Islam being theocentric, the community owes its cohesion primarily to the Faith, not to government and not to its religious leaders. Each individual Muslim is personally responsible for the well-being of his fellows, his 'brothers' and his 'sisters', to aid them in poverty, to comfort them in distress and to put them right when they go astray (though always in a spirit of kindness); at least in principle, each member of the community, however humble, has a duty - when he sees something wrong or out of place - to correct it either with his hand or with his tongue, or, if he does not have the power to do this, then to correct it within his own heart. His duty dos not, however, extend to sending for the police or reporting the matter to the authorities, for - as a Muslim - he embodies the Law in himself; there is no question of handing over his responsibility to the impersonal state.
Islamic scholar, writer and diplomat (1921–2010)
And yet I needed to know the meaning of my own existence. Only those who, at some time in their lives, have been possessed by such a need can guess at its intensity, comparable to that of physical hunger or sexual desire. I did not see how I could put one foot in front of the other unless I understood where I was going and why. I could do nothing unless I understood what part my action played in the scheme of things. All I knew was that I knew nothing - nothing, that is to say, of the slightest importance - and I was paralyzed by my ignorance as though immobilized in a dense fog.
One of the fundamental themes of the Qur'an is man's flight from reality. Given the basic premise that God is, and that His being both transcends and encompasses all existence, then unbelief is precisely such a flight. Men and women throughout the centuries have tried at every opportunity to evade total Reality and to take refuge in little corners of private darkness. Even at the simplest everyday level there is constant avoidance of the thought of death; there is evasion of our inward solitariness, which no amount of conviviality can entirely overcome, and there is a refusal to acknowledge our limitations and our sins. Not only is it the innate tendency of fallen man to 'forget' God, but there comes about a luxuriant growth of forgetfulness in every sphere.
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It is clear that if we are to fulfill our true function, we must first identify and then become our true selves; the man alienated from his own centre is alienated from all things, not only a stranger to himself but also a stranger in the universe. Yet he cannot find the centre nor can he ‘become himself’ without help. For the Muslim, the Prophet not only shows us the way to the centre but, in a certain sense, is himself the way, since it is by taking him as our model, or by entering into the mould of his personality, that we are best able to travel to our destination. Action which springs from our own true centre - ‘without external cause’, as the dictionary has it - is the only truly ‘spontaneous’ action, and it is therefore in imitating him that we achieve spontaneity.
Man is either Viceroy or else he is an animal that claims special rights by virtue of its cunning and the devouring efficiency of teeth sharpened by technological instruments... But if he is Viceroy, then all decay and trouble in the created world that surrounds him is in some measure to be laid to his account
The independence movements in the colonies and protectorates came into being, not through return to indigenous values on the part of those concerned, but through the absorption of occidental ideas and ideologies, liberal or revolutionary as the case might be. The process of modernization - a euphemism for Westernization - far from being halted by this withdrawal, was in fact accelerated. The enthusiasm of the new rulers for everything 'modern' was not restrained, as had been the enthusiasm of their former masters, by any element of self-doubt. The irony implicit in this whole situation was tragically apparent in the Vietnam war, when the people of that country fought, not to preserve their own traditions or to gain the right to be truly themselves, but under the banner of a shoddy occidental ideology and for the privilege of imitating their former masters in terms of nationalism and socialism. The west was at war with its own mirror image in a vicious dance of death.
A few years before his death in 1934 the great Algerian Sheikh, Ahmad al-'Alawi, became friendly with a Frenchman, Dr. Carret, who had been treating him for various minor ailments. One day Carrett tried to explain his agnosticism to the Sheikh, adding, however, that what most surprised him was that people who did claim to be religious 'should be able to go on attaching importance to this earthly life'. After a pause, the Sheikh said to him: 'It is a pity that you will not let your spirit rise above yourself. But whatever you may say and whatever you may imagine, you are nearer to God than you think'. In this confused age in which we now find ourselves there may be many a believer who is a kafir under the skin, and many a kafir who is closer than he knows to the God in whom he thinks he does not believe.
It is important to be aware of these paradoxes because the distrust of religion - or at least of 'organized religion' - which is so widespread in the Western world, derives less from intellectual doubts than from a critical judgement of the way in which religious people are seen to behave. The agnostic does not concern himself with the supernatural dimensions of religion, let alone with ultimate truth. He sees only that part of the iceberg which is visible above the surface, and he judges this to be misshapen. The whole sad story is summed up in the wise child's prayer: 'Lord, please make good people religious and make religious people good'.
If the term 'science' has any precise meaning - relating it to knowledge of the real - then it is the science of tawhid. It could be said, and with good reason, that the kafir should never be permitted to approach the physical sciences or to involve himself in them. He does not possess the key to them, and he is therefore bound to go astray and to lead others astray. He divides when he should unite, and his fragmented mind deals only with fragments: it is little wonder that he splits the atom, with devastating results. Those who know nothing of the principle are incompetent to study its manifestations. 'Pursue not that of which thou hast no knowledge. Surely hearing and sight and heart - all these - shall be called to account' (Q.17.36).
The evidence is all around us. There are a thousand ways in which our existence may be terminated between one moment and the next; a simple drug will transform the most intelligent among us into an idiot, or the bravest among us into a coward; and we know from our reading if not from experience that techniques of torture, more widely practised today than at any time in the past, can destroy every vestige of human dignity in a very short time. Such human dignity as we may have - and the Viceregent of God is indeed a figure of great dignity - is a robe loaned to us, just as a woman’s beauty is loaned to her, just as our skills, whether hereditary or acquired, are on loan, as are our strengths and our virtues. We can claim nothing as being truly ours except for our weaknesses and our vices, together with the ill we do in the world; for the Quran assures us that all good comes from God, all ill from man. We do not even control the breath of life within us, and: ‘No soul knoweth what it will earn tomorrow nor doth any soul know in what land it will die. Truly Allah is the Knower, the Aware!’ (Q.31.34).
...it is reasonable to maintain that the spectacle of human nature extended to its uttermost limits has much to teach us about ourselves and is therefore, after its fashion, a 'sign for those who understand'. According to a famous hadith of the Prophet, Adam was created 'in the image of God'; and we are Adam's progeny , 'the tribe of Adam', as the Quran has it. There is something in man, precisely because the One-without-associate, the Independent, the Self-sufficient is in some mysterious way reflected in his nature, which demands such freedom from constraint as only an absolute ruler has. But because man is not God this opportunity to extend himself limitlessly leads to destruction; in the desire for great power and in its exercise there are certainly elements of greed and arrogance, but there may also be an element of nobility striving for a supreme mode of self-expression. These men we have been considering revealed human nature, stripped to the bone, in all its grandeur, its instability and its ferocity; and those who find such men totality alien know very little about themselves.
The Sunnah of the Prophet provides not only a framework but also, as it were, a network of channels into which the believer’s will enters and through which it flows smoothly, both guided and guarded. It is not his way, the Muslim’s way, to cut new channels for his volitive life through the recalcitrant materials of this world, against the grain of things. At first sight one might expect this to produce a tedious uniformity. All the evidence indicates that it does nothing of the kind; and anyone who has had close contact with good and pious Muslims will know that, although they live within a shared pattern of belief and behaviour, they are often more sharply differentiated one from another than are profane people, their characters strong and their individualities more clearly delineated. They have modelled themselves upon a transcendent norm of inexhaustible richness, whereas profane people have taken as their model the fashions of the time. To put it another way: the great virtues - and it is the Prophet’s virtues that the believer strives to imitate - can, it seems, be expressed through human nature in countless different ways, whereas worldly fashion induces uniformity. In media advertisements one ‘fashion model’ looks very much like another.
Religion is a different matter. Other subjects may lend themselves, in varying degree, to objective study, and in some cases personal commitment serves only to distort what should be a clear and balanced picture. Religion is a different matter for here objectivity only skims the surface, missing the essential. The keys to understanding lie within the observer's own being and experience, and without these keys no door will open. This is particularly true of Islam, a religion which treats the distinction between belief and disbelief as the most fundamental of all possible distinction, comparable only on the physical level to that between the sighted and the blind. Believing and understanding complement and support one other. We do not seek fir an adequate description of a landscape from a blind man, even if he has made a scientific study of its topography, and has analyzed the nature of its rocks and vegetation. In Islam, every aspect of human life, every thought and every action, is shaped by and evaluated in the light of the basic article of faith. Remove this linchpin and the whole structure falls apart.