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ISLAM
A FRIEND OF HUMANITY OR A FOE?
M H Faruqi
Islam’s message is plain and profound. It starts as a seed and blossoms into a
garden. Seven years after Prophet Muhammad (SallAllaho alaihe wasallam) had been
charged with the duty to convey the message, the Makkans banished and confined
him and his kith and kin of the Banu Hashim clan to the Valley of Bani Hashim
(later called as Valley of Abi Talib). The message had been spreading, despite
all opposition and oppression, and, therefore, the chiefs of Makkah had decided
on a policy of boycott and isolation. It was assumed that while the people
outside would hear no more of Islam, those under siege would recant. In any
case, they hoped, the message would die a natural death.
The besieged had to subsist by eating leaves and roots of desert plants or
boiled or roasted hide. The wail of hungry infants could be heard outside the
valley, but the sanction-keepers were unmoved. The blockade lasted around three
years. However, if anyone happened to stray by, Prophet Muhammad (SallAllaho
alaihe wasallam) would say to him, “Say! There is no deity (but Allah, and)
prosper!” These were four few words, but their meaning was clear and complete.
The success and prosperity, Prophet Muhammad (SallAllaho alaihe wasallam) was
inviting them to were not so visible but seemed implicit and inevitable. The
Arabs were by now so well familiar with the Kalimah, the basic statement of
Islam, that the listener had no difficulty in relating the two words “La Ilaaha”
to its complete form - There is no deity but Allah, Muhammad is the Messenger of
Allah!
Allah is the Kind and Just God Who created the whole humanity and a complex
environment around it, and provided it with rules and guidance and did not leave
it in a state of total anarchy. There cannot be the Kind and Just God Who
creates a whole humanity and a complex environment around it, but does not
provide it with rules and guidance and leaves it in a state of total anarchy.
The belief about Allah and messengership has, therefore, always gone together.
The first man on this planet, Hadhrat Adam (Alaihis Salaam), was a vicegerent
and messenger of Allah. So were Nooh, Ibrahim, Dawood, Sulaiman, Musa, Isa,
Muhammad and thousands of others whom we do not know of today. They all spoke of
One God - Allah.
How do we know Allah? First there is subjective evidence within ourselves.
Since, we all come from Allah, there is within all of us a fine sense of
awareness that there is Allah. There is more evidence outside. You try a ‘null
hypothesis’, that there is no Allah, and you can’t think of a perfectly designed
and perfectly ordered universe and everything contained therein without
everything made according to a plan, behaving according to an integrated system
of rules and laws, all without a Master and Creator. It would be absurd to
conceptualise anything otherwise.
But if there is Allah, and there surely is Allah, then what does He mean to us?
Just Someone merely out there somewhere without any continuing relationship
between Creator and the created? It is easy to be aware of Allah, but you cannot
determine simply on the basis of your subjective cognition of what that
relationship requires of you. Hence, all that long line of messengers from
Allah, from the first one, Adam, to the last one, Muhammad (Alaihim us Salaam).
Otherwise, we would have no certain means of knowing Allah and knowing what He
wants of us.
The Holy Quraan tells us that Allah is Kind and Beneficent, Just and Merciful,
Lord and Provider, Sovereign and Law-Giver, Wise and True. He is Original. He is
Eternal. He does not retire or sleep. He has no partners or kin. He is
All-Knowing and All-Seeing. No one can escape His reckoning and He will punish
or reward each one according to his deeds. His justice is blended with mercy.
His mercy is blended with justice.
Every child that is born, is born a Muslim, with a clean slate. It is not
condemned at birth. Muslim means one who submits, submits to Allah, of his own
volition. The test, therefore, lies in the future, when the child has grown up
and has the ability to act any way he or she likes, to obey or not to obey.
Allah does not impose Himself. People are free to believe or not to believe. And
many do not. They invent their own deities and worship their own desires.
Naturally, there are consequences to both belief and disbelief. No system of law
or discipline treats those who abide by the law and those who do not in the same
manner. It cannot be otherwise.
There is, therefore, the Aakhirah, the Hereafter. Nothing is as sure as death,
and it is only logical that people are judged at the end of the Day and rewarded
or punished accordingly. The best reward is the Pleasure of Allah and the worst
punishment is His Displeasure. But Humans are also very much bone and flesh. The
rewards and punishment are, therefore, tangible too: Heaven and Hell.
It is a long journey from Here to the Hereafter. You have to have your bearings
right, the right sense of destination, the right navigational equipment, and an
inbuilt system of correcting the course and raising an alarm, in case one begins
to go dangerously astray. You need to have your limits (Hudood) defined which
you may transgress only at your peril, because otherwise you may be endangering
the whole society. You need a very powerful social vehicle to carry you through
a long, arduous and not unoften hazardous journey. A powerful vehicle needs a
very powerful brake too.
Islam offers the ability to relate directly, without any intermediary, to Allah.
Islam is, therefore, not just maxims and precepts, about being nice and good; it
is also about social and personal discipline, a system of law and punishment
without which maxims and precepts could become meaningless outside a small and
limited area of individual morality.
But an Islamic society is not governed by laws alone. Just as the lock on the
door is fixed only for the thief or someone who may otherwise feel encouraged to
steal, laws in Islam are directed at the wicked fringe, or the weaker ones who
may feel tempted to break the law and once having done so with impunity, may
find it difficult to get out of the vicious circle. The aim is to keep the
wicked fringe as much narrowed down as possible, to punish the actual guilty,
deter the potential breakers of law, and protect society and its economic,
social and moral fibre.
One knows what happens otherwise: a geometric progression of crime, which
neither the courts and nor the prisons are able to cope with. We also need to
reckon the sheer economic cost of laissez faire morality!
The contemporary focus on the Islamic state, by Muslims who want to regain their
lost freedom and by those who are somehow afraid of the Islamic state and
Islamic Shari’ah, tends to convey a fallacious impression of a polity that is
saddled with a plethora of laws. It is not true. The number of laws that would
govern an Islamic state are very very few as compared to those hundreds and
thousands we find otherwise. It would be an instructive exercise if someone was
to count the number of Islamic laws that used to govern the former Ottoman
caliphate and compare them, for example, with the number of laws on the statute
book of the then British Empire.
Islamic laws are based on conscience and conviction and not on legislation and
imposition and there is little scope for conflict between the interest of the
individual and the state. No one is above the law and everyone is governed by
the same law.
The Islamic society is a self-regulating society. You don’t have to abide by a
law because someone is watching and you don’t mind breaking it if you feel you
can do so with impunity. An individual is answerable in his own cognition,
first. Whether under watch or not, the person knows for sure that he or she is
answerable before Allah. There is no way one can escape His notice, His Pleasure
or Displeasure.
Yet, one is human. A person may forget or relax. A Muslim, therefore, takes time
off from the necessary routines of life to bow his or her head in prayer before
Allah, five times in a day. These prayers are as much a continuous reminder of
one’s close relationship with Allah, with His Grace and His Mercies as with the
sense of inescapable accountability before Him. It is also an act of
thankfulness.
Worship in Islam - offering Salaah five times a day, observe Saum in the month
of Ramadhaan, giving one-fortieth of your wealth every year in Zakaah, Hajj once
in a lifetime, if you can afford it - are all meant to keep fresh and active
one’s consciousness of Allah. The implications of this consciousness are as much
personal as social.
The ability to relate directly, without any intermediary, to Allah while in
Sallah, the joys of month-long hunger in Saum, the life-long sacrifice of a part
of one’s wealth every year in Zakaah, and the physical hardships, monetary costs
and emotional discipline involved in Hajj, bring both personal fulfilment and
social enrichment. You come to know the taste of hunger. You find you become
richer by giving. And how pleasant it is to discover that no matter the colour
of your skin, the land of your birth, rich or poor, you are an equal member of
the human fraternity. This equality does not diminish; it elevates you.
Islam also has its own economic “equation”. Giving Zakaah adds to prosperity,
taking interest makes everyone poor. By banning interest absolutely, Islam
denies money any right to grow by itself and puts a true premium on labour and
production. It is intriguing that during all this past century or so
characterised by talks of socialism, whether democratic, Marxist or Christian,
of all the rhetoric against capitalism and monopoly, no one has cared to bother
about the worst of all monopolies: the wealth of the nations entrusted to banks
for growth and safe-keeping.
How can a piece of metal or paper grow by itself except by taking someone else’s
money, by siphoning into the wealth produced by others, by manipulating the
market, by offering - other people’s capital - to borrowers of their choice
irrespective of its wider social implications, by imposing its control of money
over the needs of others, and by creating false money simply by giving borrowers
the right to draw money which in most cases meant no more than a paper
transaction between the various branches of the lending bank or banks? The
monetary system allows a few dozen money holders to do all this and leaves us to
complain about an uncontrollable spiral of inflation. Governments may come and
go, inflation goes on.
The Holy Quraan calls taking or giving interest as tantamount to war against
Allah and His Messenger. However, it is doubtful if such an economic law would
appeal to anyone who thinks of Allah as Someone of even less authority and
interest in the affairs of His subjects than a constitutional monarch, and who
does not think that Allah is All-Knowing and All-Wise, Just and Merciful,
Sovereign and Law-Giver.
Islam also sets a real challenge by providing us with an enemy, a real one, so
that one doesn’t have to create or invent one. The enemy is Satan! It has no
powers over humans, but it has been given the ability and freedom to confuse and
to seduce. The humans too have their freedom to succumb or to spurn. A real
drama requires a real villain, and you cannot prove your love without being able
to reject the seductions of the villain.
Islam invites us all to face our common and real foe, the foe that cannot be
wished away. All our future depends on how we deal with the real enemy.
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