The Islamic bill of human rights is a system of axiolgical principles or values. The deontological applications of them, or the duties and ought’s deriving therefrom, have been elaborated in the shari’ah — the law of Islam. Hence, Islam’s human rights are not merely ethical desiderata, or ideals of administrative policy, which cannot be invoked in legal processes. They have the full force of established law, and they have been known both to the literate and illiterate a whole millennium before the age of printing. Equally, except in a few cases, the letter of the prescriptive elaborations of human rights in Islam is not sacrosanct and hence absolutely unalterable. The qualities of eternity and immutability belong to the principles behind the prescriptive elaboration, not to their figurization , i.e. to the legal form given them by translation of the purposes of the law into legislative prescriptions. Eternity and absoluteness, belong in the main, to the axiological postulates. With the exception of these postulates and directions, all deontological elaborations, whether legal or methodological, and other prescriptive particularizations of the shari’ah are ever-open to reinterpretation by humans. This openness is dictated by the ever-changing conditions and situations of human life which demand in turn a readiness on the part of the law to meet them in pursuit of its eternal objectives. The shari’ah is divine and eternal therefore, not in its letter, but in its spirit.

The letter of the law is honoured precisely because of its derivation from that which is divine and eternal. To enable itself to move with time and to accommodate changing human conditions, the shari’ah established the science of usul al fiqh. This science recognized from the earliest time that the shari’h has other sources, besides the texts of the Holy Qur’an and Sunnah, which guarantee dynamism and creativity. To this purpose, usul al fiqh established a methodology of logical deduction and analogical extrapolation from the data revelata, as well as criteria for an empirical discovery of the common welfare of the people which it declared an equally valid source of law. For the overwhelming majority of Muslims (the adherents of the Hanafi, Maliki and Ja’fari schools or madhahib of law) to establish critically — i.e. empirically — the requisites of public welfare and to subsume them, either through istihsan (juristic preference) or maslahah (juristic consideration of the commonweal), under the Maqasid al Shari’ah (the general purpose of the law), is the pinnacle of juristic wisdom and Islamic piety.

We are therefore dealing with neither a fossilized law whose form or letter is immutable; nor with a flux of precepts which change with every situation. Rather, Islam’s human rights are anchored in eternal principles or values whose applications may develop following human situations, but only with critical guarantees for the permanence of those principles and values.

As values, Islam’s human rights arrange themselves in clusters and are best discerned as such; for a recognition of each value becomes at once a recognition of its relatives, as well as of its order of rank within the cluster and in the realm of values as a whole. There are nine such clusters.

I. Values Associated with Birth

All humans are born innocent.

1) There is neither original sin nor fall; neither vicarious guilt, nor vicarious merit; neither predestination to be saved, nor to be condemned.

2) On the contrary, all humans are created in the best of forms and perfect; i.e., endowed with faculties which enable them to recognise their Creator and their creaturely status, to discern good and evil, to acknowledge their own human rights and obligations.

3) They are created absolutely equal. Their physical characteristics as well as those which pertain to the geography or sociography of their birth and are no more than aids for personal identification.

4) There can therefore be no division of human castes, destined at birth for one kind of living or another, as Hinduism claims; or into classes destined at birth for one kind of function or another, as Marxism claims; nor predestination to salvation or damnation as Calvin taught; nor, finally, ontological election to a “chosen” status different from all humans, as Judaism claims. A human’s personal worth or unworth can never be a function of that person’s birth. To be born is to have the right to be, to live as long as God alone permits. No one may be deprived of life except for legitimate cause, and none may take away his own life.

5) Equally, to be born is to be endowed with God’s amanah or trust to actualize the divine patterns, i.e., to realize the absolute in this space-time.

6) This is the meaning of khilafah or vicegerency of God.

7) As well as the ground of cosmic status, the station higher than that of the angels, which belongs to all humans by virtue of birth.

8) No human may be deprived of the right to fulfill the amanah and khilafah, to the full extent of one’s power.

II. Values Associated with Childhood

All humans are entitled to have parents, descendents from whom gives them their names and identities.

9) No foundling may remain a foundling but must be rehabilitated into his natural family. All children are entitled to love and care on the part of their parents or guardians as well as to acculturation and socialization, to guidance and discipline, to redress and punishment where necessary.

10) All humans are entitled to a free education which fully develops their potentialities and prepares them for their khilafah.

11) They are entitled to training in the vocation best adapted to their capacities so as to produce in their productive years more than they cost or consume from conception to burial. Unless they do so they would not have increased the total quantitative and qualitative good of creation, of history, which is the criterion of their moral worth.

III. Values Associated with Adulthood

A. Rationalism. The truth is, and it is knowable by humans. It is one; just as God is One.

12) It is knowable by any of the twin avenues of reason and revelation, since the object of both is one and the same, namely, the will of God which is knowable as the divine patterns of creation, in the realms of nature, of the psyche, of society, of ethical religious and esthetic consciousness.

13) No contradiction between reason and revelation is ultimate.

14) Wherever contradiction occurs, it is our understanding of either the data of revelation, or the data of nature, that is at fault, necessitating re-examination. All humans are entitled know the truth; and no censorship or restriction may be imposed by anyone.

15) All humans are hence entitled to enquire, to search, to learn and to teach one another. Human society is a school on grand scale where everyone is student and teacher at the same time. Ideological or thoroughgoing skepticism is the inseparable twin of cynicism. It is false, and a defiance of God.

16) No one may promote it to destroy the tradition of human knowledge and wisdom, though questions may always be asked to increase that legacy. No one may prevent anybody from appropriating it or contributing to its growth.

B. Life-and world-Affirmation. God has created life and the world for good purpose. Life must therefore be lived and the world developed. Instincts ought to be satisfied and happiness sought and achieved. Talents, faculties and potentialities, ought to be realized and the result must be the building and growth of culture and civilization.

17) Fulfillment of self as well as of creation is indeed a divine purpose established that humans, in their pursuit of it, do the good deeds which actualize the moral values, i.e., the higher part of the divine will. Conversely, no human may destroy life and the world, or subvert culture or civilization. Cynicism is a denial of the divine purpose of creation and action based upon it is a defiance of the Creator Himself (SWT).

C. Freedom. The liberty to know and to think (mind), to judge and to choose (heart), to act or not to act (arm), belongs universally and necessarily to all humans. Coercion in any form, except as imposed by law, is a civil and religious offense, punishable in this world as well as in the next.

D. Egalitarianism.

18) As creatures of God, all humans are absolutely equal in their relation to Him, to His providence and justice, His love and mercy as well as to His judgement in this world and in the next.

19) Their equal creatureliness is the corollary of His unity and transcendence. Differentiation among them is legitimate only when it is based upon individual effort and merit.

20) On the other hand, racism, chosenness, or any discrimination on the basis of religion, race, colour, language, ethnicity, descendence geography or history, is evil prohibited by God and a threat to His unity and transcendence.

E. Ummatism. Belonging to an ummah or society is a fact of nature and a divine pattern. All humans are members of one ummah or another.

21) while no human may turn his back to, and dissociate himself from society as such, each is free to associate with, or dissociate from any group or ummah. To this end humans are free to communicate and assemble with one another, to build such institutions as would promote and express such association.

F. Responsibility. Except minors and the legally-declared insane, all humans are mukallafun; i.e., responsible before God and the law, each within his/her sphere of influence. Both men and women are responsible for the welfare of their dependents, relatives, and neighbors, according to the prescriptions of the shari’ah if they are Muslims, and to millah law if otherwise.

22) They are responsible for their contracts and covenants;

23) for fulfillment of established customs.

24) All duties incumbent upon the collectivity of Muslims become personal duties incumbent upon every adult individually, wherever and whenever the collectivity fails to carry them out.

25) It is both the right and the duty of every member of the ummah, of every citizen of the Islamic state, to bring court action against any violation of the shari’ah; and it is the duty of society to support such an initiative and protect its author.

G. Universalism. Humans were created to form an open society, where action is meant to actualize the divine patterns. This is an open competition which any human may enter without conditions.

26) Any person or group may join this society, fulfill its functions, rise in hierarchy or achieve in its arena all that personal qualification, self-exertion and effort make possible.

27) Righteous achievement of the individual person is the only basis of merit. All humans have the right to reside wherever they choose, to change their residences at will.

28) Equally, they are entitled to transport their wealth and goods wherever they wish, to join or secede from the ummah of their birth. Muslims may not secede from their ummah and continue to reside in the Islamic state.

IV. Values Associated with Economic Activity

29) All wealth belongs to Allah (SWT) who made everything in creation subservient to man.

30) If they have acquired it legally, humans are the trustees and stewards of it, entitled to its usufruct and enjoyment without limits. No property may be expropriated without legitimate cause and equitable compensation. No one may prevent another from drawing benefit from God’s bounty in any amount.

31) Property may be owned privately, corporately or publicly. It may not be destroyed or abused. Likewise, no one may make a misrepresentation in business transactions or cheat, steal, or rob another of his/her wealth.

32) None may hoard or monopolize any commodity for the purpose of “cornering the market” and raising prices artificially.

33) None may lend more on interest, or share the profits without sharing the risks.The benefits accruing from public property should devolve to all citizens according to their needs.

34) All humans are entitled to employment, and all employment should earn enough to support the workers and their dependents throughout life, according to a clearly defined and agreeable minimum standard of living.

35) Equal works should earn equal pay in all cases. All humans are entitled to their savings and their private properties. They may give their wealth as gifts or pass it to their descendants according to the inheritance laws of their ummah.

36) The orphans, the poor and the destitute are entitled to the assistance of society in such measure as would guarantee the minimum standard of living.

V. Values Associated with Political Activity

Islam regards decision-making as a process determined by the principle of shura, or participation of ruler and ruled together. Participation in the political life of the ummah or world state of Islam, is not only a basic human right, but a religious duty.

37) This participation Islam directs, should express itself in the selection and appointment of the ruler, in obedience to and monitoring of the ruler’s exercise of power, in giving the ruler the benefit of warning and advice and in impeaching and/or removing the ruler from office in case of failure.

38) Ruler and government are expected to fulfill the shari’ah and actualize the vision of Islam.

39) These are not only “official” duties of the ruler and members of the administration, but personal religious and civil duties incumbent upon all individuals in case the ruler and government fail to realize them. While Islam abhors any discrimination between the citizens of the Islamic state in public service based on anything but personal competence and merit, its ethic forbids the Muslim to seek public office, expecting public servants to be sought and elected or appointed by their fellows. Self-nomination and promotion are condemned.

40) Islam regards political office as a sacred trust placed in the candidate most capable of fulfilling the ideal of Islam relevant to that office. Islam regards a human as entitled to live under the Pax Islamica — the jurisdiction of the Islamic state — if they so wish, regardless of whether or not they are Muslims; and to exit therefrom, otherwise. In the former case, they have to abide by the laws or institutions of their millah, or faith- community.

41) Islamic law will not apply to them unless they themselves request such application. No human may be arrested or interned except under the laws of his millah or under criminal laws of the shari’ah; and none may be subject to harassment or invasion of privacy by government officers. No ruler or government may command the citizens anything that violates the shari’ah. Wherever this happens, the government loses its right to be obeyed, and to oppose it becomes the duty of the citizens. Wherever there is departure from the shari’ah, no obedience is due.

VI. Values Associated with Social Activity

All humans are entitled to marry and raise a family;

42) to exercise control over their children and to acculturate them into their own traditions. The family in its extended form is the basic unit constitutive of society. Its formation, constitution, and the rights and duties of its members toward one another are all defined and girded by the shari’ah. All may choose and associate with their friends; and may assemble for any purpose without permission. All humans are entitled to have their public morals protected by the state and their moral/religious sensitivities safeguard against offence by any person or agency. All humans are entitled to the protection of their persons and properties by their neighbors, against any damage, and all have the duty to stop their neighbors’ aggression against any other’s person or property.

43) All humans have the right to identify with the ummah whose ideology represents their personal convictions, to lead their lives in ways which they determine as most consonant with that ideology, to express that ideology in theoretical, actional or esthetic form, and to order their life and leisure as the ideology dictates. They are entitled to build and maintain such social and cultural institutions as their culture and its creative development demand.

44) They are entitled to help and support one another if they suffer injustice, and to prevent same before its occurrence whether themselves or others. Men and women are full legal persons and equal in all matters affecting their lives.

45) Both sexes are entitled to the names and identities given to them at birth, to equal education and full exercise of all religious, cultural, moral, social, economic, and political rights and duties under the law. In matters of support and inheritance, and in some cases of legal witness, Muslim men and women are not equal.

VII. Values Associated with Judicial Activity

46) All humans are equal before the law; the rulers and the ruled, the rich and the poor, the black and the white, the Muslim and non-Muslim. All humans have the right to arbitrate their disputes among themselves or have them adjudicated by the courts under the shari’ah,

47) if they are Muslims, under their millah-law otherwise. They have the right and the duty to defend one another before a court, to give witness, to enjoin the good, to prohibit and prevent evil.

48) The best witness is one given before it is asked for. No human may be tried in absentia or without hearing of defence.

49) No one may be commanded or coerced to counter the shari’ah.

50) Every human is presumed innocent and treated as such until proven guilty in a court of law. No person may be indicted except under the shari’ah, which pluralistically includes the millah-laws; and none may be condemned or punished beyond its prescriptions.

51) No one may be held responsible for the crime committed by another except in the case of a minor or a person under guardianship.

52) And no one may be tortured or put under duress to give witness or information under any circumstances. All matters flowing out of coercion, cheating or spying are null and void, and inadmissible as part of any legal process.

VIII. Values Associated with International Activity

53) All humans, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, citizen or non-citizen resident or non-resident of the Islamic state, individuals or groups, are entitled to enter into a covenant of peace, mutual security and friendly relation with the Islamic state. Any human may plead any case in its shari’ah courts, seek and obtain permission to reside, to work and trade in peace and security within the Islamic state.

54) In case the non-citizen, non-resident is a Muslim, the shari’ah would apply to him/her in all its provisions; in case of the non-Muslim, the laws of his/her millah will apply. In no case may such a person be treated differently from the citizens. Every human being is entitled to hear the message of Islam without exception; and it is the duty of the ummah to present it.

55) No one may prevent the message from being heard. The Islamic state has the duty to remove such obstacles or “iron curtains” by any means at its disposal.

56) Besides this, the preservation of freedom to hear the word of God, to consider and to judge according to one’s best conscience, no cause justifies recourse of force except in the repulsion of an actual aggressor. No group or people or nation may ridicule another or deride its faith and tradition. A fortioti, no group, people or nation may aggress upon another. Inter-group disputes may be solved only through arbitration or judicial procedure in a court of law. The Islamic state and all nations ought to support the victims of aggression and to redress the injustices committed. even if this requires the taking up of arms against the aggressor nation.

57) All persecuted humans (not those running away from justice) have the right to take refuge in the Islamic state. And the Islamic state is duty hound to extend its protection to them.

IX. Values Associated with Death

58) All humans are entitled to medical care throughout life and to special care in their old age. If they have no young dependents to care for them, society is obliged to do so in a way which safeguards their mental and social health as well as their personal dignity. Humans are all entitled to free and proper burial according to their millah laws.

Conclusion

59) The human rights and obligations which Islam recognizes constitute a humanism in which man is not the measure of all the thing as Protagoras had thought. God or His will is indeed such a measure. Islam rejects the tragic Promethean view in which man defies God, steals the fire from Him, and ends like the Greek and German gods in eternal doom. It equally rejects the Christian view in which man is fallen and helpless, hopeless except for a God messiah to pull him out of his tragic predicament. But it commends Christianity and its adherent for their humility, their love and concern for humanity. It equally rejects the Hindu Upanishadic and Buddhist Theravadic view that life and existence are an aberration of the Absolute or an evil to be surmounted by withdrawal and meditative processes. Finally Islam rejects all ethnocentrist views of humanity and the world, especially that of Judaism. But it commends Judaism and its adherents for their tenacity in upholding the absolute unity and transcendence of God.

Islam acknowledges man to be the vicegerent of God, fully endowed, free and responsible to realize his cosmic function, and thereby to deserve his eternal bliss or doom. Moreover, Islam’s humanism under God is not a mere philosophy, a system of values advocated by culture alone. Islam’s humanism under God is law known to all, backed by sanctions and the authority of the Islamic state, and promulgated equally for its citizens as well as others, whether Muslim or non-Muslim.

Notes

1. The Prophet (SAAS) said: Every human is born innocent (’ala al-fitrah). His parents make him adhere to one religious tradition or other (i.e., man’s historical religiocultural personality is acquired and not necessary)

2. The Qur’an reported Adam’s sin; but it affirmed that his sin was his own; that he repented and was forgiven. (Qur’an 2:36-37).

The Qur’an also affirms that no soul will get any more or any less than it has earned (Qur’an 3:25); that no person is responsible for the guilt of another, or may intercede on another’s behalf (Qur’an 2:48): that guilt is not transferable (Qur’an 6:164); that no atom’s weight of good or evil will be lost in the final reckoning on the Day of judgement (Qur’an 99:7-8). Allah who created everything perfect (Qur’an 32:7); “We created man in the best of forms” (Qur’an 95:4) God then perfected man, breathed into him of His own spirit. God gave man his hearing, his sight and heart, as faculties of cognition and knowledge (Qur’an 32:9)

3. “Turn yourselves to the primordial religion, as a hanif; to the natural religion innate and absolutely the same in all humans. That is the only true and worth religion” (Qur’an 30:30). Add to these verses the ubiquitous admonition to reason, to consider, to think, to judge, to compare and contrast, to seek the truth, to choose the right guidance.

4. “O People! We created you all of a single pair of male and female; and We have constituted you into tribes and nations that you may identify one another. The worthier in the eye of God is the more righteous.” (Qur’an 49:13).

5. “Unless in retaliation for the killing of another person or in punishment for spreading evil, whoever kills a person has killed the whole of humanity; and whoever gives life to a person has done so to the whole of humanity.” (Qur’an 5:32)

6. “We (God) offered Our trust to heaven and earth and mountains. They all rejected it, in fear of its burden. But man accepted and carried it.” (Qur’an 33:72)

7. “And when thy Lord said to the angels, I plan to establish a vicegerent for Myself on earth, the angels asked, Would you establish on earth a creature that sheds blood and spreads evil while we constantly glorify and adore You? God said: I have designed a plan [for humanity on earth] which you do not know.” (Qur’an 2:30).

8. “And We commanded the angels to prostrate themselves before Adam, and they did.” (Qur’an 2:34); “We have ennobled and cherished humankind, enabled them to traverse land and sea, provided them with all good things, and granted them priority over many other creatures.” (Qur’an 17:70).

9. Islamic law condemns adultery in the strongest terms; but it is most considerate to the children of adulterous unions, whom it regards as innocent of their parents’ crime. It prescribes their acquisition of the father’s name, if known, as legitimate and rightful in all cases. “(Allah) did not make your adopted sons (truly) your sons. That is only your empty claim, whereas Allah says the truth and guides to it. Give them the names of their real parents; that is more just in Allah’s judgement. And if their parents are utterly unknown, then regard them as your clients, but always as your brothers in religion.” (Qur’an 33:4-5).

10. In the case of children devoid of parents or relatives to assume these duties, the shari’ah imposes these duties upon the Islamic state and regards the chief of state or khalifah personally responsible for the welfare and Islamic upbringing of such children.

11. The Prophet (SAAS) decreed that the pursuit of knowledge is a duty for every Muslim man and woman.

12. “Rather, it is Allah indeed that is the Truth” (Qur’an 22:6). “And proclaim, O Muhammad, the truth has come and is now manifest. Falsehood has been confuted; for it deserves to be so.” (Qur’an 17:81).

13. “Heaven and earth are full of patterns of Allah for the believers to grasp. In the creation of man as well as in that of every creature Allah has created, there are patterns to be perceived by those who are convinced.” (Qur’an 45:3-4). “We shall present to them our patterns in the horizons as well as within themselves (in their consciousness) until they realize that this is indeed the truth.” (Qur’an 41:53).

14. say O Muhammad, My Lord Who knows all things, challenges with the truth. Say, the truth has now become manifest. The opposite of truth has nothing to stand upon and is devoid of effect or power. Say, if I fall into error, it is my deed, my personal responsibility (Qur’an 34: 48-50).

15. “Truth and wisdom have become manifest. They are different from falsehood and straying.” (Qur’an 2:256). The Prophet (SAAS) said: “Whomsoever God wishes to bless, He causes him to acquire knowledge.”

16. “Does man think that he has been created in vain?” (Qur’an 75:36).

17. “The righteous are those who examine and ponder over the creation of heaven and earth and exclaim in conclusion: O God You have not created all this in vain.” (Qur’an 3:191).

18. “There shall be no coercion in religion.” (Qur’an 2: 256) “Whoever wishes to believe, let him do so; and whoever wishes to disbelieve, let him do so likewise.” (Qur’an 18:29).

19. Supra, note 4. On his last pilgrimage, the Prophet (SAAS) said in his sermon at ‘Arafat: All of you issue from Adam, and Adam issued from dust. No Arab has any priority over a non-Arab, no black over a white, and no non-Arab over an Arab and no white over a black — except in righteousness.

20. Supra, note 4. To everyone a place will be assigned corresponding to the merit of his deeds (Qur’an 6:83). The Prophet (SAAS) said: “Were Fatimah, daughter of Muhammad himself, to commit theft, I would impose upon her God’s sanction of having her hand cut off.”

21. “Let there be of you an ummah calling to the good deed, enjoining the acts of righteousness and prohibiting those of evil. Felicitous is such an ummah.” (Qur’an 3:104).

22. The Prophet (SAAS) said: Everyone of you is a shepherd, responsible for his flock.

23. “Fulfill your covenants perfectly; for to convenant is to commit oneself responsibly.” (Qur’an 17:34). “Felicitous are those believers who keep their promises and fulfill what they have committed themselves to do.” (Qur’an 70:32).

24. Supra, note 21. “Take the side of forgiveness and enjoin that which is right” (Qur’an 7:199).

25. The shari’ah distinguishes the fard ‘ayn (personal duty) from the fard kifayah (collective duty). But it prescribes the automatic transformation of any collective duty unto a personal one wherever and whenever the collective has failed to fulfill that duty.

26. “And if those whom you call to Allah turn away from this cause, Allah will exchange them for another people who will be otherwise.” (Qur’an 47:38).

27. “No man may receive credit except for what he himself had wrought. His accomplishments must indeed be shown, and he must be rewarded accordingly.” (Qur’an 53:39-41).

28. “Is not Allah’s earth wide enough to accommodate all?” (Qur’an 4:97) “And the earth has He spread out for living creatures.” (Qur’an 55:10) “Allah has made the earth subservient to you, O humankind, strike out then into the world and seek of Allah’s bounty.” (Qur’an 67:15).

29. This principle of the shari’ah if often misunderstood to imply discrimination between Muslims and non-Muslims. That non-Muslims may change their religion and join the Muslim ummah, and Muslims may not to convert to other religions and join their respective ummah, is alleged to constitute such illegitimate discrimination. The fact, however, is otherwise. The shari’ah holds all humans free to choose their religious affiliations, to enter into and exit from any religious denominations, including Islam. What it condemns is exit from political affiliation with the ummah or the Islamic state while continuing to reside within its territory. Since affiliation to the religion of Islam is ipso facto affiliation to the Islamic state and the ummah it is not conceivable to exit from the one without exiting from the other. Exit from the religion is a religious matter in which personal freedom is guaranteed for all. But exit from the ummah is at once an exit from citizenship, or loyalty to, the Islamic state. No state can or does tolerate anybody’s self-exoneration from loyalty to itself while continuing to affirm one’s citizenship or residence in that state. Such loyalty is a conditio sine qua non on residence or citizenship. That is why Islamic law has treated exit from Islam as tantamount to exit from state, and therefore necessitating either physical separation from the territory of the Islamic state or prosecution as if it were treason. Naturally, the Muslim who converts to another religion, secedes from the ummah and exits from the Islamic state is not only safe because the jurisdiction of Islamic law does not reach him; neither the ummah nor the Islamic state has any claim against him.

30. “Do you not know that to Allah alone dominion of heaven and earth?” (Qur’an 2:107);

“Do you not see that Allah has made subservient to you everything in heaven and earth and showered His blessings upon you?” (Qur’an 31:20)

31. “So strike out into the earth and seek the bounty of God therein.” (Qur’an 62:10); “There are no restrictions on the bounty of your Lord.” (Qur’an 17:20) The Prophet (SAAS) said: “Whoever appropriates something of the earth without due title, will be thrown on the Day of Judgement into the seventh lowest level.”

32. “Woe to the fraudulent! Who exact full measure when they receive but cheat when it is their turn to give.” (Qur’an 83:1-3); “Whether male or female, the hand of the thieves shall be cut off in retribution from Allah for their misdeed.” (Qur’an 5:38) The Prophet (SAAS) said: “Whoever deals with fraudulence is not a Muslim.”

33. “As to those who pile up their wealth of gold and silver, who do not spend it in the cause of God, warn them of sure and dire punishment.” (Qur’an 9:34); The Prophet said: “Every monopolist is a sinner.”

34. “Allah has made trade or buying and selling legitimate; but He has prohibited the collection of interest” (Qur’an 2:275); “Those who collect interest are like those possessed by Satan” (Ibid).

35. “Felicitous are those who recognize a right to the destitute and the deprived to a share in their wealth” (Qur’an 70: 24-25). The Prophet (SAAS) said: “Give the employee his wages before his sweat has had time to dry…God honors the believer who practices a profession.” In another hadith the Prophet (SAAS) reported that Allah (SWT), will prosecute mercilessly anyone who cheats a worker out of his wages.

36. “The inheritance should be divided after satisfaction of a debt due and the fulfillment of a willed gift” (Qur’an 4:11).

37. The Prophet (SAAS) said: “Those who die without having participated in the election of one caliph or political officer pass away as non-Muslim.”

38. Upon his election to the caliphate, Abu Bakr (Radiya Allahu ‘Anh [RAA] May God bless him) said: “If I govern well, you should help me. If I govern badly, you should correct me….It is your duty to obey me only so long as I obey God and His Prophet. Were I to disobey them, you owe me no more obedience” (Ibn Ishaq, Sirat al- Nabiyy (SAAS) edited by M. M. D. Abdul Hamid, Cairo: M. Subayh, 1383/1963, Vol. IV, p. 1075. Allah (SWT) described the felicitous believers as those who conduct their affairs in consultation among themselves (Qur’an 42:38).

39. Ibid.

40. “Do not therefore nominate or praise yourselves.” (Qur’an 53:32).

41. This was one of the distinctive features of the constitution of the Islamic state, the first written statement constitution in history. It was dictated by the Prophet Mohammad (SAAS) in 622 A.C. on the very first day of the Hijrah, or his arrival to Madinah in that year, and on account of which that day was declared the beginning of the Islamic era. The constitution decreed as legitimate and indeed constitutive of the Islamic state, the Jewish ummah, with its religion and institutions and laws. Later, the same principle was applied to the Christians by the Prophet himself (SAAS), and following in his footsteps, the Muslims later applied it to Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists and adherents of all other religions who had either lived in the Islamic state or entered therewith into a covenant of peace! This was responsible for the creation of a novel system of organization, the first pluralistic society- wherein several religious communities live in peace under the aegis of a professedly ideological (Islamic) state. Moreover, this Islamic pluralism is not one of a few constitutionally guaranteed basic human rights, but a legitimization of all the laws — religious, social, political, cultural, economic, criminal, procedural — governing any non-Muslim society which opts for the Pax Islamica, the world-order of Islam. Thus, the non-Muslim citizens of the Islamic state may order their lives as their religious and cultural traditions; and their own courts of law are backed by the Islamic state, for the enforcement of their own laws.

“In their possession is the Torah wherein is the law of God” (Qur’an 5:43); “As to the People of the Evangel [the Christians], let them rule themselves by what God has revealed therein.” (Qur’an 42:38).

42. “It is indeed Allah’s pattern that He has created of yourselves spouses in whom to find quiescence; that He established between you the pattern of mutual love and compassion. Such are the patterns of Allah that those capable of reasoning may ponder over and consider” (Qur’an 30:21). The Prophet (SAAS) commanded Muslims to marry and procreate. Willed celibacy is condemned in Islam, as is monkery (Qur’an 57:27).

43. Islam stands for the closest solidarity and mutual security of humans with one another (see Qur’an 90:12-18). Condemning the others, the Qur’an affirmed: “They did not prohibit one another from committing their evil deeds. Accursed indeed was their conduct” (Qur’an 5:79). The shari’ah is not satisfied to recommend neighborly love in a general matter, but has established a number of duties which a person must observe toward the neighbour: and it declared failure and neglect to observe them subject to sanction.

44. See this author’s “The Rights of Non-Muslims under Islam: Social and Cultural Aspects”, Journal of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol. I, No. 1 (Summer, 1979), pp. 90-102.

45. The shari’ah was first in human history to recognize woman as a legal person, fully endowed to perform all legal functions. This was the consequence of Islam’s rehabilitation of woman, its denial of the Christian myth of Eve as temptress and source of evil, as cause of original sin and of the fall of humankind, and its affirmation of equal rights and duties as belonging to her. “Allah will not lose count of a single deed whether committed by man or woman. For men and women are equally members of one another (of society)” (Qur’an 3:195).

46. In order to guarantee woman’s dignity and gird her person against abuse, Islam prescribed that woman is always entitled to the support of her father, guardian, husband or nearest male relative, regardless of her wealth. Islam thus exonerated all women from having to earn their livelihood and be subject to the degradation usually accompanying a woman in want. Nonetheless, woman is free to work and add to her personal income if she wishes and has the requisite talent and competence. Somewhat to balance this favourable position in the economic life of society, Islam assigned to the male heir double the share of the female. The charge commonly levelled against Islam as unfair to women usually omits from consideration men’s obligation to support all their women relatives and concentrates on the half-share in her parents’ inheritance assigned her. In fact, Islam is biased in favor of woman and seeks her protection and welfare at all times. Another charge against Islam refers to the refusal of the shari’ah court to consider woman’s witness as equal to a man’s; but this too is a misunderstanding. Being intended for the millions rather than the exception, and assuming the patriarchal family as the basic social unit, the shari’ah regarded a woman’s witness as the full equal of man’s in cases of legitimacy, descendence and family relations - the area with which most women are indeed familiar - but only half of man’s witness in cases of civil, administration, and criminal laws, with which she is usually not knowledgeable.

47. “If you dispute with one another on any matter, refer it to Allah and His Prophet for adjudication” (Qur’an 4:59); “O Muhammad, Adjudicate their disputes by that which Allah has revealed, and do not follow their desires” (Qur’an 4:49). See also Qur’anic quotations at end of fn. 41 supra.

48. The ethic deterring Muslim conduct in this regard is based firstly upon the Qur’anic verse:

” Let there be of you an ummah which calls to the good, which enjoins the acts of righteousness, prohibits the acts of injustice and evil. Such are the felicitous” (Qur’an 3:104). Secondly Muslim commandment towards the neighbor is determined by the Prophet’s commandment: “Whoever witnesses an injustice or evil, let him redress it with his own hand. If he cannot, let him do so with his tongue. And if he cannot, with his heart; but that is the weakest faith.”

49. “Conjecture is no substitute for true knowledge” (Qur’an 53:28); “Do not spy on one another; nor talk evil about another in his absence” (Qur’an 49:12). The Prophet (SAAS) said: “If the evil you tell about your neighbor in his absence is true, you have committed a sin. If it is false, a double sin.” He further said: “Whoever is sued in court for a right violated must be heard.”

50. Supra, fn. 38.

51. “These are the sanctions of God. Never go beyond them” (Qur’an 2:229). The Prophet (SAAS) commanded: “Avoid applying the sanctions of the law wherever there is any degree of doubt.”

52. In such cases, the responsibility of the guardian is to compensate the victim for the damage or loss of sustained. Otherwise, no one is responsible but for his/her own action. Allah (SWT) proclaimed: “Every person is responsible but for what he had wrought” (Qur’an 52:21).

53. “Even a little suspicion is a crime” (Qur’an 49:12); “To harm the Believers, whether man or woman, by ascribing to them what they have not done, is to commit a grave and perfidious crime” (Qur’an 33:58).

54. This is perhaps the greatest breakthrough in international relations ever achieved, namely, that any individual or group — not only sovereign nations — are entitled to enter into the international arena as full legitimate contenders, defendants or participants. They can conclude covenants or treaties and be responsible for their fulfillment. Since its inception in 622, the Islamic state opened itself to anyone or any group desiring to enter into a legitimate relation with it for any purpose, and empowered all its courts-of-law to deal with any dispute arising out of such agreements. Like any other legal person, the Islamic state regarded itself as neither too shy to invite and enter into such relations, nor too proud to plead in any first-instance court if its agreement was violated. Indeed, under the shari’ah the court-of-law is a public institution which any human may enter and use to bring about equity and justice to any person or interest under the jurisdiction of the Islamic state. Non-citizen transient residents may even challenge the action of the chief of state.

55. Calling humans to God is a permanent personal duty for every Muslim man and woman. Allah ta’ala commanded (Qur’an 16:125) See next footnote.

56. This was the cause of all the wars of conquest which took place in the first century of Muslim history. The state sent missionaries to present Islam to the ruler and the ruled. Where they were well received — regardless of whether or not their efforts led to any conversions, the relation between their nation and the Islamic state remained good, and that national entered into the “house of peace” with its political, social, economic and religious structures intact. Where the missionaries were killed, the state was forced to mobilize and march against the offenders.

“Those who rise to redress an injustice perpetrated against them, and achieve victory, are not blameworthy for what they do in course of their action” (Qur’an 42:41); “Felicitous are those who, when We establish their dominions on earth, uphold the salat, pay the zakat, enjoin the good deeds and prohibit the evil” (Qur’an 22:4l); “Call unto the path of your Lord with wisdom and goodly counsel. Argue with them with the more comely arguments” (Qur’an 16:125); “Say: O People of the Book! Come now to a noble principle common to both of us, that we worship none but God; that we associate naught with Him; and that we take not one another as lords beside God” (Qur’an 3:64).

57. “If any two factions among the believers quarrel together, reconcile them. If one transgresses the terms of peace, then fight ye all against the transgressor till he complies. When he does, reconcile them again in justice and fairness” (Qur’an 49:9).

58. “And if any polytheist asks for your protection, grant it to him that he may hear the word of God. Then escort him safely to his refuge” (Qur’an 9:6).

59. The Prophet (SAAS) commanded: “When your neighbour dies, it is your duty to prepare his remains for burial and do so well to their Creator who will judge them according to their deeds.”

Rational System

Islam is also a rational system which not only allows questions but raises knowledge to a new level of dignity and respect. No other religion has exalted knowledge and its pursuit, as has Islam. In fact, for the first time in human history, a religious book invited people to question the creation of the universe and stated that in it (the universe) were signs for people of knowledge. Everything in Islam is subject to rational pursuit.

Islam has only forbidden the questioning of one thing and this is something which reason cannot handle. However, this does not imply an anti-intellectual attitude. The only thing which Islam has said is not within the capacity of the human mind to question is the essence (dhat) of God. This will always escape a person, as He, Allah, is transcendent. However, His will, His purpose, His works, His intentions and His effects can be known.

Even the rites of Islam can be examined rationally. For example, logical and rational explanations can be made for the time of Prayer, the number of rakats or units in Prayer and even why we must bend our toes when we do. Of course the Muslim will always be aware that the answer he has obtained by rational enquiry is not exhaustive. It cannot be definitely accepted as explaining all the facts. It could be erroneous or incomplete. However, Islam encourages its followers to ask “why Islam?”. Islam is an intellectual and historical religion. There are no secrets and no mysteries which cannot be understood by an ordinary person.

Easily Understandable

Islam does not present stumbling blocks to the mind. It does not make claims which overwhelm the mind. Islam does not present to a person that which the human intellect cannot grasp. Anyone can understand Islam as it is a universal religion. However, for example, Hinduism legitimises idolatry for the less educated, as it says, not all people can understand the higher religion of the Brahmans.

Universal Message

Islam does not force a person to choose between various religions as it has included the essential teachings of all religions in its universal message. The Islamic concept is that, to every people, Allah sends a Messenger and that in their present religion or ideology they must have retained some kernel of truth from the original teachings of that religion which was, of course, the teachings of the primordial religion (deen al-fitra) or, in other words, Islam.

Islam views inter-religious dialogue as an internal discussion, not as a discussion with outsiders because, from its perspective, all mankind are members of a universal religious brotherhood. So the differences Islam has with other religions are regarded as internal differences. Of course, Islam criticises some Jews and Christians who have wrongly interpreted their faith, however, this criticism is based on the fact that they have strayed from the original teachings of their religion.

Islam, therefore, was the first religion in the world to call for the critical examination of religious texts. The Muslim says, in effect, to other religions: “Let us together examine the Holy Books of our religions and compare the contents with the original teachings of our respective religions and examine how far we have adhered to, or gone astray from these original teachings.” Muslims, therefore, never attack other religions.

However, for the Hindu, if he has not been born in India, he is unclean; for the Jews the sacred law only applied to them and for the Christian there is no salvation outside the Church. Islam, however, accepts the personal morality and values of Jesus, the concept of liberating a human being from materialism found in Hinduism, as well as the practical ethics for harmony in human society as found in Confucianism.

Religious Tolerance

Islam is tolerant of other religions and regards them as religiously legitimate or de jure. In accepting other religions as legitimate, Islam, therefore, accepts their adherents. No other religion has given equal treatment to other religions as has Islam for over 1400 years. As we well know, Judaism and Roman Catholicism were illegal in the time of Queen Elizabeth I. In Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella, it was illegal to have any religion other than Catholicism, and Muslims and Jews had to choose baptism, exile or death. In the Middle East, some Christian sects, which were brutally eliminated by their fellow Christians in Europe, have survived after fourteen centuries of Muslim rule. Secular regimes do not respect religion. They look down upon religion; either they believe any religion will do or they believe no religion is acceptable. The tolerance of other religions in Islam comes from respect because Islam says in every person there is an embryonic fitra or purity planted in all human beings at birth and in every religion there is a basic kind of the original deen al-fitra.

The Human Being’s Innocence

Islam declares a person to be born with a clean slate. The human being was not born evil but rather he was created good and equipped by nature to fulfil his duties. From the Islamic point of view, the drama of a person’s life is something that takes place after birth and not before. Islam does not record a human being as a degradation of the divine as it regards a human being as having instincts which are pure and good.

The Human Being: An Integral Whole

Islam does not divide the soul and life of a person into two compartments, i.e. religious or ethical and verbal or material. Islam regards the human being as an integral whole. All of his actions and instincts are part and parcel of his being together with his hopes, fears, certitude, faith and conviction. Islam wants all these to cohere and, therefore, we could say that Islam is mental health par excellence. Islam considers a person’s work or even sex in this world as an act of worship.

Life Filled With Purpose and Meaning

Islam takes the world of life and existence seriously, declaring it to be full of meaning and purpose. Life is not a sport, nor is it purposeless. From the Islamic perspective, everything has meaning because the concept of God’s purpose in creation gives meaning to human life. The Muslim is never bored with life; there is no existential anxiety in Islam. The Muslim can see the working of the good purposes of the divine Creator in everything. The Muslim lives in a world where life is full of meaning and purpose and this means the Muslim never looses his mental balance. In fact, mental illness is very rare in the Muslim community.

World-Affirmative

Islam is world-affirmative. For the Muslim the world is good. It is a blessing, it has been created good, to be enjoyed. Islam does not view the world as a demon, it is not valued as being satanic or evil. It is not a degraded kingdom. The world is the only kingdom; the hereafter is not a kingdom but merely a place of Judgement for a human person’s actions during his life. For Muslims, the world is a beautiful place; pearls, clothes and horses are to be enjoyed. What is wrong, is its misuse under moral law. The world is good and Muslims are obliged to cultivate it and make it into a garden. The process of organising people as a community is a religious duty.

No ‘ism’, ideology or religion matches Islam in its world-affirmative stance. All Muslims should be wealthy and affluent. It is Satan who promises poverty, not God. In fact, the Qur’an criticises those who were lazy and who failed to migrate, who could not pull themselves up by their bootstraps; they deserved what they got. To be a Muslim is to live in and to be loyal to this world but not above and beyond our loyalty to Allah.

A Social Faith

In building this world and conforming it to God’s desire, Muslims are told that they must work with each other and not alone. Islam establishes a social order not a mystical order. Islam’s social order has teeth, regulated by law, the Shariah. Islam wants to establish a social order to command the good and prevent the evil. However, every Muslim must correct evil. It is his duty, just as much as it is his duty to pray five times a day.

In Islam, it is of the highest degree of faith to plunge into space and time and bring about thetransformation of the world in accordance with God’s desire. Islam is firmative action in a social setting; it is neither abstract nor isolationist. Islam establishes justice and an ordered society, regulated by law. Islam guarantees justice for all; Madinah was that class of model society. In those days justice had no price. For several centuries under Islamic rule any citizen who voiced a complaint could be sure that justice would be done. No theory of society can give as much as the Islamic theory of society has given. Society, based on race, language or history are prototypes of the animal world where dog eats dog. The social order of Islam ends this and brings justice to all. A Muslim’s mission is to bring order and this international society established by Islam must be carried to the world and, therefore, the Islamic social order seeks universality.

Universal System

Islam provides a social order which cannot only tend to be universal but must become universal. The Islamic system is a system for world order and it must spread around the world. Unless it is spread around the world, it will degenerate into a form of nationalism which is haram or unlawful in Islam. Islam is built on the basis of values which are not only for the group which adheres to them, but for the whole of mankind. Allah is the deity of all people and the Islamic concept of society must spread all over the world.

Does Islam deny the value of national, ethnic or linguistic identity and culture? No! Islam recognises the worth of these national and ethnic groups. Islam does not only tolerate but encourages the development of different ethnic groups. The group has a special perspective on the values affecting people’s lives. Insofar as it exists, national culture is encouraged by Islam, but it is subject to the universal law of Allah. The interests of the nation or group must be subject to the moral law, the Shariah, which encompasses the whole of mankind. Islam created a world society and it was Islam, over 1400 years ago, that first established a working system of international law.

It was only in the 20th century that the West started to develop international law. Grotius contributed only wishful thinking. In the West, international law existed only in the imagination until after World War I when the League of Nations was established. The present system of international law is far inferior to the Islamic system of international law because, under the Islamic system, the law of nations is backed by a court and not just a single court in the Hague. Any Shariah court in any part of the world can hear any international dispute to which the parties are not only nations but also individuals. If we want to solve international problems we must make justice under international law possible for everyone.

Promoting Harmony With The Environment

Islam is a religion that enables us to live our lives in harmony with nature, ourselves and God. Islam does not compartmentalise but rather unites the life of a person. This is the summum bonum, supreme good of Islam because Islam assures us of happiness in this world and the Next. Presently, people are so madly in pursuit of this world that it has resulted in upsetting the ecology of nature; this because of the decay in the inner nature of human beings. In this age of unprecedented advancements in science and technology, the pursuit of worldly gain has turned sour and self-destructive because it is devoid of all ethical values. Therefore the pursuit of dunya (worldly affairs) without Deen can only lead to, and has led to, disaster. On the other hand, pursuit of Deen without dunya is merely daydreaming. Islam asks people to cultivate the world without robbing, usury, stealing and raping the environment and insists that people must carry out their tasks subject to moral law. For the Muslim, involvement and success in the world will ensure success in the hereafter. Islam is the only religion which guarantees happiness in this world and the next. Having granted this great gift of God to humanity what else could we do but say ‘we hear and we obey and all praise is due to Allah, Lord of the Worlds.’

Ismail Faruqi, “Why Islam”, Islamabad Pakistan: unpublished audio recording, International Islamic University, Islamabad, Pakistan, date unknown.

Synopsis

If the concept of tawhid is central to Islam and everything Islamic, it is because of its centrality to existence and every thing that exists. Indeed, Islamic science, whether religious, moral or natural is essentially a quest to discover the order underlying the variegated world of multiplicity. The work of al-Shahid Dr. Ismail Raji al-Faruqi on the subject of tawhid entitled Al-Tawhid: Its Implications for Thought and Life thus affords the reader to not only a look on the axial doctrine of Islam but also allows the reader to understand that doctrine from a number of different perspectives.

In the endeavor to explain the simple truths of the doctrine of unity, Dr. al-Faruqi touches upon a broad spectrum of subjects, drawing into his discussions various elements from history, comparative religion, anthropology, philosophy, ethics, epistemology, archeology and other disciplines. As such, his concept of tawhid is rich in the depth of its erudition, abundant in its perception.

Indeed, it is perhaps this work more than any other that reflects the profound and original thought of Dr. al-Faruqi.

There will be new updates and we will post more articles by Dr. al-Faruqi very soon, insha’allah.

Summarizing the approach of Ismail al-Faruqi, Ibrahim Kalin wrote in God, Life and the Cosmos (Ashgate, 2002 p. 60-61):

Ismail [al-]Faruqi’s work known under the rubric of “Islamization of knowledge” is a good example of how the idea of method or methodology (manhaj and manhajiyyah, the Arabic equivalents of method and methodology, which are the most popular words of the proponents of this view) can obscure deeper philosophical issues involved in the current discussions of science. Even though [al-]Faruqi’s project was proposed to Islamize the existing forms of knowledge imported from the West, his focus was exclusively on the humanities, leaving scientific knowledge virtually untouched. This was probably due to his conviction that the body of knowledge generated by modern natural sciences is neutral and as such requires no special attention.

Thus, [al-]Faruqi’s work and that of [International Institute of Islamic Thought] IIIT after his death concentrated on the social sciences and education. This had two important consequences. First, [al-]Faruqi’s important work on Islamization provided his followers with a framework in which knowledge (`ilm) came to be equated with social disciplines, thus ending up in a kind of sociologism. The prototype of [al-]Faruqi’s project is, we may say, the modern social scientist entrusted as arbiter of the traditional `Alim. Second, the exclusion of modern scientific knowledge from the scope of Islamization has led to negligent attitudes, to say the least, toward the secularizing effect of the modern scientific world view. This leaves the Muslim social scientists, the ideal-types of the Islamization program, with no clue as to how to deal with the questions that modern scientific knowledge poses. Furthermore, to take the philosophical foundations of modern, natural sciences for granted is tantamount to reinforcing the dichotomy between the natural and human sciences, a dichotomy whose consequences continue to pose serious challenges to the validity of the forms of knowledge outside the domain of modern physical sciences.

As for the Christians, the Muslims argued with them in the manner of the Qur’an. But when it came to political action, they gave them the benefit of the doubt as to whether they followed the Christianity of Jesus or of the Church. Muhammad and ‘Umar’s wager for a Christian victory over the Zoroastrians, the Meccan Muslim’s choice of, welcome and protection by Christian Abyssinia and Muhammad’s personal waiting upon the Christian Abyssinian delegates to Madinah, the Prophet’s covenant with the Christians of Najran, ‘Umar’s convenant with the Archbishop of Jerusalem and his refusal to hold prayer on the premises of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre lest later Muslims might claim the place, the total cooperation of the Umawis and ‘Abbasis with their Christian subjects, and of the Umawis of Cordova with Christians who were not their subjects-all these are landmarks in a record of cooperation and mutual esteem hardly paralleled in any other history. Some persecution, some conversion under influences of all sorts, some aggression, some doctrinal attacks going beyond the limits defined by the Qur’an, there were, without a doubt. The Muslims in all places and times were not all angels! But such were scattered cases whose value falls to the ground when compared with the overwhelming spread of history which has remained true to this Qur’anic position.

I. The Present Problem

Perhaps nothing is more anachronistic-indeed absurd-than the spectacle of the Western Christian missionary preaching to Muslims the Western figurization of the religion of Jesus. The absurdity is twofold: First, the West, whence the missionary comes and which sustains him in his effort, has for decades stopped finding meaning in that figurization which is the content of mission. Indeed, in the missionary himself, that figurization determines but one little portion of his consciousness, the remainder falling under the same corroding secularism, materialism and skeptical empiricism so common in Western thought and culture. Second, the missionary preaches this figurization to Muslims who, in North Africa and the Near East, were thrice Christians. They were Christians in the sense of preparing, through the spiritualization and interiorization of the Semitic religion, for the advent of Jesus. It was their consciousness and spirit which served God as human substrate and historical circumstance for that advent. Naturally, they were the first to “acknowledge” Jesus and to believe in him as crystallization of a reality which is themselves. They were Christians in the second sense of the Western figurization of Christianity when, having fallen under the dominion of Byzantium, they flirted with that figurization and in fact adopted all its doctrinal elements regardless of whether or not they officially joined the churches of Western Christianity. After living with this figurization a while, they welcomed and embraced Islam. But they remained, even as Muslims, Christians in the sense of holding the realization of the ethic of Jesus as the conditio sine qua non of Islamicity and of realizing a fair part of the Jesus-ethic in their personal lives. The comedy in evidence today is that the missionary is utterly unaware of this long experience of the Muslim with Jesus Christ.

This Western missionary, whether monastes or other, has associated himself with, and often played the role of colonial governor, trader, settler, military, physician and educator. In the last two decades, after the Muslim countries achieved independence, he found for himself the role of development expert. Expertise in poultry breeding, neurological surgery or industrial management, and the crying need of the Muslim as yet underdeveloped countries were callously taken as God-sent occasions to evangelize, thus stirring within the Muslim a sense of being exploited and producing still more bitterness. Besides, such an expert-missionary is often sponsored by, if not the direct employee of, the aiding agency of the Western government; and a fair harmonization of his tactics and purposes with those of that government were safely presupposed. The Western World knows of no Christian who, moved by the Sermon on the Mount, came to live among Muslims as a native, who made their burden his burden, their hopes and yearnings his hopes and yearnings. Albert Schweitzer, the idol of the modern West in Christian self-giving to the natives of Africa, was as unchristian as to condemn all the Africans’ search for liberty; indeed, publicly to request President Eisenhower to prevent a United Nations debate on Algeria. The Africans ought to be helped and their suffering relieved, this saint of the twentieth century commanded his fellow Christian whites-but as our colonial subjects! Moreover, where it dissociated itself from imperialism and was purely religious, Western Christian mission to the Muslim World was never a mission of Jesus, but a mission of the Western figurization of Christianity arrogantly asserted in words, hardly ever exemplified in deeds. Modern Christendom has produced a Mrs. Vester who really gave and, fortunately, is still giving of her life to the orphans of Jerusalem. There probably were and still are other isolated individuals of this caliber. Nonetheless, the persistent effort needed to establish an ethically respectable relation with Muslim society has been neglected. Since it has brought hardly any significant conversions and aggravated the alienation of the two world communities, and since the Muslims, as well as Muslim World Christians, regard it as pouring ideological salt into political wounds inflicted by the Crusades and a century of colonization, the mission chapter of Christian history, as we have so far known it, had better be closed, the hunt called off, the missionaries withdrawn and the mission-arm of the Catholic Church and of the World Council of Churches liquidated.

To say all this is not to advocate isolation. In fact, isolation is impossible. The world is simply too small, and our lives are utterly interdependent. Not only our survival, but even our well-being and happiness depend on our cooperation. Mere diplomatic courtesy or casual coalescence of political interests will not suffice. No genuine and effective cooperation can proceed without mutual esteem and respect, without agreement on purposes, final objectives and standards. If it is to last through the generations and withstand the excruciating travails that it must and will face in the construction of a viable world-ecumene, cooperation must be firmly based on a communion of faith in ultimate principles, on communion in religion.

There is yet a more important and logically prior consideration why isolation is neither possible nor desirable. In Islam as well as in Christianity, and probably in all other religions, the man of religion does not, in his religious claim, assert a tentative hypothesis, nor a truth among other truths, or a version of the truth among other possible versions, but the truth. This is so much part of religious experience and of the claim resting on such experience that to deny it is to caricature the religion as a whole. Neither Islam nor Christianity can or will ever give it up. Certainly this is exclusivism; but the truth is exclusive. It cannot run counter to the laws of identity, of contradiction, of the excluded middle. Unlike science which works with probabilities, religion works with certainties. Religious diversity is not merely a religious problem. If the religion in question lays claim to the truth, contrary or diverse claims are intellectual problems which cannot be ignored. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the exclusivist claim is as much de jure as it is de facto.

In our day and age, exclusivism casts a bad smell. Having worked with probabilities for three hundred years, as scientists or the audience of scientists, and-as philosophers or the audience of philosophers-with skeptical notions of the truth for over half a century, we contract our noses whenever an exclusive claim to the truth is made. As men of religion, I hope we all have the strength of our convictions, and feel neither offended nor shamed by what our faiths claim. On the other hand, there is something shameful about exclusivism, just as there is about mission. That is to lay one’s claim with authority, to refuse to listen to or silence criticism, and to hold tenaciously to one’s claim in face of evidence to the contrary. We regard the exclusivist in science stupid, arid even insane, for running in the face of evidence. Such opprobrium equally belongs to the man of religion guilty of the same offence against the truth. Resistance to evi dence, however, is not a necessary quality of religion, nor of the man of religion. It falls within the realm of ethics of knowledge. True, religious theses are not as easily demonstrable as those of science; and the man of religion appears often to Rout the evidence when it would be more just to say that he is not yet convinced thereby. But where the evidence is significant or conclusive, to flout it is a deficiency of the man. Though its object is religious or moral, exclusivism is epistemological and hence not subject to moral considerations. On the other hand, although its object is epistemological, fanaticism is moral.

Islam and Christianity cannot therefore be impervious to each other’s claims, for just as it is irrefutably true that each lays claim to the truth and does so candidly, it is irrefutably true that the truth is one, that unless the standpoint is one of skepticism, of two diverse claims to the truth, one or both must be false! In the awareness that the standpoint of religion is that of a claim to the truth, none but the most egotistic tribalism or cynicism would sit content with its grasp of the truth while diverse claims to the one and the same truth are being made just as candidly by others. The man of religion, however, is moral; and in Christianity and Islam, he is so par excellence. He must therefore go out into the world, teach the truth which his religious experience has taught him and in the process refute the contrary claims. In Islam as well as in Christianity, the man of religion is not a tribalist nor a cynic; and his personal relation to other men, if not the fate itself of other men, weighs heavily in the outcome of his own fate. Hence, both the Muslim and the Christian are intellectually and morally bound to concern themselves with the religious views of each other, indeed of all other men. To concern oneself with the convictions of another man is to understand and to learn these convictions, to analyze and criticize them and to share with their adherents one’s own knowledge of the truth. If this is mission, then Islam and Christianity must missionize to the ends of the earth. I realize the equivocation of the term, and I suggest that the word “mission” itself be dropped from our vocabulary and the term “dialogue” be used to express the man of religions concern for men’s convictions.

“Dialogue” then is a dimension of human consciousness (as long as that consciousness is not skeptical), a category of the ethical sense (as long as that sense is not cynical). It is the altruistic arm of Islam and of Christianity, their reach beyond themselves. Dialogue is education at its widest and noblest. It is the fulfillment of the command of reality to become known, to be compared and contrasted with other claims, to be acquiesced in if true, amended if inadequate, and rejected if false. Dialogue is the removal of all barriers between men for a free intercourse of ideas where the categorical imperative is to let the sounder claim to the truth win. Dialogue disciplines our consciousness to recognize the truth inherent in realities and figurizations of realities beyond our usual ken and reach. If we are not fanatics, the consequence can-not be anything but enrichment to all concerned. Dialogue, in short, is the only kind of inter-human relationship worthy of man! Vouching for Islam and, unless my reading of Christianity has completely deceived me, for Christianity as well, dialogue is of the essence of the two faiths, the theater of their eventual unity as the religion of God, the religion of truth.

We must say it boldly that the end of dialogue is conversion; not conversion to my, your or his religion, culture, mores or political regime, but to the truth. The conversion that is hateful to Islam or to Christianity is a conversion forced, bought or cheated out of its unconscious subject. Conversion as conviction of the truth is not only legitimate but obligatory -indeed, the only alternative consistent with sanity, seriousness and dignity. Moreover, the mutual understanding between Islam and Christianity which we yearn for is not merely the conceptual, descriptive knowledge of Islam texts and manuscripts achieved by the Orientalistik discipline, nor of the Christian tradition achieved by the Muslim and older discipline of “Al Milal wa al Nihal” where the elements constitutive of Christianity are simply listed as in a series. It is primarily an understanding of the religion in the sense of faith and ethos, of apprehending the moving appeal of its categories and values, of their determining power. Religious facts may be studied scientifically like any specimens of geology. But to understand them religiously is to apprehend them as life-facts whose content is this power to move, to stir and to disturb, to command and to determine. But to apprehend this power is to be determined by it, and to do so is precisely to attain religious conviction-in short, conversion, however limited or temporary. To win all mankind to the truth is the highest and noblest ideal man has ever entertained. That history has known many travesties of this ideal, that man has inflicted tremendous sufferings upon his fellowmen in the pursuit of it are arguments against man, not against the ideal. They are the reasons why dialogue must have rules. Dialogue according to rule is the only alternative becoming of man in an age where isolation-were it ever possible-implies being bypassed by history, and noncooperation spells general disaster. Granted, the rules must be critical and their presuppositions the fewest and simplest.

II. Methodology of Dialogue

Granted then that dialogue is necessary and desirable, that its final effect should be the establishment of truth and its serious, free, candid and conscious acceptance by all men, we may now move on to the specific principles of methodology which guarantee its meaningfulness and guard against its degeneration into propaganda, brainwashing or soul-purchasing. These are the following:

No communication of any sort may be made ex cathedra, beyond critique. No man may speak with silencing authority. As for God, He may have spoken with silencing authority when man was an infant, and infant man may have accepted and submitted. To mature man, however, His command is not whimsical and peremptory. He argues for, explains and justifies His command, and is not offended if man asks for such justification. Divine revelation is authoritative, but not authoritarian; for God knows that the fulfillment of His command which issues from rational conviction of its intrinsic worth is superior to that which is blind. Fully aware of his moral freedom, modern man cannot be subjected; nor can he subject himself to any being without cause; nor can such cause be incomprehensible, irrational, esoteric or secret.

No communication may violate the laws of internal coherence mentioned earlier. Paradox is legitimate only when it is not final, and the principle overarching thesis and antithesis is given. Otherwise, discourse will issue in unintelligible riddles.

No communication may violate the laws of external coherence; that is to say, man’s religious history. The past may not be regarded as unknowable, and historiography assumed to stand on a par with either poetry or fiction. Historical reality is discoverable by empirical evidence, and it is man’s duty and greatness to press ever forward towards the genuine understanding and reconstruction of his actual past. The limits of evidence are the only limits of historical knowledge.

No communication may violate the law of correspondence with reality, but should be open to corroboration or refutation by reality. If the laws of nature are not today what they were before Einstein or Copernicus, it is not because there are no laws to nature, nor because reality is unknowable, but because there is a knowable reality which corroborates the new insights. The psychic, ethical and religious sensitivities of the people, of the age, are part of this reality; and man’s knowledge of them is most relevant for the Muslim-Christian dialogue we are about to begin.

Dialogue presupposes an attitude of freedom vis-a-vis the canonical figurization. Jesus is a point at which the Christian has contact with God. Through him, God has sent down a revelation.

Just as this revelation had to have its carrier in Jesus, it had to have a space-time circumstance in the historical development of Israel. Equally, Muhammad, the Prophet, is a point at which the Muslim has contact with God Who sent a revelation through him. Muhammad was the carrier of that revelation, and Arab consciousness and history provided the space-time circumstance for its advent. Once the advent of these revelations was complete, and men began to put their faith there in numbers and confronted new problems calling for new solutions, there arose the need to put the revelation in concepts for the ready use of the understanding, in precepts for that of the intuitive faculties, and in legal notions and provisions for the guidance of behavior. The revelations were “figurized.” Simultaneously, as is natural in such cases, different minds created different figurizations because they had different perceptions of the same reality. This latter pluralism is not a variety of the object of faith, the content revealed an sich, but of that object or content in percipi, i.e., as it became the object of a perception that is intellectual, discursive, intuitive and emotional all at once. Within each religion, the object of faith which is also the content of the revelation was, in itself, all one and the same. Although the figurizations of the revelation were many, that of which they were the figurization was one. Jesus is one; the God who sent him, and the divine revelation with which he was sent, each and every one of these was one, not many. When, as objects of human knowledge, they were conceptualized and perceptualized, they became many. The same is of course true in the case of the figurization of Islam.

The pluralistic variety of men, of their endowments and talents, their needs and aspirations, and the peculiarities of their varying environments and historical circumstances produced a great array of figurizations in both religions. Undoubtedly, some of them were, some others were not, and still others were more or less inspired. There were differences in the accuracy of figurization, in the adequacy of conceptualization and perceptualization, and outrightly in the truthfulness and veracity of the representation. That is all too natural. Disputation and contention arose and lasted for many centuries; they continue to our present day. In the case of Christianity, it became evident that one of the figurizations surpassed in the mind of the majority all other figurizations. It must then be, the community concluded, an identical copy of the content revealed. Since this content is holy and is the truth, the thinkers of the community reasoned, all other figurizations are “heresies” inasmuch as any departure from the Holy is anathema, and any variance from the Truth is falsehood. Slowly but surely, the “other” figurizations were suppressed, and the chosen figurization stood as “the dogma,” “the Catholic truth.” In the case of Islam, the general religious and ethical principles revealed in the Qur’an were subjected to varying interpretations, and a large array of schools produced differing figurizations of law and ethics. As in the case of Jesus, the life of. the Prophet was the subject of numerous figurizations. In order to bolster its authority and add to its faith in its own genuineness, each school projected its own thought onto his own person. Consensus finally eliminated the radical figurizations and preserved those which, in the judgment of the community, contained all the essentials. Later Muslims sanctified this figurization of the fathers, solemnly closed the gates of any creative interpretation however orthodox, and practically, though not theoretically, hereticated every departure from what they had made canonical.

Being human conceptualizations and preceptualizations of reality, the figurizations of Islam and Christianity are necessarily tinged with the particularism of space-time. It is quite possible, therefore, that some later generation might find some aspect of the holy content in the old figurization dimmed by time or distance; that the said content might need to be rediscovered therein; that some other generation might find new figurizational items which express to them that content or some part thereof more vividly. Certainly this is what happened in the Reformation, which brought in its wake revivification of many an aspect of the divine revelation of Jesus and released new as well as dormant energies in the service of the holy. This is also what happened in the Taymiyan (fourteenth century) and Wahhabi (eighteenth century) reforms in Islam.

Would such a re-presentation or rediscovery necessitate the Christian’s and the Muslim’s going out, as it were, of their own figurizations’ out of their “catholic” truths? Not simpliciter. For there is no a priori or wholesale condemnation of any figurization. But we should never forget that, as a piece of human work, very figurization is capable of growing dim in its conveyance of the holy, not because the holy has changed, but because man changes perspectives. Truth, goodness and value, God and the divine will for man as such, are always the same. But His will in the change and flux of individual situations, of the vicissitudes of history-and that is precisely what the figurization had been relational to-must be changing in order that the divine will for man be always the same. To question the figurization is identically to ask the popular question: What is God’s will in the context of our generation? of our historical situation? indeed, in the context of our personal individuation? The dimness of the figurization must be removed at all costs; its meanings must be rediscovered and its relevance recaptured.

There are those who argue that the figurization can and should never be transcended. Some of these do not recognize the humanity of the figurization. Others insist that piety and morality are rediscoverable only in the figurization itself. To seek the ever-new relevance of the divine imperative is for them to relate the figurization of the fathers to the new situations of human life and existence. That that is not a barren alternative is proved for them by numerous movements within the Christian tradition, and by a number of juristic interpretations of the shar’iah, in the Islamic tradition. Whether or not the present needs can be met by such means cannot be decided beforehand, and must be answered only after the needs themselves have been elaborated and the relating attempted, We can say at this stage, however, that a considerable degree of freedom vis-a-vis the figurization is necessary to insure the greatest possible tolerance for the issues of the present to voice their claim.

6. In the circumstances in which the Muslims and Christians find themselves today, primacy belongs to the ethical questions, not the theological. When one compares the canonical figurization of Christianity with that of Islam, one is struck by the wide disparateness of the two traditions. While Christianity regards the Bible as endowed with supreme authority, especially as it is interpreted with “right reason” — that is to say, in loyalty to the central tenets of the figurization according to the Protestant school, or in loyalty to the tradition of the Church as understood by its present authorities, according to the Catholic-Islam regards the Bible as a record of the divine word but a record with which the human hand had tampered, with holy as well as unholy designs. Secondly, while Christianity regards God as man’s fellow, a person so moved by man’s failure that He goes to the length of sacrifice for his redemption, Islam regards God primarily as the Just Being whose absolute justice-with all the reward and doom for man that it enjoins-is not only sufficient mercy, but the only mercy coherent with divine nature. Whereas the God of Christianity acts in maws salvation, the God of Islam commands him to do that which brings that salvation about. Thirdly, while Christianity regards Jesus as the second person of a triune God, Islam regards him as God’s human prophet and messenger. Fourthly, while Christianity regards space-time and history as hopelessly incapable of embodying God’s kingdom, Islam regards God’s kingdom as truly realizable-indeed as meaningful at all-only within the contexts of space-time and history. Fifthly, while Christianity regards the Church as the body of Christ endowed with ontic significance for ever and ever, Islam regards the community of faith as an instrument mobilized for the realization of the divine pattern in the world, an instrument whose total value is dependent upon its fulfillment or otherwise of that task.

This list is far from complete. But it does show that the pursuit of dialogue on the level of theological doctrine is marred by such radical differences that no progress may be here expected without preliminary work in other areas. Since it is at any rate impossible for this generation of Muslims and Christians to confront one another regarding all facets of their ideologies at once, a choice of area for a meager start such as this is imperative. Priority certainly belongs to those aspects which are directly concerned with our lives as we live them in a world that has grown very small and is growing smaller still. The Muslim-Christian dialogue should seek at first to establish a mutual understanding, if not a community of conviction, of the Muslim and Christian answers to the fundamental ethical question, What ought I to do? If Muslims and Christians may not reach ready appreciation of each other’s ideas or figurizations of divine nature, they may yet attempt to do the will of that nature, which they both hold to be one. To seek “God’s way”, i.e., to understand, to know, to grasp its relevance for every occasion, to anticipate its judgment of every moral deed-that is the prerequisite whose satisfaction may put the parties to the dialogue closer to mutual self-understanding. Even if theories of God’s nature, of His revelation, of His kingdom, and of His plans for man’s destiny were to be regarded as objects of faith beyond critique, certainly the ethical duties of man are subject to a rational approach. Neither Christianity nor Islam precludes a critical investigation of the ethical issues confronting modem man in the world. The proximity of these issues to his life, his direct awareness of them as affecting his own life as well as that of mankind give immediacy to the investigation, and they assign the prerogatives of competence and jurisdiction to his personal and communal judgment in the matter. The relevance of the issues involved to world problems pressing him for an answer furnishes the investigation with a ready testing ground.

Moreover, ethical perceptions are different from the perceptions of theoretical consciousness where to miss is to perceive unreality. Difference in ethical perception is that of the brother who does not see as much, as far or as deep as the other. This is a situation which calls for the involved midwifery of ethical perception. Here, there is no question of error and falsehood, as every perception is one of value and difference consists in perceiving more or less of the same. Neither is the question one of an acquiescent profession of a propositional fact. It is rather one of determination of the perceiving subject by the value that is beheld; and for such perception to be itself, it must be the perception of the man, just as for his realization of the will of God to be itself, i.e., moral, that realization has to be his own free and deliberate act. On the purely theological level, when the impulse to make others heretical is at work, tolerance can mean either contemptuous condescension, conversion, or compromise with the truth. In ethical perception, on the other hand, disagreement is never banished or excommunicated; and heretication defeats its own purpose. Tolerance and midwifery-which are precisely what our small world needs-are the only answer. Their efforts are in the long run always successful; and, at any rate, they are in the Muslim’s opinion the better as well as the “Christian” view.

III. Themes for Dialogue

Looking upon the contemporary ethical reality of Muslims and Christians, three dominant facts are discernible:

First, the modem Muslim and Christian regard themselves as standing in state of innocence.

Whatever their past ideas and attitudes may have been, both of them agree that man’s individuation is good, that his life of person and in society is good, that nature and cosmos are good. Fortunately, modem Christian theologians too have been rejoicing in their rediscovery of God’s judgment of creation “that it was good.” The ideological import of this re-discovery is tremendous. Man has rehabilitated himself in creation. He has found his place in it and represented his destiny to himself as one of engagement in its web of history. He is in God’s image, the only creature with consciousness and spirit, unto whom the command of God has come, and upon whom the will of God on earth depends for realization as that will is, in itself, a will to a morally perfected world. Certainly, God could have created the world already perfect, or necessarily perfectible by the workings of natural law. But He created this world, “where rust and moth consume and where thieves break through and steal”, i.e., a world where His will, or value, is not yet realized, that in the free realization of it by man, the moral values may be realized which could not be realized otherwise. Hence, this world is good, despite its imperfection; and man occupies therein the especially significant-indeed cosmic-station of the bridge through which the ethical elements of divine will enter the realm of creation. It is not surprising that a rediscovery of such momentum causes a great deal of joy, a feeling of self-confidence in the great task ahead. Gone are the sordid obsessions with the innate depravity, the intrinsic futility, the necessary fallenness and cynical vacuity of man and of the world. Modern man affirms his life and his world. Recognizing the imperativeness as well as the moving appeal of God’s command, he accepts his destiny joyfully and presses forth upright into the thick of space-time where he is to make that will real and actual.

Secondly, the modem Muslim and Christian are acutely aware of the necessity and importance of recognizing God’s will, of recognizing His command. This acknowledgment is the substance, the content or “meat” of their acknowledgment of God. “Recognition of God’s command”, “ethical perception!” and “the act of faith” are mutually convertible and equivalent terms. Such acknowledgment is indubitably the first condition; for it is absurd to seek to realize the divine will in the world without a prior acknowledgment of its content, just as it is absurd to seek to realize what ought to be done without the prior recognition of what is valuable. How is one to recognize that which ought to be done in any given situation — which must be one among a number of possible alternatives — without the standard or norm with which the realizability in the alternatives of that which ought to be can be measured and ascertained? Indeed, if any axiology-free program of action could ever be envisaged, the agent thereof would not be a moral subject, but an automaton of duties. To be moral at all, the act must imply a free choice; and this is a choice in which consciousness of the value, or of its mat’al as the spatio-temporal concretization thereof, plays the crucial part. All this notwithstanding, and however absolutely indispensable and necessary the acknowledgment of God’s command and will may be, it is only a condition, a conditio sine qua non to be sure, but still a condition. Philosophically stated, this principle is that of the priority of the study of values to duties, of axiology to deontology. The act of faith, of acknowledgment, recognition and acquiescence, is the first condition of piety, of virtue and felicity. But woe to man if he mistakes the condition of a thing for the thing itself! The act of faith neither justifies nor makes just. It is only an entrance ticket into the realm of ethical striving and doing. It does no more than let us into the realm of the moral life. There, to realize the divine is imperative in the value-short world, to transfigure and to fill it with value, man’s prerogative as well as duty.

Thirdly, the modem Muslim or Christian recognizes that the moral vocation or mission of man in this world has yet to be fulfilled, and by him; that the measure of his fulfillment thereof is the sole measure of his ethical worth; that in respect to this mission or vocation all men start out in this world with a carte blanche on which noting is entered except what each individual earns with his own doing or not-doing. In the discharge of his mission in space-time, no man is privileged and every man is an equal conscript. For the command of the one God is also one, for all men without discrimination or election; and His justice is absolute.

IV. Dialectic of the Themes with the Figurizations

A. Modern Man and the State of Innocence

The notion of original sin, of the fallenness of man, appears from the perspective of contemporary ethical reality to have outlived its meaningfulness.

Sin is, above all, a moral category; it is not ontological. For modern man, there is no such a thing as sin of creation, of nature, of man as such, no sin as entry into existence or space-time. Physical death is perhaps the deepest mystery of the process of space-time; it is certainly a disvalue, but it is not moral, and therefore not sin, nor the consequence of sin.

Moral sin is not hereditary; neither is it vicarious, or communal, but always personal, always implying a free choice and a deliberate deed on the part of a moral agent in full possession and mastery of his powers. The actual involvement, or the “attraction,” to which the free moral agent may be subject by merely being a member of his family, of his community, of his religio-cultural group, is not denied. Modern man is also aware that sin is an evil act the ontic consequences of which-whether material or psychological-diverge in space-time ad infinitum, affecting in some measure the being and lives of other people. He is equally aware that such consequences are not moral precisely because they are ontic, i.e., necessary, involving no choice on the part of the person whom they affect. Moreover, modernity has removed the hitherto necessary connection between existence and membership in the family, community or religio-cultural group. It was this strict necessity of the connection, characteristic of ancient societies, which, though partially, had induced the fathers to represent sin as a necessary and universal category. The modern Muslim and Christian no more hold a man as member of a group and as subject to the fixations operative in that group except as the result of a decision that man makes for himself. This is particularly true of those societies which have achieved a high degree of internal mobility, especially true of Western society. But the fact is that the whole world is moving in that direction and the day is not far when, from the perspective of the now-forming world community, the universalization of education and the termination of the age of societal isolation, it will be relatively easy to move from one culture to another.

Sin is not only a doing, whether introverted, as when the doing is strictly within the person’s soul directly affecting neither his body nor anything else outside his soul, or extroverted, as when the doing is spatial involving his body, the souls and bodies of others, or nature. Such doing is only the spatio-temporal consequence of sin. Sin is primarily a perceiving. Here lies its locus and genesis, i.e., in perception. Its effect is in intent and doing. Accordingly, it can be counteracted only in the faculties of perception and its solution must therefore be in education. It is obvious that retaliation and retribution are by themselves inadequate to meet sin wherever it may take place. That forgiveness is equally inadequate becomes clear when we consider that by releasing the ethical energies of the sinner from frustration at his own misdeed, the spiritual power of forgiveness can cure only the sinner with strong ethical sensitivities. For it takes a sinner genuinely frustrated by his own moral failure to respond to its moving appeal. The rest-and the rest is surely the great majority-remain untouched by its power, if not encouraged and confirmed in their sinfulness. Education, on the other hand, ministers to everybody’s need. It is universal in its application as all men stand to benefit from its fruits. Admittedly, forgiveness does have an intrinsic power which acts on all perceiving subjects moving them to emulate the forgiver. Like love, courtesy and respect, it is “contagious.” But it is forever personal, its activity and effect are always erratic; whereas education is always subject to deliberation, to critique and to planning.

It is within the realm of perception that the modern Muslim and Christian can make sense out of the Christian figurization’s notion of sin. From this perspective, sin is man’s propensity to ethical misperception. It is an empirical datum whose ubiquitousness is very grave and disturbing. Nonetheless, it is not necessary. The general propensity to ethical misperception is counterbalanced by the propensity to sound ethical perception which is at least as universal as its opposite. Indeed, there is far more value in the world than there is disvalue, far more virtue than sin. If by nature man falls in error in his cognition of the ethical, of value, it is equally by nature, if not by a stronger nature, that he is driven to keep on looking and trying despite the faltering. “Man by nature desires to know” the true, the good and the beautiful (said Aristotle); and “man is doomed to love the good” and pursue the true and the beautiful (said Plato). While his soul yearns for, seeks and pursues value, man’s natural “will to live” keeps him on his feet, and his “will to do” propels him forward despite the setbacks of sin. True, man is by nature inclined to moral complacency, but he is equally inclined to the life of danger. And while modem man is certainly resolved in favor of the latter, our reason tells us that we should encourage him all the more because the life of danger holds the greater promise. Man may and certainly will err in ethical perception. But he is not hopeless; nor are his misperceptions-his sins-incorrigible. His fate, blest or unblest, devolves in the first place upon him alone.

If this is convincing to both, the dialogue must move on towards revivifying the figurization recapturing whatever truth there is in it. We may hence expect it to bring out the following point. Ethical misperception, in all its varieties, is that which we ought to guard against, to avoid and to combat in ourselves, in the others and in all men. Indubitably, we must become fully aware of the enemy, of his tactics and defences, of his nature and constitution, if we are to fight him successfully. In the mind of the general, a very prominent place is occupied by “the enemy.” It was such genuine awareness on the part of the fathers that induced them to put sin in man’s flesh, in the passions for the lower values of pleasure and comfort, of life and power, in the overhasty realization of value, the surmounting of mares cosmic station, in the arrogant pride that the ethical job of man on earth has already been done and finished. in this sense everyone is susceptible to sin as every man has his temptations, his weak moments when his ethical perception is dimmed and his moral vigor is dull and slow to act. To be always conscious of this disposition, i.e., to keep it constantly in mind as the negative object of the moral struggle, is the peculiar merit of the fathers’ emphasis on sin.

Unlike the fathers, therefore, the modem Christian and Muslim cannot think of sin as the predicament out of which there can be no hope of deliverance save by a non-human, divine act. Even if, in the interest of final victory in mans moral struggle, we overestimate the enemy, victory must certainly be possible if it is to be an objective and the struggle is to be sustained despite the eventual setbacks. Were we to grant that sin is necessary but keep in mind its meaning as ethical misperception, we would be contradicted by the fact that man has in fact perceived rightly when he perceived God’s past revelations as genuine. This inconsequence may not be removed except by adding another fantastic assumption nihilating man’s responsibility for genuine perception, viz., predestination to right perception. But that is a pure fabrication; that perception which is not the person’s perception is not perception.

Finally, the dialogue must move towards a clear answer to the ethical question. If we keep our balance, we will recognize that the right mental and emotional attitude to sin is to keep it in consciousness in order to avoid and to surmount it. The Toad hitherto is and can be only education, the axiological anamnesis which causes the man to see for himself, to perceive value and expose his own ethos to determination by it. The teacher in general, whether mother, father or elder, teacher by concepts, or by example, is precisely the helper who helps man perceive Tightly and thereby surmount the sinful misperceptions. Education is the unique processus of salvation, No ritual of water, therefore, or ablutions or baptism, of initiation or confirmation, no acknowledgment of symbols or authority, no confession of contrition, can by themselves do this job for man. Every person must do it for himself, though he may be assisted by the more experienced; and everybody can.

B. Justification as Declaring or Making Good

Looking at the figurization created by the fathers, the contemporary Muslim and Christian observe that its notion of justification as a declaring or making good the person who has acknowledged the figurization does not accord with contemporary reality. Here three considerations are in order. First, where ethical misperception has been the fact or the rule, no confession of any item in the figurization will transform misperception into perception. Even the confession of God as conceived of in the figurization does not constitute the “entrance ticket” we mentioned earlier, the sine qua non of salvation. What will do so is the confession of the content of divine will, of value itself. For it is the materiale values themselves, not the concepts and theories of “God” or “divine will” as enunciated or elaborated by the figurization, that move the human soul, that can be realized once they are known, and that must be known in order to be realized.

Second, education, as we have defined it, is a long and continuous growth which has no divisions admitting of the representation of its processes as a before and an after. Neither is the realm of values (the will of God) divided into two parts such that only the attainment of one, rather than the other, may be said to constitute, or begin, ethical living. Genuine perception, therefore, as well as genuine value-realization, is with the child as well as with the mature elder, though the objects (values and their relations) discerned may belong to different orders of rank. Salvation or, rather, an amount of it may be the work of the “faithful” of any religion as that of the “faithless” — the goyim or barbaroi of any faith without regard to the figurization to which they subscribe. The child must then be “justified” as much as the adult, the “sinner” as much as the “saved,” provided he perceives that which his yet-undeveloped, or little-developed faculties enable him to perceive. Value-perception is a continuous growth process. It does not admit of a moment of justification before which there was no growth at all and then, by divine fiat, it has come to be. Third, perception of genuine value is only the beginning of the process of felicitous achievement. Beyond it yet lies the longest and hardest part of the road, the realization in space-time of that which had been correctly perceived.

Another meaning of confession is conversion. It consists of a new openness of mind and heart to the determining power of the divine, of value. It is the state of fulfillment of the admirably stated first command of Jesus, namely, to love God with all one’s mind, all one’s heart and all one’s power. This is certainly a radical transformation, for it entails a deliberate willingness to seek the good and to submit to its determination rather than to evil’s. As the first step of faith, however, it must stand below the act of confession as perception of value at all. All it recognizes is the value of submission to value which is also a prerequisite but more fundamental, more elemental, than the first. It can also refer to an attitude that comes after perception of the whole, or a large part of the realm of value. In this case, it is of momentous significance if we regard the ethical phenomenon as necessarily broken into perception and action, as separate successive stages between which the devil and his temptations may intervene. This view rests upon the groundless assumption that ethical perception is formalistic and, hence, discursive and intellectual (Kant’s “practical reason” trying to subdue and to discipline an erratic “Willk”. The establishment of ethical perception as emotional a priori intuition (Scheler, Hartmann) has recaptured the unity of the ethical phenomenon as perception and action at the same time, and proved the Socratic formula “knowledge = virtue” once again true.

There is yet another sense, recognized and well-emphasized by the figurization of Christianity, in which faith and its confession can constitute a real achievement. This is the sense in which the confession of faith, i.e., the subject’s conviction that he is now reconciled to God and accepted by the community, means the liberation of his ethical energies for self-exertion in God’s cause. Since the state of sin is by definition the undesirable state of being, and faith is the consciousness of this undesirability at all levels, the solemn confession of faith becomes the resolution not to relapse into that which has so far been rightly perceived as undesirable. Psychologically speaking, assurance of the acceptance by God and the community of this resolution as something serious and significant, has the good effect of removing whatever fixity misperception may have developed in the moral subject and releasing his energies towards value-realization, as if a new page had been turned in his book-of-life. Though this must remain a mere “as-if,” it is a powerful moment psychologically. In a person of ethically sensitive nature, the consciousness of sin may possess that person to the point of frustrating his determination by the good, his will to right perception and right action. In such a person, the phenomena of repentance, confession, reconciliation and acceptance can not only release pent up energies but create new ones and orient them towards the good to which they can then rush with a great surge. But, as we have said earlier in connection with the psychological effect of salvation upon the subject, we must remember that such responses and effects are the prerogative of the few, just as great sin equally belongs to the few. The majority, however, remains as little determined by the one as by the other. In the mediocre measure that the majority can have either the cause (sin) or the effect (justification), the advantage of the confession of faith must perforce be equally mediocre.

There is a sense, therefore, though a unique one indeed, in which the act of faith carries an ontic relation to man and cosmos, which is its capacity to infuse into the psychic threads of the subject new determinants and thus bring about a new momentum as it deflects the causal threads from the courses they would have taken had these new determinants not entered the scene. This “plus” of determination is as ontically real as any natural determination since both of them equally produce the same result, namely, the deflection of causal threads to ends other than those to which they would lead otherwise. But we should guard against ever confusing the nature of this “plus.” It is certainly not a justifacti, a making just, for, ontologically speaking, the deflection of causal threads which constitutes the moral deeds have not yet taken place though it has become a real possibility. Nor is it a declaring just in the forensic sense that, whereas the same person remains the same, the scales of justice that pronounced him sinful have just been tipped in his favor by the fact of solemn confession. Such would be literally a case of “cheating.” Nor, finally, is justification a considering of the sinful as innocent, ethically speaking. For it is neither a category of God’s thought, nor one of the mares deeds which belong to history and can never be undone. It is only a psychic release in the justified sinner, whose real value is not intrinsic but derivative of that of the values which the newly released energies may, or may not, reali