The Ethics of Islam

NON- MOSLEMS, unless they have made the teachings of the Arabian Prophet a subject of special study, have generally a very distorted conception of Islamic morality. They imagine that, with the exception of a feu r principles, borrowed from Christianity or Judaism, the rest may be summarised in the stern alternative of “tire Koran or the sword.” Few stop to consider the truth or the meaning of the antithesis; enough that it exists somewhere in the ecclesiastical records of the crusading days. It is impossible to exaggerate the baleful influence of this wholly unjust idea. In this country, English education has deepened the gulf between the two great communities which inhabit the soil of India, by diffusing through the medium of histories written with a bias against Isl&m, the notion to which I have referred.

To disabuse people therefore of the impression that Islam is a religion of force an.d violence, I give in the following passages a short abstract of the Ethics of Islam in the words of its great Teacher, of his Disciple, AH, and of the moralists who have from time to time written on the subject. But before proceeding further I desire to point out that Islam possesses, in common with all other moral creeds, tlie everlasting heritage of universal truth. It is to the new life, the new vitality, the vibration it causes to the pulse of humanity that we have to look for the moral force of the creed which wants to take the place of an older faith, and not to what new truths it teaches for truth cannot be new; it is immutable and eternal like Nature itself.