Western civilization through Muslim eyes chapter1

Western civilization through Muslim eyes

BOOK ID

Title: Western civilization through Muslim eyes

Author (s): Sayyid Mujtaba Musawi Lari

Publisher (s): Qum: Foundation of Islamic C. P. W. , 2010= 1389.

ISBN: 978-964-5817-65-5

Category: General Politics & Current Affairs

Topic Tags: Society Civilization

Appearance: 176 p

Congress Classification: BP۲۲۹/۳/م۸الف۵۰۴۹۵۴ ۱۳۸۹

Dewey decimal classification: ۲۹۷/۴۸۹

National bibliography number: ۲۰۳۹۹۹۸

point

The Author in the book highlights and answers some of the vital questions like: What is the position of Islam today, what is its task and what role should it and could it be playing in helping mankind out of the morass into which the divisive materialism of East and West threaten to plunge us one and all?

 

Part 1: Physiognomy of the West

Genesis of Human Life and Civilization

The very advance in scientific research into the origins of life on this planet pushes the date of its first appearance further back into remoter ages while increasing the riddles to unravel and the puzzles to solve.

Despite the comparatively recent appearance of human life proper—an infinitesimal fraction of the period for which the planet has nourished living matter —much uncertainty obscures the etiology of its production.

Nonetheless, scientists and paleontologists have, by excavations and the discovery of artifacts, corn and other relics of human handicraft, been able to trace the course of man's upward progress through a series of stages in history thus:

1. Paleolithic: marked by the use of simple weapons to kill animals in self-defense or for food: stones, sticks and similar hunting tools: savagery and brutishness in constant fear of the beasts: use of caves and holes in the earth as shelter from voracious carnivores and from the dark. Primacy went to the most capable hunter: all human effort was bent to the conquest of foes— whether hostile nature or animals or

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humans.

2. The Later Paleolithic: man's first step up from the use of existing objects as tools was to fabricate for himself, e. g. by binding a stick to a stone to make a hammer, or manufacturing a sharp edge by percussion of flints; from which he was led on to the discovery of the art of kindling a fire; and so to the cooking of food; and the overcoming of night and dark. Long centuries were spent on this series of developments until the Paleolithic stage was finally surmounted, and:

3. The Neolithic Age: saw manifold and varied changes in human living. Artifacts were still made of stone and wood, but the crude clumsy devices of the Paleolithic were replaced by beautifully regular, exact and polished tools. Huts were made to live in, woven wood plastered with mud. Mud was molded into crocks and pots, dried first in the sun and later on the fire.

Crops were grown and the soil cultivated in primitive fashion; certain animals were domesticated. Man learnt which grains to sow for food, which trees to protect for fruit and timber. He invented the bow and arrow and so rid himself of some types of dangerous beast; and spears to catch fish. Arrowheads, spears and axes were still of sharpened stone. But skill increased over the centuries (which have left their relics for us to find and so reconstruct their life) and finally led them out of the stone Ages into:

4. The Bronze Age: with the use of metals,

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came the birth of civilization justly so-called. For Civilization is from the same root as "City" and connotes "social living". So does also "Tamaddun" the Arabic, from the root M-D-N — city or community life: so do also "policy" and "police" from the Greek "polis": "urbane" from "urbs" and so on. For with it human life assumed a novel aspect and entered a new phase.

Man was no longer a mere hungry animal always busied with the quest for food. From concentration on his belly and its needs he emerged to dreams and visions and an objective consciousness of the world around him. The more victories he gained in his struggle with nature, the more his desires and needs increased. Emerging from barbarism he found the final road toward civilization: freed from the trammels of ignorance and dullness imposed by his conditions, he set out on the pursuit of learning and science.

The human animal's progress was distinguished from other species' stagnation by a spiritual factor. An internal quality we call intellect or reason, the most amazing of all phenomena, gave man hindsight and foresight, to assess the past and improve on it, to be alert to fresh methods and to innovations. Every forward step he took imprinted itself on the memory banks of the race.

A sense of dissatisfaction over imperfections spurred him on to correct them. Thus unfolded the effects of this invisible, indescribable, marvelous phenomenon called "mind". Its light causes him to observe objects and events, reflect on them,

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learn from experience and store the information for future use in that astounding computer called "the brain" as "memory", where it is available for the construction of new hypotheses, visions, experiments and advances.

Two other revolutionary products of human ingenuity arose in the mists of prehistoric antiquity:

1. The invention of the Wheel for transport — at first mere rolling of heavy objects on logs— to the axle-tree between two roundels—to the developed cart, set between true wheels with axle, hub, spokes, felloes and tire: and

2. Language: noises accepted as means of conveying the impulses arising in one human mind to another—mutual agreement to interpret certain sounds each time uttered as of the same significance the grunt of fear or warning—the roar of rage—the coo of love—and so to the names of objects—to phrases— to orders like "come", "go", "fetch", "run" and finally to abstractions, concepts, ideas, projects, worship of the forces controlling capricious nature.

With language, social living and so true civilization came to birth. When signs were accepted as representing the arbitrary sounds that represented ideas, prehistory emerged into written history.

Prehistory is traced from vestiges and evidences dug up and inter preted. History starts when there are written records to consult. This invention of writing was the most revolutionary stroke of genius. It started with inventories of property, bills of exchange, composed by drawing pictures of the objects (sheep, cattle, vessels, grain-measures) then with a series of dashes to indicate number; then with symbols to indicate the nature of the transaction—the

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names and addresses of parties to it— and so gradually to symbols for every observed phenomenon, for relationships between them, and, finally, for abstractions like color, shape and concept.

Some races like the Chinese stayed in the pictographic stage, like the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic. Other races moved on to analyses the sounds which composed words and to adopt signs to represent always the same sound regardless of its meaning. It is these which carry all we know of the past 6 millennia of humanity's history.

Meantime masonry also made great advances. Exact measurement became possible. Men learnt to extract ores from rocks by smelting, and then to mound and temper them — at first the softer metals like tin and copper and their alloy bronze. When the same arts were applied to the harder iron, the Bronze gave way to the "Iron Age" — the true start of modern times.

Four thousand years ago true religion dawned through the obedience of the Patriarch Abraham to the call of Almighty God in Babylonian territory. The world's Creator charged Abraham with the task of leading Babylon's society out of darkness. His was the first apostolate as God's spokesman to rally mankind out of superstition and wrongdoing.

Naturally he met with opposition and resistance from those with vested interests in falsehood and evil. But Abraham's prophetic proclamation of Monotheism and ethical worship raised a force of followers far superior to the united front of his adversaries, the advocates of Ahriman and the would-be despotic tyrants on the

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spirit of man. Abraham obeyed the call to leave his ancestral home, and finally after many thousand miles of nomad travel found haven in the Hejaz where with his son Isma'il he set up Monotheism's central shrine.

Seven and a quarter centuries before Christ, Rome was founded; and in the succeeding centuries extended her rule far and wide. Not long after Rome's foundation, Zoroaster (Zardusht) arose in Iran and substituted for the magic of Magianism a rational and moral relationship between man and the God of Good in the eternal battle against Evil.

In almost the same century Confucius and Lao-Tze in China and Gautama the Buddha in Hind laid the basis of the philosophy which was developed by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in Greece during the succeeding century. All this found consummation in the Birth and Life of Jesus Christ, who proclaimed the call to reform human society, to rescue mankind from the pollutions of Judaistic materialism, to extirpate corruption and internecine combat, and raise humanity towards ethical and spiritual purification. This age was marked by the growth of intercommunication, of industries, and of building and medical skills.

AD 476 launched the Mediaeval period in Europe. The Church added temporal power to its spiritual leadership and became ruler of the thinking and living of society, while Europe fell into the dark ages of barbarian invasion, ignorance, bloodshed, nationalistic and tribal rivalries.

Meantime in the East, Islamic civilization established its sway (see Part 2). In AD 1453 Sultan Muhammad Fateh captured Istanbul and

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a new age began. In Europe the new independent nations— England, France, Germany, Austria—vied with each other for expansion. The magnetic compass enabled ships to cross the Atlantic Ocean and find America.

A Renaissance of thought and science swept over Europe and established more orderly international relations, until the French Revolution of AD 1789 ended the Age; and the Industrial Age took over the 19th century and changed the face of Europe. Invention followed invention. Discovery pressed on the heels of discovery. European history entered its newest and modern phase.

Evaluation of Modern Occidental Civilization

The world we live in has been making giant strides, entailing a revolution in thought because of science's daily advance in the study and the satisfying of man's needs. Science and industry have unloaded the work that yesterday imprisoned man in hard labor onto machine-tools. These set man free to enjoy life's luxuries in ease and leisure. They liberated his mind and spirit from the bonds of business to expand into limitless research into Creation's mysteries.

So swift has been this progress that developments which took centuries of the olden "time" measured in "nights and days" take only minutes or even seconds of modern "time". Ships which took months and years to cross oceans by the force of winds on sails, now by steam or electrical power take days for the distance.

Land transport, once dependent on beasts of burden, now moves on trucks, trains and planes with jinn-like speed. Man's gaze, no longer earth-bound, explores our galaxy and outer space, plumbs sea-deeps and

penetrates to the earth's core. Old ignorance of this marvelous planet yields to fascinating new knowledge of the facts of nature, from infinite space to the atom's infinitesimal components, magnified a million times and made visible by electronic microscope.

Modern Western civilization’s productivity, affluence, comfort and leisure cannot be denied or decried. Advances in health and welfare, childcare and maternity have cut infant-mortality, increased longevity, produced cures for diseases deemed incurable, swept the plagues and pestilences of the past into oblivion.

Nonetheless, although science and technology have moved mankind farther and faster in the last century than in 10 previous millennia rolled into one, we of the Jet, Atom and Space Age know we have only started to learn the ABC of the writings in nature's mighty Book of Truth which await perusal.

It must be regrettably acknowledged that Western civilization’s short comings and weaknesses are no fewer than its advantages. Despite the leisure and ease which knowledge and culture provide for society, despite the new pages of history turned, human happiness has not increased nor have social ills diminished.

Technology and industrialization have reached a zenith while moral and spiritual life has sunk to their nadir. While science climbs, thought declines, divisions proliferate, and the West, rejecting spiritual and moral values, has bowed its neck under the yoke of worship of the machine. Machine-worshippers will never lay hands on joy or peace or happiness.

Science imposes an order on life which provides affluence but not happiness, since happiness is outside its competence. Science does

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not distinguish benefit from harm, or ugly from lovely, but only true from false. The order imposed on human living by science alone will set Hell on fire and must be resisted at all costs.

For civilization draws in the train of its priceless gifts a pernicious and deadly insecurity, breeding-ground of crimes and corruptions. It kindles a fire of lusts and longings that burns warp and woof of soul and spirit. It bans calm of mind, spirit, faith. Far from lighting a lamp to illumine human conduct, science has lunged it into deeper dark and murk.

Science's conquests and victories, like those of war, leave an aftermath of ruin and waste, sadness and suffering beyond the reach of remedy. Beside every flower blooming in civilization’s garden grows a thorn that wounds the soul.

Balance the boons of cars, planes, factories, surgery, wonder-drugs and affluence against the banes of bombs, gas, jets and rockets, death-rays, crime and violence. Within its own limits intellect is a good servant. But it cannot grasp the non-material. Hence with the decline of virtue many axioms of ethics have been consigned to oblivion beyond recovery.

The Islamic world, though not in midfield of the disturbances and activities of science, does not escape their manifestations in personal, social, educational or cultural life, and the flood of "civilization" rushes upon us. For ideas and ethics know no national frontiers; they infiltrate from land to land—good as well as bad. Man's inclinations being what they are, the evil and corrupt go quicker

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and deeper. Hence, though our society cannot compare in scientific or technological advances, it manifests the complete pattern of Western decadence.

A society can suffer no worse disaster than the loss of the power to distinguish good from bad; no society that has suffered this loss can attain welfare or wellbeing.

Too many see only the fascinating externals of "civilization", but are blind to the painful tragedies and the moral crisis of the modern age. The "civilized" world displays its superficial charms, so that persons who briefly sojourn there willingly abandon their discernment and judgment and shut their eyes to unpleasant facts and wrongdoings, feeling that the slightest difference in their own manners of habits or talk from those that obtain in the West is shameful; and instead of seeking the causes of Western progress and the means of reaching such ends, bring home as gifts a load of moral degeneracy and spiritual degradation. Such self- deception is the worst of defects, causing the loss of personality, of independence of thought, and of appreciation of the treasures of national culture, religion and nationhood.

This misleads thought away from religious conviction. It robs people of the power to assess and analyses events by a deep and universal doctrine that distinguishes good from bad. By this means many a truth is obscured.

East-West Interaction

The nations of Europe have been able to arrive at their modern welfare states without rejecting their religion and manners.

Japan, too, has made notable progress while preserving her creeds, customs and characteristics: and has with

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lightning speed soared up towards a high level of civilization. From being, through centuries, one of the world's backward lands, Japan has, in a mere 60 years, entered the ranks of progressive nations.

Japan never leant towards the West, nor fixed eyes and ears on Europe as a model to copy. She has clung fanatically to her heritage and nationhood. Cherishing the traditions of the great men of her history, she has continued to act as for centuries past, still preserving her ancient "Shinto" and "Buddhism" and pursuing vehemently her own forms of worship — however light-minded a sensible person might consider that worship.

But revolutionary freethinking gives no basis for diagnostics. It cannot analyses or unravel even the most obvious of social problems. Yet it welcomes every form of protest against, or criticism of, religion, with respect and joy, as being tokens of "enlightenment". Such negligence will never be able to face life's realities with a free mind.

The vast extension of scientific exploration into all aspects of material life has enabled human living to make an astounding leap forward. But while scientists busy themselves laying bare nature's powers and channeling their discoveries into technological industries, they fail to notice that they are only occupying one corner of a vast laboratory and neglecting all but the physical side of human nature. Could this be the deep cause of the mounting tide of licence and excess?

The perfecting of material science has not been accompanied by increasingly profound ethical insights. In fact the two

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disciplines proceed on different courses — so different that progress along one course may even precipitate retrogression on the other, from sheer satiety.

Recently a European professor said to a science conference held in Tehran: "In the field of morals the West envies the East. For the East's moral achievements are richer and finer than the West's. While the East profits from Western science and industry, the West needs to profit from Eastern ethical achievements. "

To keep alive, human society needs other principles alongside industrial and technical culture. When the political and social set-up cuts the human community off from its basic philosophy of living so that life is bereft of altruistic ideas of mutual help and turns into a monotonous unremitting pursuit of enough to eat, the masses fall prey to the type of violence which the poet called "man's inhumanity to man. "

Unfortunately mankind today is still in the kindergarten stage. We still have to attain an adult intellectual level if we are to make full use of the priceless reserves hidden in the heart of nature and at the same time to invest our spiritual capital in ways that yield dividends of happiness of heart and enhancement of spirit.

Infant mankind is childishly at the mercy of passing moods and passions instead of obeying the dictates of mature common sense. The bulk of humankind fails to recognize its prejudices and superstitions as idols, but worships them as much as "progressive" people worship "science".

Millennia of unpalatable experiences, and constant fresh miss adventures,

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must finally drive man to realize that the only alternative to inevitable annihilation is self-committal to the Road of Right and of Divine Guidance.

The sociologist Stanwood Cobb writes: , in his "Lord of 2 Ka'abas" (p. 1):

"Each vital facet of Western society's life, organization and culture is marred by some extraordinary crisis. Its whole body politic and soul are sick. Its nerves are on edge because the world is teetering on the brink of the divide which separates the moribund age of materialist scientific glory from the dawning age of tomorrow's moral culture.

We are experiencing the thoughts and deeds of the last minutes of a 6-centuries old materialist civilization; and glimpsing the first faint rays of the new. They are still too weak to sustain a sure hope. The long dark shadows cast by the old as it sinks below the horizon dim nascent brightness, making the road towards the new even more difficult to descry.

Human culture is experiencing that longest night of the winter-solstice as it broods over our past culture, and torments our spirits with nightmares and bogies and phantoms, ghosts and ghoulies and gooseflesh and horrors. Yet beyond that night lies the morning of the new culture, truly universal and moral, awaiting its chance to bless mankind. " [1]

We boast our "realism". But it is highly unrealistic blindly to accept, to follow and copy, the manners and customs, the institutions and formulae, of others. Such imitativeness merely binds a yoke of obedience on its own neck. Initiative is the

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fount of independence. Imitation is the parasite that devours independence.

The confusion in our ideas and ethics is due to the torpor caused by imitation. Nor does our turning our back on our own historical and spiritual traditions in favor of Western habits help us towards clarity.

In his book, "Islam and Others" (p. 42) a great Islamic thinker wrote: "We do not ask for intellectual or social seclusion. We do not draw aside from the course which history compels civilization to follow, for we are fellow-travellers and partners in mankind's caravan. But we have been Muslims and, as such, have given great treasures to human culture.

The positive achievements of our great past laid the foundations of the modern world edifice. Yet we fail, alas! to give this pioneering due credit, and to preserve its esteem and dignity. When we learn to value our past successes properly, we shall free our hearts of the inferiority complex which bows the neck to tyranny, and take up the pure reasoning of free men.

Instead, like beggars cap-in-hand on the rich man's threshold, we accept gifts when we should throw them back in his face—or act so nobly that we win him to imitate us. In fact, for us civilization has a two-fold significance.

It comprises, first, our own far from undistinguished share in founding civilization, which we must not consign to oblivion but preserve in the stable practices and personality, the bright and shining extension of human experience provided by our people's way of life: and,

in the second place, those fascinating manifestations of others' culture, prepared and matured by them for themselves, from which we must choose such a selection as will suit our needs without damage to our heritage.

"Civilization" derives from the same root as "city", and belongs to the sublime side of human thought. To debase its creativeness for mere imitation is to reduce whole communities to mere monkey-life. "

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[1]: Stanwood Cobb, "Lord of 2 Ka'abas" p. 1.

Materialist Europe's Religious Practice

So far has the materialist spirit infiltrated civilized peoples that today you will find hardly one European with any aim in life loftier than scratching up a livelihood. Nonetheless many hold religious beliefs, and cling to their inherited Christianity, however adulterated it with heresies, and incapable of meeting anyone's spiritual or moral needs.

It may seem odd that such a religion can still exercise any authority in this "progressive" world: yet it has shaped and still shapes the spiritual and ethical mound of Western civilization. On Sundays shops and secular institutions are closed. Church bells ring out on all sides with their distinctive clanging. Congregations of all social classes gather and attentively listen to sermons. The TV gives special religious broadcasts supervised by the churches.

The religious take their babies to church to be christened at the priest's hands, and affirm their faith before him. Religious leaders are respected and called "Father" i. e. spiritual father of the community. During the long centuries of the Church's ascendancy, while all Europe's economy was based on land-ownership, a tithe of all agricultural produce was exacted to support the heavy expenses

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of religious institutions.

During the last 200 years or so, with the increasing secularization of society and the shift of the economic base to industry and commerce, one land after another has abolished the system of "tithing" and of the parson's "Glebe Land". But huge endowments have remained, while the faithful make regular voluntary contributions, often under a system of "stewardship". This is how Christianity's spiritual leaders come to command an adequate budget for their vast undertakings.

A committee on printed matters controls publications, and in this the Church plays the leading role. The Church supervises educational planning for nursery and primary schools. For all nine years of their schooling, pupils are obliged to attend church on Sundays for services specially prepared with religious instruction suited to their age-group. Strangest of all, innocent babes have to go into the confessional and admit their sins to a priest.

Films may not be shown without the permission of a board consisting of church leaders, doctors, sociologists, economists and psychologists; and the angles of religion, psychology, sociology and economics are all taken into account.

An Iranian in Europe

The writer had the misfortune to require medical aid in Europe. I was taken into a Catholic hospital in Germany. I was welcomed and accorded the attention they give to religious who come as patients; in my room, as in all rooms, was a statue of Jesus and a painting of the Virgin and Child. Regular prayers were offered in the chapel for the cure of the sick!

One day I saw them lighting

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candles before the statue of Jesus in one of the large halls of the place. Fancy that! Lighting a candle in broad daylight beside a man-made statue — and that in the hub of science and learning! What an outcry there would be if a simple peasant in Iran were to light a candle on a dark night at the shrine of a saint! How our "lessoned" youth would mock him and his "old-fashioned" ways!

I shall never forget one occasion when blood was needed for a transfusion. The head of the hospital asked me: "What sort of blood does Islam allow for transfusions? May Muslims accept non-Muslim blood? We will prepare blood for you according to Islamic principles! "

Developed countries set voluntary limits in the true interests of freedom. For the limits are intended to prevent misuse of the products of civilization. Thus the TV shows sports matches, holds teaching sessions, pictures the life of distant lands, and, in brief devotes the major part of its screenings to educational programs.

In the name of freedom it is prohibited for anyone to turn up his radio so loud that it bothers neighbors or passers-by. No-one may give parties that last on into the small hours if they disturb his neighbors. In fact, when you are in the streets you never hear a radio.

Though it is true that I did once hear a radio noise that made the welkin ring. I was just leaving my hotel and was astounded; for this was the first

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time I had ever heard anything like that in Europe. And what type of sound fell on my ears?.

Iranian music! I decided to investigate. Next day I chanced to meet an Iranian who had taken up residence near the hotel. In the course of conversation I casually mentioned the event. Putting his finger to his lips, he confessed with a smile that it was he who had perpetrated the noise on the day before just to see what would happen!

It is truly sad that in Iran we have not mastered the right use of modern amenities. This is because we have deviated from the track traced for us by our ancestral principles, and plunged into disgrace. Everyone knows the undesirable effects of TV's presentation of life. Much of the blame for the decline of the morals of society lies at its door. All that viewers gain from such films and programs is an increased urge towards moral corruption and mayhem.

Everywhere in Iran radio noises reverberate from every side in nerve-racking volume.

Industrial discoverers and inventors never meant to guarantee the sort of profits now obtainable from the exploitation of their brain-children nor could they have offered any such guarantee, for nothing was further from their thoughts than the idea their products, conceived for a rightful use, might one day fall into the hands of people who would turn them to purposes which are positively harmful and, for the population of a country like ours, threaten mortal peril.

Without exception, all the

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phenomena of industry, its tools and its products alike, are capable of falling victim to the process by which mercenary profiteers squeeze personal advantage out of public demand. The natural unreason of man, the tendency to mistaken attitudes, rapidly makes selfishness epidemic, so that people compete in technological profiteering to the tragic loss of others.

The root of this tragedy must be sought in the fields of learning and wisdom rather of ignorance and folly! For a Muslim to desert the humaneness and courtesy which his religion enjoins is surely a moral blemish of shocking proportions! God forbid that in our country such unbridled self-seeking and wrongdoing should be allowed in the name of "Freedom" to spread its evil disease unchecked.

Reasons for Christianity's Advance

Two sorts of religion exist — "Revealed" and "Natural". Today both suffer from such deformities that nearly all their manifestations not only have ceased to grow but in fact daily dwindle towards extinction. Apart from Islam, Christianity is the only exception, since it makes such enormous efforts on a world-scale that it is expanding all the time, and therefore is coming to confront the almost equally widespread Islam all over the place.

A conjunction of factors favors Christianity's spread. The world-climate is propitious. Popular thinking is easily influenced by skillful propaganda to move in any desired direction. This is due both to mankind's innate suggestibility and also to the subliminal effects of modern advertising techniques. The social renascence of recent centuries has made these techniques a life-and-death matter. In this crisis Christian

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leaders have launched a global campaign, with the full weight of the various Christian bodies behind it, to put Christianity within reach of everyone everywhere.

While waves of religious propaganda thus flood over these civilized peoples, lust for the brilliance of materialism sets limits to men's thinking and robs them of the ability to go deep into moral and spiritual questions. Men are so fascinated by the manifestations of material prosperity that they are turned aside from the pursuit of truth and from the quest for the treasures of the spirit.

All the factors enumerated above have combined to help Christianity flood the world with the irrational tenets that are so ineradicably rooted in Western minds and spirits.

It cannot be said that our own Islamic efforts at propaganda have been either energetic or effective. We have been so unschooled in the elementary essentials of successful publicity that we have nothing to declare. Yet the shining force of Islam's holy doctrines could be made to meet the crying needs of man, if we changed.

For centuries, Islam has made no noteworthy effort at propaganda. After the first outburst of its revolutionary up rush from the Arab homeland, Islamic landowners and viziers have preferred to maintain the status quo for their own comfort. Meantime schism split Muslim unity. As a consequence Islam lost political supremacy in world affairs, and its various portions fell victims to Western imperialism piecemeal.

Church Resources and Organization

Christianity was launched without any definitive social principles, laws or system for running affairs. This deficiency long prevented

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Christian spiritual leadership from interfering in social, political or governmental matters. So it continued until the sixth century of the Christian era.

On Christmas Day AD 800 the king of the Franks was crowned "Caesar" and transferred some of his territory to the over lordship of the Pope. With this began the epoch of Christian leadership's supremacy and glory. The Church grew in power and wealth. Conflicts over the control of power arose between political and religious leaders. Europe fell prey to the oppressive wars of Popes and Emperors.

People who regarded the Church as the manifestation of the spirituality of Christ were stubborn partisans of the clergy: and by their help the Church's temporal power and influence increased daily until its unrivalled hegemony was fastened upon the nations of Europe.

In early days, before deep rifts split Christianity, each Christian city had its "Bishop" and groups of neighboring cities were jointly administered by an "Archbishop" or "Patriarch". he Bishop of Rome gradually came to assume supreme authority as Pope (which means "papa" of all Christians). He interfered in all religious matters, including the appointment and dismissal of Bishops and Archbishops.

Finally this became too much for the "metropolitan patriarchs" of Constantia (i. e. Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul) , and they decided to withdraw from Papal jurisdiction and set up a separate domain of their own, in recognition of the fact that the imperial capital of the Empire had been moved from Rome to Istanbul. After a series of violent clashes between the Pope and Istanbul

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Patriarchs, final separation occurred in AD 1052. Christianity split into two camps.

Eastern Europe was subject to the Constantinian clergy, self-styled "Orthodox". Western Europe from Poland to Spain remained obedient to the Pope as self- styled "Catholics". These two religious bodies followed different rites and hurled charges of heresy at each other.

In the early 16th century a third body formed itself in Europe, initiated by Luther and styled "Protestant". Luther and his followers started by opposing the Pope's habit of selling sites in heaven together with "indulgences" remitting sins: and went on to attempt to reform the whole Church and purge it of errors and corruptions.

They only succeeded in creating another split in the unity and simplicity of Christ's religion: the huge number of people who followed Luther in rejecting papal authority and sacerdotal dogma became a third sect including most of northern Europe.

The Pope's absolute power in Catholic Europe of the 12th and 13th centuries provoked its inevitable reaction. A number of heretical movements arose promoting doctrines condemned by the Papal Office. So great became the anxiety of the Pope and of the Catholic party about these insurrectionary movements that in 1215 AD the Pope set up the "Inquisition" to combat and eradicate such heresies. The Inquisition had branches in every city of France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Spain and other Christian lands. Persons accused of heresy were hauled up before the inquisitors, and, if condemned, suffered severe penalties.

This institution used its excessive powers in such a way as to suppress all

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freedom of thought. Anyone suspected of ideas and opinions regarded as contrary to those held by the Church was subjected to hellish tortures. These courts even sometimes passed sentence for heresy on the dead, ordering the disinterment of their coffins— a process described by Will Durant in his "History of Civilization" (vol. 18, p. 35) thus:

"The 'Court for the Inspection of Ideas, Laws and Religion', had a legal procedure all its own. Before a local assizes of the Court was held, the 'Faith-ace (Auto da Fe) was read from all Church pulpits, demanding that information be laid against anyone suspected of atheism, irreligion or heresy: and that such persons be hauled before the Court of Inspection.

Neighbors, friends and relatives were encouraged to turn informer. Informers were promised complete secrecy and protection. Anyone who harbored an atheist, or failed to denounce him, was himself incarcerated, and threatened with the church's excommunication, curse and ban. Sometimes the dead were charged with atheism and blasphemy.

Special ceremonies were employed for their judicial condemnation. Their property was confiscated: their heirs were stripped of their inheritance. From 30 to 50% of the property of a deceased person who was condemned were given to the successful accuser. Trial by ordeal assumed different forms in different times and places.

Sometimes the accused man's arms were bound behind his back and he was suspended from them. Sometimes he was so bound that he could make no movements and then water was poured down his throat so that he died of suffocation. Sometimes

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ropes were tied so tight round arms and legs that they cut through flesh to the bone. "

So powerful did the Christian hierarchy become in Europe that no fewer than ten kings and political leaders of Germany and France were excommunicated by Popes. Some great landed proprietors lost all. Some were compelled to do public penance. Thus in AD 1075 Pope Gregory VII excommunicated the Emperor of Germany, Henry IV, for disregarding a Papal Firman, and told him that he must give up his throne.

Henry promptly donned penitent's garb and hurried to the Papal Court, where the Pope kept him waiting three days before receiving him, accepting his repentance and granting him absolution.

In 1141 Pope Innocent II excommunicated Louis VII. In 1205 Pope Innocent II excommunicated King John of England for attacking certain bishops.

Finally John felt compelled to send a message to the Pope saying: "An angelic messenger bade me supplicate Jesus and His Apostle, our benefactor Pope Innocent, and his catholic successors, on behalf of England and Ireland. From henceforth we hold these kingdoms as Viceroy of the Pope and the hierarchy, and have commanded that the sum of £1,000 English be paid to the Roman ecclesiastical coffers annually, in half-yearly installments of £500 each, in silver. Should I or any of my successors on the English throne transgress against the purport of this decree, we forfeit right to the English sovereignty. " [1] .

The same author writes: "During this period 5,000,000 people were punished for offences against orthodox thought, or contravention of

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a papal decree. They were hanged on the gallows; or left in the pitchy dark of well-like dungeons. In the 18 years, 1481-99, the Inquisition burnt 1,020 people alive, sawed 6,860 asunder, tortured 97,023 to death. " [1]

Victor Hugo wrote: "The real history of the Church will be read not on the pages, but between the lines, of the official annals. The Church caused Parnili to be whipped within an inch of his life for declaring that 'stars do not fall from their appointed paths. '

The Church cast Campland into prison 27 times for claiming that innumerable other worlds besides earth exist. The Church tortured Harvey for the crime of proving that the blood circulates through the arteries and veins of the body.

The Church incarcerated Galileo for claiming that the earth orbits round the sun, in contradiction of theories put forward in the Old and New Testaments. The Church imprisoned Christopher Columbus for discovering a land not mentioned by St. Paul.

They claimed that it was sacrilege to discover laws of the heavenly bodies, or the orbit of the earth, or an unforeseen continent not foretold in scripture. The Church excommunicated Pascal and Montey for immorality, and Muller for sacrilege and immorality. " [2]

The Church also exercised her power against Islam. On the pretext of treeing Jerusalem, she launched campaigns of bloodshed and atrocity in what she called "Wars for the Cross" or "Crusades", during the years 1095 to 1270.

Although the prime cause of these wars was the hatred and jealousy of Islam nursed by

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the Pope and the hierarchy, they stirred up the common people to enlist by false promises of loot and by ingenious calumny against the Muslims. Pope Urban II called a congress of clergy and religious leaders to decree a war against Muslims: at which the Pope ordered all bishops and clergy to enlist men for the battle against the Muslims, and himself led the recruiting campaign in France.

So vast was the first army that started out for Jerusalem that it seemed as if all Europe were afoot toward Asia. Some say there were as many as a million men on the march. En route these plundered, burned, mutilated and drowned the local citizens.

They slew soldiers and civilians alike, women and children included. When they finally took Jerusalem in 1099, three years after the start, only 20,000 survived out of the original million. Civil wars and pestilence followed this "Christian" sacrifice of myriads of their own and of other nationals.

In the words of Gustave Le Bon: "The atrocities committed by the Crusaders against friends and foes, against soldiers and innocent peasants, against women and children, against old and young, give them top place in the annals of savagery.

One of their number, Robert the Monk, wrote: 'Our army raged through alleys and piazzas and over the flat roofs of adjoining houses like a mother lion robbed of her whelps, rampaging, tearing children to shreds in savage delight. We put old and young to the sword. To speed up the work we used

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one rope's loop to hang many people together.

Soldiers stole anything that came to hand, even ripping open the bowels of corpses in their search for jewels or coins. Whatever they found they pocketed. Finally, Bohemond assembled all the survivors—men and women, maimed and helpless, together—in the castle, and butchered them all, saving only the young for sale in the Antioch slave- market. '

And Godfrey Hardouinville reported to the Pope: 'In Jerusalem Muslims who fell into our hands were slain by our people in Solomon's porch until the temple precincts flowed knee-high with blood'. " [1]

The Inquisition's torture of the learned and thinking class of its day roused an inevitable reaction against the Church. Independent-minded scientists pushed on with their work, despite severe censorship, until Church bigotry was compelled to beat a retreat and leave the road open for enlightened study and investigation.

But by now scientists had come to regard all religion as the partisan of superstition, of ignorance, and of the suppression of science and erudition. The atrocities of the Crusades and barbarities of the Inquisition aroused abhorrence and suspicion in the popular mind against every form of religion.

In Russia, too, the Church's neglect of the poor and destitute, and patronage of the rich, roused a reaction which aided the rise of the communist movement, and caused its leaders to declare war on religion, stigmatizing the religious as "capitalist lackeys and exploiters of the working class," and declaring that it was only "by obliterating the myth of God from the mind of

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man" that the revolution of liberty, equality and fraternity could be realized.

Ferdof, in his book "Religion in the U. S. S. R. " (p. 7) , writes: "In Czarist Russia the Church owned vast properties in lands, buildings and furnishings, with millions of robles in gold in the banks. She drew an income from forests, pastures, fisheries, commerce, industry and much else.

In fact, the Church was the biggest capitalist of all, the biggest landowner, the biggest banker of Russia. She mercilessly exploited merchants, small and large. She made no attempt to improve industrial working conditions. So great was the hatred this conduct aroused amongst working and shop keeping classes that the clergy were called `wolves in priests' clothing'. "

Christianity, in its day the preserver of ancient manners and customs, the conservative reactionary, has today learned to strengthen its own foundations by adding to its brilliant historic past all that science and culture has to offer to modern genius.

The Catholic Church alone wields 4,000 propaganda organs spread all over the globe. Their budget enables them to extend their efforts at conversion to darkest Congo, to remotest Tibet and to the most primitive tribes of Australia.

The annual budget of the Church of England is well over 900,000,000 tomans.

Such figures, when compared with the pittance at Islam's disposal, pain the heart.

The Gospel has been translated into more than 1,000 languages. In 1973 the American "Society for the Publication and Distribution of the Gospel" put out 24 million copies.

The Vatican publishes its own newspaper "L' Osservatore Romano" with a daily circulation

of 300,000. It produces some 50 monthly periodicals with a total circulation of several millions per month. It runs 32,000 primary schools, universities and hospitals. Four powerful agencies dispatch missionaries to the other continents.

Christianity employs three methods of propaganda:

1. Translation of the books of the New Testament;

2. Erection of churches and places of worship;

3. Dispatch of missionaries to all parts of the world.

Protestant sects likewise exert remarkable efforts at spreading their faith. "The Reader's Digest" wrote: "The revolutionary foundation of the Protestant Church of America was a revolt against efforts in Europe to renew the exaction of the 'tithe' which has been the Church's ancient right.

Yet from 1950 on, the movement of 'stewardship' has been taken up increasingly, so that many congregations have doubled or trebled their contributions, and thus made possible hundreds of new church buildings, and the reinforcement of missions at home and abroad.

Most important, congregations and their members have realized the joyful results and unexpected rewards of the revival of this ancient custom. "

--------------------

[1]: Marcel Cache "Social History," Vol. II.

[1]: Marcel Cache "Social History," op. cit. , Vol. II, p. 123.

[2]: "History of Free Thought", p. 147.

[1]: "La Civilization Islamique et Arabe", p. 407.

Christianity and Islam in Africa

The Christian religious establishment has no fears of Judaism, Hinduism or Buddhism, since these are religions of national groups which exert little influence outside their native environment. So the only danger which they feel to be menacing is Islam. For it has an ideology and way of thought which they know, some as friends, and some as enemies. The "Suddeutscher Zeitung" reported the Pope as saying to the bishops assembled at the Vatican Council 1: "Islam constitutes a more serious threat in Africa to Christianity

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than does Communism. "

Although Islam's missionary efforts are practically nil, its sheer breadth of culture and emotional power win many converts in a number of places, particularly in Africa, where oppressed blacks find its inclusive brotherhood so attractive a refuge that the Church cannot fail to take note of the numbers which it draws.

"Belgian Institutes" reports that, at the start of the 20th century, there were 4,000 Muslims in one province of the Congo, and that by the 1960s in Maniyema and Stanleyville and Kivu this number had increased to 236,000.

The Paris periodical "Peru" quotes Marcel Corder, European expert on Islam in Africa, as saying: "Islam, once the religion of chiefs and princes, has recently become a faith of the masses, who like rushing floods are on the move toward a better, quieter life ; and, carried on this tide, the realism and urgency of Islam spreads from the north of Africa to the south with irresistible speed. "

"The Revue de Paris", assessing Islam, paganism and Christianity in Africa, says: "Islam is advancing at a phenomenal rate, winning on the average half a million new adherents annually, not on the ground of its ancient roots, but of the new conditions of life developed in the last century, so that a conservative estimate might reckon 50% of black Africans as in some measure Muslims... In 1950 four graduates of Al-Azhar opened Muslim schools in Mabaku, which were making lightning progress until the French government stepped in and swiftly closed them down. "

Dr. Laura

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Veccia Vaglieri, Professor at Naples University, writes: "What is the reason why, despite the considerable freedom allowed to non-Muslims.

____________

1 The Vatican Council draws Catholic leaders from every continent to Rome, where it is held about style='font-size: 6. 0pt;line-height: 110%; once a century. Its object is to settle issues which may have arisen in any part of the world. At the last vatican Council 7,000 Church leaders assembled under the chairmanship of the Pope. Its discussions on church affairs occupied three series of sessions, each two months long, at a total cost of some 650 million Italian lire!

Islamic communities, and the total lack of any Muslim missionary work nowadays, and the general weakness of all religions everywhere, Islam has nonetheless been making great advances in Asia and Africa in recent years? Today it is not the sword which compels acceptance. Indeed, many lands once ruled by Muslims are now under non-Muslim governments which push their own religions at the Muslim populations—yet in vain! What is the power hidden in this faith? What in the inmost nature of humanity finds contentment and satisfaction therein? What profound element in the human spirit is moved to respond to Islam's call with so enthusiastic and glad a shout of 'Here am I'? "

Christians stop at nothing in their efforts to destroy Islam. Professor Muhammad Qutb writes: "A shipping line of English origin runs establishments in South Africa. It once employed many South African Muslims on its ships, but, being a Christian company, decided not to employ Muslims. To achieve

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this end it paid part of its employees' earnings with alcoholic drink. Since alcohol is forbidden to Muslims, nor may they sell it, they lost this part of their wages. A Muslim lawyer learnt of their plight and advised them to refuse to receive this form of payment, unknown anywhere else in the entire world, and to take the company to court if it objected to their protest. The company, as soon as the protest was made, promptly made it a pretext for firing every Muslim from their employ. " Philanthropy indeed!

Muslim missionaries face a wide-open door in Africa. The people of that continent are ready to embrace Islam with heart and soul if we would show any sort of zeal in carrying the message to them. For all Africa is seeking a religion that can harmonies the spiritual and the material, promote social equity and equality, and call all mankind to peace, to quiet and to truth.

Modern Christianity cannot, because of its own poverty and deficiencies, meet this longing. The Church itself is a divisive factor, supporting discrimination, not allowing black and white to worship the same God in the same building at the same time! In fact, the Christian attitude to the blacks is inhuman.

Lumumba, Congo leader now dead, once told a Paris newspaper: "I could never understand why we were taught in our schools that Christian principles merited our respect, while outside our schools Europeans acted in ways entirely contrary to those principles and trod all civilized humane

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precepts underfoot. The way the Europeans treated the blacks gave the lie to all that their schools taught. "

It is not only in Africa that Christianity is being challenged by Islamic advance. In America Islam bids fair to win the allegiance of the black population. Every effort is made to suppress Islamic agencies. The Senate requested the president to ban the Black Muslims and make their activities illegal. But preventive measures only increase Black Muslim membership and strengthen the enthusiasm of their activities. They now run 70 branches in 27 states. Islamic cultural centers exist in Chicago and Detroit: while Islamic centers and mosques have been built in numerous other cities of the U. S. A. The Muslims run a newspaper called "Muhammad Speaks". They stage protest-demonstrations at which they carry banners inscribed: "There is no God but Allah: and Muhammad is His Prophet. "

Black Muslims perform their religious duties with exemplary enthusiasm. Their womenfolk wear the veil. They try to buy only meat slaughtered in accordance with Muslim law, stamped with the "Moon and Star" guarantee. The fact that certain individuals have made personal fortunes by monopolizing sales of proper dress, foodstuffs and other Muslim essentials in exploitation of the new piety; the fact that a few extremists have resorted to irreligious violence; and the fact that many of the new converts have still only a rudimentary grasp of the theological truths underlying their faith — these facts do not negate the blessings already brought to the converted masses. They are ills which

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will be cured as instruction and practice deepen the newfound faith. For Black Muslims eagerly learn Arabic and insist on schools and colleges teaching their children Arabic to enable them to read the Qur'an in the original. Amongst them thieves may be executed. Even enemies admit that Islam has brought a change of heart to Black Muslims.

Christian missionaries in Africa do not attempt to assist the Africans to progress to equal the whites. They wish them to remain subject to the white church and state. As Professor Westermann "Imperialism and the Gospel" writes: "Conversion to Islam raises the convert's social status, increases his self-respect, shows him his possibilities, teaches him to be a world-citizen, defines his relations with Europeans in dignity. The black man who previously carried garbage on his head gains in Islam a status which wins respect, even amongst Europeans. But a black man who abandons paganism for Christianity sees himself in a different light from the Black Muslims, since the foundation of our society is different from that in which Africans were brought up. They see the outward benefits of our civilization, but cannot grasp its inwardness because we have not given them the requisite training to do so. Nor have they grasped their own distinctive contribution and specialties, because we have not understood our duty to study the black cultural background, and to help the Africans progress on lines that are a natural continuation of their historical development to date.

Comparing the African background with our own

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as superficially as the African regards our way of life, we offer our fellow-Europeans an unflattering and one-sided picture of the black man. We present him as an inferior European. But Islam presents him as a black African to be respected as such by himself and by others. Islam gives him a natural equality which we fail to see. He is a human being with his own history and tradition. But Christians, who think of their present level of culture as natural to man, treat black converts to their religion with the condescension due to poor savages living amid rubble and rubbish. They provoke the blacks to vindicate their superiority. Here the Black Muslims offer them their chance, while black Christians are pushed back into inferiority. For this reason American Negroes surge towards Islam and away from Christianity. ":

Anti-Islamic Propaganda

Church leaders face the advance of Islam apprehensively. To prevent the harmony of Islam's truth reaching men's ears, Christian leaders use smear tactics in a world-wide propaganda of calumny and denigration which stops at nothing.

I saw an example of this on German TV. A Yemeni Muslim described the mosques of Yemen and the worship in them. Then the TV interviewer gave a detailed description of the region's poverty and distress. He blamed Islam for acting as an obstacle to the progress of the Yemeni people. "A bigoted adherence to the tenets and principles of Islam," he said, "kept the Yemen in primitive backwardness and weakness, lingering two centuries behind the forward strides of

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civilization in the rest of the world. " This he called an example of "Islam's failure to keep pace with the changes most of mankind are enjoying. "

Imagine the effect of such poisonous propaganda, backed by skillfully selected film, on European minds, either uninformed, scantily informed, or wholly misinformed about the nature of Islam! Surely such distortions are a betrayal of humanity.

These propagandists should be asked: "If the Yemen's lack of progress in material living is to be accounted for on the background of their religion, why is the south of Italy so backward when the Pope reigns supreme there? Why do so many leave southern Italy to seek menial employment in wealthier lands? Why is Christian Greece so far behind many Muslim countries? Why did Greece, which before the rise of Christianity pioneered man's upward road, itself go downhill towards ruin after accepting Christianity, until it came under the Turkish flag and started to rise again? Or again, why do the non-Muslim peoples of Asia suffer miseries far worse than any Muslim land knows? "

In Bosnia, where Muslims, Orthodox and Catholics, live cheek by jowl, the Muslims are the better off. In Russia Muslims are no whit inferior to their Christian neighbors. Chinese Muslims are ahead of Buddhists there. Singapore's Arabs enjoy greater material prosperity than any other of that island's inhabitants, including the British.

Most Westerners present Islam in a false light, repeating baseless fabrications which betray blank ignorance of Islam's principles: and churches encourage such errors.

Muhammad Qutb "Islam and Misconceptions of

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Enlightened Thinkers" (p. 298 Persian ed. ) writes: "I spent some hours discussing Islamic matters in Cairo with a U. N. delegate. Suddenly he exclaimed: `All very fine! You have made a powerful case for the rightness and truth of Islam. But I can't give up the benefits of modern progress. For instance, I like flying in supersonic planes... He added a few other technological advantages until I broke in, astounded: 'But what's to prevent you enjoying modern comforts? ' He replied: 'Well, I thought you Muslims advocate a return to tent life in the desert, and want me to go back to nomadism and wilderness-living like a savage! "

In Germany I lodged in a hotel where the manager was a man who had studied in English and French universities, gained high degrees, and even studied Arabic. He said to me: "As a Unitarian I know my God well and have implicit faith in Him. But I cannot accept the God whom the religious establishment bid their followers serve and worship in their buildings. It seems to me wholly alien to the rationality of a Creator to expect His creatures to follow a path which runs directly contrary to enlightened thought and to human nature itself. " He added, with the depth of his feelings written all over his face: "The worship of the One God must decide man's destiny, eradicate the evil consequences of misleading ideas, and raise human culture to pure monotheism. "

This highly educated European knew nothing of Islam's creed of the pure unity of

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God, nor of the basic difference between the Holy Qur'an on the one side and the Old and New Testaments on the other. He imagined that the Qur'an resembled Torah (O. T. ) and Gospel (N. T. ) in its presentation of God. So I gave him a book in German on Islam to enable him to learn its principles.

It is unfortunate that some of our compatriots commit acts when abroad which Westerners attribute to Muslims in general, and on them judge Islam, whereas the perpetrator acted (a) as an individual, and (b) contrary to his religion. Indeed, my hotelier, on the ground of the behavior of a few Iranians, had refused to accommodate any more Iranians, and only made an exception in my case because an old and trusted friend of his insisted. Even then he only agreed to a stay of a few days. In the course of that visit he gained confidence in me, solely because he never saw me overstep the bounds of decency and right, and not because I made any extraordinary effort to win his regard. He praised me (modesty forbids my quoting his exact words) , and even demonstrated his emotions and affection with presents. Sometimes a guest came to his full hotel, to whom he gave my room, while offering me his own private room instead, leaving his desk in it, open and piled with documents of value!

Finally the day came that I had to go elsewhere. He took down my new address, and from then on,

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whenever Iranians asked him for rooms, he at once telephoned me and asked for my character guarantee. I went bail for their good conduct, to save fellow- Iranians' difficulties (for foreigners on their first visit to a foreign city, unless they have had the wisdom to reserve ahead, find much trouble in discovering accommodation in the early hours of the night).

One night the hotelier rang and asked about some newly arrived Iranians on their first visit to Germany. I gave my customary guarantee of their character. But next morning he rang me, and in a voice which betrayed his disquiet and dismay, complained: "Those people you vouched for last night proved shockingly bad guests. " I shamefacedly apologized, and decided: "Never again! "

The present world crisis gives Muslims a prime occasion for opening the hearts of the civilized world to the inspiring tenets and programs of Islam. The conditions for making this holy creed known in wide circles are propitious. True, it is the congruence of a religion with the inmost needs of human nature which insures that faith's spread, but circumstances and environmental needs merit study on a world scale also, for discernment of psychological moments favorable to its proclamation. This study and this proclamation we have not yet, alas, undertaken as we should. Yet without it, individual moves, inadequate actions, hit-and-miss efforts, planless propaganda, uncoordinated institutions, can never achieve a satisfactory result, nor advance far into territories where opposition is traditional and deep-rooted.

We err in not grasping the supreme importance of

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intelligent propaganda with sound organization. Despite the admirable force inherent in Islamic culture for a revolutionary advance, and its specialized lore of society, the factors that should realize this have vanished from our midst. For all our heritage of the soundest canons and most rewarding ideology, our plight is desperate, and of itself leaves a wide field of action open to Islam's foes.

Morals in the West

Life is for Westerners "machine-made". It has lost spirit and warmth. True, many material discomforts, deficiencies and difficulties have been overcome and banished by "civilized" devices. But the social life that results shows no evidence of the glory of the spirit of man.

The glaring divisions and dissatisfactions of modern civilization must be patent to the merest dunce. The inventions and discoveries made to ease life and advance civilization fail to ease man's disillusion and disquiet of mind. Social difficulties and dangerous crises may have been averted, but this has not sufficed to confer happiness and joy on the generality of mankind.

Over and above his varied physical needs, man has a moral urge and a spiritual yearning. The attraction of physical delights is no greater than the pull of ethical impulses and intellectual quests. To confine men's minds within the four walls of materialism is an unforgivable sin.

"The pursuit of happiness" is rightly included with "life and liberty" among "man's inalienable rights". The first step towards happiness involves preoccupation with the perfecting of personality, and not of the material environment alone.

Parallel with his astounding advances in industrial and scientific

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technology, man must equally advance his inner resources, his spiritual powers and his force of soul. These have been allowed to fall behind. There can be no true human perfection without equilibrium in life's inner and outer aspects—both. If they are in imbalance, "civilization" offers no base for hundred per cent happiness.

Modern ethical and social shortcomings demonstrate that the factors which produce human perfection have not been allowed the attention they warrant. Humanity has erred in failing to recognize and study the factors of happiness and well-being.

History contains no nation so impregnated with total corruption in every department of its life that no single sound section remained. So it is with the West today. Alongside moral corruption, good qualities still exist. There are many who faithfully follow the precepts of honesty, decency and right. But these virtues do not make up for the sins and wickednesses that abound.

Such virtues may be approached from different angles and practiced on different grounds. The West's moral capital has been removed from the Bank of Faith where it belongs. Divorced from its source in religion, it depreciates both in intrinsic value and in interest returns. Where the prevailing motive is profit, righteousness and goodness are judged by their material profitability. Small wonder that they decline in the West!

Sex in the West

In sexual conduct the West has stepped outside all moral bounds. In life's beginnings everyone knew in his heart that purity and continence in sex matters have a moral value of their own, and that transgression leads

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to moral degradation. But this truth has either been gradually forgotten, or else deliberately obliterated from men's consciences by subversives.

Purity has lost its esteem, and been discarded by society, while all sanctions for control of morals have been abandoned.

A friend told me that he heard a girl ask for advice on one of Germany's regional radio stations. saying: "For some years I've gone steady with a boy, but in the course of time tired of him and decided to take up with another boy. Can I keep them both? Or should I give up the second relationship and stick to the first? "

The Radio Counselor replied with the guidance (sic! ): "Until the age of 28 you are at perfect liberty to enjoy the company of, and have intercourse with, one friend or several, without any ties or conditions, so have no scruples or worries in doing what you like! "

Where are we when the media, and other authorities, whose duty it is to protect public morals and ban pollution, themselves recommend fornication, and under the pseudonym of "a special relationship before marriage" promote promiscuity ; or posing as "champions of freedom" cast off morality and preach revolt against decency and self-esteem and proper pride?

Will Durant, the sociologist, wrote in his "Pleasures of Philosophy": "City life prevents men from observing the seasons, while sexual passions increase and conditions make indulgence easier. A civilization which makes marriage economically impossible before the age of 30 drives a man to sexual deviation, weakens continence, and reduces

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purity from its original esteem as a virtue to distant lip-service as an impractical dream. Art enhances human beauties. Men cease to count their sins. Women, claiming equality with men, fall prey to passions. Love affairs unlimited and premarital cohabitation become the rule rather than the exception. The streets may be free of prostitutes—but not through fear of the police! It is because women have bankrupted prostitutes by taking over their business for free! "

Human nature is made to desire control of its powers, so that they are employed justifiably. To trespass on ground abhorrent to humanity's essence cannot fail to raise a crop of undesirable growths. To trample the laws of his own being underfoot in the name of freedom can never yield the peace of heart and joy of mind men seek.

Western permissiveness has made licence public. Has this unbridled riot of wantonness subsided? Crime, rape, neurasthenia, riots, strikes— what generates all these but this same sexual "liberty" and licence?

Sweden has given total sexual freedom for a quarter of a century. Such savagery now prevails amongst its youth that professors and responsible authorities suffer from it. A Parliamentary commission was set up to study this outbreak of savagery and its insurrectionary perils. The Swedish Prime Minister frankly said: "We shall need at least a generation to redress the disasters caused by an error lasting twenty years. "

Freud examined man's animal nature and traced all human actions to font-family: "Bookman Old the sex urge. He thus divorced sex from ethics.

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Chastity went by the board. No one could think up a frontier to stop its downward rush. In its train it dragged many human values. Thus, "The Reader's Digest" reports: "West German statistics show that occupying troops of the victor nations have fathered 200,000 bastards, 5,000 of them black, on German women, all now in care at the German government's charges. And this is 10% of the total number of illegitimate children now a charge on the government, not to speak of the unknown number unborn through contraceptives or abortions. Of East Germany we have no facts, but it is more than probable that the problem there, if not worse, is no better. Nor do other Western nations lag far behind Germany. Most painful is a report from Northampton, in Mid-England, that illegitimate births are of all living births, and that this started when Northampton went over from agricultural to industrial employment. " [1]

The psychologist, Dale Carnegie, writes in his "Mirror of Success": "Statistics published by an American foundation show that husbands who were known to be unfaithful to their wives were of all classes and all ages. Some 50% of all husbands are unfaithful, some regularly. Most of those who remain faithful do so perforce, through fear of disease or lack of opportunity. Telephone-tapping in New York over a short period revealed that New York wives are equally promiscuous. "

"The Encyclopedia Britannica" says: "Of all U. S. hospitals, 650 specialize in V. D. and half as many more sufferers from V. D.

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apply for help to their G. P. or local specialist. " [1]

Kinsey's book on "Habits of Sexual Behavior" (p. 304) , shows that 3,000-4,000 infants annually are born in the U. S. A. with venereal disorders. And the proportion of deaths in the U. S. from these diseases is greater than the total mortality rate of all other illnesses added together—except for T. B.

The Tehran Daily "Ettela'at" (Tehran Journal) No. 10414 reports from "Psychology" of December 1960: "The number of illegitimate 95%; births in the U. S. has increased so rapidly that it is a headache for the 95%; American government. The statistics for 1957 show more than 200,000. 95%; illegitimate births in the U. S. A. — an increase of 5% over twenty years. "

"Black, White" (No. 380) , reports: "The annual abortions in the U. S. A. exceed 1,000,000. 65% are due to free relationships outside wedlock, and 50% are of unmarried teenage girls. "

Dr. Molenz of South London said, according to the Tehran Daily "Kayhan" (No. 535): "Of every five girls attending church in England, one is pregnant. Criminal abortions in London reach 5,000 per annum. One living birth in twenty is illegitimate. Despite the annual improvement in the standard of living, this number increases year by year. Illegitimacy is most prevalent in well-to-do families; and girls in rich families are more prone to become unmarried mothers. "

These facts suffice to demonstrate modern civilized man's enslavement to his sexual instincts. Sexual indulgence has reached such a pitch that many moral and human values best learnt in family life have been forgotten, so that people

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no longer acknowledge any bounds or limits governing conduct.

Some years ago Tehran newspapers reported that in Idaho men exchanged wives for three-week periods, and gave each other presents to "seal their friendship". An outcry arose and the group was indicted in court in order to safeguard future generations and punish fornication.

So -much for misconceptions in one area of human life, the sexual.

--------------------

[1]: "Divorce and Modernity", p. 34.

[1]: "The Encyclopedia Britannica", Vol. 23, p. 45.

Social Drop-outs

In every nation it is the thoughts of their learned men and the way of life of their leaders which shape the convictions of the public and the thinking of the individual by direct influence. "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Corruptio optimi pessima. "

If the ruling class who are trustees and guides of society promulgate filth, what can be expected of the lower orders? If the salt has lost its savor, what will salt the mass? Lustful desires are natural in man. The example set by the leaders who give such desires free rein overrides all moral precepts. A person raised in the school of unbridled self-indulgence conceives of total personal freedom as unrestrained permissiveness. In this the ideas of chastity and purity have no place; only the impulses of the feeling of any moment decides action.

Those who throw moral standards overboard raise a hedonist insurrectionary posterity, helpless and hopeless in the face of elemental carnal urges, turning a deaf ear to the calls of duty sounded by reason and conscience.

Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson of the Mahatma, declared in 1962 in the U. S. A.: "A painful future awaits America, since youth there

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is sunk in sensuality, unwilling to perform their duties. Of seven young men called up for the draft, six fail their medical because of capacity deficiencies and weakened spirit caused by dissipation. "

Khrushchev likewise in 1962 forecast: "The U. S. S. R. faces dangers ahead because of the grip that sexual passions have fastened on our youth. "

Strange that this age of scientific and industrial progress is being driven to its knees by youth's preoccupation with the sexual problem, at the core of a technological society depersonalized by the heartless monotony of a machine-made environment.

The Beatles are one phenomenon the age has thrown up — undisciplined, inelegant, imbecile, they draw youth in crowds. Next the hippies, like tares in a cornfield of culture, revolt against the dry materialism of the established environment. Rejecting ethical values and spiritual sanctities as ungrounded superstition, they deride rational living, drop out of society, and run riot; until, when they need a moral standard and spiritual refuge, they find themselves destitute and forlorn.

Such social phenomena, results of youth's emotional derailment, reflected in pollution and corruption, show that modern civilization, which treats people as cogs in a machine, can never satisfy the innate longings of human hearts, with their spiritual sensitivity and humane sentiments. The rise in the suicide rate is further evidence that material comfort and ease do not suffice.

Germany's annual "Police Report" (p. 1974) , lists 10,000 suicides in West Germany, while over 6,000 men and 7,000 women made unsuccessful suicide attempts.

In France, prime home of intellect, 35,000 suicide attempts

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are recorded annually.

The consumption of hard drugs amongst American youth is so terrifyingly high that recently New York police found the corpses of 38 youths, aged from 16-35, dead through drug-taking. Some of the victims were drive to such desperation by inability to get drugs that they slashed their wrists. Heroin addicts are the most numerous-- 100,000 in New York alone -- one addict in every 70 inhabitants! Among the rich of the U. S. A. , addicts rank high. A New York doctor said that one of America's most famous actors injects himself with ten doses per 24 hours at $60 the dose! "Many deaths of high ranking personalities, officially attributed to heart failure," he adds, "are, in fact, fatalities due to drug addiction. " (Ettela'at No. 13015. )

"The Spirit of Man" (p. 32) , says: "In the U. S. A. a major crime is committed every 25 minutes; and every 24 hours 3 murders, 5 indecent assaults, 30 major thefts and 3,000 petty larcenies. Four billion dollars is spent on combating crime and upholding law, and of this $100,000,000 is disbursed in New York alone. "

Such is the life-style, self-emasculated, yet boasting its brains and culture and elevation, which people seek to emulate, and choose as their life-model!

Worship

For all their propaganda machines and temporal power, the Western churches' intervention in cultural and social matters, and their religious preaching to refine morality and make men's hearts pure, has had little effect. It has not redeemed the bankruptcy of spirit, nor reined in the untrammelled self-indulgence that besets Westerners. How

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can a religion which permits its adherents unlimited freedom to commit shameful deeds hope to wrench their collar out of the talons of the subversives' grip on the polluted, or uproot the noxious growths of immorality?

Worship and godliness and true humanity must be approached with the sole aim of drawing near to God in purity of intent. But these practitioners have left the track and been perverted.

Religious leaders, who should constitute a staunch dam to hold back the floods of corruption, have themselves fallen victims to the prevailing fashion of permissiveness. How then can Christianity possibly produce renascence and moral revolution in the West? How can such institutions recall mankind to that purity of heart without which no man can know the Lord? Yet the world can only emerge from its crisis of morals by that road of purity via revolution and renascence.

The "Tehran Weekly Journal" (No. 1089) reported: "Church Fathers entice the errant into the church with dancing and music. The Revd. Francis Mieux of Montreal, Canada, 35 years ordained, is a skilled musician, both as composer and player, author of 1,500 popular melodies, a priest who combines the two callings of religion and art. "

Surely to perform such works in a place of worship is to make a mockery of religion? Amongst the most solemn pronouncements made by all the prophets of God have been the asseverations that no man can serve both God and Mammon; and that there is no escape from the pollutions of the world, the

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flesh and the devil except by a resolute concentration of the attention on God. Inordinate attachment to materialist considerations must be set aside in favor of the quest for a personal knowledge of God's being, if human life is to be soundly equilibrated. This is the rock on which to build the house of life. All else is shifting sand.

True worship frees a man from the bondage of fleshly lusts, and draws him into God's presence and to spiritual joys. Observe how this truth of priceless inestimable worth has been squeezed out by the permissive' preaching primacy of carnal desire.

Islamic worship has many aims. One of them is to rip away the curtains of negligence and ignorance and so to usher in a mighty moral and spiritual re-armament and revolution.

Stanwood Cobb, Christian savant, in his book "Lord of the Two Ka'abas" p. 227, compares Muslim and Christian worship thus: "I was," he writes, "allowed to be present in Hagia Sofia Mosque in Istanbul to witness a service of prayer and worship there. In such services repeated genuflections (Rukoo') and prostrations (Sujood) play a large part as the accompaniment to fixed forms of prayer and adoration. I was deeply impressed by the solemnity, humility and reverence of the worshippers. It far surpassed anything I have ever met in any Christian church in its sincerity of veneration, depth of self-surrender, and dedicated devotion to the Divine Essence.

I shared with other foreigners the privilege of watching the ceremonies of the Night of Power

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(Leilat-ul-Qadr) on which the Qur'an was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. From a balcony in one of the squinches we looked down on the 5,000 worshippers who crowded Hagia Sofia, performing their rukoo's and sujoods in perfect unison, rhythm and order. The rustle of their bending to genuflect or prostrate themselves, the sound of their hands being placed on the floor before them, their united uprising, made deep quiet waves of reverence fill the vast dome, and ascend heavenward.

The sight was splendid, matchless; dignified, numinous, humble, reverent, expressive of a sense of individual freedom, democracy, equality, which allowed no discrimination of persons or classes. I saw an itinerant carpet-vendor cheek by jowl with a Pasha in gorgeous robes, in concord, without fear or favor, standing, kneeling, prostrating themselves in common worship, while big-bellied dark-faced Negroes busied themselves with their religious observances alongside the most chic of the Turks of Istanbul. For Islam from its inception has pursued a creed of brotherhood which it preserves today. "

Western religion's biggest error has lain in treating faith as an individual private affair, unrelated to daily life. This mistaken doctrine casts its shadow over all aspects of Western society. Pollution, national crises, permissiveness, corruption, are all ills directly due to this divorce of religion from practical affairs.

Hence, too, the tug-of-war between inner spiritual values and the outward struggle for a livelihood. A sound creed dictates a man's code of conduct and draws guidelines for him which apply to every practical eventuality of living.

Belief shapes thought

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and action. Living cannot evade the formative effect of creed. Hence the downright sinfulness of separating religion from practical life. Such a separation runs directly in the face of the law of nature. As Dampierre writes in his book "The Conflict between Science and Religion": "Constantine decreed that Christianity was an official religion of the Roman Empire ; and, to please his pagan subjects, permitted many customs of the earlier paganism to be taken up into Christianity. Thus arose the idea, which prevailed in medieval religious days, and still prevails in modern irreligious days, that `religion is a private matter' concerned solely with the individual soul and its relations with God. "

Alcohol

A frenetic consumption of alcoholic beverages augments our social ills, daily producing sinister perversions in manners and morals, and in religious, psychological and medical health.

No sane thinking person can fail to remark these bitter facts. Hospitals are filled with D. T. patients and with mentally deranged alcoholics, while outside them thousands, under the influence of drink, take to murder, suicide, theft, blackmail and character assassination.

Alcohol offers an escape from problems and worries: but always ends by multiplying them. Instead of diminishing life's sufferings, it adds material and moral bankruptcy to them, and crushes rather than relieves the sufferer. It makes the bells of doom and disaster toll even louder in his ears. He flees from their clamour back to his alcoholic solace. He seeks to drown his sorrows, in the hope of enjoying an imaginary paradise where his burdens will roll

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away, in the brief span of his drunken stupor.

"Be not drunk with wine but be filled with the Spirit" is the motto of a wise man who realizes that to resort to means which dull reason may lead to insanity, and to the loss of all those intellectual powers which raise man above the level of the beasts. For alcohol is indeed "the poison that men put into their mouths to take away their brains. "

In Hamburg I was able to gain admission to view the inside of a synagogue to which I had been drawn by its splendid exterior. A guide showed us its various parts. To our surprise, these included a special room for wine and cheese parties. In consternation I asked: "Is wine drunk even on these sacred premises? " He replied with serious mien: "Only by a select group who have the right to drink wine in this room! "

So widespread has alcohol consumption become that universities and health authorities have set up organizations to check it. But they have not yet penetrated to the root of the problem — the cancer at the heart of Western creeds which leaves individual free-will too much rein in matters which should be of social concern, and so allows people to imbibe a poison that breaks up sound family life and ruins nations. The fear is growing that the working classes and the youth of tomorrow will be turned into an alcoholic mob, to the tragic disaster of the sufferers and of

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the peoples of the world.

Doctors attending the 24th International Congress for the Combating of Alcoholism in France issued the following statement concerning the effects of alcohol on mind and spirit: "20% of women and 60% of men entering hospital are alcohol addicts: 70% of mental patients and 40% of venereal patients were so afflicted as a consequence of misuse of alcohol. In England, experts affirm, 95% of mental cases are due to mental disease induced by alcoholic drinks. " ('Health Magazine').

And the same magazine (No. 12, p. 5) states: "French newspapers headline as 'shaking' the report of the French Minister of Health on the number of deaths due to alcohol, for it said that in one year 20,000 deaths in France were due to excessive alcohol-consumption, and cited the Secretary- General of the Committee for Combating Alcoholism as authority for the statistic that 25% of industrial accidents and 57% of automobile accidents in France were due to alcohol. "

The former French President Poincaré was also head of the anti- alcohol society, and stated in a book on the World War: "French youth! Your biggest enemy is drink! Do more than skirmish with Germany! Take up arms against drink! Drink caused more spiritual and material damage in 1870 than the war with Germany then cost France. The drink which pleases your palate is a deadly poison. It ages you prematurely and robs you of half your lifetime, rendering your body far more vulnerable to the attacks of disease and infirmity of all

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kinds. "

"The Reader's Digest" Persian edition reported that in Germany "in one year some 150,000 cases are tried in the criminal courts on charges arising from misuse of alcoholic drinks. " A United States Cabinet Secretary said, according to "Health Magazine" (No. 12, Year 5): "We must keep an eye on the effect of alcoholism on our finances. Experts tell us that their research fixes the cost to the state (apart from private costs) at $15,000,000,000 in one year. Of this one billion dollars goes to hospitalization, five billion to public assistance and charity, two billion to police and similar costs, seven billion to courts and prison charges. Over and above this must be set the fact that the tax on alcohol only brings in $8 billion to the Treasury. "

Nor is the Soviet Union immune. The Tehran Daily "Ettela'at" (No. 13108) reports the institution of severe measures to diminish the dangerous levels of alcohol consumption there, since, the Premier of the U. S. S. R. declared: "Alcohol has caused an increase in the crime level, a rise in absenteeism from factories, and a fall in production such that the state must perforce undertake a far more severe campaign against this. "

The same addiction must be blamed for many air-accidents. The industrial psychology specialist Dr. Clement Korn Gould, in an article in the Persian edition of "The Reader's Digest" (No. 37, Year 26) , lays the majority of accidents of U. S. A. airlines to this account, both amongst hired pilots and private owners of planes and helicopters. He adds:

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"Research has established that the majority of air crashes are due to inattention, often due to alcoholic after-effects on the minds of pilots and co-pilots, and this more among Americans than any other nationality.

"Further, investigation has demonstrated that a majority of pilots involved in crashes had imbibed during the flight. The increase in air crashes has made responsible authorities determined to get to the root of the causes; and their researches have shown that a large number of accidents during the last few years have been due to drunkenness in the pilots or to their sexual indulgence before the flight. "

Shortages and Uncharitableness

Daily increasing affluence and the technological revolution have produced deep divisions in human living. One group of human beings rakes in huge dividends from investments in trusts or cartels or companies, and seems able to have anything it wants, to such an incredible extent that some even provide luxury accommodation for their dogs and cats. Another group scrapes up a miserable livelihood at subsistence level, hardly able to lay hold of the barest essentials of life.

All thinking people feel pangs of conscience at the desperate sufferings allowed in all parts of the world by modern social conditions. Many misfortunes, which in the past would in a very short time have been alleviated, now fester on as uncured tragedies. No wonder a violent hate against those who enjoy excess riches invades the hearts of the under privileged!

The developed countries make a global effort to improve their economic conditions: but with no advantage to

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the masses—indeed, even to the disadvantage and decline of poorer lands. So the class difference gapes wider. Many lands groan under poverty and famine.

"The Ferdosi Magazine" of July 28th, 1948, in an article on "Nutrition", makes the following points:

1. Underdeveloped lands number 2,500 million inhabitants, of whom 500,000,000 suffer from undernourishment;

2. 1,500 million suffer from malnutrition;

3. As a direct or indirect consequence, 8,000,000 die of hunger annually.

In Brazil alone a quarter of a million infants die annually from under nourishment. In India infant mortality balances the natural increase of population. The food an average American family throws away as waste daily, equals the food of the average Indian family for four days.

Worse, some unscrupulous and frivolous persons cause artificial shortages of foodstuffs in order to raise prices and line their own pockets, hard-heartedly ignoring the fact that these foodstuffs might lengthen the lives of untold millions. Legislation to suppress such inhuman prodigal self-indulgence could end hunger in the world very quickly. So says the periodical "Enlightened Thought" (719): "In 1960 125 million tons of grain for bread disappeared from the warehouses of America. It would have sufficed to fill the bellies of India's more than 500 million inhabitants for a year. America destroys a great deal of her harvest annually simply to keep prices up. Capitalist institutions in the West have deliberately caused starvation to increase throughout the world. America fills silos and warehouses with foodstuffs. They then compel poor nations to purchase at high prices to the detriment of

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their economy. Thus a few selfish power-hungry persons pile up fortunes while being, in fact, guilty of the murder —no less—of millions of innocent fellow- humans. "

Philosopher Bertrand Russell writes: "During the last 14 years America has spent 4,000 million dollars on purchasing its farmers' surplus wheat crops. Millions of tons of wheat, barley, maize, cheese, butter have piled up in American storehouses and rotted, simply to keep up prices on the world market: and now they are marking mountains of butter and cheese 'unfit' with a color-code, to prevent the price of dairy products falling. "

Sociologist and philosopher Stanwood Cobb writes in his "Lord of Two Ka'abas" (p. 145/6): "Expansion in technology, industry and scientific instruments has produced a deeper sense of our moral poverty. Developed lands cannot boast of ethical superiority over backward nations. Modern materialist civilization is full of inner contradictions and incongruities, between words and actions, between thought and speech, between reason and feeling. Materialist culture in its various manifestations proclaims the theoretical equality of all human beings; but in practice produces inequities and injustices in the ethical, intellectual, social, spiritual and family spheres, and fanatically vindicates these wrongs.

"Democracy claims to be 'Government of the people by the people for the people'. But at its best it is oligarchy, and soon turns to dictatorship of an individual.

"It claims to aim at 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number'. In fact, it gives rise to frustration, failure, anxiety, misery.

"It encourages altruism and a social conscience in its rhetoric, but its

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policies are selfishness run riot, with. no regard for the fate of others. Individuals and groups that get in the way are trampled ruthlessly underfoot. This age surpasses all others known to history in exploitation, profiteering and power-hunger. "

In "Sociology" (p. 157) , Samuel Konig writes: "The developed lands comprise 25% of the world's population and own 85% of its capital assets; leaving 15% for the remaining 75% of humanity. The lapse of time only widens this gap. In affluent lands themselves, wealth is the property of a minority only. A U. S. Senate Committee in 1946 affirmed that 5% of America's great industrial concerns owned 80% of American industrial capital, controlling 60% of the total work force and drawing 80% of the total industrial profits. "

The world president of the United Nations' "Farming and Agricultural Organization" says in an article entitled "Hungry Man" (by Jose de Castro, No. 8, p. 24): "Today two thirds of the inhabitants of the earth live in constant hunger ; and about 1,500 million people live on the subsistence level, suffering constantly from this most horrible of social ills. 

Savagery in a Civilized Age

Some sociologists held that war is inseparable from human life, which "was from its inception cruel, brutal and nasty. " Other sociologists and psychologists deny this, holding that war can be removed from human life, since bloodshed is caused by ethical derailments, social disorders and economic disruptions; and is not an ineradicable ingredient in human nature. Instruction and education in basic truths, and an equitable ordering of social conditions, can remove the causes

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of war. The terrible and irreparable damage which war brings down on the devoted heads of innocent millions can thus be averted, they say.

The matchless triumphs of science and technology have made the 20th century a bloody holocaust. It is stamped as the age of greed, ambition, insurrection, violence, and of history's most inhuman wars. A glance over the first 75 years of the 20th century is enough to make manifest that in that short time our advanced and civilized peoples have perpetrated more crimes than in the whole previous course of human history.

The West possesses industrial techniques and atom bombs. Its knowledge drives man through mud and blood. It turns once fertile lands to deserts. The cry of the oppressed rises to high heaven, bewailing the West's weakness of thought and decline in morals.

The aftermath of two world wars between imperialist powers pursuing conflicting material interests has been dire for all mankind. No excuse can wash the grime of wickedness, heartlessness and cruelty from this century's warmongers' garments.

World War I lasted 1'565 days. Nine million died. Twenty-two million were maimed and left unemployable for life. Such are the statistics of casualties on the actual battlefield. The number of deaths and injuries caused in crowded cities as a side-effect of the fighting is incalculable. The cost of that war is reckoned as more than $400,000,000,000.

The Carnegie Peace Trust, in its report "The Twentieth-Century World", claims that that same sum could have built, at prices of that date, a decent house

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for every family in England, Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, Germany, Russia, the United States, Canada, and Australia. The survivors weep, like Rachel for her children, "for they are not", and will not be comforted. Its ravages were not repaired before World War II broke out.

Statistics say that in World War million were killed; 20 million lost a limb; 17 million liters of blood were spilt; 12 million children were born deformed; 13,000 primary and secondary schools, 6,000 universities and 8,000 science laboratories were destroyed; 319 thousand million bullets were fired.

In 1945 America dropped two small atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Hiroshima 70,000 people were vaporized and 70,000 others crippled. In Nagasaki 40,000 died and 40,000 were maimed. Buildings were laid flat. Nor were innocent babes or animals spared. Within five days Japan surrendered unconditionally.

World press reports said that after the war Russian artificial-limb factories placed an order with their American counterparts for 4 million feet, to fit out those who had lost a foot in the war, since such levels of production were beyond the means of their own industrial installations. If so many feet were needed in Russia, how many irreparable injuries must have occurred amongst her people, and how many in other lands, for which no statistics can ever be affirmed?

The August 1945 bombs held 235 units of uranium, and 239 of plutonium, the equivalent of 335,000 units of T. N. T. An average atom bomb of today is 5,000 times more powerful, and a hydrogen bomb 5 million

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times more destructive than an atom bomb. Yet one atom bomb would suffice to flatten a city like New York, Paris, London or Moscow. They no longer need manned planes. Guided missiles can deliver them right on target 2,000 miles away.

The seismographic echoes of one such explosion can be recorded 7,000 miles from its center. The Nobel Prize-winning U. S. chemist, Dr. Linus Pauling, says that in the first hour of a new war 10,000 megaton bombs would wipe out 175 million inhabitants of densely populated lands. The U. S. A. had a stockpile of 24,000; the U. S. S. R. 80,000; England 15,000, at the moment he was writing.

A future war, U. S. Army General Neumann writes, will claim as its victims not so much soldiers as civilians. Entire communities, women and children included, will perish. Our physicists have taken war out of human hands and transferred it to fighting machines, which make no distinctions of age or sex, belligerent or non-belligerent. The new theatre of conflict will not be a field of battle or a fortress, but those cities and villages in which manufacturing and commercial centers exist. On these would hail down flying missiles filled with explosives, incendiary devices, poison gas, and disease-bearing bacteria.

These two wars have cast all humanity into the vortex of self-destruction. But their horrors have not had the slightest effect on the moral attitudes of the West, nor changed its intoxication with affluence and alcohol —witness the many regional wars today which might at any moment coalesce into one total

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war of world annihilation. Civilized nations use their mental, physical and financial powers, not for the proper ends of peace and prosperity for all, but to prepare and stockpile the instruments for everyone's destruction.

Bertrand Russell writes: "Governments competing in sending astronauts to the moon and beyond will between them destroy this world. In past ages sheer want drove tribes to attack their neighbors for the scanty supplies available. Today affluent societies commit suicide in competitive insanity. "

The "Economic Record" reckons that 400 billion dollars were spent on armaments in the first half of the 20th century —enough to feed every human stomach for the same period and simultaneously provide housing for one-third of humanity—all this in a world where two-thirds of the population live barely at subsistence level in illiteracy and indigence.

The W. F. T. U. estimates that 70% of the world's working personnel are on jobs which have some connection with armament manufacture.

So terrible are modern weapons that a Third World War would leave neither victor nor vanquished, but only a funeral for all humanity.

Sociologist Petrim A. Sorokin writes: "The key question of our day is not the superiority of capitalism or communism, nationalism or internationalism, but the replacement of a materialist culture by a superior philosophy of life. In World Wars I and II, each side claimed that peace would ensue if its rival group were wiped out.

In World War I the Allies blamed Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany ; while he held that the suppression of England was necessary for world peace.

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In World War II differing views held that peace could only come by Hitler's resignation or death; by Churchill's removal ; by Mussolini's never having been born ; by Hirohito ceasing to be the deified ruler of Japan; by Trotsky replacing Stalin in Russia. Yet now that all these persons are departed, the fever of crisis and war still inflames the world ; and men's hearts fail them for fear. For it was not the individual Kaiser Wilhelm, or Hitler, or Mussolini, or Churchill, or Stalin who caused the 20th century's troubles.

They merely headed up the multitude of human passions which would have produced similar leaders with other names in any case. A boiling pot produces scum. The scum can be removed. But fresh scum soon covers the brew unless a purifying element is introduced that eliminates the cause. "

True, our age has produced the "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals" and prolonged human lives by heart-transplants. But its deadlier products like atom bombs weigh heavy in the balance. The United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, vindicate the 20th century's claim to be champion of the oppressed and enemy of the oppressor. Yet millions starve to death or are killed off in wars between hostile political groups, despite these idealist institutions.

Are the multifarious agencies that condemn war themselves wholly blameless? Are not those who shout that "all differences should be settled by diplomacy", themselves guilty of pressing their views on others by unjust and forceful measures? Are

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not Christian leaders, who preach "peace on earth and goodwill towards men" and "war shall be no more", merely adding to the cynical disillusionment of the younger generation, who see that violence and bloodshed are still countenanced as instruments of policy, and do not forget how the Roman Church turned a blind eye on the crimes of Nazism and Fascism?

Apartheid

The theory of apartheid, based on the utterances of some innovating thinker ("philosopher") denies racial equality. Its promoters want "the superior race" to run the world while "weaker inferior races" serve them.

Such a notion is, of course, totally incompatible with any philosophy of man that professes principles of "freedom", individual and/or social, as basic. Further, it prevents any growth in the weak. Most modern investigators regard the doctrine of the superiority of one race of humans over another as unfounded and artificial superstition, when viewed in the light of history and of scientific research.

"No pure race exists. No scientific evidence proves the race theory definitely. An "Aryan" race is a myth. History does not relate the actuality of a race which called itself "Aryan". The "Aryan" family of languages is a fact. But there are many instances of different racial stocks employing the same language for communication. " ("History of Religion", p. 219. )

National Socialism's rise was part cause of World War II. Hitler's Germany's ideology was "One race shall rule" — of course the "German Nordics"—who were to found a strong center of government in mid-Europe. Its brief brutal regime, by means of

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Congresses at Nuremberg and elsewhere, and fanatic racial propaganda, drew the loyalty of German nationals who made great, if illusory, profit from their dominance of the neighboring lands.

Dr. Gustaf le Bon in his "Bases of the Spirit of Dictatorship" (p. 194) writes: "Racism played a major social role, regarded as pivotal by politicians, so that after much bloody conflict it settled to an armed peace which burst out again in devastating violence. Behind all this was the idea that the strongest nation, and that most secure from danger, is that with the largest territories and most numerous population, whereas it is just these nations that live nearest the verge of overthrow. "

Today the most advanced nations consider "white" superior to "cultured" and cherish racial superstitions. In the cradle of civilization "sin" is called "black": and cultured people are bereft of many human rights and liberties. In some states of the U. S. A. no black man may marry a white ; and schools, colleges, hospitals segregate black and white. So do many associations, hotels, restaurants, public transport lines, and—most shameful of all—even some churches.

"In 1954 the Supreme Court made integration of schools obligatory. But white schools only accepted 4 blacks per 100 students, and the entry of some even of them into their schools was only achieved by force and the use of troops. " ("Tehran Illustrated News", No. 1174. )

The whites resorted to brutal atrocity in their struggle to hold back the blacks, reminiscent of the worst barbarities of the Middle Ages.

The Universal Declaration

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of Human Rights has not had the power to enforce its principles of racial equality. In the space-age earth is torn by racial conflict based on the color of men's skins. Stahwood Cobb ("Lord of the two Ka'abas" p. 198) writes: "I am against Kipling's sentiment; `East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet'. Why not? What human difference exists between one man and another? Christ taught us two millennia ago that virtue and humanity are linked with good intents, good works and love. But 20th century people know better, and say that superiority depends on skin color! Hitler is called bad for exalting one race: but today's scene is peopled by little Hitlers. Take S. Africa. Take our own America. Apartheid and discrimination everywhere! Take Viet Nam. Was there not a racist element in our pressure there, on the basis that 'the Western white race is superior to the Asian yellow'? "

South Africa, where blacks outnumber whites by 7 to 1, has made racial discrimination its law—apartheid makes whites, blacks, Indian immigrants, cultured, live in separate communities. The identity cards state which group they belong to. The separation applies in buses, trains, churches, restaurants, telephone-kiosks, hospitals and cemeteries. Interracial marriages are prohibited. A black may not work in a white area nor take up a job of high intellectual or scientific level. Menial tasks are reserved for blacks. Small wonder that sometimes half a million are in prison! White judges preside over cases involving blacks.

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"Keyhan" (the Tehran Daily) (No. 7013) reported that a black girl, born in the house of a white S. African family, was only allowed to remain in her father's home as a maid, according to the S. African law, or else go and live in the black section of Johannesburg. The father preferred to move house and home to a land where his daughter could live with her parents, as she should, rather than bow to the inhuman law enforced by the highest instance in S. African law.

"March 12, 1960, Sharpville was one of several S. African cities where demonstrations protested against the law that all blacks must carry identity cards and show them whenever ordered. Sharpville police fired on a peaceful demonstration walking past the police H. Q. , killing 69, and wounding 180. " ("Ettela'at" (Tehran Daily) No. 13149. ) What is such repression but the enforcement of slavery?

Harry Harwood, in his book on "Freedom", writes: "True, slavery in the old form is abolished; but it lingers on in the form of class enslavement in our society, with the endeavor to keep the blacks on the lowest rung of the social ladder. "

Landslide in Family Life

The family is the community in microcosm. It is the root from which nations grow. It is the basic unit of society. Its climate must be love and its soil character. In it human life begins—and ends! It must be happy, a citadel of heart-warming peace and quiet, where affection reigns, which runs on oiled wheels of confidence and trust, security

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and sincerity. The more firm its spiritual and moral edifice, the more sure its joy and happiness in today's troubled, explosive, insurrectionary atmosphere. Every human being has a greater need than ever for a home and family which will provide a haven of quiet and a refuge for thought and reflection.

The West pursued a simple agricultural life before the industrial revolution. In those days the family was a center of consideration, caring and constancy. Men went out to the fields to work for a living. Women set the care and upbringing of their little ones above all else. The family circle bounded the lives of all its members.

But industry needed hands. One of the first effects of its need was the dispersal of men, women and children to industrial centers, government offices, commercial houses and other large institutions. Conurbations grew in which the sole object of existence was to increase the outward comforts and luxuries of life.

This break-up of family life weakened the marriage bond. Gentleness and affection grievously diminished. Women felt lost without the single-minded devotion to their family and the upbringing of their children which had been their sole preoccupation in previous epochs. They spent their energy in exhausting factory work. The dual role of factory worker and mother proved too much. The necessary time, the adequate opportunity, for leisure of heart, for ordering family life, was missing. She must clock in at the fixed time at work; and housework lost its charm in the weary hours of

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exhaustion which were all she had left to give to it.

Further, the new "freedom" was so limitless that it uprooted family life, casting chastity and decency to the winds, leaving disaster and division to replace the morality of family and social unity, which had relied on religion and conscience for their sanctions.

The mounting tide of divorces is sweeping the civilized world on a dangerous course, yet it is helplessly unable to stem the flood.

A petty difference in taste between husband and wife is found sufficient ground for ending a marriage-contract. Minor conflicts and incompatibilities are all treated as evidence that a marriage has irretrievably broken down and that a family unit should be split. The storm-clouds of passion and prurience, with hurricane force, blast the tender growths of family oneness; and the most sacred inheritance of the centuries falls victim to the violence of the most unstable and ephemeral desires. Yet a modicum of common sense could solve the tiff and quench the fire, while tolerance and unselfishness would stabilize the relationship on a sure foundation of principle, justice and love.

An Iranian living in Germany told me that in the last few years all his neighbors, without exception, had ended their marriages in the divorce courts!

The Iranian national daily "Keyhan" (No. 6926) , reported that marriage guidance councils had been set up all over East Germany to check the flood of divorces and broken families. Doctors and lawyers, too, had joined the campaign. Newspapers were devoting column after column to the

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matter. The rising curve of divorce statistics was blamed primarily on the wives' employment in industrial jobs which kept them outside the home.

Sheer economic need drove 70% of married women to take a job simply to gain an adequate family income. Of these 60% had children. The toll of the double call on her energies by job and family house holding on a woman's nerves naturally is so severe that she and her husband quarrel constantly, until their morale cracks and divorce seems the only solution for an intolerably strained situation.

Tolstoj wrote: "One main cause of the upsurge in the divorce rate is women's excessive freedom of choice, which the capricious and touchy feminine nature cannot carry. Of course it is also true that the machine-age does produce nervous strain, and throws men and women into relationships of intimacy and familiarity which easily cross the bounds of legitimate companionship, and may arouse jealousy within the family ; while women's employment outside the house rouses a host of further problems. "

Statistics in New York and Washington show that divorce amongst intellectuals (sic! ) outnumbers those amongst all other classes; while those in Hollywood were so shocking that the authorities refused to publish them.

"Keyhan" on 28 Farvardin 1339 reported that divorces in the past year in England were a record total-50% due to unfaithfulness, 50% to other causes.

America's "Wake Magazine" reported that the divorce rate had increased 1,000% in the last ten years.

French courts heard 9,785 suits for divorce, 8,000 on the wives' initiative.

World

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War I, and World War II still more, increased youth's rejection as an expression of "freedom", of traditional moral standards, and divorces increased in consequence. G. de Pels in his book "Matrimony and Modernity" says: "The excess of divorces over first marriages is due to the effects of World Wars I and II. "

"The Reader's Digest", Persian Edition (No. 103, Year 25) , reports a request to the French government by the French Family Federation that divorce be prohibited in the first three years of wedlock. England has enacted the same law with two exceptions only: extraordinary brutality by the husband, or extraordinary corruption in the wife.

In the U. S. A. , 3,000,000 children's parents are separated (Tehran Weekly Journal "Ettela'at" (No. 1206) ). Lawson writes: "Anyone with a grain of philanthropic sense must feel the pain of these terrifying figures and seek to cure them. Since most separations are due to the women's initiative, both cause and cure must be found in them. "

Alas, Iran's own Westernized classes are afflicted with the same divorce-disease. In the last decade in Tehran alone over 1,000 divorces have occurred because of quarrels over money, and been reported in the papers. Many more went unreported. Of 15,335 weddings in Tehran in 1339, 4,839 ended in divorce — almost one in three. 86% of these divorces were demanded by the wives—all Westernized materialist intellectuals (save the mark! ). It is a warning of a menacing peril which must be averted. The type of "civilization" which destroys the family cannot be left

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as it is if we are not to see division cleave our people asunder and unbridled passions annihilate our culture. It must be replaced by the practice of Islam's stabilizing and constructive social lore.

Love of Animals

Certain Western nations are dog-lovers to the point of madness. An Iranian scientist who took his medical degree in Germany wrote: "My landlord loved his dog, kissed it and cuddled it. I tried to warn him of the danger of infection with hydatid cysts. He dismissed my remarks as unfounded, so I fetched him a medical book, which he studied with dismay, and then asked me: 'If contact with a dog is so dangerous, why do physicians and university professors keep dogs in their homes? ' I replied that there are many habits professionally recognized as harmful to health which medical men indulge in because they like them, making a mockery of commonsense, science and reason, preferring to risk their welfare! "

Iran's National Society for the Protection of Animals, in its journal, quotes an American magazine, which sent a questionnaire to all its dog-loving clients (mostly women) , asking:

1. Do you like your dog or your spouse best?

2. If you and your dog were both hungry, with insufficient food even for one, would you give that little to your dog, or eat it yourself?

3. Does your dog sleep in your bedroom?

4. If your dog died would you shed tears?

5. Do you credit your dog with a personality above animal level?

6. If your dog bit your child and your child hit

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the dog with a stone and both were howling, which would you rush to comfort?

7. If your dog and your husband both fell sick simultaneously, which would you call the doctor to first?

8. Does your mind frequently wander to thoughts of your dog while you are working at your office?

Of 75,000 replies, the answers worked out as follows:

1. Close on two-thirds loved their husbands when the husband loved the dog. A number roundly stated that their dog was everything for them!

2. 60,000 said they'd give the dog the food, since it mattered less if they starved to death themselves than if the dog should fail to survive.

3. 49,000 had their dog sleeping in the bedroom. "He's better than anyone else," wrote the women.

4. Two-thirds would shed tears if the dog died, and give it a funeral ceremony.

5. Practically all replies regarded their dog as more than an animal, with a spiritual personality.

6. We'd try to quiet both. "

7. "First the vet, then the doctor. "

8. "Of course our thoughts frequently turn to our dogs while we're away at work—or anywhere else, for that matter. The dog plays too important a part in life for anyone not to keep on thinking of it. "

Fancy crediting a dog with a spiritual personality and mourning its death! These are idealists, who espouse the cause of freedom and independence. Yet they condone the ruthless bombing with incendiaries and atomic warheads of entire nations without a qualm. They let the dog sleep in their bedroom yet they

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refuse entry into society to millions of fellow-humans, just for the crime of having a black skin.

They call the vet as soon as the dog is ill and fix its cure yet they let humans die, in groups, of famine, poverty and disease, without compunction. In America the special shops for dogs stock ten kinds of eau de cologne and even sell toothpaste, cosmetics, combs and all beauty-specialties for dogs!

"Time Magazine" is quoted in "Ettela'at" (No. 13241) , thus: "Some of our great cities are literally 'the dog house' — e. g. London, Tokyo, Mexico City. In these, dogs are so numerous that they cause discomfort and dirt everywhere. They bite children in growing numbers and make confusion more confounded. Tokyo has 280,000; Los Angeles 300,000; New York 500,000; London 700,000; Mexico City over a million. Dogs are making a mess of the world. "

The French periodical "Animal" reported that American dog-owners spend $300,000,000 annually on beauty goods and garments for their pets. In New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, beauty-shops for dogs do a roaring trade. Their attendants have to take a six or twelve-month course for a "Diploma of Dog- Beautician" to get the job! Most cities have at least one dog cemetery with funeral-rites for dogs.

Meantime, five million unemployed suffer neglect and indigence.

Of course, Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals are maintained by humane and tenderhearted people. Should they not extend their humane care to their own kind? Dr. Alexis Carrel rightly voiced the protest of all sane

people against the contradictions tolerated in this world. "This should ye have done; and also not have left the other undone. " Meaning "Do the lesser humane work (i. e. for animals) without neglecting the greater humane work for people. "

Childhood Traumas

The physical and biological equipment of a woman fit her for certain creative functions in life, peculiar to her sex, which she is called to fulfill. Her capacity for motherhood carries with it certain emotional, mental and nervous conformations of spirit. She is formed to care for and to bring up children with supreme art and heart. The meeting of an infant's many wants, and the careful nurture of its delicate instincts in the secure climate of a loving home, is, amidst the raging passions and deadly violence prevailing in our modern world, the most vital and basic task offered to any human being. No nursery school, no infants' crèche, however well-equipped or psychologically planned, can supply a mother's place. A child deprived of mother-love suffers psychological injuries.

Western women, busied with jobs outside the home, have abandoned nature's destiny; and diverted the wonderful talents innate in the feminine personality into unnatural and disastrous sidetracks. The materialisms of East and West are alike incapable of changing the ingredients of human nature. Both have removed woman from the role for which she was designed. Untold malformations result —in personalities, in communities, in moral conduct. Juveniles brought up without the proper home-environment suffer incurable traumas. Nurseries run by people whose only motive is to make a

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living and who lack the passion to bring children up, treat their charges from the start as potential rebels, and thereby rob them of patience and of self-respect.

Dr. Alexis Carrel writes:

"Modern society has committed a serious mistake by entirely substituting the school for familial training. The mothers abandon their children to the kindergarten in order to attend to their careers, their social ambitions, their sexual pleasures, their literary or artistic fancies, or simply to play bridge, go to the cinema, and waste their time in busy idleness. They are, thus, responsible for the disappearance of the familial group, where the child was kept in contact with adults and learned a great deal from them. Children brought up in schools with a crowd of other children of their own age [Carrel writes `young dogs brought up in kennels with others of the same age do not develop as well as puppies free to run about with their parents'. Translator] do not develop as well as those living in the company of intelligent adults. The child easily molds his physiological, affective, and mental activities upon those of his surroundings. He learns little from children of his own age. When he is only a unit in a school he remains incomplete. To reach full strength the individual requires the relative isolation and the attention of the restricted social group consisting of the family. " [1]

Tehran weekly "Ettela'at" (No. 1206) quotes a foreign report that in America 25% of women in divorce suits suffer from

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mental ailments, while 150,000 children per annum fall victims to the ills consequent upon a divided home. Women, after a day's work, go home tired out; while home-life itself is so painful for many that they take tranquillizers or other pills, and frequent psychiatric clinics, in search of relief from nervous debility. Youth psychiatrist Dr. George Mally says: "Many psychological ailments in young people are due to memories of babyhood for which their mothers bear the blame. Lying, torturing dumb animals, delinquency, appear in young people who have lacked a mother's care. "

Where affection and love between father and mother is weak, children feel less sense of duty to parents. In some families the members never see each other for years, and children by the age of 17 turn surly and rebellious. Some parents turn the children out of the home to fend for themselves at the earliest age allowed by law. Others allow the children to continue to live at home, if they contribute the expenses of their board and lodging, and replace any crockery they break at once out of their own pocket. Such treatment is worse for girls, who tend to seek solace for the loneliness caused by lack of parental care in undesirable friendships with boys.

Conurbations where machines do so much of the work have banished the ancient warmth and joy of heartfelt affection in family and neighborly relations. Townspeople forget what tenderness, unselfish ness, fellow-feeling and sympathy are; and come to count those they call "friend" on

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the fingers of one hand. Civilized living has dried out the wellsprings of humanity with its "new order". On the assembly-line, cooperation is enforced by legal and financial sanctions. But the team-work of heart, by which one person voluntarily helps another who is in difficulties, vanishes amongst the depersonalized crowds of un-neighbourly neighbors. "Bear ye one another's burdens", which for our tribal forefathers was normal living, has nowadays become something which few people will do unless they are paid for it.

While I was a patient in that German hospital, my visitors, though few, were more numerous than those who visited native German patients, much to the hospital staffs surprise.

Let me add a true story from my own experience. Some years ago a German university professor accepted Islam under the tutelage of the Hamburg Islamic community. Later the new Muslim fell ill and was hospitalized. When the Islamic leader heard of this, he straightaway went to visit the professor in hospital. He found him unexpectedly dejected and downcast. After a long silence the professor broke out with a sad tale: "Today my wife and son visited me. They had learned that I had an incurable cancer, and said they had come to say 'goodbye' for the last time as they understood I have only a few days more to live. It's not the fact that I am dying that gets me down, but my wife and my son's heartlessness. "

"Never mind! " said the Imam, "Islam's your family now. And we believers

will come and sit around you here and see to your every need until the end and after. To do this is for us a winning of merit in heaven, a sacred duty, a divine command and sincere expression of our brotherly love. " This news made the patient's face light up. Thereafter he gradually weakened and died.

The Muslim community undertook his funeral and escorted his body to their cemetery. Whilst the cortege was proceeding with due solemnity, a youth rushed up and angrily demanded the professor's corpse. They asked "Why? " He said: "That's my father you are burying—illegally, for I sold the hospital his body for 30 marks some days before he died! "

The scandalized Muslims stood firm. After some heated altercation the young man had to withdraw his demand. Asked later what his job was, he replied: "I work days in a factory and evenings in a dog-beauty-parlor. " To such depths can family love, human feeling and a sense of proportionate values sink in a society that is "civilized"!

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[1]: Alexis Carrel, "Man, the Unknown", Harpers, New York: 50th edition p. 270.

Conclusion of Part 1

Mankind's downhill rush from moral levels plunges into a materialist flood of social unrest and sedition. The greatest thinkers realize that some way must be found to end the avalanche if the world is not to collapse from its own depravity. Thinkers, as one man, declare that only in a revival of faith and morality can there be found a safe ground on which to build the new society, A change of heart in countless individuals must precede, and lay the foundation

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for, family, community, financial, national and international renewal. It is a hopeful sign that the masses of ordinary people submerged in the sea of troubles caused by materialist, heartless, machine-made living are beginning to realize the inhumanity and hopelessness of such a way of life and type of society.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, as U. S. President, voiced this realization in powerful words: "Our affluent society rests on shaky moral grounds. We reach the moon and pollute the earth. We long for peace and go to war. An age that has split the atom must heal the splits in humanity. Empty hands must be filled with work, empty stomachs with food, and empty hearts with satisfaction. To cure the moral crisis that blights our world, each of us need only look to ourselves. If we each listen to the still small voice of conscience we shall soon perceive that simple basic things, like goodness, purity, unselfishness, love, integrity, are our greatest and most priceless treasure. Seek affluence in these, and the tragedies of misused material affluence will end in happiness for all. "

Dr. Alexis Carrel in his "Way and Rule of Life" (pp. 15 and 34): "We need a world in which every person can develop their innate talents to the full, with no separation between material and spiritual. We have learnt that life cannot be lived right without a guide and a compass. But too few are alert to the grave perils which await human life if we do not follow that guide's

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directions. Too many are guided by their fleeting passions, intoxicated by the materialist ease which technology provides, unwilling to renounce even a small portion of those comforts, pursuing pleasure, bobbing like corks on the flood of lust for gain and fun which will soon drop us all over the falls.

Instead of letting the assumptions of an orderly universe, on which science bases its work, shape our human institutions, and bear us upward towards supreme truth, we have poured them into the molds of ideologies which can never satisfy our real need. Putting the material first, modern man sacrifices spiritual to economic affluence, and abandons peace of heart for hedonism. We think 'freedom' includes independence of nature's laws. Liberalism and Marxism preach doctrines which neglect the fact that man was not made only for 'production and consumption'.

He was designed for pure love, religious feeling, intellectual treasures, creative imagination, self-sacrifice and heroic living. To live solely for economics is to amputate a vital part of his personality, and this is why both liberalism and Marxism not merely neglect but actually destroy and cast away the basic elements which nature itself included in man's composition. "

To eradicate the causes of these tragedies and miseries, the modern world's sole hope is a return to Divine Truth as revealed by God's inspiration through His Prophets. The next sphere for exploration must be that interior space which is within the mind of man. For this we must first disperse the storm-clouds of passion which darken it:

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we must lose the fetters of lust which bind the human spirit: we must expel the corruption and filth which confine him in the valley of the shadow by means of a cleansing revolution which refines both thinking and living. Only so can man regain true humanity and enter into his rightful heritage of those spiritual values which should be his distinguishing characteristic, by means of which alone the deep inward happiness Man was made for can grow and expand to all his fellow humans everywhere.

Part 2: Islam's Gifts to the World

Islam

Islam stands for harmony and perfectibility with an unmatched depth and breadth of scope that comprises all aspects of spirit and life. It knows all the roads that lead to blessing and happiness. It has the cure for human ills, individual and social, and makes them as plain as the wit of man can devise or comprehend. It sets out to develop all sides of each person: and therefore perforce includes every reality which impacts human existence.

It has not given way, in its doctrine of man, to modern errors or corrupt institutions. It does not set man in God's place. To do so is to leave man with only himself to rely on in all his pride and egotism: or else to reduce him to the slavery of being a beast of burden for his fellows, powerless, will-less, helpless before nature's and matter's tyrannies. This is precisely what modern heresies do with man. But Islam vindicates man's unique nature vis-à-vis

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all other living creatures, affirming that he is a special creation with a lofty calling all his own.

Islam holds that a man's personality does not cease to exist with death, but is continuous and eternal. "Worldly" and "other-worldly" are an indivisible unity. Body and soul can therefore not be dissolved into disparate elements. Islam, on these grounds, presents both worlds in shining terms. It both trains a man for eternity and also finds the guiding principles for its public institutions on earth in the sublime destiny inherent in man's creation.

Eternity dictates universal principles, unchanging and unchangeable. These Islam proclaims as tenets, convictions, commandments, statutes, in its school of contentment, in its thrust for progress. It offers man the perfection of freedom for thought, for concern, and for exegesis of the divine law on matters of social necessity. It reverts to first principles which provide the sure and unshifting basis of rock-bottom truth in all the chances and changes of this mortal life.

Islam holds that man has certain characteristics which are his link with the material world and certain others which connect him with realities that are non- material and which motivate desires and aims of a more sublime nature. Body, mind and spirit each has its proper propensities. Each must be duly weighed, so that what one of these indivisible elements desires does not conflict with the desire of another.

Islam takes all the elements and facets of human nature into account and caters for the compound essence of man's combined material

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and spiritual propensities. It draws him upward towards the highest without cutting his roots in the material. It demands absolute purity and chastity without denying the flesh and its needs. Its current flows from pole to pole over a network of live wires—convictions and regulations which preserve the integrity of all the innate human instincts while rejecting the Freudian doctrine of total freedom which treats man as nothing but animal.

Islam is not a mere set of ideas in the world of metaphysical speculation: nor did it come into being simply to order man's social living. It is a way of life so comprehensively meaningful that it shapes education, society and culture to heights none other ever aimed at. It forms a supreme court of appeal and rallying- point for East and West alike, and offers them an ideology which can answer their divisive materialisms. It can replace their inequities and contradictions with a more universal, more perfect and more powerful idea.

Islam does not concede priority of any kind to material affluence or to hedonistic comfort as basic for happiness. It finds its principles in an analysis of man's true nature. With these principles it constructs a plan for individual, social and international living, framed by fixed and all-embracing moral standards, aimed at a goal for humanity far loftier than the modern world's limited materialist aims.

Islam does not imprison man in the narrow confines of the material and the financial. It sets him in a spacious and expansive air. There morality, principle

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and the spirit reign. Its statutes are those which spring from the nature of man himself. They encourage mutual help and team-work. They pursue values outside the straitened boundaries imposed on individual and on community by the petty pusillanimous pedestrian patterns of materialist purposes. Instead it yokes man's strength and striving to the change, advance, progress and perfecting inherent in his creation.

Islamic training sets out to refine and enhance human qualities and to harness them to right and reasonable objectives which direct and dictate every forward step to the desired end. It focuses a man's motives, which arise from his natural desires and basic needs, in such a concentrated and streamlined beam that each talent is called in to exercise its function in due succession and order. Impetuous uncoordinated impulses are thus controlled so that no single instinct overrule commonsense nor momentary urge replace reason. Instead man is made master of his fate and captain of his soul. Excess is obviated and every person is accorded his or her legitimate share in the common triumph of all. In this employment every need of body, mind and soul is met and satisfied.

Whenever in history individuals have united in harmonious pursuit of such aims, persons and communities have found themselves. "What is right" has ruled thoughts, conduct and character; human living has been orderly and secure. Reason dictates this training, and calls to a religion with convictions superstition-free, canons practical, statutes feasible and excellences virtuous. The God-given human intelligence intuitively and logically

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perceives their truth.

No man is asked to perform a task above that which he is able. But his powers are put at full stretch. Every possibility within him is expressed to the full. And each is, at doomsday, judged; then the fire itself shall prove each man's work of what sort it is.

Islam and Politics

Modern political theory exalts "the general will". Democratic government attempts to put that general will into practice by making law out of the policy voted for by "the majority" (which need only be 51%) leaving null and void the will of the minority (which may be that of as many as 49% of the voters). The minority is thus not "free" at all, even though in some cases its will may be sensible, and in the circumstances right. But "Government by the Will of the People" will never voluntarily strip off the sanctity and splendor with which it has endowed "the general will", giving that concept precedence over all other material and spiritual values.

Islam, on the other hand, gives precedence to the Will of the Lord of this world, rather than to the uncontrolled inclinations and sentiments of a majority of humans. Islam refuses to strip the Godhead of control of the legislative and jurisdictional power. Islam's conception of Godhead and of divine government is wide enough to comprise everything that goes to make up human life everywhere on this planet. This makes Islam man's unrivalled guardian. It demands total obedience to its statutes on the ground that

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these are God-given and that therefore no human being has a right to allow his own desires to dictate any action in breach of these statutes and rules of life.

How can God be proclaimed worthy of total commitment by people who arrange their lives on precepts deriving from other sources than God Himself? No person dare claim divine authority for a partner for God, nor substitute another lawgiver for Him. Islam's aim is to champion truth and right in everything in human society, since truth does not specialize exclusively in social, political and financial matters but also clothes the stature of man himself in its most beautiful vestments.

The human physique is fearfully and wonderfully made. So are the rules and rights that govern human living. No-one can claim a complete knowledge of all the mysteries of man's make-up, or of the complicated social structure it generates. For this structure comprises the specialized areas of the body and the spirit of all its individuals as well as of all their relationships with each other. Nor dare anyone claim to be innocent of sin, of a shortcoming, a fault or an error. No-one is aware of all the elements which go to make up human happiness and welfare.

Despite all the devoted efforts of scientists to penetrate the mysteries of human being, the area they have succeeded in covering is still extremely limited. To quote Dr. Alexis Carrel again ("Man, the Unknown" p. 4): "Mankind has made a gigantic effort to know itself. Although

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we possess the treasure of the observations accumulated by the scientists, the philosophers, the poets, and the great mystics of all times, we have grasped only certain aspects of ourselves. We do not apprehend man as a whole. We know him as composed of distinct parts. And even these parts are created by our methods. Each one of us is made up of a procession of phantoms, in the midst of which strides an unknowable reality. "

Without insight into the human make-up man cannot frame laws 100% suited to the-human condition, nor justly cure the troubles that arise: witness the bewilderment of legislators, their constant alteration of their own statutes in face of today's new problems and unexpected blind alleys. Motives of personal advantage, self-interest, profit, ambition, power, and even of environmental predilections, intrude to distort the legislators' outlook consciously or unconsciously. Montesquieu said of legislation that "none is ever wholly objective and impartial, for the personal ideas and sentiments of the legislator influence his drafting". Thus Aristotle, because he was jealous of Plato, influenced Alexander to denigrate his great predecessor.

Modern slogans of "Liberty and Equality" and "the Public Will" are empty words used by politicians to win support for their laws, laws which in fact represent the interests not of the masses but of the landowners and capitalists.

Henry Ford wrote of England, which boasts itself "the Mother of Democracy": "We cannot forget the 1926 general strike or the way the government tried to break it with every means in its

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power. Parliament, tool of the capitalists, proclaimed the strike unconstitutional and illegal, and turned police and army out against the strikers with bullets and tanks. Meantime the media of radio and press declared the government to be the servant of the workers, a plain subterfuge contradicted by the fines imposed on the trade unions and by the imprisonment of their leaders as soon as the opportunity offered. "

Khrushchev declared in the 22nd Supreme Soviet Congress: "In the era of the personality-cult (i. e. under Stalin) corruption infiltrated our Party's leadership, government and finances; produced decrees which trod the masses' rights underfoot; lowered industrial output ; filled men with fear in their work; and encouraged sycophants, informers and character-assassins. "

Thus both Eastern and Western systems of government falsely appear in the guise of the public will, Parliamentary rule, representation of the masses: while capitalism and communism alike frame inequitable laws because they neglect the heavenly decrees which establish fast what is best for man.

Islam and Legislation

Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote:

"To discover the rules of society that are best suited to nations, there would need to exist a superior intelligence who could understand the passions of men without feeling any of them, who had no affinity with our nature but knew it to the roots, whose happiness was independent of ours but who would nevertheless make our happiness his concern,... in fact a divine lawgiver is needed. " [1]

By these standards the most competent legislator is the Creator of man Himself, He knows all the mysteries

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of man's being, makes no profit out of any human society, and needs no man. Hence the principles which can shape equitable social regulations must be learnt from a person who receives direct guidance from the Creator, whose teachings are the inspired revelations of that unique Source, and who is wholly reliant on that Infinite Wisdom.

Human laws aim only at the ordering of human society. They do not stray outside those limits, nor touch non-social matters like personal conditions, attitudes of mind, spiritual excellence. They do not try to cure internal pollutions within the personality. It is only when personality problems issue in social disorder in action that they enter the scope of legal measures. A person may be filthy in thought and spirit and still good in the eyes of Western law, which looks only upon outward acts and not upon the heart.

Islam with its wide outlook aims not just at redressing what has been done wrong but primarily at putting individual and society right from inside, regarding the ethical personality as the basic unit, and its perfecting as the priority. Islam aims at an orderly society composed of sound morals, sane thinking, sensible action, serene psyches. It therefore legislates for the inner life of the individual in as much detail as for the outer life of society. It brings order and congruence between large and small in creation, the natural laws and the spiritual, the material and the metaphysical, the individual and the social, creeds and philosophies. It

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helps man not to come into collision with the natural laws which underlie the orderliness of the universe; disobedience to which collapses and confounds all human affairs.

Man-made institutions pursue performance of the law: but in Islam the trustee for the law's performance is a deep-rooted faith; and a Muslim duly performs his obligations by the force of morality and faith, even in matters where he is seen by no one save by God alone. Armed force is only needed to control the tiny minority of criminal-minded hypocrites. Islam thus pays due regard both to inner purity of heart and to outward purity of action. It calls those deeds good, laudable and meritorious which spring from sincerity and faith.

USA's Attorney General, in his introduction to his book on Islamic Law, wrote: "American law has only a tenuous connection with moral duty. An American may be accounted a law-abiding citizen even though his inner life is foul and corrupt. But Islam sees the fount of law in the Will of God as revealed to and proclaimed through His Apostle Muhammad. This Law, this Divine Will, treats the entire body of believers as a single society, including all the multifarious races and nationalities which go to make it up in a far-scattered community.

This gives religion its true sound force and makes it the cohesive element of society. No bounds of nationality or geography divide, for the government itself is obedient to the one supreme authority of the Qur'an. This leaves no place for

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any other legislator; so that no competition or rivalry or rift can arise. The believer regards this world as a vale of soul-making, the ante-room to the next: and the Qur'an makes perfectly plain what are the conditions and laws which govern believers' behavior to each other and towards society; and thus makes the changeover from this world to the next a sure and sound and safe transition. "

Despite Westerners' small acquaintance with Islam, and their often mistaken ideas, far removed from reality, a comparatively large number of their thinkers grasp some of the depth and profundity of Islamic teaching and do not conceal their admiration for its clear exegesis and estimable doctrines.

A Muslim scientist's respect for Islam's laws and ordinances is no surprise. But if a non-Muslim savant, despite his slavery to his own religious bigotry, yet recognizes Islam's grandeur and greatness and its lofty leading, that is a real tribute, especially when it is based on a recognition of the progressive nature of Islam's legal systems and their legacy to mankind. This is why this book quotes foreign verdicts on Islam. We do so, not because we need their support, but because they can help to open the road for seekers and enquirers so that who reads may run its way.

Dr. Laura Veccia Vaglieri, Naples University professor, wrote: "In the Qur'an we come across jewels and treasures of knowledge and insight which are superior to the products of our most brilliant geniuses, profound philosophers and powerful politicians. How can

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such a book be the product of the brain of a single man— and that of a man whose life was spent in commercial, not particularly religious, circles — far removed from all schools of learning? He himself always insisted that he was in himself an ordinary simple man like other men, unable, without the help of the Almighty, to produce the miracle of such work. None other than He whose knowledge compasses all that is in heaven and earth could produce the Qur'an. "

Bernard Shaw, in his "Muhammad, Apostle of Allah", said: "I have always held the religion of Muhammad in the highest esteem simply from the marvel of its living vigor. To my mind it is the sole religion capable of success in mastering the multifarious vicissitudes of life and the differences of culture. I foresee (it is manifest even today) that, man by man, Europeans will come to adopt the Islamic faith. Mediaeval theologians for reasons of ignorance or bigotry pictured Muhammad's religion as full of darkness, and considered that he had cast down a challenge to Christ in a spirit of hatred and fanaticism. After much study of the man, I have concluded that Muhammad was not only not against Christ, but that he saw in Him despairing mankind's savior. I am convinced that if a man like him would undertake leadership in the new world, he would succeed in solving its problems, and secure that peace and prosperity which all men want. "

Voltaire, who at the beginning

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was one of Islam's most obdurate opponents and poured scorn on the Prophet, after his 40 years of study of religion, philosophy and history, frankly said: "Muhammad's religion was unquestionably superior to that of Jesus. He never descended to the wild blasphemies of Christians, nor said that one God was three or three Gods were one. The single pillar of his faith is the One God. Islam owes its being to its founder's decrees and manliness; whereas Christians used the sword to force their religion on others. Oh Lord! if only all nations of Europe would make the Muslims their models. "

One of Voltaire's heroes was Martin Luther. Yet he wrote that "Luther was not worthy to unloose the latchets of Muhammad's shoes. Muhammad was a great man and a trainer of great men by his example of virtue and perfection. A wise lawgiver, a just ruler, an ascetic prophet, he raised the greatest revolution earth has seen. "

Tolstoy wrote: "Muhammad needs no other claim to fame than that he raised a barbarous bloodthirsty people out of their diabolical customs to untold advances. His Canon Law with its intelligence and wisdom will come to be the world's authority. "

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[1]: Jean Jacques Rousseau,"Social Contract" Book II: Chapter 6: "The Lawgiver".

Islam and Ideologies

Our world is split into two blocs. They hold contradictory ideologies, each backed by its own scientists and savants who, in a spate of pamphlets and books, prove it right and its opponents wrong. Each claims to be the sole sure road to happiness, and says its adversary is the sole cause of confusion and

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catastrophe.

Both cannot be right. Both may be wrong! Each may be missing a vital point. Yet both have made large contributions to human progress through the brilliance of some of their scientists and technologists.

Progress in one field is no proof of equal progress in every field of human life, any more than an individual's possession of one set of talents indicates a competence in all occupations. An outstanding physician is not ipso facto a brilliant musician! Nor does technological advance ipso facto imply equal advance in thought, wisdom, religion, government, morality.

Dr. Alexis Carrel writes ("Man, the Unknown" p. 27 and 28): "The applications of scientific discoveries have transformed the material and mental worlds. These transformations exert on us a profound influence. Their unfortunate effect comes from the fact that they have been made without consideration for our nature. Our ignorance of ourselves has given to mechanics, physics and chemistry the power to modify at random the ancestral forms of life. Man should be the measure of all.

On the contrary, he is a stranger in the world that he has created. He has been incapable of organizing this world for himself, because he did not possess a practical knowledge of his own nature. Thus, the enormous advance gained by the sciences of inanimate matter over those of living things is one of the greatest catastrophes ever suffered by humanity.

The environment born of our intelligence and our inventions is adjusted neither to our stature nor to our shape. We are unhappy. We

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degenerate morally and mentally. The groups and the nations in which industrial civilization has attained its highest development are precisely those which are becoming weaker, and whose return to barbarism is the most rapid. "

The perfection and sublimating of man in a whole series of different areas requires a body of sound and universal teachings based on realities of human life and free of all faults and errors. Such is only to be found in the teachings of the prophets of God to whom revelation was granted concerning the origins of the world's being.

Morality, to rely on sanctions higher than the natural and to be inspired by what is beyond the material, must build solely on fundamental and basic instructions.

From the moment that man was set upon the globe and laid the groundwork of civilization, a cry rose to heaven from his inward depths. This cry we call religion. Its truth is indissolubly connected with a moral order.

Inhumanity, faction, inequity, tyranny, war, all testify to the truth that governments and their laws have never sufficed to control the sentiments and beliefs and feelings of man nor to establish an order of justice, happiness, peace and quietude in society. Science and knowledge can never solve the problems of human life nor prevent its derailment except in alliance with religion.

Will Durant, American sociologist and philosopher, writes in his "Pleasures of Philosophy" (pp. 326/7): "Has a government such power in economic and ethical matters to preserve all the heritage of knowledge and morals and

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art stored up over generations and woven into the warp and woof of a nation's culture? Can it increase that heritage and hand it on to posterity? Can a government, with all the modern machinery at its disposal, bring the treasures of science to those depressed classes who still think of scientific utterances as blasphemy and witchcraft?

Why it is that such small men govern America's biggest cities? Why is our administration conducted in such a way as to make one weep over the lack of noble policies and true patriotism? Why do corruption and deception enter into our elections and make havoc of public property? Why has government's basic task dwindled today to an attempt merely to prevent crime? Why do governments not seek to understand the causes of war and the conditions of peace? Churches and families ought to undertake the imposition of civilization on such governments. "

Western society can only continue to tolerate moral confusion and its ways of destruction because of its limited powers to take reform into its own hands. But the continuation of this state of affairs already tolls a warning bell. Peril lies close at hand, for civilization stays stable only so long as there is a balance between ends and means, between authority and aspiration. When this equilibrium breaks down, such violence ensues that no goodness can stop it. It rushes headlong to an inevitable disruption. You will find no nation throughout human history which survived the corruption of indulgence and permissiveness.

Rome perished. The

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glory of Greece collapsed. France, because of the indulgent lives of its citizens, turned soft and gave way to the first Nazi assault. One of their most famous generals himself wrote that the reason for their weakness was the inner erosion of character.

Spengler foresaw the downfall of Western civilization and said that other lands would in the future see great cultures arise. Perhaps the East will be one of the first to return to its ancient heritage. This will not come by worshipping at the false shrine of misguided civilizations. But the decline of one civilization can awaken men to the divine plan and inspire them to follow it; and so, by means of this sublime truth, to found an entirely new social life on sound foundations.

Islam and Nationhood

Today, alas, the symptoms of an inferiority-complex over Western industrial prowess and its deadly consequences mark everything in Eastern nations' life. Many a Muslim is so impregnated with Western ideas that he wishes to see everything through Western spectacles, in the belief that progress demands manners and morals, laws and legislation, which copy Western styles. This total surrender welds the ring of slavery in our ears.

We spread the red carpet of our self-respect, our material and moral wealth, our religious and national heritage of good-breeding, before their feet. This is what saps Muslim nations' strength, both physical and spiritual. Muslims they may be: but they have lost the art of thinking on Islamic lines, cast aside their Muslim outlook on world events, alienated themselves

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from Islam's creed and culture, and want to Westernize all Muslim ways. Mankind's greatest problems are not those which can be solved in the laboratory.

Shall a foreign force prevent our taking our place in civilization’s caravan? Suppose we follow neither the capitalist nor the communist trail. Suppose perfect social justice rules the interior of our land, and wins us an international regard, restoring our ancient prestige amongst the assembly of national governments. Might this not save us and mankind from further horrors of wars?

Why do we not let our religion's laws and statutes solve our internal problems? If it can prevent us occupying the seat of a beggar at the table of humanity, and instead install us as masters in that house to the benefit of all, is this a small thing? Can a rich and generous giver turn beggar? Can a man born to command turn submissive, cringe and crawl as an inferior, and give up his right to choose the road he knows is proper?

Our inherited treasures have blessed humanity in the past. Neither West nor East dare disregard that fact, and despise us as backward and helpless, however much they strive to turn our confidence into confusion and our hope into hopelessness, so that we fall easy prey. Our long experience over three thousand years of history has left us tired. We have culled habits, thought, laws, manners from here and there over centuries, and donned them in indiscriminate combination, so that we make ourselves more like

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figures in a ridiculous carnival procession than the dignified personalities that we should be, wearing our own national garb with distinction and consuming our national dishes with conscious nobility.

Take our present constitution. We first copied French models: then those of other European nations were added; and later, on each occasion when new legislation was called for, sought our mound in some other place again, so that there is an endless conflict between the spirit of the laws which we have borrowed from outside, and the national spirit for which the laws are made. As a result, a transgressor of the law gains national renown, hero-worship, and help unstinted in every way.

Why? Through ignorance in the community? Not so! For the educated do not respond to the laws. No! It is the inconsistency between the national spirit and the borrowed laws, unrelated to social needs, historical antecedents, national consciousness, personal convictions that emerged from an environment entirely alien to the spirit of our people. Each borrowed law came from a community with its own history, religion, needs and peculiar realities. Yet none of them can even give a wholly positive answer to its own people, as continuous insurrectionary conditions show.

Professor Hocking of Harvard in "The Spirit of World Politics" writes: "Islamic lands will not progress by merely imitating Western arrangements and values. Can Islam produce fresh thinking, independent laws and relevant statutes to fit the new needs raised by modern society? Yes! — and more! Islam offers humanity greater possibilities for

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advance than others can. Its lack is not ability—but the will to use it. In reality the Shar'ia contains all the ingredients needed. "

Iran's national daily "Keyhan" on 14th Day, 1345 reported: "Yesterday, anniversary of the martyrdom of the Imam Ali, all Tehran practiced Islam's laws 100%. Result: —no crimes; forensic offices unemployed ; no murders; no violence ; no ripple on the calm surface ; borough officers and police untroubled by any calls; even family quarrels within the homes were quickly hushed in reverence for the martyred Leader of the Faithful. "

The Persian "Reader's Digest" (No. 35, Year 25) corroborated this, saying: "The average number of corpses in Tehran mortuaries on any one day of last year was 6 — fewer of course on religious holy days and more on some other days. Last week's anniversary (Day 13th) of Ali's martyrdom was total peace— a proof of the persistent strength of religious conviction, and of the calm and sanity society attains on days when sale of alcohol is banned and amusement houses are closed. "

Such is the result of Muslims practicing their religion's laws for 24 hours. Could a single Western city report, if not 24 hours, even 60 minutes, without an accident, a theft or a murder? When will mankind attain the adult maturity to learn the simple lesson from which so easily comes the peace, the quiet, the unity that all want? It is plain serendipity for us for, in the poet's words, I round the globe in search

of Heaven did roam: Returned, and found my Heaven was here at home. "

Islam and Economics (1)

Man has always had to wrestle with the task of exploiting nature's resources to extract his livelihood from there. In the primitive centuries, as Aristotle said, life organized itself socially "to make it possible to live: and continued, to make it possible to live well. " In the last four centuries a "science of economics" has been deduced from the statutes regulating human relations and the exchange of goods which developed through this social organization. Faced with the vast expansion of a technology and affluence, this "science" has broken into two opposing camps.

On the one side "Capitalism" or "free enterprise" believes that nature should take its course in economics, so that an enlightened self-interest causes the genius of some finally to level out to the benefit of all. This is the doctrine for which the Western bloc stands.

On the other side "Communism" holds that the means of production must be controlled by a proletariat state, so that a just and equal sharing of all the benefits of human endeavor is imposed on society.

The rivalry for absolute power between these two ideologies hangs over the modern world with a menace like the sword of Damocles.

We must ask Marxists whether their "classless society" can be ensured by the single measure of making the means of production joint property and abolishing a moneyed class, when in fact a diversity of classes exists arising from other than economic causes. While in Soviet Socialist

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Republics no bourgeois propertied class exists, other classes distinguished by occupational and environmental differences do exist: e. g. factory-workers, agriculturalists, civil servants, clerks, party officials and numberless others. Do physician and nurse receive equal pay? Or navy and engineer?

There are yet other differences amongst people which exist in reality — Lenin's "reality in which we have to orient ourselves. " People differ in age, sex, inclinations, tastes, physical strength, appearance, reasoning powers, ideas and outlooks.

A Soviet economist recently wrote ("Economics" Vol. 2, p. 216): "It is impracticable to impose absolute equality right across the board. If we were to pay professors, thinkers, politicians and inventors exactly the same as manual workers, the only end-result would be the abolition of all incentives to brainwork of any kind. "

Capitalism claims that only by private enterprise and personal property can an economy be achieved such that the standard of living of all classes constantly rises and the difference between rich and poor constantly diminishes. Against this claim must be set the report of an enquiry arranged by Walter Reuther, President of the U. S. A. United Auto Workers Union, in his capacity as chairman of the "American Society to Combat Hunger. "

This committee affirms that ten million Americans suffer from under nourishment; and asks the president of the republic to declare a state of emergency in 256 cities, situated in 20 of the states, where the danger is most grave. As causes of this under nourishment, the committee cited the aftermath of World War II coupled with a number of

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defects in America's internal economy. The Secretary of Agriculture took extreme measures to purchase from abroad and commandeer from within all foodstuffs he could lay hands on to fill the gap (UP).

We are bound to ask, therefore, how far any regime, whatever its claims, has succeeded in equalizing the classes, eliminating differences and building a sound and just society?

Both Socialist and Capitalist regimes base their systems on theories which are reverenced without any regard to moral and spiritual values. The aim of each is to increase affluence, and nothing more.

Islam's philosophy reverences the whole man in his world setting. It orders society's material behavior and benefits, while at the same time legislating for moral virtues, spiritual perfections, and a higher standard of living. By this it means, not simply the material, but the mental, the spiritual, the moral, the altruistic, the philanthropic standards which enable all men to live each for all and all for each.

Western law supports property-rights and gives preference to those of capitalists over those of workers. Soviet law, in their own words, exists to strip the individual of all property rights and to extirpate capital as a personal possession, giving preference to the workers' group throughout. Both systems are grounded in human reasoning and judgment.

But Islam's law is grounded in Divine Revelation. Its legislation is not a human expedient. It does not set class against class; but helps each group to respect the excellence of other groups. Dictated by the Lord of all creatures for the

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general good and for the good of all, it permits no class to lord it over others nor allows injustice to break in. A ruler is in it only an ordinary person with a particular set of duties, himself under law, wielding power solely to ensure that the Divine commandments are obeyed in society. Since confidence reigns that God's Law is sovereign, peace and quiet obtain.

Islam on the one hand opposes Capitalism's doctrine that the rights of property-ownership lie outside the limits of state control, and its permitting "free enterprise" to exercise aggression and tyranny of the stronger over the weaker in an exaltation of the rights of the individual to the detriment of the rights of society as a whole: and, on the other hand, does regard the sanctity of property as a fundamental.

Prosperity is the stone on which independence and freedom are built within a social order. The common good must be the regulating principle governing personal ownership of property. Islam therefore equally opposes the Communist total rejection of private enterprise and property, which entrusts the key of bounty to the state, reducing the individual to so subordinate a position that he is left with no intrinsic value in himself as a person, being regarded as a state tool — a stomach for the state to fill and thereafter exploit, as a farmer does his horses and cattle.

Communists hold that private property is not natural to man. They aver, without advancing evidence to support the thesis that the

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first communities of primitive man held all things in common in cooperation, love and brotherhood, neither did any man say that aught that he had was his own. The human "community" started as communist with everything in common and parted to each as his need required. The claim to personal ownership of anything, they contend, only developed by slow degrees until it reached the terrifying excesses it manifests in today's world.

Their utopian "Golden Age" is, alas, a pipe-dream: for the facts show that personal ownership is not a result of the development of acquisitive tendencies in a particular environment. Property is coeval with the appearance of man on earth: it is as germane to human nature as all the other innate urges, and no more to be denied than they are. Modern economists say that the universal sense of ownership of property, which is found in every tribe on earth and in every epoch, can only be explained if it is a primal instinct.

Man wants to be the sole master of the goods that minister to his needs, in order to feel truly free and independent. Further, a man feels that goods which owe their existence to the hard work of his hands are in a way an extension of himself, deserving of the same respect as he demands for the integrity of his personality. Finally, he feels the inner urge to build up a store to ensure his future and that of his family, developing thereby a thrift and

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economy which make him lay up a provision against a rainy day.

This store he thereafter guards jealously as "his own". The community's wealth grows with the increase in private property and productivity, for a social unit subsists by the industry of its individual members. The incentive to hard work lies in its rewards in personal ownership and in increased ease of living. Wherefore society must concede to the individual the right to own what his toil has created, since society's own welfare is itself a product of that toil.

Islam, with its practical and realistic approach to man as he is, recognizes the importance of the urge to own as a creative factor for all social progress; and therefore legislates to secure a man possession of all that his hand has won for him by proper and lawful means, regarding his productivity as the guarantee of his right to ownership.

Islam rejects the contention that oppression, exploitation and violence are inevitable concomitants of private ownership; for they only appear where the legislative power is held by the richest class, and by them, as in Western lands, directed solely to the protection of their own interests. Since Islamic Law derives solely from the supreme overarching Authority of God, it is wholly impartial: so no law can be devised by it with the aim of protecting the rich or injuring the poor. From its inception, Islam has recognized private property, but always only under such conditions that violence and oppression are ruled out of

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court.

Islam holds that it is wrong to wrest factories out of the hands of those who founded them and who, by patient endurance of hardship and toil, built them up to give labor to many, goods to society, and, of course, also profit to themselves. For Islam holds that such resort to violence in removing the means of production from the hands of men of initiative is injurious to social security and to respect for the rights of the individual. It discourages the spirit of invention and initiative and enterprise. Nonetheless the government can and should so control the administration of great industries and the establishment of factories that social justice, equity in profit, public benefits and the government's own finances are properly cared for.

In sum, Islamic economics gives joint primacy to both individual and community. It equably balances the interests and rights of these two elements by guaranteeing a free economy while safeguarding the freedom of the individual member and the benefit of the whole community simultaneously by certain reasonable and necessary regulations on private ownership. The urge for such ownership it recognizes as innate, and therefore germane to human nature, so that the only limits which may be imposed upon it are those dictated by the general interests of the whole society, which of course contains the best interests of each single member.

Islam regards the instinct to possess as an incentive divinely implanted to inspire men to hard work for the improvement of the means of livelihood and

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of their increased production: yet regulates the expression of this incentive with conditions that obviate violence, oppression, exploitation, extortion and other forms of misuse of freedom. These conditions safeguard the interests of society and are limits on individual independence in no way injurious to liberty, since both communal living and individual freedom must impose those limits on behavior which will guarantee the survival of both individual and community; and must therefore outlaw profiteering, embezzlement, malversation, hoarding, miserliness, avarice, usury, forcible seizure of other people's property and all similar criminal and anti-social methods of amassing capital.

Islam and Economics (2)

Economic historians tell us that at its inception the capitalist system was simple and beneficent: but that the habit of granting loans at interest step by step grew to its present harmful excess. With this came the bankrupting of small concerns and their amalgamation into huge complex companies and financial structures. Islam labels such usury "sin", as it does also the crises of boom and slump inseparable from the system.

Islam has legislated for a payment of "Zakat" (the Poor Rate) of 20% on capital gains by the rich for the support of the indigent. This helps to level out differences, to draw economic extremes closer together and to curb excessive piling up of wealth. Another Islamic regulation with the same aim and same results is the government's right to tax wealth for national finances, since Islam holds that God has put His good gifts into this world for the benefit of all, as may be seen

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by the forests, reedbeds, pastures, desert lands, mountain ranges, mines. [1]

Estates, too, become public either through the intestacy of a deceased owner or because they are paid as fines in restitution; so that they are as much the property of all as God meant all things to be. Islam's testamentary laws also curb undue accumulation of property in the hands of one family from generation to generation.

The conditions, therefore, by which Islam limits its respect for the rights of private ownership, are those which are dictated by the need to assure that the individual's privileges never menace the wellbeing of the Islamic community. Therefore, in emergency or disorder, the just Islamic government can employ the legal powers put at its disposal both to avert dangers which threaten the future and also so to administer society as to meet the needs of the Muslim masses, any time it sees fit.

A country's land may not fall into the possession of a small handful of proprietors. Indigence and malnutrition of the masses may not be ignored. These points are fixed principles, frankly and firmly, faithfully and forcefully, propounded by Islam. The Faith condemns the injurious intrusion of modern capitalist practices into the Muslim world and bans.

In the Qur'an it is written (Sura 59-"Al-Hashr" —"The Gathering of Troops" verse 7 in part): "The dispositions we have revealed for the distribution of property... are ordained that capital may not merely circulate round the group of capitalists amongst you. "

In addition to the legal enactments which ensure

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the correct use of finances and resources by punishing transgressions, Islam also brings entirely new motives to bear, as our Qur'anic quotation hints, by directing men's aspirations towards God. It therefore streamlines their conduct within the confines of the road that leads to Him. This road has moral fences on either side over which the aspirant desires not to stray. The road is paved with philanthropy, affection, and sentiments of charity and self-sacrifice, which mean that no Muslim will voluntarily be a party to courses of action which lead to injustice to others. Thus the individual's conscience refuses to pile up excessive capital, and the employer refuses to use tyranny or oppression to compel his workers to produce.

This lofty spiritual challenge, directed towards helping the individual come to a knowledge of God and so to love of his neighbor, is deeply planted within the conscience, so that a man finds his pleasures and his treasures in pleasing his Creator; and these excel all other values for him. In truth it is the decline of faith today, and the diminution of belief in doomsday and judgment, which led to the greed and cupidity and maleficence and the forms of injustice and oppression which we see around us. Unless men's relationships are right with God, their relationships will not be right with one another. A revolution of conscience It produces a revolution in the soul, in society, and in the world. Such is the lesson of history in practice, as well as

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the doctrine of religion.

The same considerations apply to the ideology of Communism, and it will be readily seen that Islamic lore is superior to both the Western and Eastern materialist excesses.

Modern philosophers like William James, Harold Laski, John Strachey, Walter Lippmann, criticize Communists' total abrogation of personal and social affairs in favor of the state authority, saying that the individual's personality and initiative are suffocated in such an ambience. While on the other hand capitalist democracy over-emphasizes individual freedom to the detriment of social progress. This creates an oligarchy of the rich, making them masters of the means of production and turning all men into slaves of economics.

From opposing angles they come to a common conclusion that individuals must impose an inner discipline on themselves if they are to enjoy true freedom, contradictory as that may seem, and that the welfare of society depends upon the responsible exercise by its members of that self-disciplined freedom. What is their conclusion other than a restatement of the doctrine which Islam has been preaching for 14 centuries? It is time that the lessons of history, the conclusions of the philosophers and the doctrines of religion were made the guidelines for the conduct of men and communities everywhere.

In AD 1951 the Paris College of Law devoted a week to the study of the Islamic "Fiqh" (Canon Law). They called in experts from Islamic lands round the world for elucidation of particular points, e. g.:

1. Islamic Canon Law on property;

2. Conditions for filing deeds

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of exchange on property to preserve the welfare of society and the public;

3. Criminal responsibility;

4. The reciprocal influence of Islamic faith and Canon Law on each other.

The head of the Parisian Lawyers' Society chaired the conference and summed up at the end thus: "Whatever our earlier ideas about Islamic law and its rigidity or incompetence in documenting transactions, we have been compelled to revise them in this conference. Let me sum up the new insights—new I think to most of us— the conference has given us, in this week devoted particularly to the Fiqh, Islamic Canon Law.

We saw in it a depth of rock bottom principle and of particularized care which embraces mankind in its universality and is thus able to give an answer to all the emergencies and events of this age. In our final communiqué we say: 'Islam's Canon Law should be made one of the formative elements of all new international legislation to meet present-day conditions, since it possesses a legal treasure of stable universal value which fits its Fiqh, amongst the modern welter of religious views and pronouncements, to cope with the exigencies imposed by the new forms of living arising in the modern environment'. "

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[1]: The arid sunbaked expanses of the Islamic belt of territory which stretches from the Mauritanian Atlantic coast nearly 6,000 miles through the Soviet Muslim Republics of the Western Gobi, can support only a scant human population, while the paucity of vegetation forces a nomad migratory way of life upon livestock-owners, if they are to find pasturage. Hence our author's list of the publicly owned benefits of God's gifts: while his omission of sunlight and rain, which are natural in the thought of Westerners as free for all, are not mentioned because that belt has always too much sunshine and too little rainfall. (Translator's note. )  the greed and avarice which lead to enslavement, war and imperialism.

Islam and Intellectual Advance

Most Westerners are ignorant of the debt their civilization owes to Islam, even for modern industrial transformation, scientific advance and philosophical enterprise.

Islam came into the world in the bosom of one of the most backward of peoples. In a very short time it had raised those tribes to pre-eminence in every field.

Its

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greatest miracle was its appearance as a full grown adult of the spirit in so degraded and poverty-stricken an environment.

Its second miracle was the raising of that environment, by sheer force of inspiration, without any extraneous aids, to an unmatched destiny.

Its third was to create a cultural focus from which strong waves radiated, stimulating renascence in other peoples of every background throughout the world.

The changes it wrought compose history's greatest revolution so far, a revolution in sense and sensibility, in thought and intellect, in relations of individuals and communities, and indeed in every department of human life.

By the end of its first millennium Islam stretched from the Atlantic coast of Africa in the west to the Great Wall of China in the east, from the Mediterranean to the Sahara in Africa. In Spain its troops took first Andalusia, then all Spain up to the Pyrenees, and even penetrated the south of France as far north as Tours. All the "Jezirat-ul'Arab" was of course Muslim. From Muslim Iran and Afghanistan other troops took Sind, the Punjab and the Gobi— and this within a few short centuries.

In all its dominions the principles worked out in the Arab homeland were applied to the new societies under its sway. In particular its justice, equality and brotherhood, humane fruits of its meticulous care for the individual and his place in society, which are the distinguishing marks of Islam, set their stamp on the communities over this entire vast area.

The first task was the overthrow of

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tyrannies: the second was the establishment of sound Islamic rule and respect for human rights: the third was the illumination of intellect, research and thought: the fourth was the propagating of the faith by its calm appeal to reason and logic and by its profundity and breadth of vision: the fifth—and perhaps the most glorious because the most anonymous —was the infection of other nations, of all creeds and none, with its own superior moral, mental and spiritual outlook.

This last achievement not merely raised the general level of peoples of every religion throughout the world, but also drew many proselytes to itself from the idolaters of Arabia, the animists of Africa, the Magians and Zoroastrians of Iran, and the Christians of Egypt and Syria.

Pre-Muslim Arabia had no trace of culture, no science, no erudition, no economics; for geographical reasons Arabs lived in penury and squalor, the prey of superstitions, isolated from world currents. Islam changed all that, and went on to open the hearts and brains of men everywhere to new possibilities.

In far-off Andalusia a school of scholars, writers, mathematicians, scientific researchers and philosophers arose, inspired by Islam to revive the level of thought reached by the Greeks 1500 years earlier, and to move on up from there to heights never before touched by man.

Modern scholars in every country, even those whose prejudices would make them prefer to maintain a critical and hostile attitude to Islam, more and more draw attention to the speed of the spread of the

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Muslim faith, to its beneficent results for mankind's prowess in thought and study, and the progressiveness of the ideas which it brought to other stagnant civilizations.

It should be noted by all our "progressives" everywhere, that this brilliant advance for all humanity was the concomitant of a moral self-discipline, of an eschewing of the dissipation which follows upon losing the reins of passion, and of a deliberate control of the creative instincts, which channeled them into works of artistic, intellectual, and social creativity worthy of mature human beings. This inner discipline, which man needs, promotes the inner freedom he desires; and it is one cause of Islam's wide dominion over the minds of men of the early Middle Ages. For it offered not merely sounder outward forms of living but reassurance to the inner core of the spirit. It abolished the wild persecutions brought about by purblind bigotry and by narrow-minded fanaticism.

It was for this reason that the Sultan Kemal-ul-Mulk, nephew of Saladdin, talked as man to man, and as scion of the same spirit, to Francis of Assisi when the Saint crossed the lines from the camp of the Crusaders under King Louis, whom the Muslims had halted before Damietta. It was the same universal humanity which caused the vast contrast between Omar's merciful treatment of the Christians in Jerusalem when he conquered it, and the barbarous massacre of Jerusalem's Muslim inhabitants by the European Crusaders who took it back for a brief period 300 years later. Islam replaced such

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savagery with a constitutional rule, a humanely regulated society, an overarching philosophy embracing all mankind.

In Europe's Dark Ages, while the Church established its power over the different nationalities, and fettered them in restraining bonds in a status quo, Islam was building up a many-sided culture which laid the basis for that flowering of science, knowledge, and artistic and technological creativity which is called the "Renaissance".

This was while the Church was condemning Galileo for confirming Copernicus' theory of the orbiting of the earth round the sun, and forcing him to his famous recantation: "I, Galileo Galilei, in the 70th year of my age (1633 AD) , on my knees before your Reverences (the Pope and Bishops) with the Holy Scriptures before my eyes, take them in my hands and kiss them while repenting and denying the foolish claim that the earth moves, and regard that claim as a hateful heresy," even while he muttered rebelliously sotto voce "Eppur si muove".

Yet 500 years previously our own great astronomer and mathematician Omar Khayyam of Nishapur (floruit 2nd half of 11th century AD, when William the Bastard was conquering England) had provided Iran with the Jalali Calendar which to this day enables us to start our new year not merely on the day, but on the exact hour, minute, and second that the earth terminates one orbit and starts another round the sun at the vernal equinox! How few Westerners know this! They think of him as a poet, though he was an indifferent

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one, but do not realize that if they had picked up his wisdom they might have avoided all their Gregorian alterations of the Julian calendar, and the loss of their "11 days"!

Roger Bacon (1214-1292 AD) the Franciscans' "Doctor mirabilis", was in the reign of Edward I of England compelled to give up the experimental research into science to which his lectures in Paris on Aristotle's works and in particular on the "Liber de Causis" had led him; and was driven out from Oxford back to Paris to be kept under the Church's eye—an eye too narrow and bigoted to see the wealth of the scientific treasures he was offering them. He was arraigned as a dabbler in devilish and satanic alchemy: and the mob was incited to yell for "this sorcerer's hand to be cut off and this 'Muslim' (1) to be exiled. "

Nowadays European and American historians and scholars all recognize and relate the fundamental contributions made by Islam to all modern advances in science, mathematics, technology, philosophy, in many ways of which this brief chapter has only been able to touch the fringe.

Cultural Revolution

No better evidence of the passion of Islam for the spread of erudition, from its very inception, can be given than the words of the Prophet himself who said, after the battle of Badr and the Muslims' victory, to the huge crowds whom they had taken prisoner, that any of them who wished to buy their freedom but had no cash for a ransom could employ their

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literacy as their resources; and any polytheist who trained ten Muslims to read and write should win freedom. His pronouncement was put into practice; and it was thus that a large number of his original adherents were started on the road of education.

His nephew and successor, the Imam Ali, on whom be blessing, declared that the spreading of science and knowledge and culture and intellectual ability was one of the merits to be coveted and achieved by every Muslim government. In the record of his words it is reported that he said: "O people! I have rights over you and you have rights over me. Your right over me is to insist that I shall always give you guidance and counsel, and seek your welfare, and improve the public funds and all your livelihoods, and help raise you from ignorance and illiteracy to heights of knowledge, learning, culture, social manners and good conduct. "

215 years after the Hejra the Abbasid Caliph Ma'amoun founded a "House of Wisdom" in Baghdad to be a center of science, and furnished it with an astronomical observatory and a public library, for which he set aside 200,000 dinars (the equivalent of some 7 million dollars). He gathered together a large number of learned men who were acquainted with foreign languages and different disciplines, like Honain and Bakht-eeshoo' and Ibn Tariq and Ibn Muqafa' and Hajaj bin Matar and Sirgis Ra'asi, and others too numerous to mention, and set aside a large sum for them, dispatching many

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of them to all the different countries of the world to collect books on science, medicine, philosophy, mathematics, and fine literature, in Hindi, Pahlevi, Chaldean, Syriac, Greek, Latin and Farsi. It is said that the vast collections they sent to Baghdad exceeded 100 camel loads!

Europe had not one university or cultural center to show for itself in those centuries when Islamic lands had large numbers staffed by experts and specialists in all branches of knowledge. These Islamic centers were beginning to radiate waves of brilliant new thinking to the world at the very moment when the Crusades were launched. In fact it might be said that it was the new learning fostered by Islam which itself furnished the Europeans with some of their new thinking that made possible whatever prowess they achieved in those disastrous wars and fired the passion of jealousy and cupidity which made the West wish to seize for itself the treasures which they saw Islam bringing to the nations under its sway.

Dr. Gustave Le Bon writes on page 329 of volume III of his "History of Islamic and Arab Civilization": "In those days when books and libraries meant nothing to Europeans, many Islamic lands had books and libraries in plenty. Indeed, in Baghdad's 'House of Wisdom' there were four million volumes ; and in Cairo's Sultanic Library one million; and in the library of Syrian Tripoli three million volumes ; while in Spain alone under Muslim rule there was an annual publication of between 70 and

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80 thousand volumes. "

G. l'Estrange in his "Legacy of Islam" page 230 writes: "The Mustansariyya University was furnished with equipment and built in a huge campus with college edifices of such splendor that its peer exists neither in the Muslim world nor elsewhere. Its four law-colleges, each with 75 students and a professor who taught the pupils gratis, paid its professor a monthly salary, while each of the 300 students was given a gold dinar a month. A college kitchen provided the daily meals. Ibn- el-Farat says that the library contained priceless and unique volumes, on many branches of science, for any student to borrow. Pens and paper were provided for the notes anyone might wish to take. The university had hammams (baths) and infirmaries. Its doctors conducted a daily inspection of the colleges, and wrote prescriptions for any who were ill. The college stores were able to dispense drugs prescribed, immediately. All this at the beginning of the 13th century AD! "

Dr. Max Meyerhof writes: "In Istanbul the mosques possess between them more than 80 libraries, with tens of thousands of books and ancient manuscripts. In Cairo, Damascus, Mosul, Baghdad, and in cities of Iran and of India there are other great libraries full of treasures. A proper catalogue of the precious volumes in all these has not yet been published complete in print. Moreover, the Escorial library in the Iberian Peninsula contains a huge section filled with books and manuscripts produced by the Islamic scholars of the West, which also awaits

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completion of its cataloguing. "

Dr. Gustave Le Bon writes on pages 557/8 of his "Islamic and Arab Civilization": "The Muslims pursued the sciences with profound application. In any town they took, their first act was to build a mosque and thereafter a college. This led to the production of majestic institutions of learning in a vast number of cities. Benjamin Toole (ob. 1173 AD) said that in Alexandria he found more than 20 colleges at work. Baghdad, Cairo, Cordova, and other places all had great universities with laboratories, observatories, huge libraries and all the other requirements for tackling intellectual problems. In Andalusia alone there were 70 public libraries. The library of Al-Hakem II in Cordova contained 600,000 volumes and it took 44 volumes to catalogue the library's contents. When Charles the Just, four centuries later, founded the Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris he was only able to assemble a total of 900 volumes, and that after great labors, while one- third of that 900 were books on religion. "

The same author on page 562 adds: "The Muslims launched science on the road of exactitude, experiment and forward-looking discovery by hypothesis, with a particular enthusiasm, while producing books and treatises and high schools that spread their intellectual prowess to all corners of the world. They thereby opened for Europe the road to its renaissance. So it is with justification that the title of 'Europe's Professor' is given to the newly-arisen Islamic power, since it was through them that the treasures of ancient Greek and Roman

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science were rediscovered and enhanced and given back to Europe as she began to emerge from the Dark Ages. "

Josef Marc Kapp writes, concerning the first centuries of Islam's progress in culture, in his book "Muslim Splendor in Spain" (p. 170): "Even the lowest classes in society were athirst to learn to read; and humble workers limited their expenditure on food and clothing and spent their last soul on buying books. One worker collected such a library that men of learning flocked to him. Freed slaves and the children of slaves entered the ranks of the learned; and men like Vafyat-ul- A'iyan Ibn Khalkan laid the foundations for great progress".

Nehru wrote concerning the benefits conferred on social progress and the cultural revolution of the Muslims in Andalusia in his book "A Glimpse at World History" (p. 413): "Cordova had over a million in habitants, a magnificent public park of about 20 kilometers and suburbs stretching 40 kilometers, with 6,000 palaces, mansions and great houses, 200,000 smaller houses of beauty, 70,000 stores and small shops. 300 mosques, 700 hammams with hot and cold baths for public use. There were innumerable libraries of which the most comprehensive and important was the Royal Library, which contained 400,000 volumes. Cordova University was famous throughout Europe and in western Asia. At the same time education was provided for the poor. Indeed one of their contemporary historians writes that nearly everyone in Spain in those days could read and write, while in the rest of Christian Europe, apart from the monks

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and clerkly persons who were educated trough religious houses, no one, including the highest members of the nobility, thought it worth his while even to attempt to master basic arts of reading. "

To illustrate these claims I append eight extremely brief chapters, each on a different branch of science or culture; my debt I gladly acknowledge to Arnold and Guillaume's "Legacy of Islam" (publ. O. U. P. 1931) to which I refer any reader who wishes to extend his information.

Medical Science

Dr Meyerhof writes in "The Legacy of Islam" (p. 132): "Muslim doctors laughed at the Crusaders' medical attendants for their clumsy and elementary efforts. The Europeans had not the advantage of the books of Avicenna, Jaber, Hassan bin Haytham, Rhazes. However they finally had them translated into Latin. These translations exist still, without the translators' names. In the 16th century the books of Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and Avicenna (Ibn Sina) were put out in Latin translation in Italy and used as the basis of instruction in the Italian and French universities. "

On page 116 of the same work he writes that after Rhazes' death the works of Avicenna (AD 980-1037) were taken up. His influence on thought and philosophy and general science was profound, and his medical works (based on the works of Galen which he had found in the Samarqand library in Arabic translation) had a sensational outreach. Other scientists followed— Abu'l-Qais of Andalusia ; Ibn-Zahr of Andalusia ; Abbas the Iranian; Ali ibn-Rezvan of Egypt ; Ibn Butlan of Baghdad; Abu Mansur Muwaffaq of

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Herat; Ibn Wafeed of Spain; Masooya of Baghdad; Ali ibn-Esau of Baghdad; Ammar of Mosul; Ibn-Rushd (Averroes) of Andalusia ; whose works translated to Latin were used in European universities. Europe knew nothing of the cholera bacterium when Islam entered Spain, and the people there regarded the disease as a punishment sent from heaven to exact the penalty of sins: but Muslim physicians had already proved that even the bubonic plague was a contagious disease and nothing else.

Dr. Meyerhof writes of Avicenna's book "The Canon" that it is a masterpiece of medical science which proved its worth by being printed in a series of 16 editions in the closing years of the 15th century AD, 15 Latin and one Arabic. In the 16th century more than a score of further editions were published, because of its value as a scientific work. Its use continued throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, so that it became the most widely known of all medical treatises. It is still consulted in medical schools.

Will Durant writes that Mohammad ibn Zachariah Razi (Rhazes) was one of Islam's most progressive physicians, author of 200 treatises and books well worth studying today: in particular his

1. "Smallpox and Measles" (published in Latin and other European tongues in 40 editions between 1497 and 1866) , and

2. "The Great Encyclopedia" 20 volumes mostly unobtainable nowadays: five volumes were devoted to optics ; translated into Latin AD 1279; printed in five editions in 1542 alone; known as the most authoritative work on the

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eye and its ailments and treatment for centuries; one of the nine basic works on which Paris University composed its medical course in 1394 AD.

Surgery made similar progress in the hands of Islamic practitioners, who even used anesthetics, though these are assumed to be of modern origin. They employed a henbane base.

Among Rhazes' innovations was the use of cold water to treat persistent fever, of dry-cupping for apoplexy, of mercury ointment and animal gut for wound sutures, and many others.

Further information on Islamic medicine can be sought from the many books on the subject. The diagnosis of tuberculosis from the fingernails, the cure of jaundice, the use of cold water to prevent hemorrhage, the crushing of stones in bladder and kidney to facilitate their removal, and surgery for hernia are among advances too numerous to mention in detail. The greatest of Islamic surgeons was Abu'l-Qasem of Andalusia, affectionately called Abu'l-gays, and sometimes Abu'l-Qasees, floruit 11th century AD, inventor of very many surgical instruments and author of books to describe them and their uses— books translated and printed in innumerable editions in Latin and used all over Europe, the last such edition being in 1816.

Pharmacology

Gustave le Bon writes: "Besides the use of cold water to treat typhoid cases — a treatment later abandoned, though Europe is taking this Muslim invention up again in modern times after a lapse of centuries— Muslims invented the art of mixing chemical medicaments in pills and solutions, many of which are in use to this day,

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though some of them are claimed as wholly new inventions of our present century by chemists unaware of their distinguished history. Islam had dispensaries which filled prescriptions for patients gratis, and in parts of countries where no hospitals were reachable, physicians paid regular visits with all the tools of their trade to look after public health. "

Georgi Zeidan writes: "Modern European pharmacologists who have studied the history of their profession find that Muslim doctors launched many of the modern beneficial specifics centuries ago, made a science of pharmacology and compound cures, and set up the first pharmacies on the modern model. So that Baghdad alone had 60 chemists' shops dispensing prescriptions regularly at the charges of the Caliph. Evidence of these facts can be seen in the names given in Europe to quite a number of medicines and herbs which betray their Arabic, Indian or Persian origin. " Such are "alcohol, alkali, alkaner, apricot, arsenic," to quote some 'a's alone. all the tools of their trade to look after public health. ”

Hospitals

Georgi Zeidan continues: "Within two centuries of the death of the Prophet, Mecca, Medina and the other great Muslim cities all had hospitals, while the Abbasid governors and their ministers competed each for his own region to have the best such institution for the care of the sick. Baghdad alone had four important hospitals. By three centuries after the Hejra the governor Adhud-ud-Dowleh Deylamy had founded the Adhudi Hospital with 24 specialists, each master of his own particular field, a hospital which

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soon earned the reputation of excelling all hospitals throughout Islam, though in the course of time it too was surpassed.

"The order and arrangement of Islamic hospitals was such that no distinctions of race, religion or occupation were recognized, but cure was administered with meticulous care to any patient. Separate wards were allotted for patients of specific diseases. These were teaching hospitals where the students learned theory and observed practice. In addition, there were travelling hospitals which carried doctors and their gear by camel or mule to every district. Sultan Mahmoud the Seljuk travelled with a hospital which required 40 camels for its transport. "

Dr. Gustave le Bon writes: "Muslim hospitals went in for preventive medicine and the preservation of health as much as if not more than for the cure of the already diseased. They were well-aired and had plenty of running water. Muhammad bin Zachariah Razi (Rhazes) was ordered by the Sultan to seek out the healthiest place in the Baghdad neighborhood for the construction of a new hospital.

He visited every section of the town and its environs, and hung up a piece of meat which he left while he looked into infectious diseases in the neighborhood and studied climatic conditions, particularly the state of the water. He balanced all these various experimental tests and finally found them all to indicate that the place where the portion of meat was the last to putrefy and develop infectious bacteria was the spot on which to build. These hospitals had large common

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wards and also private wards for individuals. Pupils were trained in diagnosis and brought observation and experience to the perfecting of their studies. There were also special mental hospitals, and pharmacies which dispensed prescriptions gratis. "

Marc Kapp writes: "Cairo had a huge hospital with playing fountains and flower-decked gardens and 40 large courtyards. Every unfortunate patient was kindly received, and after his cure sent home with five gold coins. While Cordova, besides its 600 mosques and 900 public hammams, had 50 hospitals. "

Chemistry

Jaber ibn Haiyan, disciple of the sixth Imam Ja'far as-Sadiq, became known world-wide as "the Father of Chemistry" and of Arab alchemy. His influence on Western chemistry and alchemy was profound and long-lasting. Some hundreds of his works survive. Of him the late Sayyid Hebbat-ud-Din Shahristani of Kadhemain, once Iraq's Minister of Education, writes: "I have seen some 50 ancient MSS of works of Jaber all dedicated to his master the Imam Ja'far. More than 500 of his works have been put into print and are for the most part to be found among the treasures of the National Libraries of Paris and Berlin, while the savants of Europe nickname him affectionately 'Wisdom's Professor' and attribute to him the discovery of 19 of the elements with their specific weights, etc. Jaber says all can be traced back to a simple basic particle composed of a charge of lightning (electricity) and fire, the atom, or smallest indivisible unit of matter, very close to modern atomic science. "

The blending of coloring matters, dyeing,

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extraction of minerals and metals, steelmaking, tanning, were amongst industrial techniques of which the Muslims were early masters. They produced Nitric Acid, Sulfuric Acid, Nitro-glycerine, Hydrochloric Acid, Potassium, Aqua Ammonia, Sal Ammoniac, Silver Nitrate, Sulphuric Chloride, Potassium Nitrate, Alcohol, Alkali (both still known by their Arabic names) , Orpiment (yellow tri-sulfide of arsenic: arsenic is derived from the Persian zar = gold, adjective zarnee = golden, Arabised with article "al" to "al-zernee" pronounced "azzernee" and so taken into Greek where it was turned to the recognizable word "arsenikon" which means "masculine" since the gold color was supposed to link it with the sun, a masculine deity! ): and finally—though this does not close the list we might cite—Borax, also an Arabic word booraq. Further, the arts of distilling, evaporation, sublimation, and the use of Sodium, Carbon, Potassium Carbonate, Chloride, and Ammonium were common under the Abbasid Caliphate.

Industry

The Abbasid Caliph Haroun-al-Rasheed sent Charlemagne in Aix from Baghdad a present of a clock made by his horologists which struck a bell on the hour every hour, to the great wonder and delight of the whole court of the newly "crowned Holy Roman Emperor.

The massacre and expulsion of the Muslims of Andalusia by the Christians carried with it the closure of many of the great factories that had existed under Islamic rule, and the standstill of progress that had been made in science, crafts, arts, agriculture, and other products of civilization.

Towns began to fall into ruin because of the lack of skilled masons. Madrid

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dropped from 400,000 to 200,000 inhabitants: Seville, which had possessed 1,600 factories under the Muslims, lost all but 300, and the 130,000 workers formerly employed had no more jobs, while the census of Philip IV showed a fall of 75% in population figures.

It was the Muslims also who brought about the substitution of cotton-wove paper for the old parchments; and it was this invention which formed the basis for Europe's later invention of printing, using an old Chinese technique, and so for the vast uprush of learning which came with the Renaissance. More, since monks were starved for parchment on which to write their religious works, they were tending more and more to scrape off priceless ancient scientific texts from old parchments and to use them again as palimpsests. The introduction of paper put a stop to this disastrous practice in time to save quite a number of texts which would have otherwise been lost forever, as, alas, too many were.

A paper manuscript of the year AD 1009 was found in the Escorial library, and claims to be the oldest hand-written book on paper still in existence. Silk-wove paper, of course, was a Chinese invention, since silk was native to China though rare in Europe; and the Muslim genius lay in seeing the possibility of substituting cotton for silk, and so giving Europe a plentiful supply of a practicable material for the reproduction of books by the monkish scribes.

Philip Hitti writes in his "History of the Arabs" that the art

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of road making was so well developed in Islamic lands that Cordova had miles of paved road lit from the houses on each side at night so that people walked in safety ; while in London or Paris anyone who ventured out on a rainy night sank up to his ankles in mud — and did so for seven centuries after Cordova was paved! Oxford men then held that bathing was an idolatrous practice ; while Cordovan students reveled in luxurious public hammams!

Mathematics

Baron Carra de Vaux, author of the chapter on "Astronomy and Mathematics" in "The Legacy of Islam" (OUP 1931 pp. 376-398) , points out that the word "algebra" is a Latinization of the Arabic term Al-jabr (= "the reduction": i. e. of complicated numbers to a simpler language of symbols) , thereby revealing the debt the world owes to the Arabs for this invention. Furthermore the numerals that are used are "Arabic numerals" not merely in name but also in fact. Above all the Arabs' realization of the value of the Hindu symbol for zero laid the foundation of all our modern computerized technology. The word "zero", like its cousin "cipher" are both attempts at transliterating the Arabic "sefr", in order to convey into Europe the reality and the meaning of that word in Arabic.

De Vaux writes: "By using ciphers the Arabs became the founders of the arithmetic of everyday life; they made algebra an exact science and developed it considerably; they laid the foundations of analytical geometry; they were

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indisputably the founders of plane and spherical trigonometry. The astrolabe (safeeha) was invented by the Arab Al-Zarqali (Arzachel) who lived in Spain AD 1029-1087. The word "algorism" is a latinization of the name of its inventor, the native of Khiva called by the name of his home province Al-Khwarizmi. The Arabs kept alive the higher intellectual life and the study of science in a period when the Christian West was fighting desperately with barbarism. "

This is not the place to go further into Muslim achievements in mathematics and astronomy. Suffice it to refer once again to the Jalali calendar of Omar Khayyam, with its formulae for exact calculation of the timing of the earth's orbits round the sun, to which reference has been made earlier.

Geography

The Arabian Nights' tales of Sinbad the Sailor, and of his voyages to China, Japan, and the Spice Islands of Indonesia, give quite enough evidence of the brilliance of Arabic commercial shipping and the knowledge of meteorology and geography which was at their disposal. Small wonder that the Faith spread through them from Morocco to Mindanao.

But, besides the SE Asian seas, Arabic sailors penetrated far down the East coast of Africa, and also up the rivers which are channels from the Black Sea into the distant interior of Russia. The Safarname (Travel journal) of Suleiman, a sea-captain of Seraf, the port on the Persian Gulf recently excavated by Dr. David Stronach of the British Institute of Persian Studies, was published at the end of the

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9th century AD with accounts of his voyages to India and China. It was translated into Latin, as giving some of the earliest first-hand knowledge of China which ever reached Europe.

The geographer Ibn Hauqal (floruit circa AD 975) wrote in his preface: "I have written the latitude and longitude of the places of this earth, of all its countries, with their boundaries, and the dominions of Islam, with a careful map of each section on which I have marked numerous places, e. g. the cities, the kasbahs, the rivers, the lakes, the crops, the types of agriculture, the roads, the distances between place and place, the goods for commerce and everything else in the science of geography which can be useful to sovereigns and their ministers and interesting to all people in general. "

Abu-Reihan al-Biruni, Ibn Batuta and Abu'l-Haussan are amongst other names in the history of the science of geography whose worldwide travels were accompanied by meticulous observation and painstaking notes, which are amongst the proudest achievements of science in our world to this day.

Art

Cordova Mosque is one of the finest monuments of Muslim art in Europe. Its architect and masons were local talent, who introduced a number of novelties. The Muslims excelled at mosaic, inlay, fretwork and applique work of all types. Marvellous doors, pulpits, and ceilings are decorated in many of the ancient mosques all over the Muslim world with a lacelike design of mosaic, carved ivory and wood and plaster, and fitted pieces of carved wood

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interlocking with each other with consummate artistry.

Chased and engraved wood and ivory are everywhere. Thus the Altar of the Church of Saint Isidore Hispalensis (archbishop of Seville in the first years of the 7th century AD) like the carved ivory jewel-case made for Queen Isabella in the 11th century and the carved ivory box now in the Church at Bayeux of the 12th century (obviously some Crusader's loot from the East) inlaid with silver in chased gold, are examples of that art which was the glory of Eastern lands. All this delicate and minute handiwork was carried out with the crudest and roughest of tools, itself a further tribute to the skill and artistry of the makers.

Jewel-studded boxes and cases and caskets are to be seen in many places, though the best are on view in the museums of Damascus and Cairo. Well said Sa'adi: "An Eastern artist may take 40 years to make one porcelain vase: the West turns out 100 a day, all alike: the comparative worth of the two products can be easily reckoned! "

The Muslims were also past masters of the art of carved and cultured plaster work, in a style which still subsists though modern technologies are, alas, rendering the skill rarer all the time. Tenth century examples, some with enameled work also, are to be found in Andalusia. The Alhambra has 13th century masterpieces of this work. They glitter like the later Italian Majolica. The famous Alhambra flower-vase, 11/2 meters high, is unique in this

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line.

Conclusion of Part 2

In this part of our book we have given the briefest of sketches of some of the treasures of mind and spirit which mankind owes to the rise of Islam.

They are not stated in braggadocio but as an assessment of facts of human history. For too long they have been neglected and forgotten not merely by those who benefited from them indirectly but even also by the very descendants of their authors themselves.

Yet if mankind is to attain the power to live as one united family which is our calling and destiny, it will happen on a basis of appreciation of each other.

This adult assessment is growing. Modern scholars are now showing gratitude that the Arab General Tareq-bin-Ziyyad in AD 711 landed his troops by the mountain since called Jebel-al-Tareq (Gibraltar) after him. His Moors were unwelcome invaders at the time. It was a moment when Europe had lost most of the benefit of Roman unification and cultural advance and sunk back into the Dark Ages under the barbarian hordes overwhelming it from the North. With the Moors came in the fresh stimulus of lively minds, bringing in Arabic the best thinking of ancient Greeks and Romans, the impetus of scholarship and learning, the desire for scientific and philosophic speculation, the aesthetic delight of artistic creation again.

Islamic universities as far apart as Baghdad and Andalusia welcomed Christian and Jewish students, many of whom profited by the instructions to be obtained nowhere else in those days. They were received

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with generous subventions and assistance by their Muslim hosts, who treated them as honored guests. Dynamics, Statistics, Chemistry, Physics, were among the lessons.

In his "Making of Humanity" Brilioth writes: "Modern European education in all branches stems from the Muslims' curiosity and pertinacity in investigating the secrets of nature. "

If our brief summary opens the road for Westerners to the exploration of Eastern discoveries we are content; and can so proceed to Part 3 and an examination of Islam's treatment of some of the social problems which afflict every human community.