People are not always what they say there are - or even what they think they are. There is but One who sees us objectively, and heave reason to be th… - Gai Eaton

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.

To love Muhammad is one thing, but to imitate him - to try to be 'like' him - is another. He was the last messenger and the last prophet, so how can we expect to imitate what is by definition unique and unrepeatable? In the first place his virtues are to be imitated, and they were providentially exemplified in the extraordinary variety of human experience through which he passed in his sixty-two years of life. He was an orphan, yet he knew the warmth of parental love through his grandfather's devoted care for him; he was the faithful husband of one wife for many years, and after her death, the tender and considerate husband of many wives; he was the father of children who gave him the greatest joy this world has to offer, and he saw all but one of them die; he had been a shepherd and a merchant when young, and he became a ruler, a statesman, a military commander, and a law-giver; he loved his native city and was driven from it into exile, finally to return home in triumph and set an example of clemency which has no equal in human history. Not only do we know almost everything he did, we know the exact manner in which he did it.

The agnostic has a very curious notion of religion. He is convinced that a man who says 'I believe in God' should at once become perfect; if this does not happen, then the believer must be a fraud and a hypocrite. He thinks that adherence to a religion is the end of the road, whereas it is in fact only the beginning of a very long and sometimes very rough road. He looks for consistency in religious people, however aware he may be of inconsistencies in himself. The fact that we do expect consistency of others - and are astonished by their lack of it - is sufficient proof of our awareness that the human personality ought to be unified under one command. Perhaps the most difficult of all the requirements of religion is simplicity, for the simple man is all of one piece; he does not leave bits of himself scattered all over the landscape of his life. He is, so to speak, the same all through, whichever way you slice him, and it has been said that only the saint has a right to say 'I'; the rest of us would do better to confess 'My name is legion'.