BY Muna Ali
When Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) was asked about who among people is best, he responded that people are like metals, like gold, and silver and the best of you before Islam will be the best of you in Islam if they understand religion. The implication is that possessing the potential for moral and ethical excellence is a universal endowment by the divine and religion, properly understood and practiced, brings forth the intrinsic goodness.
So what is Islamic then about ethics? The answer is summed up again in pithy statement by the master of eloquence. The Prophet defines the sole objective of his mission when he says:
I was only sent to complete and perfect good ethical character. (Muslim)
From this statement, it is evident that ethical principles predate Islam. Islam’s contribution, then, is expanding and perfecting these ethics. This contribution is grounded in the particularity of Islam’s conceptualization of human nature, human role (khalifah – vicegerent) and the purpose of creation to recognize and acknowledging tawhid (unicity of God).
The role of the human as a worshiping servant of the Creator and as His vicegerent on earth, and all that this two-fold relation entails expand ethics while also anchoring and binding it.
Here faith and reason, body and mind, self and the Other (social and nature) are not conflicting dualisms but elements to be harmonized and balanced by responsible beings on a quest from birth to death and afterlife to attain peace and contentment. Here also the individual and collective intuition and reason cognizant of their responsibilities and conscious of their own limitation engage revelation and creation to derive an ethical system that enables attaining success in the here and hereafter.
Legal principles extracted from revelation and Prophetic tradition by a believing conscious cognizant that it is shaped by its spatiotemporal context, virtues derived from the attributes of the Creator (e.g., mercy, benevolence, justice, peace) and reflected in their human perfection in the Prophet, and rituals that provide regular ethical training all illustrate the expanding and anchoring of ethics that gives them Islamic characteristic while acknowledging their universal roots. The example of justice is an instructive one. All people everywhere, be they followers of a faith tradition or not, know about the virtue of justice but conceptualize it in various ways.
In Islam, God manifests perfect justice and humans are duty bound to strive for it first and foremost by believing and acknowledge the unicity of God. The state of unbelief is one of committing a grave injustice against oneself and utter ingratitude to the Creator.
Standing up for justice, even against oneself and relatives, is a Quranic injection. Justice towards creation (humans and nature) must be upheld even at the cost of one’s own interest; justice is prerequisite for peace with self, among people and with nature, but justice must also be tempered with compassion and clemency. Additionally, imagination, intuition, and intellect must be summoned to understand how to uphold it in a complex and interconnected world. It is these kinds of content of justice, if you will, that makes it an Islamic version of the universal.
It is the unprecedented complexity, interdependence, and speed of change; our shared responsibility before God; and the centrality of the principle of justice of Islam that should propel Muslims to work to propose an ethical vision and solutions for the crisis we encounter. We can either be content to adapt through partial remedies that ease our conscious but which sooner rather than later become obsolete.
Alternatively, we can propose cures for the numerous problems and transform our world and ourselves in the process. As we Muslims recognize that putting the prefix “Islamic” before banks that cannot escape the neo-liberal global financial system, or before slaughtering animals tortured by unbelievable living conditions, or before education that aims to protect some neglecting everybody else, or before music, or law or science; when we realise that this only maintains the status quo, we may realize that these actions are inconsistent with the ethical principles we claim to live by.
The Prophetic mission was not one about creating comfortable corners for believers to inhabit but one of transforming the world that existed into an envisioned one. Inheritors of this mission should not be satisfied in corners either. Thankfully, many are not.
