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" "There are, however, more profound reasons for protecting the ‘nakedness’ of others and for concealing our own. As was suggested earlier, few personalities are unified and all of a piece. For a man to try to cover and inhibit those elements within himself which he would like to overcome and to bring forward those which he would like to see triumphant is not ‘hypocrisy’. If he would like to be better than he is, then he deserves to be encouraged in this aim, and there is something very peculiar about the contemporary tendency to regard a person’s worst qualities as representing his ‘true’ self, although it goes hand in hand with the common belief that ugliness is in some strange way more ‘real’ than beauty and that to discover a shameful secret is to discover the truth. Perhaps a saner point of view is suggested by a story which Muslims tell about Jesus. It is said that he was walking one day with his disciples when they passed the carcass of a dog. ‘How it stinks!’ said the disciples; but Jesus said: ‘How white its teeth are!’ No one was ever damned for thinking too well of people.
Charles le Gai Eaton (also known as Hasan le Gai Eaton or Hassan Abdul Hakeem; 1 January 1921 – 2010) was a British diplomat, writer, historian, and an Islamic scholar.
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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.
The Muslim does not feel dwarfed by the immensities of nature because he knows himself to be the viceregent of God standing upright in the midst of such immensities. We, though small in stature, see the stars; they do not see us. We hold them within our consciousness and measure them in accordance with our knowledge; they know us not. We master them in their courses. Immensity cannot know itself; only in human consciousness can such a concept exist.
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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.