I cannot see any other way to our recovery. If there is some such other way, I challenge those who claim to have found it to show it to us. Simply talking about the need for a “rebirth of faith” is not much more worth than bragging about our past and extolling the greatness of our predecessors. Our faith cannot be reborn unless we understand to what practical goals it will lead us. Generalities won’t help us either. It won’t do us the least good if, for instance, we are glibly assured that the socio-economic programme of Islam is better than Socialism, Communism, Fascism, Liberalism, and God knows what other “isms” which the West has produced for its own good – its undoing. We ought rather to be shown, in unmistakable terms, what alternative proposals the Shariah makes for our social life – what its true concept of society is, what views it holds with regard to individual property and communal good, labour and production, capital and profit, employer and employee, the State and the individual; what alternative it proposes to banking (which is an Islamic society is impossible because of the obvious prohibition of riba), what its practical measures are for a prevention of man’s exploitation by man; for an abolition of ignorance and poverty ; for obtaining bread, blankets and homes for every man and woman….
Now, I do not mean to say that these material things of life are Islam’s sole concern; certainly not: for this religion of ours would not be God’s Message to man if its foremost goal were not man’s growth towards God: but our bodies and soul are so intertwined that we cannot achieve the ultimate well-being of one without taking the other fully into consideration. Specious sermonizing about “faith” and “spirit” and “surrender to God” cannot lead to the establishment of true Islam on earth unless we are shown how to gain faith through a better insight into God’s plan, how to elevate our sprit by living a righteous life, and how to surrender to God by doing His will by ourselves and by others. And all this, as far as Islam is concerned, can be gleaned from the Shariah alone.
And the Shariah can never become effective unless it becomes an open book for every one of us.
