Universality and Humanism
Quran: O People! I am but a Messenger from God to you all. (7:158) We have sent you only as a mercy for everybody in the universe. (21:107) In Islam, all men are equal, regardless of color, language, race, or nationality. It 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 continue to exist today in the so called enlightened age. Islam removes all of these impediments and proclaims the ideal of the whole of humanity being one family of God.18 to unrestricted exchange, to banking capital, to state loans, to indirect taxes in objects of prime necessity, but it holds to the rights of the father and the husband, to private property, and to commercial capital. Here again it occupies an intermediate position between the doctrines of bourgeois capitalism and Bolshevist communism."
"But Islam has a still further service to render to the cause of humanity. It stands after all nearer to the real East than Europe does, and it possesses a magnificent tradition of inter-racial understanding and co-operation. No other society has such a record of success in uniting in an equality of status, of opportunity, and of endeavor so many and so various races of mankind
....Islam has still the power to reconcile apparently irreconcilable elements of race and tradition. If ever the oppisition of the great societies of East and West is to be replaced by co-operation, the mediation of Islam is an indispensable condition. In its hands lies very largely the solution of the problem with which Europe is faced in its relations with the East.
If they unite, the hope of a peaceful issue is immeasurably enhanced. But if Europe, by rejecting the co operation of Islam, throws it into the arms of its rivals, the issue can only be disastrous for both. The Prophet said: "All creatures of God form the family of God and he is the best loved of God who loves best His creatures."Lord! Lord of my life and of everything in the universe! I affirm that all human beings are brothers to one another."
Islam is international in its outlook and approach and does not admit barriers and distinctions based on color, clan, blood, or territory, as was the case before the advent of Muhammad. Unfortunately, these prejudices remain rampant in different forms even in this modern age. Islam wants to unite 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.
"The extinction of race consciousness between Muslims is one of the outstanding moral achievements of Islam, and 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.
As for the evil of alcohol, it is at its worst among primitive populations in tropical regions which have been 'opened up' by Western enterprise ... the fact remains that even the most statesmanlike preventive measures imposed by external authority are incapable of liberating a community from a social vice unless a desire for liberaion and a will to carry this desire into voluntary action on its own part are awakened in the hearts of the people concerned.
Now Western administrators, at any rate those of 'Anglo- Saxon' origin, are spiritually isolated from their 'native' wards by the physical 'color bar' which their race-consciousness sets up; the conversion of the natives' souls is a task to which their competence can hardly be expected to extend; and it is at this point that Islam may have a part to play.
"In these recently and rapidly 'opened up' tropical territories, the Western civilization has produced an economic and political plenum and, in the same breath, a social and spiritual void ...
"Here, then, in the foreground of the future, we can remark two valuable influences which Islam may exert upon the cosmopolitan proletariat of a Western society that has cast its net around the world and embraced the whole of mankind; while in the more distant future we may speculate on the possible contributions of Islam to some new manifestation of
religion.
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