Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

ISLAM AND SLAVERY

Islam came into a world in which slavery was almost universally practiced. The Quran andHadith advise kindness toward slaves and their humane treatment and encourage setting them free. The Prophet himself bought the Persian slave Salman and immediately freed him, making him a member of his family. It is important to note that in Islamic society slavery was not equated with racism. Turkic slaves became military commanders and kings and leaders, as did some Black African slaves. Moreover, there was a great deal of intermarriage, and usually a slave’s descendants would sooner or later melt into the general texture of society.

There were of course Arab slave traders in Africa as well as European ones, but despite the fact that European colonial powers made the presence of Arab slave traders an excuse to colonize Africa, there has never been a Harlem or an Anacostia in any Islamic city. Even where there is a strong Black African presence, as in Arabia or Morocco, there is no feeling of racial distinction. Today in any grand mosque in Morocco at the time of prayers one sees worshipers ranging from Black Africans to blue-eyed Berbers, but one does not have a feeling of racial heterogeneity.

Many pious Muslims also refused to have slaves and wrote against it, but the practice in its Islamic form, which meant ultimate integration rather than segregation, continued sporadically but less frequently until the nineteenth century, when under internal forces and the impact of the ideas of Abraham Lincoln and others it was discontinued. If some write today that slavery is still practiced here and there, as in the Sudan or some other African lands, it is more like the slavery of sweatshops in China or the West today. In neither case is it a prevalent practice, nor are such practices condoned by religious authorities. Before modern times both Christians and Muslims had slaves, which does not mean that either religion created or encouraged slavery.

Various groups, not only Black Africans, were brought into the Islamic world as slaves, but all of them became soon integrated into the ummah, and Islamic society was never witness to the types of practices that went on in the American South before the Civil War. What is most important to understand is that even when it was practiced, slavery was not wed to racism in the Islamic world and therefore former slaves were soon integrated through intermarriage with the rest of the society in most parts and during most periods of Islamic history.

THE FAMILY WITHIN ISLAMIC SOCIETY

The basic unit of Islamic society is the family, which as a result of the Quranic revelation came to replace the Arab tribe as the immediate social reality for the individual. One of the most important social reforms carried out by Islam was the strengthening of the family and the bonds of marriage.

In Islamic society, as in many other traditional societies, the family is not limited to the nuclear family of parents and children, but is made up of the extended family including grandparents, uncles, aunts, in-laws, and cousins.

The extended family plays a major role in the upbringing of children, in protecting the younger generation from external social and economic pressure, and in transmitting religion, customs, traditions, and secrets of the family trade.

One can hardly overemphasize the role of the extended family in Islamic society even today.

The impact of modernism has destroyed many Islamic institutions, but not, as yet, the family. In the West the extended family became reduced to the nuclear family and more recently, through a kind of splitting of the social atom, the nuclear family has been further distilled into the single-parent family, and the institution of the family as such has been placed under severe strain. Most Muslims look upon these developments in Western society, along with new sexual mores and new female and male roles, as incomplete social experiments the results of which are still uncertain, and not as definitely established and time-honored models to be emulated. This issue has therefore become a point of contention between certain ultramodernist circles in the West and the Islamic world, but then many modern practices are opposed with equal severity by conservative Jews and Christians within the West itself. The attitude of the ordinary Muslim to all these recent social experimentations with marriage and the family is not much different from those of traditional Jews and Christians in the West. I know of many Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic families in America who, in their understanding of the meaning and significance of the family, feel closer to their Muslim neighbors than to some of their own childhood friends.

As for the question of marriage itself, one cannot understand its status in Islam without first comprehending the significance of sexuality for Muslims. In classical Western Christian theology, sexuality itself is associated with original sin and accepted only as a means of procreation. To practice it in the context of the religion therefore requires that it be sanctified through the sacrament of marriage. In Islam, as in Judaism, sexuality itself is sacred and a blessing. Therefore, there is no need of a sacrament, in the Christian sense, to sanctify it. Rather, marriage in Islam is a contract drawn according to theShari‘ah to legitimize the sexual act within marriage and to protect the rights of both partners. In both Christianity and Islam, however, as in Judaism, sexual activity outside of marriage is not allowed and is considered a sin in the eyes of God.

Islam does legally allow divorce, but makes it morally and socially difficult. According to ahadith , of all the things that God has permitted, what He hates most is divorce. That is why, although legally it seems easy

for a man to divorce his wife and a wife also has certain grounds for divorcing her husband, including being neglected and not supported, in practice divorce is relatively rare, especially in the more traditional segments of Islamic society, certainly much rarer than in present-day Europe or America.

The current perception in the West about women’s rights in Islamic society in matters of family and divorce is not accurate, because it fails to take into consideration the many social and ethical factors involved in most family situations, although there are, alas, also many tragic injustices.

As far as actual practices in questions of family law and divorce are concerned, there is much debate going on in the Islamic world today about protecting the rights of women whose husbands abuse them but refuse to divorce them, and family courts have been established in many countries to try to administer justice according to the spirit and law of the Quran rather than current customs. There are, needless to say, abuses in Islamic society in this matter as there are elsewhere, but Islam emphasizes the importance of family and marriage and the responsibility that God has placed on the shoulders of both husband and wife, even if some of those who call themselves Muslims do not fulfill those responsibilities.

As for marriage itself, it must be recalled that the Christian and Islamic marriages are based upon two different spiritual prototypes. That is why Christians and even post-Christians in the West identify marriage solely with monogamy, while Islam includes the possibility of polygamy in certain cases and situations. No one has expressed this difference of prototypes better than Titus Burckhardt, one of the most profound Western scholars of the Islamic tradition. He writes:

Europeans tend to look on Muslim polygamy as sexual licence. In so doing, they forget that the “licence” is largely compensated for by the monastic seclusion of family life. The essential point, however, is that Islamic marriage presupposes a completely different spiritual prototype from that of Christian marriage:

Christian monogamy reflects the marriage of the church-or the soul-to Christ, and this union is founded on a personal and non-transferable love.

Islamic polygamy on the other hand finds its justification in the relationship of the one Truth (al-H. aqq), to its several animic “vessels”: Man, as spiritual officiant(imam) of his family, represents the Truth; his role corresponds to the “active” vessel, namely the Spirit; whereas his wife corresponds to the “passive” vessel, namely the soul. This is also why a Muslim man may marry a Christian or Jewish woman, whereas a Muslim woman may only take a husband of the same faith as herself. These spiritual prototypes- both cases-are not something imposed on marriage from the outside, but inhere in the nature of things.

The symbolism in question is not necessarily in everyone’s consciousness, far from it, but it is inherent in the respective tradition, and therefore part of the collective mentality.1

The spiritual principles and prototypes mentioned here do not in any way mean to reduce the relation of man and woman to simply that of the active and passive principles.

As in the Far Eastern tradition, where males and females possess both yin and yang, but in different proportions, so in the Islamic perspective the male is not simply equated with the active principle and the female with the passive, for both the male and female contain both elements within their nature. What is elucidated by Burckhardt are the spiritual prototypes and principles involved.

If for Christians the multiple marriages of the Prophet diminish his spiritual status, for Muslims they ennoble sexual union and sanctify it. Moreover, if one relates marriage to the sexual act and accepts that there should be no sexual activity outside of marriage, then there has probably been a lot less promiscuity in the Islamic world, with polygamy, than there has been in the West, even before the 1960s sexual revolution, with its claim to monogamy. The Islamic world has for so long been accused in the West of being sexually licentious, while Christianity is pictured as favoring chastity and being severely opposed to extramarital sexual activity. The social reality is quite something else. There is no doubt that there is some polygamy in the Islamic world, and also temporary marriage in Shi‘ism, but most men are monogamous and there is little extramarital sexual activity in traditional Islamic society. Moreover, there is also a great deal of extramarital sexual activity in the West, although polygamy is not officially practiced. In Islamic society, illicit sexual practice is rare, although it is not totally absent, and there are practically no illegitimate children because in all types of marriages, including the temporary, children are officially recognized by law and the father has the duty to support them.

The Prophet said, “Marriage is half of religion,” and to marry is considered by Muslims a blessed way to follow the prophetic Sunnah, although it is not technically required by theShari‘ah . Because of the religious significance of marriage, nearly everyone within the Islamic world, even in big cities, is married, and great pressure is put on the young to marry, especially to avoid sinful actions. There are hardly any unmarried men and women in Islamic society; only a few are to be found here and there. In the countryside even more than in cities, a woman whose husband has died often marries another man even if she is not young and has many children. Likewise, a widower is usually pressured to remarry.

Even those who are not married, male and female, usually live with relatives and are part of the larger extended family.

THE MALE AND FEMALE IN THE ISLAMIC PERSPECTIVE

From the point of view of Islam, the distinction between the male and the female is not only biological or even psychological, but has its root in the Divine Nature Itself. The Quran asserts, “Glory to God, Who created in pairs all things” (36:36), and also, “We have created you in pairs” (78:8). The male and the female polarization is an essential part of the mystery of God’s creation. Each gender is fully human with an immortal soul, and both sexes share equally in their religious responsibilities and are equal before God’s laws. And yet each sex complements the other and together, like the yin-yang symbol of the Far East, they form a circle, which symbolizes perfection, totality, and completion.

That is why the male and female both vie with each other and are attracted to each other. The alchemy of marriage and sexual union has the power to transmute and complete each side through the realization of both complementarity and wholeness through a love that transcends the two sides and yet encompasses them, a love that is rooted in God.

The bond between two hearts is made by God, as usual Islamic formulas of marriage state, and the love of one spouse for the other is an earthly reflection of the love of the soul for God, although the male and female forms of spirituality are not the same. This intimate bond between the male and female in marriage is indicated in the verse, “They [your wives] are raiment for you and ye are raiment for them” (2:187). Each spouse is a raiment for the other not only in the sense that he or she covers the intimate life and even faults of the other from public view as our clothing covers our bodies, but also in the sense that the raiment is the thing closest to our body. Husband and wife should be also the closest being to each other. Needless to say, not all marriages turn out to be perfect, neither in the Islamic world nor in the West. But the ideals set forth in the Quran have remained very much alive in every generation of Muslims and continue to be so today.

WOMEN IN THE FAMILY AND IN SOCIETY

Since the rise of feminism in the West, whole forests have been cut down to produce books by Western observers on the subject of women in Islam. In most cases current Western ideas have been chosen as absolute criteria to judge women in other societies and to preach to them about how they should behave. In the West today there is a tendency toward what one might call “the absolutization of the transient.”

Each decade absolutizes its own fashions of thought and action without the least pause and consideration of the fact that a decade later those very fashions and ideas will be buried in the dustbin of history as one turns to a new decade. Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in the question of women’s rights and roles. If the West were carrying out this debate in 1900, there would be very different criteria for judgment, and most likely in 2100 there will be still others. Rather than using the question of women in Islam as a ram with which to batter the gate of Islamic society as a part of a new “crusade” coming from the West, it is best to first understand the situation from the point of view of Islam and Islamic society and then make

whatever criticism one wants based on objective awareness of what criteria one is using.

It is, first of all, essential to realize that what is observed in the Islamic world is the result of not only explicit Islamic teachings, but also the customs and habits of the societies into which Islam entered. For example, in what is called the Middle East today, not only Muslim but also Jewish and Christian women have always covered their hair. The covering of the face is not mentioned in the Quran, nor was it practiced by the women around the Prophet; it was adopted from Persian and Byzantine models. In view of the fact that female education and the participation of women in politics were not common practice before modern times in non-Islamic societies as far away as Japan, China, and other Asian societies, it seems incorrect to highlight what is called the “patriarchal nature of Islamic society” as a unique phenomenon associated with Islam alone. Somehow, however, nearly all the criticism coming from secularist feminists is aimed these days at the Islamic world without bothering to ask practicing Muslim women themselves-

women from the mainstream of Islamic society, not just those from the completely Westernized fringes-what their problems really are.

The teachings of Islam emphasize that, although men and women stand equally before God and the Law, they should complement each other in family and social life.

Equality before God and the Law does not destroy the reality of complementarity. Some have asked me if men and women are equal in Islam. My answer has always been that before God, in the face of the ultimate eschatological realities, and before the Law, yes, but in this world, not always.

Women are not equal to men, but neither are men equal to women, a truth to which some American authors have been referring recently as distinctions between “persons from Mars” and “persons from Venus.”

The traditional structure of Islamic society is based not on quantitative equality, but on the reality of complementarity, although there are exceptions. In this complementarity of functions, the man is seen as the protector and provider of his family and its imam, religiously speaking.

The woman is the real mistress of the household, in which the husband is like a guest. Her primary duty has been seen as that of raising of children and attending to their earliest education, as well as being the basic buttress of the family.

Like all traditional societies, Islam has honored the work of homemaker and mother as being of the highest value, to the extent that the Prophet said, “Heaven lies under the feet of mothers.” Islamic society has never thought that working in an office is of a higher order of importance for society than bringing up one’s children. Also an economic system was created in the cities, where, by and large, but not always, the wife was not forced for economic reasons to leave the home and her children during the day. From the Islamic point of view, the right of a child to a full-time mother rather than a nanny or day-care provider is more essential than many rights held dear today.

Within the home Muslim women usually wield great power and authority. In my own very large extended family on both the paternal and maternal side, I have known many mothers who were every bit as powerful and even autocratic as the most forceful “Jewish mother” or “Italian mother.”

Anyone who thinks that in Islamic society women have always been weak, downtrodden, and oppressed beings simply does not know the inner workings of a Muslim family.

The Vision of Community and Society 191

The number of husbands oppressed by their wives is probably no smaller in Islamic society than anywhere else. That does not mean, however, that there has not been in the past or does not exist in the present terrible treatment of some wives by Muslim husbands, despite the explicit injunction of the Quran to honor the possessions of one’s wife and to deal kindly with her, as when it says, “Consort with them in kindness” (4:19). Considering the practices that were going on in pre-Islamic Arabia, the regulations of Islam effected a remarkable transformation in bestowing economic and social rights upon women and protecting them from injustice.

Nevertheless, human beings being what they are, there continue to be Muslim husbands who are cruel toward their wives and who abuse them physically-against the injunctions of Islam. But of course we know only too well that there are also many shelters for battered women in America and Europe, and this problem is not confined to any single part of the world. But to neglect for one moment the power that most Muslim women wield within the family and in the most important decisions affecting the lives of family members is simply to misunderstand the actual role and status of women in Islamic society.

As was stated before, in Islam the economic responsibility for supporting the family resides with the husband, even if the wife happens to be wealthy. The Quranic law of inheritance, according to which a male inherits twice as much as a female, must be understood in light of the husband’s responsibility to support the whole family financially while the wife can do with her wealth as she wills. The famous Quranic verse “Men are the protectors and maintainers of women” (4:34) must be understood in this economic and social context, not taken to mean that the husband controls the wife’s whole life. As for the testimony of two women equaling that of one man in legal matters, this concerns cases of crime and wrongdoing and not every form of testimony, as some jurists interpreted it later. When it comes to bearing witness to a crime, the Quranic injunction takes into consideration the more merciful, gentle, forgiving, and nurturing nature of women in comparison to that of men; the injunction does not at all belittle women-quite the contrary.

Islamic sources do not at all prevent Muslim women from working and receiving wages. In the agricultural sector of traditional Islamic society women always worked with men and were also very active in many of the arts and crafts.

To this day most of the carpets and kilims of various Islamic countries are woven by women. Islam gave women complete economic independence

even from their husbands, and over the ages many women have also engaged in trade and been merchants, as was the Prophet’s wife Khadijah.

Likewise, there is no objection in principle to Muslim women participating in politics. Before modern times there were even occasionally Muslim queens who ruled independently and many others who exerted great political power behind the scenes. If one objects that there were few such female political figures, one could answer that the same held true for Christian Byzantium or Confucian China and that this limitation was not imposed by the Quran. In fact, the granddaughter of the Prophet, Zaynab, played a major political role in early Islamic history, as did a number of other women. In modern times three Islamic countries have had women prime ministers and the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was established to implement Islamic teachings in the country, has a female vice-president and many other female officials, including members of the parliament.

As for education, there is ahadith according to which seeking knowledge is a religious obligation for every Muslim, male and female. Throughout Islamic history girls usually completed only the elementary Quranic schools and only a few advanced further-not because of Islamic teachings, but because of social conditions-and from time to time women have become Islamic scholars. Sayyidah Nafisah, whose sanctuary in Cairo is a major center of pilgrimage to this day, was so learned in the science ofHadith that occasionally the greatest Islamic scholar of the day, Imam al-Shafi‘i, would consult with her. Women, in fact, played an especially important role in the transmission and study ofHadith . Also throughout Islamic history, there have been many women Sufis, some of whom were very learned, and fine women poets, from Rabi‘ah al-‘Adwiyyah, who lived in the eighth century, to Parwin E‘tes.ami, who lived in the twentieth. Again, one must not equate educational practices in some parts of the Islamic world in modern times, such as Afghanistan under the Taliban, although they claimed to speak in the name of Islam, with the general Islamic view toward women’s education. If one looks at such major Islamic countries as Egypt and Iran today, one sees a very large number of women in nearly every field of education, sometimes equaling or even surpassing men in number in the faculties of certain major universities.

The views of Islam concerning women bring us back to the question of the veil and covering. For a long time the West has had a distorted, exotic image of the mysterious Islamic world: women were covered head to toe in public, while harems of naked women were depicted reclining by indoor pools in so many nineteenth-century “orientalist” paintings in Europe. These depictions had much more to do with rebellion in the West against the restraints of the Victorian era going back to the sexual paradigm of Christianity, but they nevertheless introduced to Western society a completely false image of Muslim women. During the colonial period, head cover was taken by European colonizers as a sign of female oppression in Islamic society and Muslim modernists opted for this view themselves, as we see in the forced unveiling of women in Turkey and Iran by Ataturk and Reza Shah, respectively. As a result of these events, one sees today a whole spectrum of women, from those fully veiled to those in miniskirts, in many

Muslim countries and especially in the Middle East, where more women have discarded their traditional dress than elsewhere in the Islamic world, such as South or Southeast Asia.

It is therefore especially important to be clear regarding the Islamic teachings on this matter. The Quran commands both men and women to dress modestly and not display their bodies, and the Prophet asserted that modesty is a central character trait of Islam. It also commands women to cover their “ornaments”(zinah) , which is usually understood to mean their hair and, of course, their bodies. On the basis of this injunction, various forms of dress were developed in different parts of the Islamic world, but some forms of dress were carryovers from earlier pre-Islamic Near Eastern societies. In the earlier communities of Jews and Christians, women also covered their hair. The iconography of the Virgin in Christian art always shows her with her hair covered, and until quite recently Georgian and Armenian Christians as well as Oriental Jewish women covered their hair, as did Muslims. The covering of the hair was taken by women to be a natural part of life as a sign of modesty and especially a sign of respect before God. Even in the West until a generation ago Catholic women would not go to church without covering their heads.

Who has said that uncovering one’s hair is more liberating than covering it? This is a very complex issue that, as far as the Islamic world is concerned, must be decided along with other women’s issues by Muslim women themselves on the basis of Islamic teachings and prevalent social norms, not by others. Until thirty years ago, Muslim women who received Western education and became modernized would usually discard their head covers, but gradually matters began to change. Today in many countries, such as Egypt, many highly educated women freely choose to cover their hair again as a sign of self-identity and protection. Paradoxically, in the one Islamic country that is the most modernized and claims to be secularized in the European way, that is, Turkey, women do not have the right to cover their hair in public buildings, this ban showing total disregard for free choice and women’s rights, so central to the concern of Western feminists.

The question of the veil and many other crucial issues having to do with education, legal rights, and so on have become the focus of attention of a number of Muslim women who want to modernize the rest of society after the model of the West, whatever that model, which is still in a state of flux, might be. They are abetted in this task by Western secularist feminists and certain other elements that would like to secularize Islamic society. It is unfortunate that most Western feminists do not bother to understand the underlying philosophy of the relation between men and women in Islam and, in fact, in other non-Western societies.

Nor do they offer a clear alternative model that would have meaning for the vast majority of Muslim women.

During the last two decades a new movement has begun among believing Muslim women themselves to gain the rights they believe the Quran andHadith accord them, but that local social customs and regulations have prevented them from gaining. This so-called Islamic feminism is much more pertinent than Western-style feminism as far as the future of Islamic society

is concerned, because those women who pursue it, most of whom are pious Muslim women, do so from within the Islamic worldview. Furthermore, they also know much better than their Western counterparts what their own real problems are. In any case, women’s issues-their education, legal rights, participation in political affairs, and so forth-are one of the major challenges facing the Islamic world today, one that each part of the Islamic world has been trying to deal with on the basis of Islamic teachings and its own customs and traditions, in spite of the constant pressure from various forces in the West.

ISLAM AND THE INTEGRATION OF SOCIETY

Through the imposition of a Divine Law, the inculcation of moral values within its members, and the creation of bonds of relationship, Islam played a major role in the integration of human society. A series of concentric circles can represent the areas of relationship. At the center is the relationship between the individual and God. Surrounding that center is the circle of the family, then of the quarter of one’s city or town, then of one’s “nation” (wat.an) in the traditional sense of the term, then the Islamic community(ummah) , and finally all of humanity and in fact creation as a whole. In the same way that each circle in the series has the same center, each of these relationships was and remains based on the basic relationship between the human being and God.

Tawhid, or unity, which is the central doctrine of Islam and which also means “integration,” therefore began with the integration of the individual soul into its Center, where God resides, and then extended to bonds between members of the family and other increasingly larger groupings The Vision of Community and Society 197 until it encompassed the whole of creation. Despite the relentless downward march of time and numerous vicissitudes, Islam was able to integrate society to a large extent and create an ummah that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This ummah in turn created Islamic civilization, one of the major global civilizations, which, despite some weakening from the eighteenth century onward, is still very much alive. The Islamic ummah and civilization have seen periods of decline and rejuvenation, the appearance of those who have misled the people as well as authentic “renewers”(mujaddid) who, as promised by the Prophet, have periodically revitalized the religion and Islamic society from within.

Today the Islamic ummah, politically segmented and divided as never before, faces unprecedented challenges from the onslaught of modern secularism and consumerist globalization, challenges much greater than what it faced during the Mongol invasion. Of course, modern secularism and now globalization are also challenges to Judaism and Christianity in the West, but in their cases the challenges come from within their own society. For the Islamic ummah, it comes from the outside and is supported by exceptional military, economic, and political power. Reaction to this outside pressure has taken many forms, sometimes violent ones that go against the very tenets of Islam. These are, however, peripheral and transient phenomena. The profounder reality is the traditional religious truths of Islam embedded deep in the heart of Islamic society, which will have to survive these enormous challenges without betraying the principles of Islam itself.

More than ever before, it is important to remember that the empire of Islam resides in the hearts of men and women and not in worldly power alone. To perpetuate the life of the ummah and the rule of this “spiritual empire,” it is essential to remember the truths for which Islam was revealed and the Prophet sent as the Messenger to the world. In one of his most famoushadiths the Prophet said, “I was sent in order to perfect [for you] the virtues of character.”

The role of Islamic society has always been to make possible the attainment of virtue and the perfection of character, and such Muslim authorities as al-Farabi, like Plato, divided societies according to their ability to provide an environment that would foster this inner perfection of moral and spiritual qualities of the members of society. From the Islamic point of view, the value of a society before the eyes of God lies in its virtuous quality, its moral excellence, and not in power or wealth. It is this basic truth that Muslims must remember as they confront the powerful forces of secularism, globalization, and consumerism that threaten the very foundations of the Islamic order.

CHAPTER FIVE: COMPASSION AND LOVE, PEACE AND BEAUTY

My Mercy and Compassion embrace all things.

Quran 7:156

Those who believe and do good works, the Infinitely Good will appoint for them love.

Quran 19:96

God is He than Whom there is no god, the Sovereign Lord, the Holy One, Peace.

Quran 59:23

God is beautiful and loves beauty.

Hadith

COMPASSION, LOVE, PEACE, AND BEAUTY AS DIVINE QUALITIES

According to a well-knownhadith , on the Throne of God is written, “Verily My Mercy and Compassion precede my Wrath.” To be sure there is Divine Justice and need for justice in the world, as there is Divine Rigor and Wrath related to the Divine Majesty described so powerfully in both the Bible and the Quran. But the inner dimension of reality is inseparable from that Divine Mercy and Compassion but for which there would be no creation. Since this world is the creation of God, it must reflect His Qualities, and Islamic spiritual teachings emphasize that in fact the whole universe is nothing but the interplay of the reflections of God’s Names and Qualities. Therefore His Names of Beauty and Mercy must be reflected in His creation as much as His Names of Majesty and Justice. Furthermore, the former Names, having to do with the inner dimension of the Divine Reality, take precedence when it comes to the inner life of the soul of the Muslim.

The idea propagated by certain Western scholars and Christian apologists that the God of Islam is only the God of Justice but not of Mercy, Compassion, and Love is totally false. God’s Mercy, Compassion, Forgiveness, and Love are mentioned more times in the Quran than are His Justice and Retribution. All the four concepts mentioned in the title of this chapter, namely, Compassion (which is inseparable from Mercy in the Islamic view), Love, Peace, and Beauty, are Divine Names whose reflections must therefore be part of the very substance and root of the existence of human beings as well as that of other creatures.