Religion cannot survive, whole and effective when it is confined to one single compartment of life and education. Religion is either all or it is not… - Gai Eaton

Modern Western art, particularly in the form of the novel, has become an instrument of self-exposure and, in most cases, what is exposed is inner sickness. The novelist works out his 'complexes' in writing. He exteriorises his despair and parades before the public all the elements of ugliness and disease present in his soul. Muslims can only find this unspeakably wicked if they recognise it for what it is, but for the most part they are unlikely to recognise something so totally alien to their faith and to their culture. The freedom of artistic expression appears, from the Islamic perspective, no more than a license to vomit in public.

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.

The Law does not invade the privacy of man's inwardness, the relationship of the human soul to God, nor is it concerned with the way in which each individual interprets the basic spiritual teachings of the religion (deepening them in terms of a truth that is both outwardly apparent and inwardly real), provided this does not express itself in behaviour contrary to the interests of the community, but it provides a framework of social and psychological equilibrium within which each individual can follow his particular vocation.