there regarded the disease as a punishment sent from heaven to exact the penalty of sins: but Muslim physicians had already proved that even the bubonic plague was a contagious disease and nothing else.

Dr. Meyerhof writes of Avicenna's book "The Canon" that it is a masterpiece of medical science which proved its worth by being printed in a series of 16 editions in the closing years of the 15th century AD, 15 Latin and one Arabic. In the 16th century more than a score of further editions were published, because of its value as a scientific work. Its use continued throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, so that it became the most widely known. of all medical treatises. It is still consulted in medical schools.

Will Durant writes that Mohammad ibn Zachariah Razi (Rhazes) was one of Islam's most progressive physicians, author of 200 treatises and books well worth studying today. in particular his

1. "Smallpox and Measles" (published in Latin and other European tongues in 40 editions between 1497 and 1866), and 2. "The Great Encyclopedia" 20 volumes mostly unobtainable nowadays: five volumes were devoted to optics; translated into Latin AD 1279. printed in five editions in 1542 alone; known as the most authoritative work on the eye and its ailments and treatment for centuries; one of the nine basic works on which Paris University composed its medical course in 1394 AD.

Surgery made similar progress in the hands of Islamic practitioners, who even used anaesthetics, though these are assumed to be of modern origin. They employed a henbane base.

Among Rhazes' innovations was the use of cold water to treat persistent fever, of dry-cupping for apoplexy, of mercury ointment and animal gut for wound sutures, and many others. Further information on Islamic medicine can be sought from the many books on the subject. The diagnosis of tuberculosis from the fingernails, the cure of jaundice, the use of cold water to prevent hemorrhage, the crushing of stones in bladder and kidney to facilitate their removal, and surgery for hernia are among advances too numerous to mention in detail. The greatest of Islamic surgeons was Abu'l-Qasem of Andalusia, affectionately called Abu'l-Qays, and sometimes Abu'l-Qasees, floruit 11th century AD inventor of very many surgical instruments and author of books to describe them and their uses - books translated and printed in innumerable editions in Latin and used all over Europe, the last such edition being in 1816.

Chapter 34 Pharmacology

Gustave le Bon writes: "Besides the use of cold water to treat typhoid cases - a treatment later abandoned, though Europe is taking this Muslim invention up again in modern times after a lapse of centuries-Muslims invented the art of mixing chemical medicaments in pills and solutions, many of which are in use to this day, though some of them are claimed as wholly new inventions of our present century by chemists unaware of their distinguished history. Islam had dispensaries which filled prescriptions for patients gratis, and in parts of countries where no hospitals were reachable, physicians paid regular visits with all the tools of their trade to look after public health."

Georgi Zeidan writes: "Modern European pharmacologists who have studied the history of their profession find that Muslim doctors launched many of the modern beneficial specifics centuries ago, made a science of pharmacology and compound cures, and set up the first pharmacies on the modern model. So that Baghdad alone had 60 chemists' shops dispensing prescriptions regularly at the charges of the Caliph. Evidence of these facts can be seen in the names given in Europe to quite a number of medicines and herbs which betray their Arabic, Indian or Persian origin." Such are "alcohol, alkali, alkaner, apricot, arsenic," to quote some as alone.

Chapter 35 Hospitals

Georgi Zeidan continues: "Within two centuries of the death of the Prophet, Mecca, Medina and the other great Muslim cities all had hospitals, while the Abbasid governors and their ministers competed each for his own region to have the best such institution for the care of the sick. Baghdad alone had four important hospitals. By three centuries after the Hejra the governor Adhud-ud-Dowleh Deylamy had founded the Adhudi Hospital with 24 specialists, each master of his own particular field, a hospital which soon earned the reputation of excelling all hospitals throughout Islam, though in the course of time it too was surpassed.

The order and arrangement of Islamic hospitals was such that no distinctions of race, religion or occupation were recognised, but cure was administered with meticulous care to any patient. Separate wards were allotted for patients of specific diseases. These were teaching hospitals where the students learned theory and observed practice. In addition, there were travelling hospitals which carried doctors and their gear by camel or mule to every district. Sultan Mahmoud the Seljuk travelled with a hospital which required 40 camels for its transport."

Dr. Gustave le Bon writes: "Muslim hospitals went in for preventive medicine and the preservation of health as much as if not more than for the cure of the already diseased. They were well-aired and had plenty of running water. Muhammad bin Zachariah Razi (Rhazes) was ordered by the Sultan to seek out the healthiest place in the Baghdad neighbourhood for the construction of a new hospital. He visited every section of the town and its environs, and hung up a piece of meat which he left while he looked into infectious diseases in the neighbourhood and studied climatic conditions, particularly the state of the water. He balanced all these various experimental tests and finally found them all to indicate that the place where the portion of meat was the last to putrefy and develop infectious bacteria was the spot on which to build.

These hospitals had large common wards and also private wards for individuals. Pupils were trained in diagnosis and brought observation and experience to the perfecting of their studies. There were also special mental hospitals, and pharmacies which dispensed prescriptions gratis."

Marc Kapp writes: "Cairo had a huge hospital with playing fountains and flower- decked gardens and 40 large courtyards. Every unfortunate patient was kindly received, and after his cure sent home with five gold coins. While Cordova, besides its 600 mosques and 900 public hammams, had 50 hospitals."

Chapter 36 Chemistry

Jaber ibn Haiyan, disciple of the sixth Imam Ja'afar-i-Sadeq, became known world-wide as "the Father of Chemistry" and of Arab alchemy. His influence on Western chemistry and alchemy was profound and long lasting. Some hundred of his works survive. Of him the late Sayyid Hebbat-ud-Din Shahristani of Kadhemain, once Iraq's Minister of Education, writes: "I have seen some 50 ancient MSS of works of Jaber all dedicated to his master the Imam Ja'afar. More than 500 of his works have been put into print and are for the most part to be found among the treasures of the National Libraries of Paris and Berlin, while the savants of Europe nickname him affectionately 'Wisdom's Professor' and attribute to him the discovery of 19 of the elements with their specific weights, etc. Jaber says all can be traced back to a simple basic particle composed of a charge of lightning (electricity) and fire, the atom, or smallest indivisible unit of matter, very close to modern atomic science."

The blending of colouring matters, dyeing, extraction of minerals and metals, steelmaking, tanning, were amongst industrial techniques of which the Muslims were early masters. They produced Nitric Acid, Sulphuric Acid, Nitro-glycerine Hydrochloric Acid, Potassium, Aqua, Nitrate, Sulphuric Chloride, Potassium Ammonia, Sal Ammoniac, Silver Nitrate, Alcohol, Alkali (both still known by their Arabic names), Orpiment (yellow tri-sulphide of arsenic: arsenic is derived from the Persian zar = gold, adjective zarnee = golden, Arabised with article "al" to "al- zernee" pronounced "azzernee" and so taken into Greek where it was turned to the recognisable word "arsenikon" which means "masculine" since the gold colour was supposed to link it with the sun, a masculine diety!): and finally - though this does not close the list we might cite-Borax, also an Arabic word booraq. Further, the arts of distilling, evaporation, sublimation, and the use of Sodium, Carbon, Potassium Carbonate, Chloride, and Ammonium were common under the Abbasid Caliphate.

Chapter 37 Industry

The Abbasid Caliph Haroun-al-Rasheed sent Charlemagne in Aix from Baghdad a present of a clock made by his horologists which struck a bell on the hour every hour, to the great wonder and delight of the whole court of the newly crowned Holy Roman Emperor.

The massacre and expulsion of the Muslims of Andalusia by the Christians carried with it the closure of many of the great factories that had existed under Islamic rule, and the standstill of progress that had been made in science, crafts, arts, agriculture, and other products of civilisation. Towns began to fall into ruin because of the lack of skilled masons. Madrid dropped from 400,000 to 200,000 inhabitants; Seville, which had possessed 1,600 factories under the Muslims, lost all but 300, and the 130,000 workers formerly employed had no more jobs, while the census of Philip IV showed a fall of 75% in population figures.

It was the Muslims also who brought about the substitution of cotton-wove paper for the old parchments; and it was this invention which formed the basis for Europe's later invention of printing, using an old Chinese technique, and so for the vast uprush of learning which came with the Renaissance. More, since monks were starved for parchment on which to write their religious works, they were tending more and more to scrape off priceless ancient scientific texts from old parchments and to use them again as palimpsests. The introduction of paper put a stop to this disastrous practice in time to save quite a number of texts which would have otherwise been lost for ever, as, alas, too many were.

A paper manuscript of the year AD 1009 was found in the Escorial library, and claims to be the oldest hand-written book on paper still in existence. Silk-wove paper, of course, was a Chinese invention, since silk was native to China though rare in Europe; and the Musulman genius lay in seeing the possibility of substituting cotton for silk, and so giving Europe a plentiful supply of a practicable material for the reproduction of books by the monkish scribes.

Philip Hitti writes in his "History of the Arabs" that the art of roadmaking was so well developed in Islamic lands that Cordova had miles of paved road lit from the houses on each side at night so that people walked in safety. while in London or Paris anyone who ventured out on a rainy night sank up to his ankles in mud - and did so for seven centuries after Cordova was paved! Oxford men then held that bathing was an idolatrous practice; while Cordovan students revelled in luxurious public hammams!

Chapter 38 Mathematics

Baron Carra de Vaux, author of the chapter on "Astronomy and Mathematics" in "The Legacy of Islam" (OUP 1931 pp. 376-398), points out that the word "algebra" is a Latinisation of the Arabic term Al-jabr (= "the reduction". i.e. of complicated numbers to a simpler language of symbols), thereby revealing the debt the world owes to the Arabs for this invention. Furthermore the numerals that are used are "Arabic numerals'." not merely in name but also in fact. Above all the Arabs' realisation of the value of the Hindu symbol for zero laid the foundation of all our modern computerised technology. The word "zero", like its cousin "cipher" are both attempts at transliterating the Arabic "sefr", in order to convey into Europe the reality and the meaning of that word in Arabic.

De Vaux writes: "By using ciphers the Arabs became the founders of the arithmetic of everyday life; they made algebra an exact science and developed it considerably. they laid the foundations of analytical geometry; they were indisputably the founders of plane and spherical trigonometry The astrolabe (safeeha) was invented by the Arab Al-Zarqali (Arzachel) who lived in Spain AD 1029-1087. The word "algorism" is a latinisation of the name of its inventor, the native of Khiva called by the name of his home province Al-Khwarizmi. The Arabs kept alive the higher intellectual life and the study of science in a period when the Christian West was fighting desperately with barbarism."

This is not the place to go further into Muslim achievements in mathematics and astronomy. Suffice it to refer once again to the Jalali calendar of Omar Khayyam, with its formulae for exact calculation of the timing of. the earth's orbits round the sun, to which reference has been made earlier.

Chapter 39 Geography

The Arabian Nights' tales of Sinbad the Sailor, and of his voyages to China, Japan, and the Spice Islands of Indonesia, give quite enough evidence of the brilliance of Arabic commercial shipping and the knowledge of meteorology and geography which was at their disposal. Small wonder that the Faith spread through them from Morocco to Mindanao.

But, besides the SE Asian seas, Arabic sailors penetrated far down the East coast of Africa, and also up the rivers which are channels from the Black Sea into the distant interior of Russia. The Safarname (Travel journal) of Suleiman, a sea- captain of Seraf the port on the Persian Gulf recently excavated by Dr. David Stronach of the British Institute of Persian Stulies, was published at the end of the 9th century AD with accounts of his voyages to India and China. It was translated into Latin, as giving some of the earliest first-hand knowledge of China which ever reached Europe.

The geographer Ibn Hauqal (floruit circa AD 975) wrote in his preface: "I have written the latitude and longitude of the places of this earth, of all its countries, with their boundaries, and the dominions of Islam, with a careful map of each section on which I have marked numerous places, e.g. the cities, the kasbahs, the rivers, the lakes, the crops, the types of agriculture, the roads, the distances between place and place, the goods for commerce and everything else in the science of geography which can be useful to sovereigns and their ministers and interesting to all people in general."

Abu-Reihan al-Biruni, Ibn Batuta and Abu'l-Haussan are amongst other names in the history of the science of geography whose worldwide travels were accompanied by meticulous observation and painstaking notes, which are amongst the proudest achievements of science in our world to this day.

Chapter 40 Art

Cordova Mosque is one of the finest monuments of Muslim art in Europe. Its architect and masons were local talent, who introduced a number of novelties. The Muslims excelled at mosaic, inlay, fretwork and applique work of all types. Marvellous doors, pulpits, and ceilings are decorated in many of the ancient mosques all over the Muslim world with a lacelike design of mosaic, carved ivory and wood and plaster, and fitted pieces of carved wood interlocking with each other with consummate artistry. Chased and engraved wood and ivory are everywhere. Thus the Altar of the Church of Saint Isidore Hispalensis (archbishop of Seville in the first years of the 7th century AD) the carved ivory jewel-case made for Queen Isabella in the 11th century and the carved ivory box now in the Church at Bayeux of the 12th century (obviously some Crusader's loot from the East) inlaid with silver in chased gold, are examples of that art which was the glory of Eastern lands. All this delicate and minute handiwork was carried out with the crudest and roughest of tools, itself a further tribute to the skill and artistry of the makers.

Jewel-studded boxes and cases and caskets are to be seen in many places, though the best are on view in the museums of Damascus and Cairo. Well said Sa'adi: "An Eastern artist may take 40 years to make one porcelain vase: the West turns out 100 a day, all alike: the comparative worth of the two products can be easily reckoned!"

The Muslims were also past masters of the art of carved and coloured plaster work, in a style which still subsists though modern technologies are, alas, rendering the skill rarer all the time. Tenth century examples, some with enamelled work also, are to be found in Andalusia. The Alhambra has 13th century masterpieces of this work. They glitter like the later Italian Majolica. The famous Alhambra flower-vase, 1½ metres high, is unique in this line.

Chapter 41 Conclusion of Part 2

In this part of our book we have given the briefest of sketches of some of the treasures of mind and spirit which mankind owes to the rise of Islam.

They are not stated in braggadocio but as an assessment of facts of human history. For too long they have been neglected and forgotten not merely by those who benefited from them indirectly but even also by the very descendants of their authors themselves.

Yet if mankind is to attain the power to live as one united family which is our calling and destiny, it will happen on a basis of appreciation of each other.

This adult assessment is growing. Modern scholars are now showing gratitude that the Arab General Tareq-bin-Ziyyad in AD 711 landed his troops by the mountain since called Jebel-al-Tareq (Gibraltar) after him. His Moors were unwelcome invaders at the time. It was a moment when Europe had lost most of the benefit of Roman unification and cultural advance and sunk back into the Dark Ages under the barbarian hordes overwhelming it from the North. With the Moors came in the fresh stimulus of lively minds, bringing in Arabic the best thinking of ancient Greeks and Romans, the impetus of scholarship and learning, the desire for scientific and philosophic speculation, the aesthetic delight of artistic creation again.

Islamic universities as far apart as Baghdad and Andalusia welcomed Christian and Jewish students, many of whom profited by the instructions to be obtained nowhere else in those days. They were received with generous subventions and assistance by their Muslim hosts, who treated them as honoured guests. Dynamics, Statistics, Chemistry, Physics, were among the lessons.

In his "Making of Humanity" Brilioth writes: "Modern European education in all branches stems from the Muslims' curiosity and pertinacity in investigating the secrets of nature."

If our brief summary opens the road for Westerners to the exploration of Eastern discoveries we are content; and can so proceed to Part 3 and an examination of Islam's treatment of some of the social problems which afflict every human community.

Part 3
ISLAM AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS

Chapter 42 Islam and Alcoholic Drinks

Islam is a faith which appeals to reason and conscience. Since alcohol is injurious to reason and diminishes a man's intelligence, moral sense, logical powers and spiritual sensitiveness, any drop of it is strictly forbidden to any Muslim.

It is tragic to think of the millions of litres of spirituous liquors consumed. The sole result is that they deprive the world of a portion of that mature manliness which distinguishes the human from the animal. They can hinder mankind's attainment of that pure and acceptable destiny of perfectness which was God's plan.

Islam appeared in a society in which alcohol was rife - and not only forbade the filthy habit but was able to extirpate it with the ignorance and corruption, the selfishness, violence and resultant misery which it had caused. All this blessed benefaction to mankind was started by one inspired man, one man of God who by the strength of his faith revolted against the tyranny of addiction and called men to freedom from slavery to such petty liquids, setting them on the royal road to life.

He showed that intoxication is a sin, explained its harmful nature and destructive powers, and issued his prohibition in the light of an appeal to commonsense and to conscience. In the Sura "The Table Spread" (Maida V v.9) it was revealed through him: "Intoxicants … excite enmity and hatred amongst you and hinder you from the remembrance of God and from the fulfillment of His commands and statutes; and slavery to them diverts you from the sole road of happiness and leads to excess and abomination."

A group who were busy drinking at the moment when this passage was revealed and uttered, promptly under its influence went into the streets and broke the vessels containing intoxicating liquors and spilt their contents on the ground. It was related by Uns bin Malek that: "When that verse was revealed we were holding a drinking party in the house of Abu Talahe when the Prophet's voice reached us, calling: 'O Muslims! Take note that intoxicants are a forbidden sin and should be poured out in the streets!' Abu Talahe asked me to take all the intoxicants from his house and pour them out for him, which I did, taking them into the street where some of the bottles broke while others were washed and cleansed. So much was poured out on the streets of Medina that day that for a long time thereafter, whenever it rained, the colour and smell of the wine came up from the ground."

The prohibition was obeyed with rapidity throughout all the lands under Islamic sway; a swelling tide of character and pursuit of higher intellectual, social and industrial objectives swiftly followed.

To this very day Muslims are to be found in every corner of the world who have jealously guarded their lips and lives from the contamination of alcohol. Indeed, for many of them the mere thought of touching the stuff has never entered their minds. So profoundly endemic has the sounder habit become.

One of the defects of human laws is that the capricious changeableness of human nature affects them. For instance, when America introduced prohibition and tried to enforce it by police methods, the result was the opposite of that which was desired; and bootlegging, contraband and illegal consumption of liquor loosened respect not merely for that law, but for all law, while social behaviour and morals slid downhill at avalanche speed. Islam was successful in enforcing prohibition because it came with the force of a divine command, a God-inspired statute, interpreted to men in the light of reason and commonsense.

It is true that in America many well-meaning people had undertaken a far-reaching propaganda throughout the states against spirituous liquors, with books and films and speeches, for a decade, trying to explain the injuries to the spirit, to the body, to morals and to the finances of the individual and the nation which alcohol causes. The trouble was that the American efforts had their origin in the human idealism of a majority who voted the 18th (Prohibition) Amendment to the U.S. Constitution ID 1918. An agonising reappraisal was forced upon these idealists after 14 years of tragic experience : and in 1933 they were compelled to revoke Prohibition.

Their experience proved the ancient rule that lawgiving which goes too far beyond the moral level of the governed, provokes a human reaction which not only brings the particular law into disrepute, but the whole body of law with it; and a foul mob of unscrupulous gangsters rises to pander to the illicit desires which no legislation can extirpate. These mobs fight each other for control of the vast profits which come from moonshining and from bootlegging, and all the contraband that smuggles the object of unregenerate human craving.

How different is Islam's dependence on basic unalterable principles divinely dictated, germane to the inner essence of human nature in its creation, talents and destiny, and therefore those by which any sound human community must live. These are expressed in a flat, matter-of fact pronouncement which reason comprehends and commonsense accepts as true. No propaganda - no expensive advertising - just a simple statement of a divine decree by God's Prophet (on whom be peace). No man-pleasing - no pandering to human frailty - no eye- service - no provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof. It is not fear of punishment but love of. God which keeps Muslims on the strait and narrow.

No human legislation can hope to track down every wrongdoer and transgressor, let alone exact from each his condign punishment. It is easy to dodge the eye of human law. But the eye of God is everywhere at all times. The Muslim's conscience knows this, and in reverence obeys in private as well as in public. The censor and the lawgiver is within him. The orderliness of God's creations is spread before his eyes, and he knows he should reflect a similar divine order in his private life and in the life of the society of which he is a part. The same Providence which supplies the commandment also supplies the spiritual power to put it into practice. For He is "King of doomsday and Master of both worlds" -this present and the next.

In Such divinely inspired law, man finds the security which the mariner or the traveller over the trackless desert finds in the unmovable polestar. Such a law does not change with fashion or passion. It is outside and above the chops and changes of human caprice. It is the expression of a realistic assessment of man in the light of truth. It calls him to express that truth in his living and thinking - truth which is the sustenance of the soul, eternal, impassible, transcendent over winds of change and the transports of self-will.

Civilisation boasts its safeguarding of "freedom"; and the West bases its government on "the public will" expressed in representative government. But "representative" of whom? As we said above, a "majority" of only 51% automatically means the suppression of the will of 49% of the people "represented". On the principle of "one man, one vote", if the 51% are gangsters, the nation will be represented 100% by gangsters. Is there any difference between such "majority rule" and enslavement of minorities?

Only obedience to the single sovereign authority of the transcendent divine lawgiver will lead men "to respect one another and seek the common good." Education will not do it. A thief is bad: an educated thief is worse: a thief educated to wield all the weapons of modern technology is worse still. An English leader proclaims that the West must repent in dust and ashes for the disaster which its introduction of alcohol to untutored and innocent races has caused. "Alcohol turns the cool heads of the frozen north into blockheads: but the warm hearts of sunnier lands into those of raging demons," he says.

Voltaire wrote: "Islam takes its faith seriously, and therefore puts the ban of sacrilege on habits like gambling and alcohol; and dubs them mere carnal gaming." Jules la Boum writes. "Pre-Muslim Arabs drank to excess, gambled, took as many women to wife as they liked, and divorced whenever they felt like it. Widows were part of the patrimony of the heir, who married or sold them as he saw most profitable. Islam changed all that." Professor Edward Montay adds: "The Qur'an forbade human sacrifice and the exposure of unwanted daughters, alcohol and many other degrading practices. The consequent advance in culture is so great as to win the Prophet the title of one of the biggest benefactors of the human race known to history."

Chapter 43 Islam and the Family

While the warp of society is the individual person and the woof is social order, the unit of the design is the family. Families in which mutual understanding, sincerity and tenderness reign, form details of a harmonious pattern. But a family in confusion and disarray distorts and mars the pattern.

The instinct for survival is innate in human beings. Producing children is the expression of one urge of this instinct, for a child seems like an extension of one's own personality, and a guarantee of the continuance of the same life-force. The primary origin of the urge to found families is sought by many thinkers in this instinct for survival.

The need to feed and support a family incites a man to industrial productivity.

Other thinkers hold that the primary urge towards family-founding was merely the sex instinct; others favour the gregarious instinct; others regard wedlock as a mere commercial transaction between families entered into for the profit of both.

In fact, communal living in society requires families as its units of construction. To degrade the pure love between husband and wife merely to sex, profit or protection, is to deny human nature at its highest.

Some say that, since in the inchoate days of human living the woman as a weaker being could not exist except under a man's protection, family life is merely a feminine institution imposed on man. This is manifest nonsense: for it ignores a man's need of woman, which may be different from woman's need of man, but is just as deeply and inextricably a part of his nature. True, man has to be the breadwinner in most cases. But he needs his mate as a partner in happiness, in joy and in sound living. In marriage is the end of loneliness. Each sex needs the other. This is why "male and female made He them."

God implanted the sex instinct. God created sex differences. He created the survival instinct, the security instinct and the society instinct of gregariousness. All these were part of His providence in preparing mankind to be His joyful family Sociologists give each instinct its due weight in the scheme. They say that the exact role of each instinct varies with the changes in social structure. In primitive society the need to find food and housing is of primary importance. In the ancient agricultural community the need for children became paramount since many hands make light work. Today the sex urge has come very much to the fore, since humanity has devised means to achieve adequate food, satisfactory housing and machines to do the work. But over and above the instincts, the urge to love and the need to be loved are amongst the highest attributes of human nature.

Islam answers the call of nature affirmatively, with its insistence on the family as the best safeguard of public virtue, and its asseveration that it is the only right and legitimate way. It is written in the Sura XVI: Nahl- "The Bee" verse 72: "God has made mates for you of your own nature and made for you of them children and grandchildren and posterity, and provided for you sustenance of the best. Are they then going to believe in vain things and not be grateful for God's favours?"

Islam sets out to protect young people from being led astray by the strength of the God-implanted sexual urge in the years before their character and conscience have matured and their will is governed by discretion. That is why it lays on parents the responsibility of admonishing youth, and of imparting rules of. life and guidelines of prudence which will lead to godliness and the natural use of the power of procreation. It also holds parents responsible for arranging early marriages for those who are mature enough to wed. Young people not yet economically capable of supporting a family may find the thrust of the sex urge so strong that, without the guiding hand of their parents on the reins, the horses of nature may run away with them and carry them into danger or into the trap of illicit sex. Parents must steer the life-force into I its God-given legitimate channels where peace of mind and calm of conscience accompany the happiness of a shared life.

The Prophet is reported to have preached thus from the pulpit of the mosque: "O Muslim community! Your daughters are like ripe fruit on a tree. Fruit must be picked at its optimum moment; otherwise the sun or other agencies will rot or spoil it. You must likewise give your daughters in marriage at the moment when they are ripe, and neither later nor sooner. If you leave them hanging about too long, their inevitable , corruption will be your fault. They are human, and their human needs must be met."

Ali bin Asbat wrote a reply to a letter which he had received from the 5th Imam, thus: "I find no young men who are suitable and fitted to be husbands for my daughters. What then is my duty?" In answer the Imam wrote: "Do not wait until you find young men who are exactly to your liking in all respects. For our Holy Prophet said: 'If you do not find young people to wed your daughters who correspond with your personal desires, have regard only to their character, especially their morals and their religion, and let the qualifications you require in husbands for your daughters be faith and morals alone, since with these a young man makes a satisfactory husband; and if you choose someone without these qualifications you are personally responsible for misleading and perverting your young people."

Thus Islam not only does not put obstacles in the way of matrimony, but turns this force of nature to the advantage of society and of the individual ~ for his physical wellbeing, mental health, calm of spirit and contentment of heart. Islam regards marriage as a sacred union of hearts, a source of serenity and security for both partners. To fulfil this function it needs the qualities of purity, loving-kindness, humanity, gentleness, goodness and faith in the depths of the heart. As it is written in Sura XXX: "Rome" verse 21: "Amongst God's signs for you is this, that He created mates for you from among yourselves for you to dwell with in tranquillity. It is He who put love and compassion between you. Verily in these are signs for those who reflect."

Islam lays down clear rules to govern the relationships within the family. Sura IV Nisa'a -"The Women" calls marriage "the firm bond" and is concerned throughout the first 42 verses with the practical details of the contract of marriage and its fulfillment.

The sense of belonging together is nourished. Fairness governs the share each partner gives and takes in the compact. Each gives according to their ability and each takes according to their need. As Sura 11: Baqara -"The Heifer" affirms in verse 228: "Wife and husband, women and men, have reciprocal and commensurable rights according to what is equitable."

Islam pays the closest and most meticulous attention to the capacities of each sex with regard to their occupation, profession and work. The man has the duty of being the breadwinner and providing for material needs and the production of things. The woman is the housekeeper with the duty of providing for the family's needs and for the production of new people, for nursing the new generation and caring for the upbringing of posterity. Islam recognises the natural consequences of the way a woman is made, and will not allow her to be demeaned or degraded in any way; but preserves her from the wickedness of those who would lead her astray into corruption, and confers upon her a dignity, both at home and out of doors, which is worthy of her calling. It is of course possible that in an emergency a woman may be called to undertake tasks outside her home. But Islam seeks to avoid the kind of contacts between the sexes in the course of their employment which could turn fellowship into familiarity and comradeship into concupiscence. Therefore women must not dress in a provocative or enticing fashion nor titillate men's sexual lusts so that the madness which leads to promiscuity of intercourse is aroused.

Like any other institution, the family and its home needs a responsible head. Without a firm hand at the helm a family can drift in confusion. Either the wife or the husband must therefore take the lead, and nature shows that in general it is more fitting for the man to steer, even if in exceptional cases the woman must take command.

The man, in accepting the responsibility of the household, its livelihood, its wellbeing, its children and their care, merits the authority of a head, because his greater strength, perseverance and endurance make him more fitted than the woman to carry the heavy burden of safeguarding the family from collapse and confusion. Further, woman is a creature of emotion, and quicker to be swayed by feelings. Woman is more ruled by her heart and man more by his head. So Islam gives the prime responsibility to the person of reason, precisely as Article 213 of the most recent constitution of France does. At the same time, Islam lays down that teamwork, partnership, consultation and joint planning are to be the rule. The man is on no account to be left free to pursue his selfwilled desires regardless. He must definitely never tyrannise over his wife or abuse or bully her. It is written in Sura IV Nisa' a -"The Women'. verse 19: "Believers! You may not take over a brother's widow without her consent. You may not treat your wives harshly. You may not goad wife into suing you for a khula' (divorce) by which she has to a part of the dower which you gave her - save only if she be guilty of forfeit lewd conduct. Nay! live with your wives in kindness and equity. Should you dislike them for something, that very thing may be a point through which God will bring much blessing."

The husband, in shouldering the burden of external affairs for the support of the family has full control of everything relevant to his task. But inside the walls Of the home the wife is in full control, and hers is the duty of arranging the details of daily living, the disposition of the household effects and the upbringing of the children. The Prophet said: "The man is the breadwinner responsible for the family, while the wife has the responsibility for the house and for her husband and for the children.-' (Majmoo'é wa ram p.6/ Collections and Remains.)

Modern disrespect for the bond of marriage is due to the negligence of this high conception of wedlock. Instead it has been degraded by a mass of petty dreams and twisted imaginations. Men's thinking about marriage was in ruins before their families began to fall apart. Too many have entered on the married state without a thought for the importance of harmony of mind and spirit between man and wife. Fortune hunters, Casanovas, women-chasers prizing a pretty face above all else, have pushed the spiritual values out of sight and trodden their own best interests underfoot.

The prevalence of such badly founded families forebodes a tragic future. The deep incompatibility of thought between man and wife sets them as far apart as the poles. The gap between them gapes wider daily. Contentment and peace of heart flee from them. They get on each other's nerves. The harmony which ethical values, unselfishness and human affection bring, as both sides do all they can to strengthen the spiritual life of each other, departs. A family must be founded firmly on due consideration of the environmental conditions, the proper setting for the wife, and the compatibility of the partners' ways of thinking and of their moral standards. Marriage must be thought of as holy and basic. Only from this correct viewpoint can the inevitable difficulties of living together be satisfactorily settled.

Islam has paid due attention to all the deleterious consequences of wrongly based marriage, its divisions and unhappiness. It therefore founds the family not on fortune or passion or outward beauty or any material things, but on faith and virtue, and chastity and purity and spiritual qualities and affections, and piety both in the man and ID the woman. The Prophet is reported to have said: "Whosoever takes a wife merely because of her beauty will never find what he sought in her. Whoso takes a wife solely for her fortune, the Lord will abandon him. Seek therefore a wife whose beauty is that of faith and whose fortune is purity of living." (Vassa'el, Vol. 3, p.6.)

In the book "Man la yahdhur" (p.209), "There is no institution more beloved than marriage" is stated as Islam's policy for matrimony. Persons who seek to avoid founding a family on unreasonable or false grounds are sternly rebuked, and condemned for every form of pretext to which they resort for perverting the God-given force of sex from its proper use. In the book "Safeene al-Bahar" (Vol. 1, p. 561), we read: "Wedlock and matrimony belong to my religion. Whosoever protests against this way of life excludes himself from my religion and is not one of mine." Similarly Islam is against the wedding of people who lack the qualities of personality and the excellences of spirit which are required: and against wedding into families which do not profit from religious upbringing in moral standards. As is written in the "Vassa'el" - chapter 7 of the .'Book of Wedlock" "the Prophet in a sermon said: Avoid beautiful plants and flowers which grow by the side of filthy and polluted waters.' The Prophet was asked: 'O Prophet of Allah! what is a plant by a stagnant pool?' He replied: A beautiful woman brought up in a perverse family that has not known the restraints of instruction'."

It is natural that consorts who are not brought up on absolute moral standards and religious laws can never be sure of true family happiness and blessedness. The fruit of such marriages can only be delinquent children, rough, violent, without serenity or security of spirit. Therefore Islam, to ensure the happiness of both parties, lays particular stress on matters of morals and of mentality. It is to guard against the production of a generation that is corrupt and perverted that Islam seeks to avoid matrimony with members of families that are polluted and degraded.

If young people, at the moment when they have to choose their life's partner, would do so in accordance with Islamic rules and regulations instead of only looking at externals, and weigh the realities which are vital to happiness, setting aside false thinking inspired by polluted passions that so swiftly pass, there is no doubt that the unhappiness and family disasters brought on family life by the devotees of sexual freedom and permissiveness would all very rapidly disappear into thin air. Yet some of today's youth have been taught that a trial-marriage, to see if a couple suit each other in intercourse, is the right way and the ideal preparation for happy life-partnership.

How can they think that a brief experience of a fleeting pleasure of two bodies can plumb the depths of the spiritual qualities, mental abilities, moral gifts and personality-traits of another soul? To expect to found an eternal relationship on a few moments of pleasure is a nonsensical piece of illogic. That should be enough to condemn it out of hand, quite apart from all the moral and spiritual damage which such temporary liaisons cannot fail to cause. The inner qualities of a personality only appear in a long period of a shared life. It is the ever-changing scene and stage of their living together which reveals the truth of two partners' inward nature to each other.

Patience, forbearance, equanimity, steadiness, contentment, selflessness, self-sacrifice are discovered when life's pressures crowd in on the soul. How can brief moments of rest and fun and trips a deux penetrate to the deep ethical characteristics? Can a visit to the cinema or some other place of entertainment reveal their true selves to a couple? Indeed, in trial-marriages both partners try to conceal their bad sides and put on a good mask to fool each other.

Can a young man in the heat of passion make a decision which is the most fateful of his life? Can a trial-marriage ensure that there is no difference in spirit and no weak point in their relationship? And how can a young person ruled by the conditions of his years when the inclination to satisfy sexual instincts is so strong. weigh the essential conditions for a sound marriage dispassionately and detachedly? How can he be sure that quarrels and differences will not arise in the future?

It is for this reason that Islam recommends that, before the final signing of a marriage contract, the young people should meet each other and talk; but also, and far more important, they should get an assessment of their proposed partner's character and tastes and traits and capacities from independent observers who are able to judge from long acquaintance.

Or, since the family happiness depends in the first place on the equality of the relations between man and wife in their shared life, the firmer the spiritual and ethical bonds the surer the happiness of the household and the greater its ability to stand the shocks of life in selfless self-sacrifice and union. This is why the Prophet said. ."'Best of my people is the man who shows his family not harshness but perfect kindness and goodness." (Moral Excellence. p.247 ""Makarem-ul- Akhlaq".) And again ("Man la yahdhur" p.625): "Best amongst you is he who treats his family well: and I am kindest of all to my own family." Similarly the wife should treat her husband with kindness, and this is called her "Sacred Jehad" (Tafseer-ad- Dorr al-manthoor, "Gems of Wisdom").

One of the sad obstacles to early marriages today is the difficulty which finance poses for young people. Provision of the marriage portion, expensive ceremonies, the high cost of houses, and a dozen other extravagant charges are too much for the average youth. Islam insists, that the state should take steps to enable these difficulties to be overcome in the interests of the institution of matrimony. The book "Gems of Wisdom" reports the Prophet of Islam as saying: "It is an auspicious and beneficent act that the bride's family should make their demands for dowry and terms of the marriage contract mild and lenient."

Excessive demands may reveal not only that the bride's family but possibly also the bride herself is grasping and hard. The chapter on marriage portions in the book '"Vassa'el" tells the following story. One day the Apostle of God was seated with the assembly of his companions when a young woman rushed in and after the customary courteous salutations said: "O Apostle of God I want a young husband." The Prophet turned to all those present and asked: "Has anyone an inclination to take this woman to wife?" One man said he was willing. I The Prophet asked what dowry he would give. He replied: "I have nothing I can give." So the Prophet said. "No!" The woman returned on a later occasion and requested to be married. No one replied.

Finally the same young man who had no fortune or property at his disposition made a sign, and the Prophet addressed him thus: "Do you know the Qur'an?" He said: "Sure!" The gracious Apostle then decreed: "I will marry you to this woman at the price of the dowry which will consist in your teaching her a portion of the Qur'an every day."

Islam therefore refuses to recognise that financial difficulties may put obstacles in the way of young people's matrimony. It allows indigent and needy persons to found families by law. Islam regards fear of poverty and of involvement as false excuses for avoiding the divine law of life in wedlock, and says that Providence knows a family's needs and will not let them fall into deprivation.

It is written in Sura XXIV: Nur-"Light", verse 32: "Provide the means by which worthy and fitting persons who have no spouse may marry. If they are poor and indigent God out of His gracious care will supply their needs."

Of course hard work and industry is the way in which a man should supply his needs. When a man undertakes the responsibilities of matrimony, in order to make both ends meet he must increase his activities and his hard work. This is one of the functions of marriage in raising the standard of living for the whole of society.

Chapter 44 Islam and the Position of Women

The West's vociferous partisans of Women's Lib. have no idea of the revolutionary leap forward in women's position which Islam brought about. In the days of Islam's first appearance the position of women was that of chattels of the men - little above the domesticated animals. Yet the West, for all their vaunted freedom, have added nothing to what Islam gave to women, except liberty for increased corruption and licentiousness. Islam prohibits debauchery, laxity, vulgarity, debasement and demoralisation. Is that to hinder women's upward advance?

Islam regards both man and woman as created by God to rise to the full stature of the perfect human. This is in stern contrast with those versions of the Heavenly Book which Jews and Christians have tampered with and published as reading: "Amongst every thousand men appears one beloved of God: but amongst all the women in the world there is not to be found one who is included in God's grace and favour." (My quotation is from page 519 of "Islamic and Arab Civilisation", an authoritative work to which due respect must be paid.)

Islam proclaims that in God's eyes there is no difference between man and woman. Each is a precious soul. In His eyes all that makes people stand out from one another is their excelling in virtue, piety reverence, spiritual and ethical qualities. It is open to both men and women to achieve that type of excellence. At Doomsday each soul will be judged, regardless of sex, according to the fruits of their actions, by the above criteria. As it is written in Sura XXVII: Nahl -"Bee". "Whosoever hath faith and performs decorous actions, man or woman, I decree as their destiny a life that will be satisfied and will win that soul a reward better than the good deeds they have done." Compare Sura XXVIII: Qasas-"The Narration" (verse 84): "To whosoever does good, the reward is better than the deed."

Islam regards men and women as complementary to each other. As it is written in Sura III: Aali-Imran -"Imran's Family" (verse 195): "Their Lord hath accepted their prayer and answered: 'Never will I suffer the work of any one of you, male or female, to be lost. Ye are complementary to each other'."

Many women possess such personal excellences and intelligence that they attain great heights of true humanity and happiness. Many men, alas, fall to the lowest depths because they flout reason and abandon themselves to their passions.

It is related that on one occasion the Second Caliph, Omar, said from the pulpit in the presence of a large crowd: "I will fine any man who gives his bride 500 darhams or more as dowry. He shall be made to give the same amount as that by which his dowry exceeds the Mahr-as-Sunna (traditional dowry) to the public treasury." At this a woman who was at the foot of the pulpit cried out in a loud voice her objection to Omar's statement saying: "Your proclamation contradicts God's law. for does not the Sura IV: Nisa'a -'The Women', say (verse 20): 'But if you decide to take one wife in place of another, even if you have given the wife you put away a talent of gold as her marriage portion, take not the least bit of it back.'? How can you, then, in contradiction of the Divine Law which has stated that it is permissible to give more than the legal minimum marriage portion, make your proclamation?" Omar could not deny the impeachment and withdrew his proposition saying: "It was a man who erred and a woman who uttered the truth."

Contrast with this the tragic depression of women in pre-Islamic Arabia. What a height of dignity has been conferred by Islam on the female sex to enable one of them to lift up her voice in public rebuke to a Caliph and cause him to reverse his own public utterance! Islam took from men the right to own women. It instituted equality of human souls, with due regard to differences of male and female constitutions.

In the 19th century religious leaders of France, after long discussions, decided: "woman is a human being, but made to serve man." It was not until recent years that women in European lands had any rights to own property. In England it was not till about AD 1850 that women were counted in the national population census. It was in 1882 that a British law, unprecedented in the country's history, for the first time granted women the right to decide how their own earnings should be spent, instead of handing them over direct to their husbands immediately. Until then, even the clothes on their back had been their husband's property. Henry VIII had in his day even forbidden women to study the Bible when the first English translations began to appear.

Fourteen centuries ago Islam had decreed women's total financial independence, their right to own and dispose of property without the surveillance or control of any man, to conduct business, trade and all the transactions concerning their profit and loss, including the execution of deeds of gift, without having to check with anyone. As it is written in the Sura IV Nisa'a-"The Women" verse 33: "In no wise covet gifts bestowed by God seemingly more freely on some than on others. Whatsoever a man earns is his own. Whatsoever a woman earns is her own. Pray to God for the bounty of His Providence for He knows all things."

Besides property rights Islam bestowed dignity, liberty and freedom on women. This is not least true in the matter of marriage. Marriage is the most important and sensitive step in a woman's life. Islam did everything to secure her in it, and to enable her to consider the financial as well as all the other matters concerning the situation before she accepted him in wedlock.

Thus the rights and privileges which European women extorted after bringing forceful pressure to bear on the societies in which they lived, and only recently achieved, Islam bestowed upon all women voluntarily without any form of revolt or pressure many centuries back. Indeed there is no moment of a woman's life, and no problem she is likely to face, for which Islam has not made beneficent and wise provision.

It is true that today far too many women are condemned in the East to an unsatisfactory way of life. But this is not due to Islam's regulations. It is due to the neglect of religious precept in political, social and financial institutions.

Poverty is one important reason for the bad conditions under which Eastern women have to live. A few are too rich; but the majority far too poor, victims of hunger and wretchedness. The resultant weakness has deprived people of the strength to rise up and insist on a change in their environment, for the sake of their families and children. Nor have the women the power in such a situation to make use of their legal rights and to take the men to court for the violence and tyranny of their behaviour. Women fear the difficulties of having to live without a male companion in a man's world.

The same economic needs cause a diminution in morals and in human affections. Violence and injustice replace moral values.

Although Islamic lands are amongst the worst sufferers from these modern disasters, it is not Islam itself but the deliberate neglect and abandonment of Islamic principles by Muslims and their leaders which has brought these tragedies upon us. For Islam is the very acme of the counterforces to poverty and injustice, and insists that wealth must be fairly divided amongst people of all classes, declaring that it is wrong for people to have to live under the torture of indigence and its pressure on hearts and souls, not least those of women and children.

Have we not men wise and just enough to eradicate these wrongs? To cure the bitterness which they produce? To re-enact sound Islamic measures? To restore respect for the dictates of piety and reverence for God and men? Should not that same Islam which once rescued woman from degrading depression, now raise her again by instituting a new society?

What is the situation in the West? Women have fallen victims to the bestial passions to which men have abandoned themselves under the influence of subversive propaganda of all kinds, in which the massmedia, particularly cinema and TV, and the advertisements that disgrace the hoardings of our great cities, play so tragically fateful a part.

Nowadays a woman's good reputation and dignity does not come, as it used to, from her possession of moral excellences, education and knowledge. Too often women of piety and learning are left in obscurity. Respect, reputation go too much with the name of "artiste" which some women arrogate to themselves. They perform no useful function in society. They do not help the men forward. The name "artiste" seems to cover a multitude of sins of incontinence and debauchery, which are the very opposite of that virtue and chastity in which the honour of women once resided. How many earn a shameful living as "models"?

An American sociologist writes that the modern stripteaser can earn a million dollars a year: a fellow who is able to knock out another man with one blow of his fist gets half a million: a man who has spent a lifetime in the service of his fellows, in his white hairs finds hardly enough to live on.

Professor Albert Connolly writes: "In 1919 England's women fought for the right to be elected to Parliament, and in their battle went to prison and suffered physically in fearless vindication of their sex. What use are their grandchildren making of the privileges gained for them by these courageous women pioneers? And what would their grandmothers think of them? Maybe they are actually turning in their graves at seeing the liberties they fought for perverted to shameless license. This last half century has taught us that the liberation of women is not enough. Besides all their other sacrifices for their cause, women seem also to have connived at the sacrifice of the respect and the ancient realities, the moral dignity and the devotion to mankind's uplift which in former days brought honour to the name of 'woman' and 'mother'." (Quoted from "The Enlightened Thinkers' Magazine", No. 829).

Chapter 45 Islam and Divorce

The first point this chapter must make is that divorce is contrary to the laws of nature. The annulling of the marriage-bond and the separation of those who should be life-partners is a denial of the true nature of man as created and as at his best. Any society in which divorces become numerous, with the consequent break-up of families, evidences its deviation from nature and her requirements.

Psychologists, jurists and sociologists, concerned by the effects of divorce on the moral and juridical personality of those involved, have gone deep into the subject, and given it as their considered verdict that the ejection of a man and wife, let alone the children, from the warmth of home-life into the cold unwelcome of any substitute establishment they may find, deals a mortal blow to their spirits and exposes their children to the onset of moral ailments and psychic traumas against which family life had immunised and protected them. These scientists further hold, almost to a man, that for these reasons divorce should be rendered practically impossible by severe sanctions, except in a few cases where some cause, generally from outside, like the onslaught of insanity or criminality, makes an exception to the rule.

But what should be done in cases of irreparable breakdown of relationships? Must the partners stay in the hell they have made? Or may a way-out be found for them? Christianity says blankly. "No divorce!" But Islam more realistically faces the consequences of irreparable breakdown as a fact, and provides a way-out. Every possible safeguard is laid down in the statute book to prevent such a way-out by divorce being abused. But it is clear that the bankruptcy of the relationship is only worsened by forcing the partners to stick together; and their misery is only increased. Hence divorce, though stigmatised as "the most loathsome of states in the eyes of the Lord" is made possible when it is the better of two bad roads. It may even be that the very separation removes the cause of the irritation between man and wife, while the lapse of time in absence softens the hearts and recalls the good points which had been lost under the pains of discord; so that the couple seek reunion, and in some cases actually start the same partnership up again in pardon and joy.

Since Islam's aim is the firm establishment of marriages, in the interests of this objective certain liberties are denied. The right of divorce is given to the man only, except in very exceptional cases. This is to safeguard the best interests of women and save them from falling victim to passions. Manifestly, if two people both have the right to institute divorce proceedings, the basis of confidence is made very shaky on both sides. What better safeguard can there be, therefore, than to give the right of divorce proceedings primarily to the one who has by nature more subjection to the powers of reason, and patience in the face of lack of tenderness; and who stands to lose the sum he has given as a marriage portion, as well as having to undertake the financial burdens of the children's upbringing?

The differences in the constitution of a man and woman are manifest. The head takes first place in the man's decisions and the heart in the woman's. Reason and emotion are the gifts given to each respectively in their creation. As Dr. Alexis Carrel puts it: "The differences between men and women are, obviously, the physical ones: and then, less obviously, the internal ones like the dispositions of the nerves, the different mental and emotional talents, both of which are of supreme importance for the future of civilisation. Partisans of Women's Liberation aim at a false conception of equality; as if that desirable condition meant precise similarity and identity in upbringing, employment, responsibilities and duties." ("Man, the Unknown" pp. 84-87).

It is for these reasons that Islam's Feqh lays down: "Divorce is in the hand of the man." And it is in consideration of the woman's delicacy of spirit that the power of ending a shared life is not granted to her. Islam, in addition to the manifold measures it has taken to make it easier for people to enter the married state and start families, also makes it more difficult to break up the home. Everything possible is done to ensure happy sound home-life, for the sake of the family's members and of the society to which they belong. It is therefore that it is written in Sura IV: Nisa'a -"The Women", verse 19. "O men, live with your wives in kindness and equity. If you dislike anything in them, that may be the very point which God will use to bring about much blessing."

In order to take away such feelings of dislike and prevent their turning to hatred, and to remove their discomfort, Islam awakens the man's conscience to live in kindness and equity with patience, and not to cast off a wife who is temporarily in disfavour, since it may be that goodness and blessing may come through those very wives; so that it would be stupid to end the relationship hastily. As is written in the same Sura IV Nisa'a -"The Women", verse 128: "If a wife fears cruelty or desertion on her husband's part, there is no obstacle to their arranging an amicable settlement between them for which the wife must renounce some of her rights. But if they return through reconciliation and peace through such unselfishness, such a settlement is better than separation and divorce."

The same dislike of divorce, as the most detestable of extreme measures to be adopted only in the direst emergency, is advanced by all Islam's greatest jurist-consults and leaders, an attitude summed up in the sentence in the book "Mustadrak" (Vol. 3, p.2): "Any woman who seeks to be divorced from her husband, save in cases of extreme necessity, falls out of the grace and mercy of the Lord." Or again in Vol. 3 of the "Vassa'el" (p.144): "Enter upon matrimony. but do not divorce your wives, since divorce shakes the very throne Of God."

Islam fences in the man's power of divorce with many limiting safeguards. A man may not put away his wife by violence, harassment, injury or in a way which may drive her to a life of immorality and corruption. Thus Islam has for centuries surpassed anything yet achieved in Western countries, in its initiative to remove differences and restore understanding in family life. This is particularly true of the family courts, where well-meaning relatives have a large say and everything is done to bring about reconciliation. Causes of differences are deeply studied; and, as relatives, they are able to go deep into confidential matters without either of the couple feeling that their private secrets are being exposed or their feelings excoriated in too public an ambience. When the causes of the difference have been brought into the light of day the members of the family court exert all their powers of sincerity and' heart and affection to bring about reconciliation and to quench the fires of temper, exhorting both sides to unselfishness, tolerance, and an effort to understand each other's point of view. Since both man and wife respect these elders and have full confidence in their compassionate affection, they frequently accept the family court's recommendations for adjustments they should make in their relationships and behaviour towards each other. As it is written in Sura IV. Nisa'a-"The Women" (verse 35): "Should you fear that division will arise amongst them, appoint an arbitrator on the husband's side and an arbitrator on the wife's side from amongst their relatives and send them to them. As soon as they desire peace and reconciliation the Lord will vouchsafe it to them for He is all-knowing and all-wise."

Should the causes and roots of the initiation of divorce proceedings prove to be too deep, so that there is an irreparable breakdown in marital relationships, and all the efforts of the relatives fail to bring about any sort of hope of reconciliation, Islam in its realism recognises that each party must take their own road. It must be plain that such a family court is far more likely to succeed than all the public courts of law or marriage guidance clinics. In fact these only too often, being strangers to the family and not privy to their inmost secrets, merely increase the rift, because of the clumsiness of their well-meaning efforts. A public court has the duty to hear the evidences produced by both sides; and then, in the cold dry heartless atmosphere in which only exact truth and not mercy or clemency reigns, decide which side has most right and give verdict accordingly. It has neither the heart nor the spiritual influence of relatives to press for reconciliation, and cure the causes of the quarrel. In the Qur'an, Sura LXV "Talaq" -"Divorce" ordains in verse 2: "Two just persons from amongst yourselves shall bear witness to the evidence before God when a divorce is settled." Without these two witnesses, there is no legal divorce. An advantage of their appointment is that they can exert every pressure of affection and wisdom to avert the final catastrophe for quite a period before reluctantly, if they have to do so, agreeing that there is no other way out. They frequently succeed in the better course.

It is further laid down that no divorce may be made absolute save after the woman's period of purification after menstruation or childbirth is completed. This need to wait awhile often proves a breathing-space in which the man's feelings of tenderness once more assert themselves over his irritations, and make him decide against divorce.

Further when a man finds sharing his life with a particular woman wearisome and irksome and decides on divorce, this decision of his does not suffice in itself to end their living together not does it become effective until the expiry of the " Iddat", i.e. the period fixed by the Feqh during which a divorced or widowed woman may not be married to another man: and this period also gives a breathing-space which frequently results in the man's change of heart and decision to continue the married bond with the wife he planned to divorce.

Finally, after the execution of the formalities for a "revocable divorce" (Talaq-i-raj') a man may not expel his wife from the home until the termination of the period of the "iddat" which may last anything up to three months, nor may the wife quit their joint home except in a desperately exceptional case during that period. As the Sura LXV "Talaq" "Divorce" enacts (verse 1): "You may not expel women from their houses, nor may they themselves quit, except if they have been proven guilty of some open lewdness (during the "iddat' period). These are limits set by God. Should any man transgress these limits he does so at the peril of his own soul, and to his own harm: for you know not whether God may bring about some new situation later (than the decision to divorce)."

No formalities are necessary to abrogate a revocable divorce during these months. A mere indication of desire for renewal of the marriage relationship by the man suffices.

Should the wife feel such hatred for her husband that she repays him the statutory portion of marriage settlement he had given her, or a portion of her own property, that counts as her divorcing him; but this type of divorce is revocable within the stated period, so that if she changes her mind, and her husband agrees, he can still take her back into their home.

By these many means Islam safeguards the holy estate of matrimony from shipwreck on the rock of hasty decisions onto which emotional storms may drive some couples.

Islam had also done much to protect the wife's rights and to save her from having to continue to live in an unhappy environment. Among beneficent measures are the following:

1. the wife can insert a clause in the marriage contract ensuring that

(a) incompatibility of temperament 
(b) maltreatment 
(c) refusal of maintenance 
(d) unannounced journeys 
(e) the taking of another wife without consultation

are so provided against that if any of the above five conditions is broken she can approach a lawyer to obtain a divorce for her through the courts.

2. the wife can make it impossible for her husband not to divorce her by being intolerably refractory, vexatiously shrewish or deliberately incompatible in relationships, familial, sexual or social;

3. the wife can resort to the courts if the husband has been incapable or negligent in supplying her with maintenance or has put obstacles in the way of her obtaining it; or if either partner deprives the other of conjugal rights or fails in marital duties; the Muslim Qadhi, if the woman's plea is proved, can compel the husband to treat her right, to be reconciled, to disburse the proper sums, to confer her rights upon her in every form : and if the husband proves recalcitrant, or refuses to obey the judge's orders, the judge can then compel him to divorce his wife;

4. the wife can enter a plea in the Islamic court and obtain an injunction if the husband accuses her of lewdness, unchastity or unfaithfulness, or denies his own paternity of her child : if the husband cannot prove his case the judge will order the husband to separate himself from his wife in accordance with the relevant legislation;

5. the wife may, in the case of intolerable revulsion or aversion, in a simple fashion bring about a discontinuance of their union by renouncing a large part of her marriage portion, while freeing her husband from his obligation to pay her alimony during the "Iddat'' breathing-space period;

6 the wife, if the husband absents himself so that no news of him reaches her and she falls into financial or other difficulties, can resort to the courts and request a divorce. the judge will then perform the necessary formalities to annul her marriage contract.

It is written in Sura II: "Baqara" -"The Heifer" (verse 229): "A divorce is only permissible twice: after that the parties should either hold together in equity or separate in kindness. It is not lawful for you men to take back from your wives any of that portion which you have given them except when both parties fear that they would be unable to keep the God-ordained limits. If you judges have reason to fear that the parties will be unable to keep the God-ordained limits, so decree, for there will be no blame on either of them if she hands over a sum in exchange for her freedom. These limits are God-ordained so do not transgress them since that is to wrong yourself as well as others."

In the "Exegetical Collection" it is related in Volume I on page 167 that Ibn Abbas reported that Jameelé, wife of Thabit bin Qais, sought audience of the Prophet and complained to him: "O Apostle of God! I cannot stand one moment more of life with Thabit bin Qais, nor shall my head ever rest again on the same pillow as his." After a pause she added: "I am not accusing him of a lack of faith or of moral and marital virtues: but I am afraid that I myself will fall into infidelity and blasphemy if I have to spend another minute with him. I turned up the tent-skirting and my eye fell on my husband in the middle of a crowd of other men. He looked so ugly, a black- avised, dwarfish runt, and I hated him, and I can't go on… .!" She ran on thus, and the Prophet, after absorbing her outpouring, tried to advise and admonish her, but she paid him no heed. So he sent for Thabit bin Qais and laid the situation before him. Thabit was deeply attached to Jameelé, but self-sacrificingly and for her sake agreed to take back the marriage portion he had settled upon her - a beautiful garden - and give her a khul' divorce.

There are cases in which resort to the court by the wife is statutory. There are also cases in which she can divorce her husband without legal aid, as in cases of certain grave chronic diseases like leprosy or elephantiasis; or because of the onset of lunacy, or of physical defects which prevent marital intercourse, like impotence or castration of the husband. For these Feqh gives the wife haqq-i-faskh - the right to the rescinding or annulment of the marriage, which "faskh" is not the same as the khul' divorce, and does not involve the same financial renunciations by the wife as khul' does.

Germany and Switzerland, in Europe, also recognise lunacy as grounds for the annulment of a marriage or for separation. France does not admit either grave chronic disease or lunacy as an adequate ground, and insists that the healthy spouse must care for the leprous or lunatic partner. Undoubtedly such longsuffering and lovingkindness is highly praise worthy. while extolling it as a counsel of perfection, Islamic realism prefers to leave the partners free to choose separation or continued care, according to their own conscience.

The West is suffering terribly from the laxity it has allowed in the break-up of marriages and the violently increasing incidence of divorce. These disasters are really reactions to over-pressure by the churches, which prohibited and condemned divorce one hundred percent for many centuries, while the secular governments gave recognition to it. For instance, divorce was totally prohibited in France until the French Revolution of October 1789. In 1804, in response to popular demand, divorce was legalised; but in the following 12 years it increased so appallingly that the religious bodies brought renewed pressure to bear, until in 1816 the law legalising divorce was rescinded though physical separation of the parties was permitted. However, public pressure built up again so much that in 1884 divorce within certain limits was legalised once more.

Here follow the conditions on which in Western lands divorce for wife and husband was legal until recent times:

1. a criminal act committed by either party which involves the penalty of life-imprisonment, exile, loss of civil rights or temporary imprisonment with hard labour.

2. physical violence, mercenary prostitution, and a few other similar criminal acts of the one partner against the other.

3. adultery by either partner - though in such cases the wife has the right of divorce only if the man commits adultery with another woman in the house which belongs to his wife and himself.

The following is the road by which a wife's infidelity was proved: note it well! "The infidelity of a wife must be proved completely in the eyes of the police. The wife or the husband plan to be in different places for however a short time. They must agree about some third person to be cited as co-respondent and this person must be prepared to undertake this service. And then at the stated hour the wife must be caught in flagrantedelictu with the third party', and the husband must have the police on the spot to catch her out and so prove her infidelity. Thus the police accompany the husband to the trysting-place; and when they catch the wife in flagrante delictu this is accounted adequate grounds for her husband divorcing her." (The Law of Divorce and Renewal of Marriage p.99).

See what a mass of further impurities the impurity which wrought the need for divorce in the first place has carried in its train. And this is the "civilised" world of the West, which allows women entry into public and political life, and with the other hand takes away her honour, her femininity and the high standards which it should be her privilege to set, and turns her chastity into a mercenary bargaining-point. It must be admitted that since I first put pen to paper on this matter, efforts have been made in many Western lands to eradicate the worst of these abominations.

America makes divorce easier for both parties. It is not surprising, therefore, that American divorce figures are the highest of all.

The wise tremble at the results : the wisdom of Islamic dispositions shines by contrast like the sun in darkness. At a conference in Strasburg, statistics of one year's divorces which could be attributed to the overwhelming desire of wives to be "in the fashion" "a la mode", "comme il faut" and to "keep up with the Joneses" in modernity of garb and guise were quoted as being:

1. in France, 27% of all divorces;
2. in Germany, 33%;
3. in Holland, 36%; 
4. in Sweden, 17%.

Not every Parisienne is an excessive slave of fashion. Nonetheless it is reckoned that the costs of unnecessary purchases made by women simply to keep up with "mode" come to no less than 5,000 tomans per head (£300-£400 per head per annum). Yet all this expenditure adds nothing to the woman's natural beauty, moral stature, ease of spirit or calm mind!

European statesmen, and responsible thinkers everywhere, are well aware of the danger, and fear it acutely. All who possess the slightest sense of philanthropy must seek the means of stemming the sweeping tide of this flood of evil through the world.

Islam offers its regulations on family life, matrimony, and the respective positions of men and women, as a way which all nations might do well to follow remembering that it was a Westerner Voltaire, who said" The Prophet Muhammad reduced the unlimited harems of unfortunate women maintained by pre-Islamic potentates to a maximum of four wives: and his legislation on marriages and divorces is the most noble and effective ever conceived, formulated and enacted by any authority at any time in the world's history, religious, political or social."

Chapter 46 Temporary Marriages

Islam is a realistic and practical religion. Divinely inspired, it fits human nature like a glove. It does not exalt, as ideals, ways of life which are contrary to nature. It therefore rejected the doctrine (which the Christian Church had promulgated during its first six centuries) that celibacy was a desirable or meritorious way of life, estimable as a work of supererogation (i.e. adding to the store of merit which could be shared amongst the saints and even turned to the salvation of sinners for whom they prayed) while marriage, though not an unlawful state, falls in a moral category called "makruh" which lies halfway' between the "mubah" or "indifferent" and the "haram" or totally forbidden.

Popes and Catholics tend to follow this doctrine to this day, as also do the higher ranks of the Orthodox hierarchy. It was one of the Catholic doctrines against which Luther and his Protestants revolted, and it is forming a great source of controversy within the Church of Rome at this very date at which we write. After long discussions at a Vatican Congress, it was decided that "marriage is still less meritorious than celibacy and no alteration in the Church's doctrine can be allowed on this point."

The sexual instinct has the deepest roots in human nature. Unless it is properly catered for and regulated, it avenges itself. It responds to suppression by psychological explosions that can be volcanic in their effect if they take place simultaneously in large numbers of people. It might well be held that the disastrous breakdown of the family institution in the West is precisely such an explosive reaction against Christian attempts to suppress the sex instinct instead of sanctifying and subliminating it in its natural channels. Christians must ask themselves whether they have not committed the very sin of which their Lord and Master accused the Pharisees of His day that of "binding on men's backs burdens too heavy to be borne." Like caged beasts escaping from captivity; the people of the West dash forth from the bondage in which Christianity had tried to hold them, and in an equal and opposite reaction go much too far in the other direction.

Islam makes a proper marriage, when a man and woman reach adult hood, a merit and a virtue. Thus it turns the God-implanted instinct to its correct operation in the strengthening of society It bans bestial abuse of the instinct, but exalts its truly human use in accordance with the way in which God has made mankind. A man was made to love a wife and children. This is acknowledged in every race in every clime.

It is written in Sura 3: Al-i-lmran -"lmran's Family" (verse 14, in part): "Fair in the eyes of men is the love of objects which are the desire of their instinct, women and sons… .."

Islam during the 14 centuries of its existence has done its utmost to end the scandal of prostitution which takes such a heavy toll in family and social life, and degrades both the women who are compelled to practise it and the men whose incontinence exploits them. The law of "the temporary marriage" (ezdevaj-i-muwaqat or muta'a) by the formula (or seeghe) laid down in it, was instituted to establish conditions under which a man who was compelled by the necessities of his business or for other causes to be away from home for long periods, or who desired to give temporary assistance to a woman whose life had fallen into difficulties, could undertake a union for a specified period under strictly controlled conditions.

Remember that this beneficent piece of legislation was produced through the Prophet of Islam in the environment of those "days of ignorance" when men walked in darkness; and when illicit relationships were as common as other types of immorality in those generations of unregenerate and unenlightened persons. Most places had official "red-light districts" and houses of ill-fame as a matter of course. To raise the thinking and living of men, and to put an end to illicit sex, the Prophet of Islam brought in this law of "temporary marriage", to canalise the sex instinct in sound channels.

The chapters on "Temporary Marriage" in the book "Vassa'el" report that the Prophet posted an edict in the streets and bazaars which read: "O people! God's Apostle has made temporary marriage permissible for you, for the quenching of the fires of the sex instinct, and for turning it to sound uses, that ye may not be the slaves of sexual licence, fornication or illicit relationships." By this law the man and woman enter upon a marriage, not of permanence, but of a limited time, and live as man and wife until the expiry of the stated period. The only difference in this type of marriage is that it does not carry with it the same rights of inheritance, nor does the man have to continue to provide the woman's food, clothing and shelter after the termination of their relationship. But to preserve proper order all the other rules that govern permanent marriage must also be observed in the temporary marriage.

A woman who enters such a contract is counted as the man's real wife and can claim all the rights which are legally specified as such. As it is written in Sura IV. Nisa'a-"The Women" (verse 24): "To women whom you choose in temporary and conditional (muwaqat and muta' a) marriage, give their dowry, as a duty."

The only difference between permanent marriage and temporary marriage, so far as its social status is concerned, is its duration. If the contract specifies a definite and limited period, that is a temporary marriage. But the wife is as much a wife as if the contract had specified "a permanent and unlimited period." The children of the temporary marriage are recognised on precisely the same footing as those of a permanent marriage, and enjoy all the legal and canonical and customary rights of children whose paternity is recognised.

One reason for prostitution is that some men find it not within their reach to enter upon a permanent marriage, either because their personality or their finances prevent them undertaking the heavy lifelong responsibility. or because their stay in any one place can only be short. Merchants, soldiers, students and even tourists find themselves in these conditions. It is the realistic recognition of these facts, and Islam's consistent "yes!", to life, which have produced the institution of "temporary marriage".

What better solution could there be? Properly practised. this institution is a powerful antidote and preventative of ills like prostitution and other social ailments. It blocks the way to women's selling themselves, raises the general tone of public morality, and gives needed assistance to women who, through no fault of their own, either by the death of their husband or some other disaster, have fallen on bad times. We say "properly practised", because there are licentious and ignorant persons who abuse this law, including opponents of Islam who make misuse of it a basis for false propaganda and misrepresentation.

Temporary marriage preserves the aspect of purity and saves people from sin. That something right can be misused by wicked persons exposes those persons' wickedness. but does not invalidate the right institution. The answer is to change them by replacing their wickedness with piety of spirit and absolute moral standards. The Prophet of Islam was "sent to bring about the excellences of virtue", and it is to this end that all Islam's efforts are directed.

There exists no law anywhere in the world which is not twisted by the wicked to their own ends and against its original purpose. This is true of laws which are of the greatest benefit to society. The law of "temporary marriage" is one such. It should be backed with the full authority of the state. Those who misuse it should be punished. Those who use it right should be supported and aided in their righteous living.

In the "Temporary Marriage" chapters of the book "Vassa'el" it is reported that the Fifth Imam said, quoting the Imam Ali: "If the 2nd Caliph had not prohibited temporary marriages, no Muslim, save perchance a few utterly degraded lewd fellows of the baser sort, would have ever committed fornication." Close attention to the words of Omar (the 2nd Caliph) as reported by the learned Islamic leaders and Ulema, and reflected in both the Sunni and the Shia Feqh, leaves no doubt that in the time of the Prophet himself "temporary marriage" was both permitted and frequent : but Omar, for reasons which are not clear, towards the close of his Caliphate prohibited it in the notorious phrase: "There were two dispensations which were both legal and frequently practised during the time of the Prophet of God (on Whom be blessing), both of which I cancel, annul, prohibit and will punish: and they are (1) the dispensation permitting enjoyments prohibited to wearers of Ehram (Hajji's white garments) during the interval between 'umra' ('little pilgrimage') and the full Hajj: (2) the dispensation allowing 'temporary marriage' in particular circumstances."

Sunni Feqh gives more information. But it is clear enough that in this proclamation Omar was acting merely on a personal viewpoint, which was far from carrying with it the assent of other companions of the Prophet, who both held ,hat temporary marriage is a true Islamic institution, and also practised it themselves in many instances.

Division is the hallmark of our age. Our magazines, newspapers, films and television are filled with meretricious pictures: our radio with salacious stuff: our hoardings with posters of erotic enticement, while our women dress seductively and go around half-naked. The whole ambience entices youth off the path of virtue. Those who wish to be chaste are in grave danger all the time. People of poor background, and little knowledge of Islamic law, criticise the law of "temporary marriage" in foolish and illogical ignorance and prejudice; and this lays a further obstacle before the feet of our young people.

What then should we do? We can hardly expect even the best to master a total control of themselves and stem this powerful flood so stimulating to sexual instincts, which, in the critical age of youth, are so close to the surface and so impatient of outward control. Even if we imagined that the ideal is the real, and that every one of our youth is endowed with what amounts to a supernatural self-control, will this not of itself annul the purpose of the creation of this instinct within humankind. prevent the continuance of the race, prevent the use of that vital sperm, prevent the spirit and teachings of Islam being truly practised, in accordance with the law proclaimed in Sura XXll: Hajj-"Pilgrimage", (verse 78): "Strive in God's cause as ye should; for He has chosen you, and has in His religion not laid a difficult or insupportable task upon you"?

Should we now return to the low morals of our pre-lslamic past, and to that dirty habit of prostitution, with all the social ills and personal misfortunes with which it has filled the Western world? Shall we leave humanity to fall into that confusion of passions which is the law Of the jungle and the behaviour of brute beasts?

It is written in Sura II: Baqara - "The Heifer" (verse 61): "Remember O Israelis, that ye said: 'O Moses! We cannot keep on with only one kind of food; so pray thy Lord to give us vegetables!' And he replied: "Will ye exchange the better for the worse? Go down to Egypt and there find what you want!. They were covered with humiliation and misery, for they had drawn upon themselves the wrath of God.-. We should merit Moses. rebuke if we, who have been shown that is good, preferred to return to fleshpots of our own past and the West's present. Shall we barter a heritage of glory for a mess of pottage?

It is to prevent precisely this disaster that the law of "temporary marriage'' was introduced. What better way could there be to rescue millions of women, who are divorced or unmarried or widowed, from the pressure to keep alive in wrongful ways and to prostitute their sex to meet the cost of living? Some might be able to get a job and so a livelihood. But can that satisfy a woman's inmost feelings and spiritual needs? Can it satisfy the emptiness left in her soul by the loss of a husband's love and nearness? And what of her innate emotions and her instinct of motherhood? Are not all these temptations to lead her astray unless proper provision is made?

Men and women have taken up temporary marriages in the West without legal, social or religious sanctions - and their society has been cast into chaos. The West's thinkers are feeling after an institution like Muslim "temporary marriage" to end this chaos.

Thus Bertrand Russell writes: "Modern social and financial difficulties put obstacles in the way of youthful marriages, contrary to our liking. A century or two ago the student completed his studies between the ages of 17 and 20; and, when the pressures of instinct and the age of puberty made him marriageable, he was able to enter that state. Very few remained unmarried until they were 30 or 40. But today students only enter on their serious studies after the age of 20 and proceed to their specialisation in industry or science. Even after they have got their degree and left college, they have to spend quite a period securing their means of livelihood; so that they may be 35 before they can afford to get married and found a family The long gap between adulthood and marriage causes emotional and instinctive upheavals in the sexual life and drives the victims to find relief where they had better not. Would it not be better for the sake of the proper order of human society that we should end this touchy problem by finding some proper outlet for the sexual instinct and the marital urge to replace or to fill in that lengthy gap, and so safeguard public health, posterity, morality, the principles of communication between men and women? Some sort of temporary marriage for our girls and boys would be a solution and prepare them for a permanent marriage later when they can afford it, saving them from the corruptions of illicit sex and the spiritual pangs of conscience which follow that type of wrongdoing as well as from the veneral diseases which only too often result."

Wilhelm van Loom "Matrimonial Health as seen by Islam" (p.175) wrote: "Psychology has confirmed that when men pass early marriageable age without getting wed, tendencies to homosexuality or other forms of sexual satisfaction beset them. Statistics show that some 65% of men who have wives are unfaithful to them. To lessen their burdens the government ought to introduce legislation making temporary marriage by consent of both parties legal, with definite regulations and a proper form for them to sign and register."

Chapter 47 Multiple Marriages

Laws for the ordering of society are truly progressive and profitable when they fit human nature and the Creator's laws, and take into account the widest possible conspectus of human needs in each particular society. Unless they fulfil these conditions they cannot be durable; nor can the society they set out to regulate. Islam has taken these points into consideration, and made reasonable and stable regulations, not for any particular region of the world, but for all humanity in all periods in every clime. And so these laws will subsist and be beneficial for man so long as he continues to exist on the face of the earth.

Christians calumniate Islam as polygamous. The churches are hard put to it to maintain their footing in this lubricious age, and use contumely against Islam to bolster up their own position, exploiting the general ignorance of the truth of Islamic law and the regulations about the number of wives. In the West they go in for multiple marriages and change partners by their own caprice without any attention to legal conditions. But if they grasped the facts about Islam's law of marriage and then practised that law, they could save themselves a world of troubles.

Before the rise of Islam the tribes went in for unlimited polygamy. Indeed it was a status symbol to have many wives- the more wives, the greater the man. The prophets of God in the early ages, and the sacred scriptures of their different religions, reveal the same situation in mankind's early centuries. In China the Li-Ki law gave every man the right to have up to 130 wives. In Israel one man could have several hundred. Charlemagne had 400 and Ardeshir Babekan had about the same. Nor did the Gospel, following the Torah, abrogate or condemn this practice or utter a decree to ban it ; so that up until the second half of the 8th century AD and the time of Charlemagne polygamy was customary in Europe and not condemned by the Church. At that date, or soon after, the Church promulgated a decree throughout Christendom which compelled men with many wives to divorce them all save one. They may have obeyed; but they were driven to fornication and adultery and prostitution in consequence.

In the days of ignorance the Arabs also practised polygamy, and very unpleasantly. It was possible for a man to take as many women as he wanted into his harem . and these unfortunates had no rights at all of any kind, financial or otherwise. A woman's value sank to pitiable depths. All her legal and human rights were violated.

Islam changed all that. The number of wives was limited by law to a maximum of four. The social needs of the day made it essential that men should be prepared to take on more than lone wife, if they could afford it, since in a nomad. desert society it was next to impossible for a woman to make her own way through life unaccompanied by a man to stand between her and the worst buffets of those difficult days.

Even this beneficent provision was hedged in by Islam with a number of conditions, and in particular the basic demand that a man who took more than one wife must be quite sure he would treat them all equally, and not favour one above another in the dispensation of his own attentions or in his care for their needs.

Note that the law permitting four wives was not a command that a man must have more than one. On the contrary, if he did confine himself to one wife he committed no crime. The number four was a maximum limit. It was frequently charity and compassion for the widows of his comrades slain in battle that compelled a man to offer the shelter of his home to such a bereaved woman. Such was the case with several of the Prophet's wives. Such compassion saved the women from a fate that was worse than death.

If the numbers of nubile men and women were equal, there would be no need for a man to take on more than one. But men are always fewer in number in the world's population than women. For this there are numerous causes. First, men are more prone to illness than women. Second, it is the men who are killed in war. Third, work in heavy industry or in the mines often causes fatal injuries. And fourth, more girl-babies survive infancy. Thus, in France statistics show that for every 100 girls 105 boys are born ; and yet, out of France's population of 40 million there are 1,765,000 more women than men. This is because 5% of the boys die during the first year of their life. Another 5% have died before they are 25. Male mortality continues until the final figure cited above is that of the total living population at any one moment. .

Furthermore, women live longer than men, so that for every 100 widowers in France there are 150 widows.

In America there are 20 million girls without husbands. Because of this deprivation many fall into unfortunate habits. Professor Peter Mudawar, zoologist at London University, confirms this in his writings.

It is in the nature of woman to desire a home, a husband and children. This need can only be met properly in a society which supports sound family life. The same need is germane to the nature of man, though he is also made to undertake a number of different tasks besides the basic one of fathering a family. It is downright unhealthy for a woman to have to live alone. Because of her nature a spinster always lives looking out for the man who will be her partner. The spinster is always living in the waiting-room of life. She begins to cease to feed herself properly. Her natural care enjoys preparing food to be shared with others, while it seems pointless to her to go to all that trouble for herself alone. The spinster wakes to a purposeless day with nothing to live for and goes to bed with a sense of emptiness and of nothing done. So the psychologists tell us.

Islam is the only system which has deliberately set out to plan a satisfactory life for all these supernumerary women, in allowing them to become wives of men who have a wife already, and so save themselves from a life of loneliness and multifarious deprivation. It must also be remembered that men preserve their power of begetting children pretty well to the end of their days, while a woman's physique is only capable of bearing children for some 35 years in the middle period of her life. Unless she can find a husband for that period, she is bound to live in the misery of failing to fulfil a function for which she was made and for which she longs.

Sometimes an unfortunate wife finds that she is sterile. Because she and her husband love each other they do not wish to part. Yet both desire children. Is the man to live in the burning hell of frustrated desire for the whole of the rest of his life? Why should he not give the joy of being a mother to a second wife?

In practice the first wife, who is herself sterile, frequently expresses her desire that he should do that very thing. Our national daily "Ettela'at" on the 20th of the month of Bahman, AHS 1348 (February 9th 1970) carried an interesting story from Rasht under the headline: "A man's three wives accompany him to the registrar to witness his fourth wedding". The gentleman explained to the registrar that his three wives had all proved barren, but all helped on the farm and were a happy company, so he did not wish to divorce them; and it was with their full accord that he now wished to marry a young woman who had taken his fancy in order that he might have children. The young bride, for her part, said: "My husband-to-be is one of the good men of our village, where there are 1,000 women and 400 men, half of whom are children below the age of 16: that is one fifth of a man per woman. So you can see why I am very glad to become a fourth wife."

A law which deprives a man of the right to fulfil his innate desire to be a father violates his human rights; and a law which forces women to live in solitary childlessness violates their human rights and undermines society's institutions. How can these two injustices be cured save by the legalisation of a limited polygamy? Realism; truth; social, vital, and spiritual needs demand such a measure.

If a wife falls victim to a chronic disease, what is a charitable husband to do? He does not wish to cast her off in her incurable illness. Islam makes his way plain before him. If a husband falls to an incurable and chronic disease which makes intercourse with him dangerous for the wife lest she also be infected, she may go to the shari'a court where the Islamic judge will order her husband to grant her a divorce, and use the powers which the law gives him to enforce his decision even on reluctant husbands. But many women themselves refuse to take this way, saying that they have shared their husband's home in joy and sorrow, and their conscience will not allow them to desert in his illness a husband with whom they have enjoyed the days of his health and wellbeing. A painful disease needs a nurse and care and kindness, so that- humanity and good sense both outline the path to be followed.

Financial poverty hinders marriage and family-founding. This too prevents a number of nubile women from finding husbands. Why should those who can afford it not relieve them both of poverty and spinsterhood in an ordered union? Islam's law has conferred this blessing on millions of women.

In World War II millions of men died leaving women husbandless. These husbandless women in Germany formed an association which asked the German government to enable a man to have more than one wife. Unfortunately church AD 2 prevented the desired result (v. "Ettela'at" for AHS 29/8/1340-AD 20/11/1961).

More recently "Ettela'at" (AHS 3/3/1349-AD 24/6/1970) carried an article asking "if the fear of spinsterhood haunted 20-year-old girls, what must the feelings of the 30- and 40-year-old spinsters be?" Eve still looks for her Adam. For Eve, employment, which in Federal Germany is easy for all women, does not replace the desire for marriage. Women of 20 find it hard to discover a husband : women of 30 and 40 almost impossible: women of 50 despair Yet in Germany only 50% of 30-year-old women and 20% of 40-year-old women are married. Six million women of 40 and over in Federal Germany are and will always be husbandless. There are no unmarried men in this age-range and the total number of unmarried men in Germany is not above 350,000; so, even if they all got married, not more than one in twenty of the unmarried women has a hope even of the most unsuitable of husbands. Some emigrate to find husbands. Nothing but a law allowing limited polygamy like that of Islam could solve the problem of Germany's post-war women. Why does not the West, which vaunts its respect and compassion for women, and bows to the Women's Liberation movement, not also yield to their desire for family life and for the fulfillment of their primary function, the bearing and bringing up of children? We must leave the answers to the consciences of our readers. The fact that so many women, in lands where it is lawful, opt to marry men who already have a wife proves that they think such a shared life better than spinsterhood. If a man is prepared to undertake the added burdens of the responsibility for a more numerous family, which will be for the benefit of so many, why should the state prevent him from doing so?

A highly skilled woman lawyer, who took her doctorate in matrimonial law, writes: "To be part of a family where there is more than one wife brings no disadvantages to the first, the second, the third or the fourth. The men, it is true, have to undertake heavier loads of responsibility, and are bound by law, by morality by statute and by common usage to provide a fitting form of living for each wife with all due respect to her dignity and position, insure her against illness, see to her medical care and cure, and defend her rights and interests to the last. Should he fall short of these duties, both canon and common law can dictate penalties to compel him to their performance : while before God and man he is held to his obligations. The women's silence, and the absence of feminine objections to multiple wedlock bear its rightness out.

"Some women parrot objections invented by men, it is true. Men do not take naturally to permanent unions and the responsibilities they entail. The worst of them put ideas into the heads of silly women who do not grasp that their comments tend to undermine marriage and family-life as such, and instead, to encourage illicit sex for the gratification of male sexuality. A woman does not suffer sexually from her husband having two wives: and spiritually and mentally she is at rest in peace of mind. It is only men who have played on some women's suggestibility to pretend otherwise. Men are promiscuous. But from the dawn of history families with several women and one man have lived happily under the feminine influence. Islam's shari'a (religious law) brought order into these relations and laid down beneficent regulations for their welfare. The institution of multiple wedlock proves its worth from its ancient tradition and practical application."

Western permissiveness frustrates its own ends, and denies nature. Islam regards justice as the guarantor of human welfare and happiness, both for the individual and for society. It therefore lays down just regulations on which multiple marriage can be founded, and right be observed. Islam's Feqh establishes independence, equality and full recognition for the rights of women in marriage. It is in this assurance that so many women voluntarily enter on the marriage state with a married man. The fact that they do so shows that the condition fits the feminine nature. Those few women who object, do so on the grounds that their husband's position does not permit him to do justice to the rights of more than one woman. Such conflicts as arise spring from a man's failure to do justice to his wives.

It is written in Sura IV: Nisa'a - "The Women" (verse 3): "If you fear that you will not be able to deal justly with the orphans, marry women of your choice, two or three or four. But if you fear you will not be able to deal justly with that number then take only one." This verse was revealed after the battle of Uhud which left the Muslim community with many widows and orphans, and some captives of war. In order that the orphans and widows might be given the best protection and perfect justice, the Muslim men were told to marry the number they could deal with justly, up to the maximum of four. Their treatment was to be governed by principles of humanity and equality. The precise occasion is past, but the principles remain.

The fact that the behaviour of some men is harsh and wrongful and causes the breakdown of family life is the exception that proves the wisdom and value of the rule. Islam's shari'a lays down a moral code of the duties of husbands to wives, and decrees that the family must be the source of love, kindness and sincerity. Without this it can be hell. Muslims who contravene it must be recalled to Islam's lofty laws, to Islam's profound principles, to Islam's fascinating philosophy Then in the light of its true face, corruption and wrongdoing will vanish and the sound society come to view.

The laws governing a man's just treatment and equal care for each of his wives lay down :

1. that he must provide enough for each wife to have the proper food;
2. that he must pay the same marital attentions to each;
3. that he must fulfil all the heavy responsibilities he has undertaken for each wife and her children.

Human nature being what it is, a man may well feel more drawn to one of his wives than to another The three provisions above are meant to ensure that such personal preference does not injure the rights of any wife to her livelihood, her home and her conjugal rights, or to any need of body, mind or spirit - all things which are within a man's reach quite apart from his predilections. By ensuring these rights to women, Islam provides the basis on which heartfelt affection and loving-kindness can flourish, while the necessities like food, clothing, a house and the other material needs are properly cared for. It is written in Sura IV Nisa'a "The Women" (verse 129): "It is not given to man to be able to be fair and just as between women, even if it is your ardent desire to be so. But you must not turn away so as to leave a woman hanging in the air (meaning if you have married her and she in your house you must treat her in absolute equality with your other wives, and not leave her as if she was an unmarried woman). If you come to a friendly understanding and practice self-restraint (you will find that) God is oft forgiving and most merciful."

Thus a man may not neglect one wife, or show her disfavour or treat her as a creature that is hanging, like a garment, on the wall of his house, or deprive her of her conjugal rights.

In the days of the Apostle of God, on whom be peace, the enactment of this commandment made men who had up to four wives, should they prove unable to do due justice to each, reduce their household to one wife: while ensuring that even those who could do justice to many married only a maximum of four. Thus from the very beginning Islam brought order into the multiple marriage which the society of the day made necessary, outlawing neglect of a woman's rights, depriving the men of the unlimited freedom and absolute authority which they had had in earlier days, and totally banishing the tyranny and oppression of women which pre- Islamic Arabs had exercised.

We find exemplary histories of Muslims who religiously performed the duties laid down for married men by Islam. In the "Majmu'-ul-Bayan" (Vol. 3, p.121), we read that one of the companions of the Prophet named Mu'az bin Jabal had two wives who both died of the same illness during the plague at about the same moment. Mu'az was so desirous to maintain true Islamic equality even after their death that he didn't want to bury one before the other, in case it seemed to show an irreligious preference, so he cast lots which should be the first to receive the funeral rites.

Some Westerners have a just and realistic attitude towards marriage as a social institution. Thus Arthur Schopenhauer in his book "Some Words about Women" writes: "In nations in which multiple marriage is legal, it is made possible for practically all women to have a husband, children and a true family life which meets their spiritual needs and satisfies their feminine instincts. Unfortunately church laws in Europe have not allowed multiple marriage and left many women to a lonely life of spinsterhood. Some died unsatisfied; some were driven by their desires, or by the need to earn their livelihood, into immorality. some perished with qualms of conscience and broken hearts. Nor can I understand, after giving much thought to the matter, why a man, whose wife falls ill of a chronic and incurable disease or proves barren or unable to bear a living child, should not take a second wife alongside the first. This is a question the Church should answer. Unfortunately it cannot. Good laws are those which ensure a happy life when obeyed, not those which deprive people of happiness or bind them hand and foot in trammels of unnecessary bondage or which incite people to despise them and so to rush to the other extreme of corruption, prostitution or other kinds of vice."

Mrs. Annie Besant, the theosophist, wrote. "The West claims to reject multiple marriage. But Western men have found ways round the official law, and take many women without the responsibilities of proper marriage, so that they are able to throw off their unwanted mistress when they have had their will with her, leaving her no alternative but to take to the streets. He never meant to take any responsibility for her future. The fate of such a woman is a hundred times worse than that of one who enters a multiple marriage, who although she shares her husband with another woman, at least enjoys a husband's care and becomes a mother of a family in a family. When I see the thousands of women on our streets at night I am convinced that the West must learn from Islam and cease to be so hypocritically shocked by its dispositions concerning multiple marriage; for Islam makes it possible for a woman to have a husband and children in her bosom legally, with all due respect, instead of enduring the shame of walking the streets trying to sell her body, probably bearing an illegitimate child in circumstances in which the law will do nothing for her, and she is simply the victim of the passions of men."

Dr. Gustave Le Bon writes: "Nothing has been more criticised in Europe than Eastern customs of multiple marriage. No view held in Europe has shown the same amount of ignorance and error as this criticism. Surely the legal multiple marriage of the East is better than the hypocritical secretive multiple marriage of the West. The clandestine nature of the illicit relationship is degrading to both parties. The legalisation of multiple marriage is far more seemly in every respect."

Chapter 48 Islam and Racism

The "Unity" is the basis of Islamic theology. and therefore "Unity" is the ground of its philosophy of society. All humanity is one; a great unit. Its individuals are members of one society incorporate, which is so comprehensive that it includes all differences within its oneness. The many find within the one that brotherhood, affection, friendliness and human blood-relationship which is of the essence. Hence distinctions do not become differences - not colour, nor culture, nor class, nor custom, nor conversational idiom. Mutual respect as fellow-humans in pursuit of the common good is the rule throughout the world-wide society of Islam, without superiority or inferiority, since all mankind were created in one human soul to start with, from whom man and woman, black and white, poor and rich, civilised and savage, all evolve, sharing one common humanity Truly "God made of one flesh all the nations upon earth it haply they may feel after Him and find Him."

So it is written (Qur'an: Sura IV Nisa'a-"The Women" 1st verse). "Reverence God Who created you all from one person", leaving no room for nationalistic divisions. Differences in skin and tongue are merely tokens of the Creator's power. They call on men to study the Holy Will and Might of Him Who from one elemental root created so many variations of colour countenance and conversation : as it is written (Qur'an: Sura XXX "Rome" verse 21) "Signs of His Power are His creation of heaven and of earth, and the varieties of tongues and skins; in all of which are sermons for the wise."

It is further written (Qur'an : Sura II, Baqara -"The Heifer" verse 213): "Mankind was one single nation. Then we sent messengers to them to give them glad tidings and warnings; and with them we sent the Book in truth to judge between people in matters wherein they differed … and God by His grace guided believers to the common truth on points about which they differed; for God guides whom He will onto a path that is straight." This verse reveals that in the beginning mankind was one single nation without differences or splits or conflicts but enjoying unity, cooperation and harmony.

The martyred Imam Ali left us the priceless legacy of the Nahj-ul-Balaghe, amongst which is his historic address to Malek al-Ashtar in which he expresses this truth as follows: "Make thine heart a throne of mercy towards thy people. Show them perfect love and care. Never treat them as a ravening beast that tears and rends their properties and their persons. For they are in one of two groups. Either they are thy brothers in the Faith- or they are thy fellow-human beings of one flesh with thine own." This broad view embraces all races, all cultures, all tongues.

Unity and union amongst individuals will subsist under the aegis of unity of thought and spirit, oneness of conviction and aim; nor can any unity obtain save under that orderliness. Should a society fall into division of thought and conviction, its bonds of affection will be loosened: and. when adversity arises, material needs will increase differences, conflicts and tensions. That is why the strongest tie of unity amongst nations is the religious bond.

It is in this bond of union that Islam has brought people and peoples together, freeing them from the trammels of division and difference, and calling them to establish the bases of accord and agreement in a society of brotherhood which is the natural state of man.

Islam treats mankind as one great family of brothers and sisters. In the human family the relationship of father and child is a stronger bond than that of brotherhood. But the qualities of respect and of difference of age deprive the father-child relationship of full equality. That is why it is brotherhood which Islam exalts as the expression of that perfect and heartfelt affection which should reign within the human family. It should reign on the surface and in the depths.

Brotherhood is therefore the Qur'an's call. The sublimest levels of love and the most sincere of friendships are those which arise between Muslims. They are called brothers because of their brotherhood, because of the existence of the fact of this most tender and beautiful of manifestations of equality; it is not the command to be brothers which called the fact into existence. The command was uttered, but the natural upwelling of the spirit engendered by that surrender (tasleem) to God (which Islam is) issues in brotherhood.

This brotherhood is deeper and higher than mere natural brotherliness, for it is the unity of a shared aim, the unity of shared convictions, the unity of joint beliefs, the unity of hearts.

It is written (Qur'an: Sura XLIX, Hujurat-"The Inner Apartments" verse 10): "Believers are a single brotherhood. Make peace amongst your brothers and fear God that ye may receive mercy."

The Prophet decreed: "The members of the assembly of the believers are by love and affection one body, and any limb of that which is pained causes all the other limbs to suffer in sympathy. If any individual Muslim falls into a painful situation all the other members of the community must run to his help and share in his sorrow." (Safeenatu-l-Behar, Vol. I, p.13.)

Chapter 49 Islam, Freedom, and Justice

Since all power and authority belongs to God, men in any office which confers authority must exercise their delegated power as stewards and ministers of God to men. Thus tyrants, imperialists, slavedrivers and exploiters of fellowmen are outlawed. Islam enhances each person's self-respect : it establishes that true and only equality open to man - the equality in surrender to God for His service amongst mankind. Such surrender enables each to find his place in the whole without faction, partisan rule or superiority. Each is his own master.

Islam champions and interprets human rights. It regulates every detail of personal and community life in equity. It is the trustee and guardian of freedom before the Lord. Its first and paramount thought is unity. It excludes no one - though some exclude themselves: it opposes no one-though some may oppose themselves to it. it makes no differences - though some may insist on being different. Muslim calls to Jew who calls to Mage who calls to Nazarene, saying: -Why stand apart? Let us join in our common creed that .God is One'."

It is written: (Qur'an: Sura III, Al-i-Imran -"Imran's Family" verse 62): "Say: O Peoples of the Heavenly Books! Resort to that word which is common to us and you, which is that we worship none save GOD; that we associate no partners with HIM; that we exalt not from amongst ourselves any lord or patron other than GOD."

The peoples of today's world yearn for unity, justice and freedom. They long to be saved from exploitation and war. They wander lost, like sheep gone astray. Let them turn to the sunshine of Islam's regulations of life and living. Under that common sun, all - black, white, red and yellow-are at one in justice, freedom and equality. For Islam, true excellence lies, not in the intellectual or manual attainments of people of differing gifts; but in the moral attainments of a pure heart. These are equally open to all whatever their other gifts. As it is written (Qur'an: Sura XLIX, Hujurat-"The Inner Apartments" verse 13): "O Mankind : We created you from a male and a female; and made you into tribes and nations that you may get to know each other. and verily, most honoured before God is the most virtuous."

The Prophet (on Whom be Peace!) explicitly affirmed: "Arab is not more privileged than non-Arab, nor white than black. Spiritual excellence and true piety is the only distinction amongst humans recognised by God."

After the Prophet's victory at Mecca, a proud self-seeking group of Arabs claimed privilege for their tongue and race. To them he said: "Thanks be to God that by the sublime doctrines of Islam He has freed you from the times of ignorance, and stripped off pride, conceit and power-lust. Know now that in the Courts of God only two groups exist. The group of the righteous who are precious in God's eyes : and the group of the sinful who hang their heads in shame."

A man said to the 8th Imam: "There exists no man on earth with an ancestry more noble than yours." To him the saint replied: 'Their greatness and honour lay in their piety and zeal to do God's will." By these words the Imam rebuked the man who wished to flatter and aggrandise the Imam's pedigree; and turned his mind to thoughts of piety. Another said to the Imam: "By God! You're the best man alive." The Imam replied: "No oaths, man! There lives a man who is better whose piety is greater and obedience to God more complete. In God it is true that that verse of the Qur'an has not yet been abrogated which says: 'Most honoured before God is the most virtuous'."

God's service is perfect freedom. It is neither restrictive nor limiting. Restrictions diminish a man's capacities and happiness. But to serve God clothes the soul in the whole armour of God, protects when evil attacks, and foils all the fiery darts of the wicked.

True, serving God means obeying His laws. But this obedience is the free choice of love. And His laws are those absolute moral standards which formulate the essence of man's true nature, as his Creator means him to be at his best.

No man who has bowed his neck beneath the yoke of money-grubbing or power- seeking can ever enjoy a free life in a free society. The Imam Ali said: "'Piety is the key to honesty and purity and to the acquirement of merit in store against judgment -day. It is freedom from the chains of every bondage; salvation from the blows of every adversity. Piety puts a man's aim within his reach, wards off evil, his soul's foe, and assists him to attain his heart's desires." (Nahj-ul-Balaghe: 227.)

Remember that he gave this message in an epoch when violence, oppression, wrong, class wars and racial strife raged amongst men. Distinctions repugnant to reason, to virtue and to freedom were rife. The weak and the poor were bereft of every human right and social safeguard. With matchless moral courage the pioneer of Islam outlawed all those differences and conflicts, so illegitimate, so superstitious and so mistaken. He replaced them with the command that equality and perfect equity should be observed for all individuals. He ordained that, under the auspices of total submission to the will of God, every sort of reasonable freedom should be put within the possession of men; in such a way that the underprivileged classes of society which had never before had any sort of power to express their desires but had merely provoked the reaction of violence and oppression if they dared to protest against the will of the powerful ruling classes, should now, under the lifegiving justice of Islamic laws, find the political and social power they lacked, and shoulder to shoulder move forward until they had their full and rightful share in the leadership of their nations.

Chapter 50 Islam and Class

Anyone who thinks that other nations have raised up the under-privileged classes in society in a way in the least like that which Islam has successfully followed in its fight against tyranny and oppression misses the point and shows that he has not the faintest perception of the inner truth of Islam, and its humane social justice. No other system has hitherto been able to bring such an ideology so effectively into practice.

Even the Communists, who call themselves foes of religion, acknowledge the amazing renascence brought by the powerful and fundamental doctrines of Islam. The monthly "Mardum", organ of Iran's "Tudeh" (Marxist) party, (No. 2, Year 3), wrote: "The appearance of Islam at the beginning of the 7th century AD is a turning-point of history It changed the face of community living. Its victorious progress, in the course of less than a century, from the Arab homeland as far as the Loire in the West and as Sind and the Amu Darya in the East, forms a fascinating page.

The Jezirat-ul-Arab provided the centre for the spread of the religious ideologies of Judaism and Christianity. Yet the Arabs and Bedouin were still idolaters. Mecca was a commercial centre run by the moneymakers, turning the nomad tribal way of life into feudalism: and it was here that Arab nationalism first began to be felt and to break out. Its people were money-grubbers and small farmers owning slaves. To this world Islam came as a revelation and as a democratic revolution against the moneylending oligarchy, who drove the first Muslims out of Mecca. Islam possesses the idiosyncrasies of all moralistic religions, yet it has kept its feet firmly on the ground of this material world we live in.

It eschewed monkery and concentrated its attention on the equality of human beings regardless of race and tribe, the equal rights of women with men, the manumission of slaves, the care of the indigent; and provided so simple a set of principles that it is distinguished from all other religions. It was these qualities that enabled it to arouse a social renascence of lifegiving inspiration. It brought a heavy pressure to bear on the minds of the bloodthirsty arrogant ruling class: offered villagers and poor town-dwellers a road of salvation in this world, expelled the troops of Roman and Persian emperors and installed its own form of rule from the Himalayas to the Pyrenees."

Chapter 51 Illustrations of Islamic Practice

When we weigh the conduct of the pioneers of Islam against the behaviour and system of the socialist countries and of those of the "free" world, we see a difference as great as chalk from cheese. Islam is against all class distinction and renounces the conceptions of "boss" and "underling". A report was brought to the Imam Ali that a banquet had been held in Basra in honour of the governor, Ali's representative, Uthman bin Hunaif He was wrathful that his governor should allow himself to be drawn into a special relationship with Basra's "nobility", and be made the mark of particular distinctions by the powerful class. He therefore sent a stern letter to Uthman rebuking him, which letter is contained in the Nahj-ul-Balaghe.

After World War II all governments have had to occupy themselves with the clamour for freedom and equality. They produced the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" to enshrine those ideas. Practice has been slower than precept. Developed countries find it hard to admit that differences of colour and race are not criteria for excellence but that only character counts. Islam has recognised this fact from the start. The Prophet's first Mu'azzen was an Ethiopian: and he gave his girl-cousin in marriage to Zaid bin Harethe, who was a slave.

One day the Prophet said to Juwaiber, a poor Negro of great piety. "How good it would be if you could take a wife to share your life with you and be a help in this world and the next!"

Juwaiber replied: "May my mother and father be your sacrifice! What woman would be ready to become my wife? I have no health or wealth, no books or looks."

The Prophet replied: "Our God annulled any rights of one man to be owner of another as they were in the days of ignorance; and gave nobility to those who had been the underprivileged and downtrodden before the coming of Islam. Those who in the dark days of the night of ignorance were despised are shown in Islam to be precious to Him. Pride of place, face, race and grace ruled in the days of ignorance. Islam changed all that, and made everyone, white or black, Qureish, Arab or non-Arab, equal, as children of Adam, the man whom God made from dust. In God's thoughts, most beloved is the most obedient and chaste. O Juwaiber, we know no person superior to you, save anyone, if such there be, whose chastity and obedience excel yours. Go at once to Zeeyad bin Lubeid, most noble of the Bani Biyahde, and say. "God's Apostle sent me to you to ask your daughter's hand in marriage'."

Juwaiber went, and found Zeeyad sitting in his home with a group of his fellow- tribesmen. He asked for an interview saying: "I am come from the Prophet to confirm a principle, bearing a message. Should I pronounce it in private or in public?"

Zeeyad replied: "Why not right here? A message from the Prophet is an honour."

"Very well", said Juwaiber; "His Eminence the Prophet sent me to bid you wed your daughter to me."

Zeeyad responded: "We Ansaris (i.e. the Prophet's helpers in his first days) only wed our daughters to our peers. Go! carry my excuses to His Blessedness."

While Juwaiber was returning, Zeeyad repented, and sent a man who caught up with Juwaiber and brought him back. Zeeyad said with the greatest courtesy: "Please be seated and wait here until I return." He then went off to see the Prophet, to whom he said: "ay my father and mother be thy sacrifice! Juwaiber came from thee with a message to me to which Iwished to bring the reply in person. It is this. We Ansaris only wed our daughters to our peers."

Islam's pioneer replied: "O Zeeyad! Juwaiber is a man of faith and is thus the peer of a woman of faith; for a Muslim man is the peer of a Muslim woman. Therefore wed thy daughter to him, and think it no disgrace to have him as thy son-in-law"

Zeeyad went home and told his daughter what had befallen. She said: "Dear papa! what has seemed good to the Prophet, and his command that you make Juwaiber your son-in-law, is beyond price!" Zeeyad left his daughter's room, took Juwaiber's hand and led him to stand in the midst of the men of the tribe where he acknowledged him as his son-in-law and gave him his daughter in marriage. He himself provided his daughter's dowry and trousseau, and had a house made for them with all the furnishings and equipments required. It was thus that Zeeyad's daughter became the mother of one of the greatest of the Qureish tribe, and the black-skinned Juwaiber father of the same, a man whose hands in this world were empty but who was rich towards God and who has earned eternal fame for the beauty of his soul.

It is told that once upon a time three Muslims of three different racial stocks, to wit Salman the Irani, Saheeb the Byzantine and Balal the Ethiopian. were sitting together when an Arab called Qais joined them. This Arab, observing the precious sight of three Muslims of pure hearts and humble souls, said: "Aus and Khazraj were Arabs who stood by the Prophet in service and sacrifice. What have these three aliens to say? Who asked them to be amongst the Prophet's aides?" Qais' words reached the Prophet's ears. He rose and called his people to assemble in the mosque where he said to them in wrath : "God is one. Adam. common father of all, one. Your faith, one. Then Arabism, however proud you may be of it, comes neither from your father nor your mother-merely your tongue." The Prophet strove to crush racialism and promulgated a decree making equality the law and condemning any contrary reaction.

One day a Muslim whose father was a Negro was received by the Prophet. One Abu-Zar Ghaffari, who was nourishing a long-standing

grudge against him, said to him in the Prophet's presence: "O! son of a nigger!" Immediately the Prophet, hearing this objurgation, took him to task, saying: "Why is his mother's black skin a reason for despising him?" Abu-Zar fell on his knees, kissed the Prophet's feet and hands, repented in all humility and poured dust over his head until he received the Prophet's absolution.

The institution of the Hajj, or annual pilgrimage to Mecca, incumbent on all Muslims everywhere at least once in a lifetime, has also been a profound influence for unification and equality above colour and class. In the words of the Lebanese professor Philip Hitti in his book on "The History of the Arabs". "At the Ka'aba, to which the Lord of all men calls them to assembly, Ethiopian, Berber, Chinese, Irani, Indian, Syrian, and Arab, rich and poor, high and low, give each other the hand of brotherhood and together pronounce the double creed that, 'there is no God but God: Muhammad is His Prophet.' Thus for Islam the only distinction that exists between people is that between belief and unbelief. And the Hajj has done the greatest service in making equality and brotherhood the rule of life for millions in every clime."

It is sad to have to admit that slogans of class or race-ideologies have in recent years penetrated certain Islamic states, with the tragic result of producing similar racial and class divisions to those in less privileged lands. Our task is to restore the sound ideology of Islam and make it worldwide within one generation.

Chapter 52 Equality Before the Law

The equality which obtains in Islamic law courts should be taken as a world model. Haroun-al-Rasheed, the Abbasid Caliph, had to testify on oath in a court before a judge, and his servant Fazl bin Rabee' witnessed in his favour. The judge refused to accept Fazl's testimony. The Caliph demanded to know why. The judge replied: "Fazl himself says he is your servant. If he is telling the truth, the Islamic court does not accept a servant's testimony to the advantage of his master. If he was lying, his testimony is void on that account."

The next Abbasid Caliph, Mansour, hired numbers of camels to make the Hajj. On his return he made a series of excuses as pretexts for not repaying the hire. The cameldrivers took the Caliph into the courts. The judge summoned him and sat him alongside the cameldrivers. When he had heard the evidence he judged against the Caliph, who was compelled to pay the cameldrivers what he owed them before he was allowed to leave the court.

This immediate verdict and execution of sentence is recognised by Western jurists as one of the greatest advantages of Islamic law courts.lt saves a great deal of time and expense, for plaintiff, defendant and judge alike. Dr. Gustave Le Bon relates his own personal observation from a court he attended in Marrakesh in Morocco. Plaintiff and defendant with their lawyers and papers entered the court. The judge entered. All rose. Straightaway each side presented its case. The judge summed up. The verdict was given. Sentence was pronounced and immediately executed, to the great benefit of all concerned. "If only Western courts with their long delays would learn this art of dispensing justice fairly, swiftly and economically!" he comments.

When litigants are all secure in the knowledge that the laws by which their case will be judged are based on eternal principles revealed by God Himself, and that therefore the powerful cannot swing judgment in their own favour. arid when the judge has principles of judgment to go on which enable him with a detached impartiality to seek his guidance from the law of God in total freedom from any emotional bias; the law is observed and respected, injustices are cut out, certainty and security reign in society and bring trust and confidence in their train.

Islam does not aim to level men down, but to level them up to an equality on the highest level, where true affection and the real love of one's fellowmen call the tune - a unity of heart based on a unity of faith in the one God, Who is Maker of all and Judge of all, and Who makes no distinctions save those of obedience between one of His creatures and another. This is made plain by the Qur'anic verse 10 from the Sura Hujurat already quoted where it is written: "We made you into nations and tribes that you might learn to know each other." It is the practice of this creed which has produced that marvellous hospitality which so many Western travellers have noticed among Muslims and of which they bewail the absence in the materialistic civilisation which has grown up in the West. One traveller commented: "I found in Iran that if I walked into a village and knocked on any door, and introduced myself as a stranger within their gates to whoever addressed me through the lattice, the door was at once opened and I was welcomed in as one of the family. They sat me down to share whatever meal they were having, however frugal, gave me a palliasse and lehaf for a comfortable sleep through the night, and sent me on my way rejoicing after a breakfast of sweet tea, fresh-made bread and sour milk (mast) next morning."

Chapter 53 The Jehad - the Holy War

Islam's aim, in its wars, battles and national uprisings against polytheism and materialism, has not been conquest, expansionism, imperialism or the seizure of others' financial resources. The early impact of Islam on Mecca caused loss to those vested interests which profited from the service of the ancient idols in the Ka'aba and the pilgrims who flocked to those shrines from all the Arab world. These vested interests therefore revolted against the spread of the new pure faith. The Qureish cut off relations with the Prophet and his adherents; and forced them to flee into the mountains, where they hid starving, until they finally found refuge in friendly Yathrib, 200 miles north.

Even here polytheists mounted further attacks. The necessity to defend the believers and ensure the survival of the faith forced the Prophet to elaborate and elucidate the concept of a "just war". His raids from Yathrib (which from his adoption of it and its adoption of him won the glorious name of "Madinat-an-Nabi" meaning "the City of the Prophet") were made to prevent the Meccans mobilising large supplies of ammunition and huge forces to attack and wipe out his faithful few.

This concept of "a just war" led to that of: "the Jehad" or "Holy War", and the first revelations on this subject to the Prophet are enshrined in the Qur'anic texts (1) Sura XXII: Hajj-"Pilgrimage" (verses 39 and 40): "Those upon whom war is made by unbelievers are granted permission to fight because they are being oppressed (Verily God is most powerful to aid them) and have been expelled from their homes in defiance of right for the sole 'crime. of saying 'Our Lord is God'."

And (2) Sura II: Baqara -"The Heifer" (verse 190): "Fight in the cause of God against those who attack you. But be careful to maintain the limit, since God does not love transgressors. "By "limit" is meant that the force used must be limited to that which is the minimum adequate to restrain the evildoers who attack. The force used must never exceed that limit in order to exact revenge or impose an imperialistic conquest.

As a world faith for everyone everywhere, Islam knows no geography; but must extend to every last soul in every last region of the world, and carry them its word of truth. History shows that no established order was ever replaced by a new superior order without some warfare. Examples are the revolutions in France, India, America, Russia, China. Since Islam sets out to change men's living and thinking, and to end radicalism and exploitation, it is to run into opposition from people with vested interests in corruption. Indeed, the more successful it is in winning adherents by word of mouth and of pen, the fiercer is the reaction of those who find themselves losing their hold on people they have previously victimised. In the end the victory of arms confirms the earlier victory already registered by propaganda appealing to men's reason and conscience.

Addicts of uncleanness, dishonesty and power work up a violent resistance in the endeavour to stifle the new faith and the sound society it is producing, which is putting them out of business. Since they refuse to attend to sense they must attend to the sword. As the Prophet expressed it, according to "The Book of the Jehad and its Methods". "Goodness and blessing flourish where law wields the sanctions of force to prevent ill-doing. For alas, there are people who will not submit to what is right unless they feel that sanctions threaten penalties for transgression."

When freedom of thought and of choice of the best way of life is taken from men, force, either of police or of army, must be called in. It was to reduce oppressors and tyrants to subjection, in order that the oppressed might be freed to listen to the challenge of Islam, that the first Muslim battles took place. The masses must be given freedom to make their own choice; for without that the truth cannot come to control societies, nations and the world. As it is written in Sura IV. Nisa'a- "Women" (verse 75): "Why should you not take up the Jehad in God's cause, and for the cause of the weak in Mecca, your own men, women and children, who cry out: "Our Lord! rescue us from this town of oppressors; and raise up for us a protector, coming from Thee to aid us'?"

Islam does not war against people. It wars against oppression, tyranny and wrong. These false ideas it seeks to root out, and to replace them by the superior ideas of purity and faith. It seeks not to win over enemies, but to win enemies over to its - that is God's - side, in the eternal battle between good and evil. For humanity faces the choice between self-annihilation through evil on the one hand or the kingdom of God on earth through obedience on the other. There is no third way. To serve or to seek anything other than God and His will is idolatry The worship of possessions, pelf, or power is as much idolatry as sacrificing to stock and stone. It is a negation of man's true nature and destiny.

Therefore, before embarking on hostilities, Islam always sends a herald to the enemy bearing the invitation to accept Islam and make peace on the spot. Thus, when the Muslim armies entered Iran, the Muslim Commander-in-Chief sent a messenger to the Irani General Rustam Farukhzaad inviting him to a conference at which the Muslims explained to the Iranis why they were there, saying : "We have come to free your people from slavery to false deities and vain superstition and to lead them to the freedom of worship of the One God. In His Apostle's Name we invite you, as you will face the dreadful day of judgment, to be saved and replace your dark and inane customs with the justice and equity of the true Faith."

These conferences lasted three days. All the Muslim spokesmen promised that the Iranis should be left to run their own country in peace if they accepted Islam as they were being invited to do.

It is related, in the book above quoted on the Jehad, Volume 2, page 421, that the Prophet said to Ali: "Never be the aggressor who starts a war. First invite your enemy to turn to the true God. If God leads one person through you to enter the life of faith, that will be of greater benefit for you than if you owned all that the sun shines upon."

Islam's aim is that the knowledge of God should cover the earth as the waters cover the sea, and His kingdom extirpate violence and lust and degradation and oppression and injustice; and to this end Muslims are prepared to give their lives in peace or if necessary, in war. As it is written in the first verse of Sura XXXVII: Saffat -"Those ranged in ranks". "By those who range themselves in ranks and so are strong against evil and in proclaiming God's message 'verily, verily your God is One'."

Similarly, in Sura VIII: Anfal -"The spoils of war" (part of verses 47 .and 67) the Prophet sternly rebuked some of his fellow-fighters who followed the dark customs of the age of ignorance after a victory saying to them : "Be not like those who started from their homes insolently and to be seen of men. Your lusts are for the goods and delights of this world while the Lord desires for you an eternity of joy."

In his book entitled "War and Peace in Islam", Dr. Majid Khadouri writes on page 214: "Islam changed the old Arab conception of the 'Darul-Harb' or House of War into that of the 'Dar-ul-Islam' or House of Islam, which truly sought to minister Islam to the people of the world. Its first success was in uniting the nations which accepted it within themselves, so that civil wars ceased. It went on to found a family of Islamic nations at peace with each other. It aims to bring that blessing to the whole world. Thus the aim of the Jehad is peace on earth, and that will be its final result."

Western Crusaders developed their concept of chivalry from the conduct of the Muslim paladins in war. One great principle was that the lives of the many poorer folk should be saved by settling the issue of the dispute in a single combat between two champions each chosen to represent his own side.

A whole range of courteous attitudes and actions was developed to govern such contests. They were carried over into the peaceful contests called "jousts", in which knights fought each other to show their prowess before their monarch and their people, and also to practice against the day when they would be meeting the champion of an opposing army in serious warfare. The chivalrous and knightly conduct towards the fallen foe, which these contests taught, altered the entire manners of renascent Europe as it emerged from the barbarism of its latest invaders from the North. Ransoms were exacted and paid with honour.

Muslim armies were forbidden to cause the destruction of property, the burning of houses, the wasting of crops and pastures, the filling of wells or the deprivation of food. Mercy must be shown to the conquered. The utmost consideration must be manifested towards the enemy's children, aged, women and sick, whether mentally or physically afflicted.

Professor Muhammad Hameed-ulla of Paris University in his book on "The Prophet and War" (p. 9) writes: "The Arabia which acknowledged the Prophet and Islam is a peninsula of over one million square miles in area - the size of all Europe west of Russia. Yet no more than 150 persons lost their lives in the reduction of that entire peninsula, so that in the course of ten years a maximum of 15 deaths per annum because of fighting must be reckoned. Few other conquerors in history can show such a record."

The Prophet, sending his troops to fight, is reported by the book on the Jehad (Volume 2, p.424) to have addressed them in the following terms: 'Go in God's name for God's cause with God's aid, and act as God wishes you to act. Show no treachery or falsehood towards His commands. Mutilate no one. Show mercy to the aged, the incapable, women and children. Only when it is inevitable cut down a tree. Grant sanctuary to any prisoner from the least to the highest in order that they may hear the word of truth. Whoso follows that truth becomes your brother. If he refuses, release him to go to his home when peace is made. At all times and in every situation pray for God's help and obey His guidance about your conduct."

Similarly the Imam Ali, when the army of Mu'aviye came to attack him in Iraq, gave his final command to his troops as follows: "if your foe takes to flight on the field of battle, pursue him not nor slay him. Persons who have lost the power to defend themselves or have fallen wounded on the field of battle must not be harmed. Women must be respected and must not be caused to be afraid or to be troubled."

In war it sometimes happens that the enemy does something which moves a Muslim to a desire for revenge', but the Muslim is bidden in such a case to return to his first aims and basic principles and to fight against the desire to transgress against the truth and against that excellence which he has been tempted to forget, and to be first of all victor over his own passions, which is the true victory, prerequisite for an Islamic victory in war.

We were all brought up on the story of the Imam Ali laying an opponent prone and sitting on his chest to reason with him about the true faith : whereat the foeman spat in the saint's face. Ali at once rose and walked away. His followers asked him why , and he said: "I felt rage rising in my heart at that man's insult, and was tempted to slay him on the spot. If I had done so, it would not have been a just execution of a recalcitrant infidel because of his invincible ignorance, but an act of personal revenge under the impulse of passion. What is the good of my seeking to reason with him and bring him to a true faith unless I am living that true faith with a pure heart and free from pollution myself?"

In the Holy Qur'an such an attitude is enjoined in many places, for instance in Sura II: Baqara - "The Heifer" (verse 194): "If anyone transgresses against you requite him with an exactly like action and restrain yourself for God; and know that God is with those who so restrain themselves."

Or again Sura V. Ma'ide - "The Table Spread" (verse 9): 'O ye who believe! Stand out firmly for God, as witnesses to fair dealing, and let not others' hatred of you make you depart from justice and swerve towards wrong. Be just: for justice is next to piety. And fear God; for God knows all you do."

And again, in the same Sura (verse 3): "'Let not the hatred of some who shut you out of the sacred mosque lead you to transgression and hostility. Help one another to righteousness and piety, not to sin and rancour. Fear God, for punishment is God's and He is strict with all." Or, in connection with conflict between believers, Sura XLIX: Hujarat 'The Inner Apartments" (verse 9). "Should a group of believers split into two opposing parties, make ye peace between them. If the violence of one against the other goes beyond bounds, bring force to bear on the group which is transgressing so badly, until it once again complies with God's commands. When such compliance has been exacted, then make peace between the two parties with justice. Be fair in arbitrating, for God loves those who are fair."

The emphasis of this passage on the blessing God gives to peacemakers, and His command that Muslim fighters should be peacemakers, even if they have to use force to bring the recalcitrant to heel, rather than ask the weak to forgive and to renounce his rights as is too often thought godly, is particularly worthy of remark.

Islam enjoins renunciation of one's own rights in the interests of peacemaking, while still recognising that human nature is bound, willy-nilly to feel resentment at injuries. It calls on believers to replace the passion of resentment with the greater passion for God's will, and with obedience to His calling to end division, violence and the use of force on earth. It is in the light of this command that Islam has always showed the utmost compassion towards nations which it has conquered, and exerted itself to give them that true sense of real independence which comes to people whose hearts are fixed on God and who live to make His will regnant upon earth, starting with their own community.

The people of Homs closed the gates of their city in the face of the army of Heraclius. They told the Romans that the Muslim rule with its justice and law courts was preferable to the tyranny and force they feared.

When the Muslim army under the command of Abu 'Ubeida entered the territory of Jordan the Christians of those parts sent a letter to the Muslims which read as follows: "O Muslims! You are preferable to the Byzantines for us, even though they are of the same creed as ourselves. You are more trustworthy, more just, more kindly, more beneficent to us. They not only took dominion over us but also plundered our houses."

Philip Hitti writes in Vol. 2 of his," "History of the Arabs"(p. 638): "Wherever the Islamic army set foot, the people of those parts received them with open arms and brought them viands and water, and vied with each other in leaving their entrenchments to join the Muslim - not difficult to understand for those who realise what the tyranny of the Visigoths had been!"

Nor did the Muslims force peoples of occupied lands to change their religion.

Islam arranged a system by which they guaranteed freedom of religion to believers in any of the heavenly books by forming them into "Millats", semi-autonomous communities within the state with the right to their own forms of worship, to their customs at birth, at marriage and at death, to their own schools and the use of their own tongue if they had a language of their own like Turkish, Armenian, Kurdish, or Aramaic. They were exempt from the "Zakat" or "Tax in aid of the poor" which was incumbent on all Muslims. This exemption was because the Zakat has a religious as well as a political side. Instead they paid a poll tax because they were not Muslims. Payment of the poll tax guaranteed their citizenship rights in the whole community. Thus Islam guarded the tenderest scruples of conscience of followers of the revealed religions. It extended this care in its lawgiving to the treatment of criminals, of civil causes, of commercial matters, as well as the strictly religious side of life, so that the minorities were free and safeguarded in the following of their convictions.

In the Qur'an rules are laid down for the relationships of Muslims with non- Muslims. If the non-Muslims maintain a friendly attitude they are well-treated, though of course hostilities must be repulsed, whether overt or covert. But Muslims are forbidden to begin aggression of either type. As it is written in Sura LX: Mumtahana "(The Believing Woman Refugee) Who is to be tested" (verses 8 and 9): "God does not forbid you to deal kindly and justly with those who are not hostile to your faith and do not drive you out of your home. For God loves the just. But God forbids you to turn to those who are against your faith and drive you out of your homes or support others in driving you out. Those who turn to such do wrong."

Christian and Jewish minorities live under exemplary conditions in Islamic countries, in a coexistence where each respects the other's rights. When the Prophet first came to Yathrib many Jewish groups lived there, and dwelt alongside the Muslims without the least friction, a condition which was continued by the Caliphs after the Prophet's death. The Founder of Islam said: "'Whosoever harms a tribute-paying infidel living amongst us has harmed me." And again: "Beware! whosoever injures a non-Muslim, or steals even a worn-out piece of cloth or takes the smallest thing he owns without his consent, will find me on the side of the prosecution when he comes to trial on the Day of Judgment.'

When the Imam Ali was Caliph he one day came across a blind and helpless old man and asked for information about him. His officials told him that the old man was a Christian who in his youth and strength had been a civil servant. The saint replied: "'You used him for work when he was young and cast him off when he is old and weak! He must be given a pension from the public treasury to ensure his livelihood."

Dr. Laura Vacceia Vaglieri writes that the words of the Prophet and the Fatvas (ex-cathedra decrees) of the great Islamic jurisconsults show up the falsehood of the story that Islam imposed its religion by the sword. The Qur'an lays down that "'compulsion has no place in religion."

The Prophet safeguarded the Christians of Nejran and ordered that reverence should be shown for their place of worship. He further ordered his commanders that even the fleas in the houses of the Jews were not to be touched. Adam Metz writes that the Muslims showed a respect for synagogues and churches which no European land in medieval times showed for synagogues and mosques. And Professor Gustave le Bon writes that under Muslim rule in Spain great Christian conferences were held in Seville (AD 872) and Cordova (AD 852). Nor was any post under the government or any other job forbidden to Jews or Christians.

The Crusaders' capture of Jerusalem was a horror of brutality. Pyramids of heads were constructed. 1,000 Muslims who had sought sanctuary in their mosque were mercilessly put to the sword. Blood flowed knee-deep in the Temple courts. Kenneth Clark writes that in the history of mankind no worse warfare has been waged than the brutal Crusades, with the Normans' lust for lands and the Europeans' desire for the profits of the fruitful Eastern luxury trades behind them.

The Crusaders held Jerusalem for 88 years, and lost it again after that period to the Muslim armies led by the great Kurdish General Selah-ed Deen Ayyoubi, whom the Christians called Saladin. This was in October AD 1187 (AHL 583, Rajab month). Instead of massacring all the Christians in imitation of the Christian massacre of its Muslims 88 years before, peaceloving wise Saladin proclaimed a public amnesty; and forbade the execution, the plundering, or the torture of any Christian, so adding another glorious page to the world fame of Islam. The true spirit of Islam governed all its troops in this as in its other wars. Saladin ordered a constitutional security for all the inhabitants of Palestine. He gave one dinar to every man and to every woman and two dinars to every child, with the permission to settle where they would. Security was greater in Jerusalem than in any other city so that the Latin citizens preferred to stay there. The Bishop, who had riches beyond the dreams of avarice, said he wished to leave. Some Muslims asked Saladin to keep him and divide his riches amongst the Muslims, but he refused, saying. "It is impossible that I should"perpetrate such a crime. I will take ten dinars from him and no more.

The savagery shown by Christians in Andalusia in the West was no less. After all the services which the Muslims had performed for Spain, the religious leaders of the victorious Christian army ordered the execution of every Muslim, old and young, woman and man, at the instigation of the Pope and of Philip II. Not one in four of the Muslims escaped the ensuing massacre. Even some of these were dragged before the Inquisition and condemned for their beliefs.

John Davenport writes (p.133; "Apology to Muhammad and the Qur'an"): "Who can fail to admire the chivalry shown by the Islamic rulers of Spain or to wonder at the monuments of civilisation, both architectural and cultural, which they have left behind them? And who can fail to feel shame at the conduct of Christians, the fanaticism and bigotry and ignorance and barbarism which brought torture and oppression in its train?"

Georgi Zeidan narrates that the Christian conquerors of Andalusia made Muslims, Jews and criminals carry labels to make them known to all men wherever they went: and even presented Muslims with a choice between accepting Christianity or dying (p. 282 of the 4th volume of his "History of Islamic Civilisation"). He adds that the Christians turned Muslims' mosques into churches, deprived them of all freedom of religious observances, destroyed their cemeteries, stripped them of the necessities of existence, and smashed up their hammams.

In the time of Henry IV of Spain the 4,000 defenders of the town of Dulan were strangled by Christian hands. Such was the Christian understanding of the blessing proclaimed on peacemakers by the Messiah Himself? Is modern imperialism in our civilised world much better? Does it not tread underfoot the dignity and personality of those under its dominion, and strip them of the benefits of its vaunted "civilisation"?

Does it not enslave mind and soul and spirit as much as the body of its underlings? In order to ensure its own profits, does it not suppress all freedom of thought amongst the masses, so that they may never even think of raising a finger against their tyrants, and so that any rising murmur of a demand for justice may be stifled before it can be heard? Let the great powers mouth fine words about peace as they will. When it comes to action they set all that idealism aside. Even their so-called diplomacy is merely an extension of their imperialistic aims. Idealists can do no more than draw pictures on water until moral conditions of peaceful coexistence are established worldwide in a family of nations.

The units of a social structure are individual men and women: a harmonious structure can only be built with individual persons in accord with each other and each at one with and within the self. Islam's primary endeavour is, therefore, to create that inner peace within individuals by filling hearts with the faith and conviction that sets the conscience at peace, and which streamlines all the gifts of brain and body in a harmony of joint action towards a God-given end. Islam applies faith practically, in such a way as to produce a world which runs aright. For this reason its second task is to guarantee an environment which will promote the certainty that justice prevails; and, by obviating threats to health and property, to make all feel secure.

Islam deprecates the exploitation of one class by another. Islam instead advocates co-operation and mutual aid in quiet neighbourliness and friendship. Islam propounds norms of behaviour and trains its citizens in serene living as these norms, practised, shape habits and customs. Of course, the frailty of human nature and the limitations of human ability, insight and purview, prevent these ideals from being always and everywhere realised Without error. Even the best of leaders can be so busied with one set of events that he fails to notice another series going awry, into error, division - even into violence and oppression. But the will to redress the wrong and put things right again is always there; and above all, God's guidance and illumination exist to enlighten consciences and inspire restitution, reminding all that they will face their Judge at Doomsday.

Chapter 54 Islam and World Peace

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. Whoso will see will do so for his soul : Whoso 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.

Chapter 55 And Islam Today?

What has happened to us, the heirs of so brilliant and magnificent a civilisation? What has reduced us to our present living conditions? Why have we ceded the hegemony of our world to others? What has caused the decline in our culture, in our science and our political power? What stopped our progress in its tracks? Why have we yielded our leadership in manufactures and science to Westerners so that we now need them where they once needed us? Why must Muslims, with all their splendid past in East and West, hang their heads in the modern world?

It was not blowing our own trumpet or banging our own drum that raised Islam to world pre-eminence in its time. It was our culture, our remarkable spiritual and social revolution. Shame that we should waste our strength in conflicts amongst ourselves and in internecine tugs-of-war which have reduced the glory of Unity to an empty phoneme.

A strong nation can only be built on firm principles of manners, morals, order - sole sources of progress. Islam never owed its power to cannons and tanks and weapons but to the pre-eminence in thought amongst its Ulema, in character amongst its peoples and in following the guidance of God on the good road (for which we pray in the Fatihe 17 times a day), the road of justice, fellowship, brotherhood.

History demonstrates unmistakably that whenever the Muslims have constructed their philosophy of life in the spirit of the teachings revealed to them by Heaven, they have prospered : and whenever they have deserted those teachings, adversity and misfortune have been visited upon them. The Muslims who founded the brilliant culture and social wellbeing of the past followed those teachings more closely than we do, individual, society and nation alike.

The sun of culture shone while just measure and proportion was given to science, thought, matter and spirit. When we deserted those, the banner of endeavour, diligence and combat for right fell from our hands, only to be grabbed by the West in self-aggrandisement.

Where is the old Muslim sincerity: integrity, honesty and truthfulness? These were once the fences on either side of our path. When we transgressed across them we were lost in a trackless desert, and abandoned the holy calling, announced as God's purpose for us, of leading mankind to live as God wills. Abandoning that destiny, we sank in the quicksands of corruption, ignorance and wretchedness which engulf us today. Yet a truly united Islam could return to that heavenly vocation and lead mankind's feet on to the spiritual road. This would be a blessing for all.

Napoleon's companion in exile on the island of St. Helena wrote : "In Egypt Napoleon constantly repeated his amazement at the blessings which the Prophet of Islam and her other great men in history had brought to the foreign lands they took under their sway. He looked with hope to Islam as the force which might again confer such blessings on the world, even saying: "I think I will take up Islam as my religion'."

A true Islamic society would be very different from that which obtains anywhere in the world. Its thinking and its living must once again incarnate those heavenly principles of its inception. As the poet said:

"Islam's pure truth's from spot or blemish free:
Our Muslims blame for any fault you see."

To take its full share in that moral and spiritual revolution which must come to the entire world, Islam must orient itself in today's global realities. It must then undertake those internal reforms which will be its restitution for past backwardness. It must balance spiritual and material conditions in the right proportion in accordance with those principles of perfection which shaped the glories of its past and which are dictated by the Lord of both worlds - this one and the next. In these it will find, not merely its own internal stability, but also the secret of stability for the world and the way to mediate it to all mankind.

Chapter 56 Conclusion

Let us sum up the topics treated in this volume and the conclusions to which they lead. We started with man's ascent from a primitive animal like soul dwelling in holes and caves of the rocks up to the sophisticated denizen of the atomic space age and its affluent technological society We evaluated that society as it manifests itself in the West, and studied its interaction with the more leisurely Orient, illustrating with an Irani's reaction to his sojourn in Europe.

We examined the reasons for the growth of Christianity; and then scrutinised the history of its rise, its split into sects, and the effects of these things on the world, not least in anti-Islamic propaganda honoured with the ferocity only accorded to a rival who is truly feared. We saw Islam and Christianity face to face in Africa.

We considered the pursuit of happiness in a machine-made culture, its worship of sex, its wild seeking of sensations in materialistic ways, and the reaction of drop- outs who revolt against its drab monotony.

We saw the effects of permissiveness over alcohol; the desperate contrasts between the haves and the have-nots allowed in the world by the irresponsibility of those whose religion should make them care; the bloody wars conducted by partisans of the society for the prevention of cruelty to animals; race discrimination, and the breakdown of the family ; artificial shortages of vital goods engineered by vested interests in certain essential commodities.

Part 2 turned to look at what Islam has to offer this disturbed world; its doctrine of Man, of Eternity and Judgment, of social life on earth and the individual's duties therein; its emphasis on reason; its education programme; its political implications, and its demand for total self-alignment of each human will with the Supreme Will of the Creator of all things visible and invisible.

Part 3 dwelt on Islam's way of dealing with social problems: alcoholism, family life, racism, the class war and world peace.

Finally we asked : What is the position of Islam today, what is its task and what role should it and could it be playing in helping mankind out of the morass into which the divisive materialisms of East and West threaten to plunge us one and all?

The endeavour has been made to be scrupulously fair, to relate only known facts, to make deductions from such facts and to envisage the world as it might be. On a merely materialistic and human plane there may seem to be grounds for a disillusioned and despairing pessimism. But the marvels of renascence which have happened again and again in mankind's history, the knowledge of the great gifts which the Creator has implanted within His creatures, the certainty of His pardoning and merciful compassion towards all those whom He has set upon this earth, and above all that faith which is given to those who set their trust in Him and seek in daily prayer to put themselves at His disposal to be guided on the straight road, provide us with the optimism of a sure hope.

We therefore end with: "insha' Allah all things shall be turned to good." The Muslim's 'innsha' Allah" is not, as some Westerners have falsely claimed, a supine, faineant fatalism which accepts whatever comes without lifting a finger to shape the course of events: it is, on the contrary, an active enlistment in God's service, to serve with the obedience that a willing slave both owes and gives to a beneficent Master who owns him heart and soul. If enough men and women in the world adopt that militant obedience of the "Abedeen" who can doubt that Almighty Providence will once again pour forth the bounty of His grace upon a perishing world?

Chapter 57 GLOSSARY

Most religious terms in Iran, as throughout the Muslim world, are adopted direct from Arabic, and are thus derivatives of trilateral roots, for the Semitic languages attach a meaning to a three-letter base and produce a complete set of variations by a scientific series of modifications of the base - altering vowels inside it, doubling consonants, inserting consonants, suffixing and affixing syllables, thus: "S-L-M-" is a three letter root conveying the idea of peace and wellbeing. From it derive "Salaam", the greeting which prays for the peace and wellbeing of the interlocutor: "Islam" the religious system which confers peace with God and self and fate, and so wellbeing in this world and the next: '"Muslim" and ."."Musalman" a person dedicated to the religion ."Islam". and "Tasleem" surrender of self to the will of God revealed in Islam: etc. This glossary gives the three-letter roots and basic idea of most of the terms explained.

ALI (ibn Abu Taleb): the Prophet's cousin, first convert and son-in-law, 4th Sunni Caliph and first Shi'a Imam from AD 656 until his death under the assassin's poisoned sabre in AD 661.

FASKH: see TALAQ. A form of Divorce.

FEQH: Jurisprudence. like Roman jurisprudentia '."rerum divinarum atque humanarum notitia" it covers all aspects of religious, political, and civil life - Ritual, Fasts and Festivals, Family Law, Inheritance, Property,. Contracts, Social Behaviour, Criminal Law and Procedure, ConstitutIonal Law, Administration, Warfare.

HEJRA: "Migration": in particular the Prophet's abandoning Mecca because of its mounting hostility, and transferring himself and his followers to Y athrib, 200 miles north, whose people had invited him. He arrived on the 20th of September AD 622 and the city proudly changed its name to "Medinatu'l-Nabi" -"the Prophet's City". The 2nd Caliph, Omar, reproached for not dating documents, on Ali's advice took this event as the start of the Muslim era, dubbing the year of the Hejra "Year I" and starting it on the Lunar New Year's Day the 1st of Muharram AD 622. The Persian calendar accepted the Hejra year as Year 1 but refused to change their solar-year which begins at the Vernal Equinox, March 21st. (Root: H-]-R-). In this book, the Persian postHejra Solar year is noted as AHS. the Arabic post-Hejra Lunar year AHL.

ISLAM: was revealed to the Prophet (Sura III: Al-i-Emran -"Emran's Family verse 19): "The Religion of God is Al-Islam". And again (Sura V Ma'ide -"The Table Spread" verse 3): "This day have I approved Al-Islam for you as a religion", etc. Islam is the verbal noun of "aslama" - to submit oneself to God. Its adjective is "Muslim" - one submitted to God: also used in the form "Musalman". The basic root is S-i-m - which conveys the idea of peace and wellbeing, and reappears in the greeting "Salaam" or more fully "Salaam 'aleikum", corresponding to the Hebrew "Shalom aleicha".

JEHAD: "Holy War", a religious duty for all free adult male Muslims if called for by a Muslim sovereign or Imam, nowadays particularly if a Muslim land is invaded by unbelievers. The aim is to change "Dar-ul-Harb" (Abode of War) into "Dar-ul- lslam" (Abode of Peace with God). The Prophet declared Nejran (a Christian State) "Dar-ul-Sulh" (Abode of Treaty).

KHUL': see TALAQ. A form of Divorce.

MEDINA: the word means "city"; and from its root m-d-n is derived "tamaddun" "civilisation". Medina today is par excellence Medinatu'lNabi (= the city of the Prophet), the new name proudly taken by the citizens of Yathrib, the town 200 miles north of Mecca whose people invited Muhammad and his followers when opposition in Mecca rendered his continued stay there impossible.

QUR'AN: a verbal noun meaning "to read" or "recite" as in Sura LXXV (verse 17): "It is for us to collect It and recite It." The term originally meant each separate Revelation made to the Prophet, until the 3rd Caliph Uthman issued his authorised collection and used the name Qur'an for the whole. These Revelations are a part of al-Kitab, a book preserved in Heaven of which portions have been revealed to other "People of the Book", Jews and Christians in particular (root: q-r-'-).

SHARI'A: Canon Law, i.e. the totality of Allah's Commandments relating to the "forum externum" of man's activities. while "Akhlaq" (Ethics) is concerned with the "forum internum", the inner consciousness, motives and intentions of the heart.

SHI'A: the Muslim party which holds that succession to the Prophet should be by appointment. They relate that the Prophet, while resting at the Khumm Pool en route back to Medina after his farewell pilgrimage to Mecca in AD 632, said: "I shall soon be called to Heaven. I leave amongst you two important things, the first more important than the other. They are the Qur'an and my family." Shi'a Islam is the official state religion of Iran. It was led by "lmams" (not Caliphs) of whom Ali was first, succeeded by a generation of his descendants of whom the 12th AI- Mahdi, was translated like Enoch and Elijah and will be revealed at his second Advent. It is to this "Ridden Imam" AI-Mahdi that this book is dedicated.

SUNNI: the Muslim party which holds that succession should be by election, and preferably of a "male member of the Qureish tribe, adult, of good character, physically and mentally competent, knowing law: and possessed of administrative ability, courage and energy." They claim to be Ahl-ul-Sunna wa'l-Jama'a-people of the Tradition and of the Community-i.e. catholic orthodox traditionalists indogma and practice. "Khaleefe" means "Successor" i.e. "Caliph" On Muhammad's death, some held that Ali was his natural successor by appointment, but Omar insisted on a vote. Abu Bekr was elected 1st Caliph, Omar 2nd, Uthman 3rd, and Ali 4th. Uthman was murdered in AD 655 by malcontents who accused him of nepotism, greed in distribution of booty and suppressing local Qur'ans in favour of his '"authorised version". Despite Ali's election, his rival Mu'aviye claimed to be Uthman's avenger, and civil war broke out, ending in Ali's death, and the separation of his followers, the Shi'a, from Mu'aviye's Sunni.

SURA: a sign, a revelation. The Prophet Muhammad insisted that he was an ordinary man; distinguished only because he had been given and had accepted revelations. It is on the quality of these revelations that he rested his argument with cavillers - on both their style and their subject, their manner and their matter. Thus Sura II, Al-Baqara "The Heifer" (verse 23) reads: "If you are in doubt what We have revealed to Our servant, then produce a Sura like it." And (Sura X, Yunnis-"Jonah" verse 38): "If they say, "he forged it' say: "Then bring a Sura like it'." And (Sura XXIV, An-Nur "The Light" verse 50): "A Sura we have revealed and made obligatory and in it we have revealed clear "Ayat", i.e., to start with, each revelation was called Sura; and was written down at the time on any material that might be to hand. The Caliph Uthman collected an authorised version of these, not accepting any which did not have the attestation of at least two witnesses. His version was arranged in groups of Revelations, 114 in number, each called a Sura, ranged in order of length, the longest coming first except for Number 1 (al-Fatihe "an opening" prayer). Each Sura is named from some subject or word which is particularly striking. References to the Qur'an in this book are given by the name of the Sura and the number of the Ayat (originally sign of Divine truth, now = verse).

TALAQ: "Divorce: repudiation of a wife by the husband." Root: "T -L-Q-" -"getting free (from a bond); being set loose". Islamic law recognises several types, viz:

1. talaq proper; strictly regulated by the Prophet, e.g. in Sura IV (verse 20); Sura XXXIII (verse 49); Sura LXV (verse I sqq.),. 2. khul'. Root: "."KH-L-'-"-"doffing". thus '."the legal dissolution of the marriage contract", often by the wife returning a portion of the bridal gift.; 3. faskh. Root: "F-S-KH-"-'."rescind, annul". Also called "tafriq". root: "F-R-Q-" -"'separation". Our author quotes rules for faskh.

'ULEMA: the plural of two Arabic nouns, 'aleem and 'alem. both meaning "possessor of the knowledge (' elm) of facts": hence expert in the Qur'an, the Traditions, and the resultant Canon Law and Theology of Islam; and so the custodians of the same. Agreement of the 'Ulema on a point constitutes an Ejma'a or "consensus fidelium" and is one of the four "usul" or "root principles", the others being (1) the Qur'an itself (2) the Sunna or traditions themselves, quoting what the Prophet said, did, and approved, and (3) .Aql rational intelligence. Thus the 'Ulema once enjoyed a status in every Muslim land like that of the Supreme Court in the U.S.A., able to pronounce on the legality or otherwise of any decree or act of government. The Shi'a Mujtaheds still do so (root:'-l-m-).

'UMRA: the "little pilgrimage", performed in ritual purity wearing the EHRAM, the seamless ceremonial garments (1) white sheet from navel to knees (2) white sheet covering left shoulder, back and breast, knotted on right. On assuming the Ehram the 'Umra-pilgrim (Mu'tamer) declares his niyat (vow of intent). If this is to perform the 'Umra and shortly after it the full Hajj, in the interval between in the Prophet's time a return to ordinary habits was allowed, but the Caliph Omar revoked this indulgence. The 'Umra involves the sevenfold circumambulation of the Ka' aba and certain other rites, all of which are involved also in the full Hajj, with the addition of the visit to Mount Arafat and some other spiritual exercises.

WAQF: the transfer of property in perpetuity for a charitable service either (1) Waqf-i-khairi-public or religious, e.g. a Mosque, a Madrasseh (School of Theology), a Hospital, a Bridge, Waterworks: or (2) Waqf-i-Ahli for relatives or the poor. P. vii lists some of the Waqfs instituted by our author Sayid Mujtaba Musawi.

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