By setting Divine pleasure as the objective of man’s life, it has furnished the highest possible standard of morality. This is bound to provide limitless avenues for the moral revolution of humanity. By making Divine Revelation the primary source of knowledge, it gives permanence and stability to the moral standards which afford reasonable scope for genuine adjustment, adaptations and innovations though not for perversions, wild variations, atomistic relativism or moral fluidity. It provides a sanction to morality in the love the fear of God which will impel man to obey the moral law even without any external pressure. Through belief in God and the Day of Judgment, it furnishes a motive force which enables a person to adopt the moral conduct with earnestness and sincerity, with all the devotion of heart and soul.
It does not, through a false sense of originality and innovation, provide any novel moral virtues nor does it seek to minimize the importance of the well-known moral norms nor give exaggerated importance to some and neglect others without cause. It takes up all the commonly known moral virtues and with a sense of balance and proportion it assigns a suitable place and function to each one of them in the total plan of life. It widens the scope of their application to cover every aspect of man’s individual and collective life his domestic associations, his civic conduct, and his activities in the political, economic, legal educational and social realms. It covers his life from home to society, from the dining table to the battlefield and peace conferences, literally from the cradle to the grave. In short, no sphere of life is exempt from the universal and comprehensive application of the moral principles of Islam. It makes morality reign supreme and ensures that the affairs of life, instead of being dominated by selfish desires and petty interests, should be regulated by the norms of morality.
It stipulates for man a system of life which is based on all good and is free from all evil. It invokes the people, not only to practice virtue, but also to establish virtue and eradicate vice, to bid good and to forbid wrong. It wants that the verdict of conscience should prevail and virtue must not be subdued to play second fiddle to evil. Those who have responded to this call and gathered together into a community (Ummah) are given the name “Muslim” and the singular object underlying the formation of this com- munity (Ummah) is that it should make an organized effort to establish and enforce goodness and suppress and eradicate evil. The Qur’an is quite explicit on this fact as can be seen from the following verse:
“Ye are the best for Peoples, evolved for mankind, En- joining what is right, forbidding what is wrong, And believing in God. If only the People of the Book had faith, it were best for them: among them Are some who have faith, But most of them Are perverted transgressors.” (Qur’an, 3:1 10)
And also in the following verse:
“(They are) those who, If we establish them In the land, establish Regular prayer and give regular charity, enjoin the right and forbid wrong: With God rests the end (And decision) of (all) affairs.” (Qur’an, 22:41)
It will be a day of mourning for the community and a bad day for the entire world if the efforts of this very community were at any time directed towards establishing evil and suppressing good.