In Islam, the term ‘ibadah (service, worship) does not merely signify the ritualistic activities such as Salah (ritual Prayer), fasting, Zakah (obligatory alms) or Hajj (pilgrimage to Makkah). It includes all the activities of a believer that are in accordance with the laws of Allah (God). When a Muslim performs all the activities of his life for the pleasure of Allah, then all his deeds become ‘ibadah or worship. Naturally this includes his ritualistic worship, such as prayer, as well.

Islam requires a person to submit himself whole-heartedly and fully to Allah. Thus, surrendering all the areas of one’s activity to Allah, leaving nothing to the whims and fancies of anyone else, is in fact the true meaning of Islam.

The Qur’an shows that there are only two ways laid out before Man: one is the way of Allah and the other is the way of the Devil. A person cannot stand with one foot in Allah’s way and the other in the Devil’s way.

A Muslim is one who has willfully submitted his whole self to Allah, and his duty then is just to obey Him. A Muslim cannot split his life into compartments and say, “This is the area of my religion where I will obey Allah and these are the areas where I will follow others.” For service and worship are one in Islam. By following or obeying others than Allah, one is, in effect, worshiping them, which is a contradiction of the first item of Muslim belief: there is none worthy of worship but Allah.

Once a person accepts Allah as his Creator, Sustainer and Lawgiver, he cannot follow other gods. Islam is a complete way of life that asks its followers to model their entire lives in accordance with its principles. This may sound somewhat difficult for many; but in fact it need not be because what we mean here is chiefly a change of attitude and approach. Of course, it will have its impact on one’s life, both internal and external; but for those who wish to lead a good life on earth, Islam is the way.

What is important here is to understand that Islam does not value rituals merely for the sake of ceremony, especially when they are performed mechanically and have no influence on one’s life. If our rituals do not have any influence on our day-to-day life, they have no value. Likewise, when we do our daily activities with sincerity and faith, in the hopes of Allah’s reward, they become important acts of worship.

The Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) once told his Companions that they would even be rewarded for having sexual intercourse with their wives. The Companions were astonished and asked,  “How are we going to be rewarded for doing something we enjoy very much?” The Prophet asked them, “Suppose you satisfy your desire illegally, don’t you think that you will be punished for that?”  They replied, “Yes.” “So,” he said, “by satisfying it legally with your wives you are rewarded for it.”

This comprehensive approach to worship enables a person to purify and spiritualize the entire spectrum of his life. But this is not to belittle the importance of ritualistic worship. Actually, rituals, if performed in their true spirit, elevate man morally and spiritually and enable him to carry on his activities in all walks of life according to the guidance of Allah.

Thus, worship in Islam, whether ritual or non-ritual, trains the individual to lead a life in perfect obedience and submission to his Creator, thereby wiping out all evil from his life and paving the way for making the Word of Allah dominant in the world.

The Qur’an is the Book of Allah (God) that was revealed in Arabic to the Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) over a period of twenty-three years. He dictated it to his followers as he received it from the Angel Jibril (Gabriel), and they wrote it down on whatever materials were available. The Prophet and many of his followers memorized it as it was revealed.

The Qur’an consists of 114 surahs (sometimes called chapters) of various lengths, from 3 to 286 verses. The verses were revealed a few at a time and not in their present order but were placed in their position by the Prophet in accordance to instructions from the Angel Jibril.

Shortly after the death of the Prophet, the first caliph, Abu Bakr As-Siddiq, ordered the scribe Zayd ibn Thabit to collect the manuscripts and make one copy of the Qur’an. He did so with the assistance of the hundreds of Companions of the Prophet who had memorized the Qur’an, thus assuring that nothing was added or omitted, and that the order of the verses was according to the Prophet’s instructions. Later, the third caliph, ‘Uthman ibn ‘Affan, again asked Zayd to oversee the copying of the Qur’an. Several standard copies were made and sent to all the provinces of the Muslims, with orders that all other manuscripts be burned. This was to ensure that there would not be various readings of the Qur’an.

Thus, the Qur’an remains today exactly as it was revealed more than 14 centuries ago and contains the exact Words of Allah. Many thousands of Muslims memorized it each generation so that it was never forgotten. Further, the Arabic language in which the Qur’an was revealed remains a living language. There are copies of the Qur’an from the first century after the revelation in libraries in the Muslim world. A comparison to modern printed copies shows that the Qur’an has not changed over the centuries.

There are people who think that “a perfect Muslim” is simply one who is correct in the observance of the salah (ritual Prayer), the fasting, the zakah (payment of a certain portion of one’s wealth to the poor), and the Hajj (pilgrimage to Makkah). This indeed is not the case. If the ritual observances do not help the person to be humble, virtuous and truly God-fearing, then he or she is not a real Muslim. A Muslim should be good and just in dealing with others, no matter their religion, and take special care to keep away from all the shameful and sinful things Allah (God) has forbidden.

We can summarize the teachings of Islam about the Muslim character succinctly in this form:

Be truthful in everything, don’t lie.

Be sincere and straightforward, don’t be hypocritical.

Be honest, don’t be corrupt.

Be humble, don’t be boastful.

Be moderate, don’t be excessive.

Be reserved, don’t be garrulous.

Be soft-spoken, don’t be loud.

Be refined and gentle in speech, don’t cure and use foul language.

Be loving and solicitous to others, don’t be unmindful of them.

Be considerate and compassionate, don’t be harsh.

Be polite and respectful to people, don’t be insulting or disrespectful.

Be generous and charitable, don’t be selfish and miserly.

Be good natured and forgiving, don’t be bitter and resentful.

Share and be content with what Allah has given you, don’t be greedy.

Be cheerful and pleasant, don’t be irritable and morose.

Be chaste and pure, don’t be lustful.

Be alert and aware of the world around you, don’t be absent-minded.

Be dignified and decent, don’t be graceless.

Be optimistic and hopeful, don’t be cynical or pessimistic.

Be confident and have deep faith, don’t be doubtful and wavering.

Be spiritually oriented and not materialistic.

Be confident of the mercy of Allah, don’t be despairing and lose heart.

Be diligent and vigilant of your duties, don’t be negligent.

Be thankful to Allah and constantly pray to Him, don’t be forgetful of His innumerable blessings.

Islam sees life is an organic whole and the same principles should guide and govern it in all its ramifications. It stands for life-affirmation and life-fulfillment and refuses to divide life into watertight compartments of the sacred and the secular, of the holy and profane. It gives an integrated view of life and reality. The teaching of Islam cover all fields of human activity, spiritual and material, individual and social, educational and cultural, economic and political, national and international. They cater for the aspirations of the soul as well as for the demands of the law and social institutions.

Islam’s uniqueness lies in spiritualizing the whole matrix of life. Every activity, whether related to things like prayer and fasting, or to economic transactions, sexual relationships, diplomatic dealings or scientific experimentation’s, is religious if it is undertaken with God consciousness and accords with the values and principles revealed by Him; and it is irreligious if it is in violation of them.

The Islamic outlook on life is revolutionary as it gives a new dynamism to what has been traditionally regarded as religious. What makes an activity religious is the attitude with which it is undertaken and its conformity or otherwise with the values enunciated by God and His Prophet.

Islam makes faith and religion the basis of the entire human society and the mainspring for the network of its relationships. Commitment to Islam integrates man not only with God but also with the community of believers. Islamic community is a fraternity of faith - anyone who believes in the Islamic religion and ideology is an inalienable part of this nation - whatever his race, color, language or place of birth.

This principle of human organization is rational and ideological in nature and is capable of embracing the entire human race. This concept of an ideological community is not a mere moral precept; it has its social, political and legal dimensions. It produces a new infrastructure for human relations. Faith is the decisive force in this system. It gives birth to social institutions, from the family to the state.

The family is a divinely inspired and ordained institution. It was not evolved through human experimentation involving a process of trial and error spread over time. It was in institution that came into existence with the creation of man. The human race is a product of this institution and not the other way round.

Although marriage is a divinely ordained institution, each marriage as such is in the nature of a contract. The word nikah used for marriage in the Qur’an and the Sunnah, means ‘aqd, or contract.

Marriage ultimately leads to a number of relationships and engenders a set of mutual rights and obligations. Each contract, however, is not a sacrament; it is not irrevocable. Divorce is permitted in cases where marriage has failed. Remarriage is allowed, even encouraged. There is no stigma attached to remarriage or to marrying a divorced woman or a widower.

Faith constitutes the bedrock for the institution of the family. Marriage should be among partners who share common outlook on life and morality, and who participate in this co-venture to fulfill their destiny as God’s vicegerents.

The Muslim family is an extended family, different relations occupying different positions. It is not a nuclear, atomistic family consisting of the parents and children only; it normally has three or four generations under its umbrella. A careful look at the Islamic law of inheritance shows that all these relations are an integral part of the basic family structure and not just peripheral to it.

The family is the basis of the entire socio-cultural structure and a self-sustaining mechanism to ensure social, ideological and cultural stability over entire span of society on the one hand and in the time past, present and future on the other.

The message of Islam is for the entire human race. According to Islam, Allah is the God of the entire world and Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) is a messenger for the whole of mankind.

According to Islam, all men are equal, whatever be their color, language, race or nationality. Islam addresses itself to the conscience of humanity and banishes all false barriers of race, status and wealth. There can be no denying the fact that such barriers have always existed, and do exist even today in this so-called enlightened age. Islam, however, removes all these impediments and proclaims the idea of the whole of humanity being one family of God.  

Islam is international in its outlook and approach. It does not admit barriers and distinctions based on color, clan, blood or territory such as were prevalent before the advent of Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him). These are rampant in different forms, even in this modern age.

Islam is a way of life that transcends race and ethnicity. The Glorious Qur’an repeatedly reminds us of our common origin:

(O mankind! We created you from a single (pair) of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other (not that ye may despise (each other). Verily the most honored of you in the sight of God is (he who is) the most righteous of you. And God has full knowledge and is well acquainted (with all things).) (Al-Hujrat: 13)

The eradication of race consciousness is one of the outstanding moral achievements of Islam. In the contemporary world there is, as it happens, a crying need for the propagation of this Islamic virtue. It is conceivable that the spirit of Islam might be the timely reinforcement, which would decide this issue in favor of tolerance and peace, the historian A.J. Toynbee wrote in his book Civilization on Trial.

Islam unites the entire human race under one banner. To a world torn by national rivalries and feuds, it presents a message of life and hope, and of a glorious future.

As a complete way of life, Islam has provided guidelines and rules for ever sphere of society. Naturally, a functioning economic system is vital of a healthy society, as the consumption of goods and services and the facilitation of this by a common medium of exchange play a major role in allowing people to realize their material and other goals in life.

Islam has set some standards, based on justice and practicality, for such economic systems to be established. These standards aim to prevent the enmity that often occurs between different socioeconomic strata, and while they consider money to be among the most important elements in society, the gathering of which concerns almost every human being who participates in transactions with others, they do not lose sight of the fact that its position is secondary to the real purpose of human existence, the worship of Allah.

There are three foundational principles that comprise the economic system in Islam: personal property, freedom of activity, and the right of money.

An Islamic economic system is not necessarily concerned with the precise amount of fiscal income and expenditure, imports and exports, and other economic statistics. While such matters are no doubt important, Islam is concerned with the spirit of the economic system.

A society that implements Islamic laws and promotes Islamic manners will find that it infuses all the systems – social, economic, and so forth – that it deals with. Islam teaches that Allah has created provision for every person who He has brought to life. Therefore, the competition for natural resources that is presumed to exist among the nations of the world is an illusion. While the earth has sufficient bounty to satisfy the needs of mankind, the challenge for humans lies in discovering, extracting, processing, and distributing these resources to those who need them.

The rapid deterioration of human environment is nothing but a crisis of values.  It is actually the most striking manifestation of the development of the Western civilization.  One cannot ignore the inescapable conclusion that modern science and technology has provided us with a literal and physical capacity to completely destroy ourselves.  The threat to the very abode of our terrestrial sojourn is merely an indication of this capacity.

The Modern Situation

The modern civilization is characterized by its awesome mastery of the physical and natural forces, which throughout human history have bedeviled Man with distress and misery of every kind.  No longer helpless before the capricious might of untamed nature, modern man, having already subdued his whole terrestrial milieu, is now casting his covetous glances at the stars.  This unprecedented dominion over nature is a unique and singularly impressive feature of the modern, albeit Western, civilization.  Every other contemporary civilization tries to emulate the Western science and technology in its acquisition of the tools of this fearsome mastery.  Political ideology, religious persuasion, cultural heritage and historical traditions are all willingly sacrificed at the high altar of modernity.  Every contemporary society, it would appear, is scrambling for the spoils of the Western conquest of nature, unhampered by moral constraints of any kind.

Ironically, whereas the rest of the world is blinded by the dazzling display of Occidental might, the West itself is no longer sure of the fundamental moral forces of its civilization.  Faced with the enormity of problems confronting the world today – problems defying technical, i.e. Western, solutions - Western man is displaying every symptom of nerve failure.  The sheer impossibility of maintaining the wanton ethos of “progress and meliorism” forever has even shed an uncanny shadow of doubt on the ability of man to survive as a race on this planet.  The ominous foreboding of environmental calamity, perhaps the greatest peril facing mankind today, has also brought back the cardinal virtue of temperantia and the need for humility regarding today’s scientific jargon.  In short, gone today is the illusory sense of dominion, which man enjoyed during a short interregnum.  Gone, certainly, is yesterday’s confidence in the powers of Promethean man.

Ecological Ethics and Religious Consciousness

Man as a creature, is never found in a “state of nature”, for as soon as he becomes recognizable as Man, he is already in a state of culture.  Man’s strivings to impose his will upon nature, may therefore be construed as being essential to his constant struggle to remain in a state of humanity.  The way he reacts with nature, seeking dominion over it or propitiating it with votive gifts, thus, mirrors man’s very conception of himself and of the ultimate values he espouses.  Without doubt, human environment, the part of nature Man inhabits and fashions to meet his aspirations, reveals a great deal of a culture’s teleology and its overall world-view.  Ecological issues are, in the final analysis steeped deep in the moral and ethical consciousness of a culture.  Ecology is, in fact, a part and parcel of religious Weltanschauung.

Recently, with the gradual awareness of the degradation of global environment, the following questions have repeatedly been asked: In which way is the present state of ecological imbalance indicative of the spiritual rootlessness of modern culture?  What are the metaphysical and philosophical roots of the environmental attitude that has brought modern civilization to the brink of disaster?  What is it in the Western man’s intellectual and spiritual heritage that distinguishes his view of nature and environmental ethics, from those of earlier and other contemporary cultures?  Is the depletion of natural resources and the deterioration of human environment merely the obverse side of the industrial society that has let out the genie of technological change and is now unable to control the unruly spirit?  Could the villain in the whole ecological drama be Man himself, who has bred too many of his own kind?  Perhaps the root cause of our environmental predicament is simply that all ethics hitherto were always considered to have to deal only with the relations of Man to Man.

A very provocative answer to these questions was provided by Lynn White Jr, who put forward the thesis that the roots of our ecological problems are to be found in the Judo-Christian ethics. Man, in the Biblical tradition, White argues, is above nature.  He is a special creation of God and has been commanded to have dominion over nature: (to replenish the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the seas and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.) Christianity, White continues, sanctified Man’s conquest of nature and was instrumental in the engenderment of natural and physical sciences.  The emergence of science, technology, indeed the modern secular world, owes its rational to the Biblical Weltanschauung: nay, it is an essential fulfillment of Christian commitment.  Then White’s argument changes into an indictment and marks the specific contribution of its author, by sanctioning Man’s unrestricted conquest of nature.  Christianity, White believes, must take the blame for the environmental affliction of mankind because the roots of the present ecological crisis lay already in the first chapter of Genesis.  Having acquired this insight, White was bold enough to plead for the modification of the so-called “dominion ethics”, which misapplication has resulted in the present environmental debacle, and replacing them with what he called “Franciscan conservatism”.

Idolatry and Nature Worship

The monotheistic crusade against the sin of idolatry, of nature worship, has also been dismissed as a Quixotian charge at the windmills because “it is doubtful that any such thing as idolatry has ever existed to any significant degree outside the perceptions – or misperceptions – of Judo-Christian cultures”.  Quite the contrary, “desacralized nature, our nature, lacking sacramental transparency, has become an idol, an objectivized reality held to be final and self-sufficient: the highest reality, the only reality”.  Nothing less than the whole prophetic tradition, from Abraham to Muhammad, stands accused for mankind’s present ecological distress!

Another remarkable feature of the environmental controversy over the “monotheistic debasement of nature” was that Islam – as usual – hardly figured in this discussion as if it were a religion from the moon and the living reality of one billion Muslims merely a statistical illusion.  It was taken for granted that “Islam, like Marxism, is a Judo-Christian heresy”, which had hardly anything original to contribute.  As for those who did spare a thought or two to the flowering of science in “Islamdom”, during the Western Middle Ages, the anomalous fact was easily and erroneously “explained away”.  The argument was that “the main content and attitude of Islamic science appear to be driven solidly from Greek sources”, and that “within the context of the present discussion, the case of Muslim science must logically lead to a direction opposite to that to which it is commonly supposed to lead”.

The whole subject of the relationship of Islam with natural science still awaits proper enquiry.  It cannot be entered upon here, but all the available evidence suggests that the scientific Weltanschauung of Islam was anti-classical.  If science in Islam did not lead to the same kind of development that transpired in the West, it is simply because it was never detached from values.  Other more tangible factors, quite naturally, did contribute towards the decline of natural sciences in Islam, but the main constraints were ethical.  In hindsight one could not regard this as merely unpropitious.

The role of religious consciousness in the formation of environmental attitudes, which is the vantage point of Islam, deserves as much consideration as any other.  There is no justification for assuming an identity of Qur’anic and Biblical stance on the subject, without enquiry and comparison.  Despite the common “monotheistic” vocabulary; God, creation, Man, history and revelation, the Qur’anic statement on Man’s ultimate purpose, and hence his relationship with nature, differs not only in tenor and syntax, but also in substance as well, from that of the Bible.  Nature and ethics are at the very core of Qur’anic Weltanschauung.  To infuse the natural world with transcendental ethics is the main purpose of Man, according to the Qur’an.

Salvation or Damnation

In fact, Man’s salvation or damnation ensues from his ability to assume moral responsibility in his natural milieu.  So central is the Qur’anic theme of the affinity of nature and ethics that even outsiders have not failed to notice it.  Actually the present ecological crisis has indeed made Islam a particularly relevant ethical tradition.  Once blinded by the dazzling haze of modernity, countless numbers of Muslims are now, thanks also to the ecological hindsight of the once improvident Occidental culture, rediscovering their own spiritual roots.  The whole philosophy of secular meliorism and its concomitant delusion of progress and prosperity forever, appear patently irrelevant when viewed in the light of the Qur’anic ethic of moral responsibility and moderation.  It is not accidental that Muslim intellectuals were among the very first who raised their voices against the abuse of nature, which was being perpetrated in the name of science and progress.

In the coming years, Muslim thinkers will, I believe, make their voices increasingly heard on issues pertaining to environment and values.  Their Islamic conscience, I believe further, makes them suitable partners in a debate, which until recently has been an internal Western prerogative.  At a time when the whole ethical tradition of monotheism being reviled for leading us to the present environmental cataclysm, truth demands that monotheistic “solutions” – even outside of Biblical tradition – be sought.  I believe Islam possesses such a monotheistic solution to mankind’s present ecological ills.