Manifesto of Islam - 2

The Basis of Ethics

1) Since a man knows what he should do and what he should not do in order to realise his ideal, he derives a moral law or a moral code of do's and don'ts from his ideal. He follows this moral code willingly and easily urges by his love for the ideal. To hi no moral law except the moral law of his own ideal has any worth or value of it own. This moral law controls all the activities of his life whether they are ethical, economic, social, political, legal, artistic or intellectual. 

The basis of an Ideology

2) The system of ideas emerging from an ideal in the course of its practical application to the various aspects of human life along with its theoretical background is known as Ideology. An Ideology based on an ideal is perfect only to the extent to which it embraces the various essential aspects of natural human activity. But to the extent to which it leaves out such aspects of human life without describing and demonstrating how the ideal will influence each of them in practice, it remains imperfect. Thus there can be many imperfect ideologies based on the Perfect Ideal and there can be many perfect ideologies based on imperfect Ideals. Evidently the most satisfactory ideology is only that which a) is perfect and b) is based on the Perfect Ideal.

The Basis of Philosophy

3) Every ideal answers for the man who loves it all possible questions about man and universe. Every ideal is, therefore, potentially, a philosophy of existence. It is a different matter that this philosophy may not have been systematized by an expert philosopher or no expert philosopher may have found it possible to systematize it on account of the defects, inner contradictions and inconsistencies of the ideal on which it is based and which it seeks to interpret and apply. To the extent to which an ideal is wrong the philosophy emerging from it, or latent in it, is also wrong, incoherent and inconsistent. Thus the correct, complete and coherent philosophy of existence can be only that which is a rational interpretation of the Perfect Ideology based on the Perfect Ideal. Hence as knowledge advances, a philosophy resulting from a wrong ideal loses its strength more and more till all admit that it is wrong, and a philosophy based on the Right Ideal gains in rational support more and more till all believe that it is true. An imperfect ideology, even if it is based on the Right Ideal, cannot develop into a true philosophy for the same reason. A true philosophy is always a complete philosophy embracing and explaining all the aspects of natural human activity.

The Singleness of the Ideal

4) Ultimately a man cannot love more than one ideal at a time. A child is under the influence of several conflicting ideas at the same time. His activity is governed sometimes by one idea and at others by another. But gradually, as he advances in age and experience, these ideas come into comparison with each other and he begins to know better and better what idea is to him the most satisfactory of all. The result is that ultimately he discards all ideas except one and that idea becomes his ideal and unifies his personality. If there is a person who thinks that he can love two ideals at the same time, e.g. the ideals of Christianity and Nationalism, his misunderstanding will be removed the moment he is faced with a situation in which the demands of the two ideals come into conflict with each other. He will discover that he has to ignore the of one of them for the sake of those of the other and that, although he thought he was loving both the ideals simultaneously and equally, yet the fact was that with him one of them was subservient to the other. When a person is actually loving two or three ideals at the same time, it only means that his knowledge of himself is so poor that the practical requirements of none of these ideals is clear to him. The personality of such a person is divided and undeveloped. Such a person is on the cultural level of a child or a savage. Thus it is not possible for an individual to be a good Christian or a good Muslim and a good Nationalist or Democrat at the same time. The political ideal of an individual dominates his entire life. When a religion or philosophical creed is not the political ideal of an individual, it is really an idea which is sub-serving his political ideal and not determining any of his activities itself.

The Basis of Politics, Economics, Education and Law

5) An ideal always becomes the ideal of a number of men. Men loving the same ideal are attracted towards each other and form a group. The group becomes organized under a patriarch, a tribal chief, a king, a leader, a dictator or a president. Every organized group of men represents an ideal and every ideal comes to have an organized group of followers sooner or later. Love for the Ideal is transmitted to future generations and perpetuated in the group by direct inspiration derived from the environment which includes the influence of parents, elders, teachers and the society at large. It is in this way that an ideal group, whether the ideal on which it is based is right or wrong, continues to live for centuries. Modern ideal groups are known as states. All the activities of an ideal group or a state, like the activities of an individual, whether political, military, economic, social, ethical, legal, intellectual, educational or artistic are determined strictly by the moral law of its ideal. An organized group of individuals is like an organism in which the love of the ideal plays the role of the vital force and the leader and his government functions like the brain and its various centers of activity. The greater the love of the members of a group for their ideal, the greater is the internal cohesion, efficiency, strength or solidarity, of the group. 

The Evolution of ideals in the Individual

6) The urge for an ideal begins to operate in the life of the individual from the very beginning of his life and his ideals keep changing and evolving slowly in the direction of the Right ideal with the growth of his knowledge and experience. To the child, the most satisfactory objects are those that satisfy his instinctive desires like eating, possessing, self-asserting, playing, etc. His urge for an ideal, therefore, finds expression in the love of such objects. As the child grows in years, his parents impress him as splendid figures, on account of their superiority in all matters as well as on account of their proximity to him. Hence they become his ideal. He seeks their approbation and, in order to win it, is prepared to regulate his conduct and control his instinctive desires which once formed his ideal. Later on, he develops love and admiration for his teachers, and begins to look upon them as perfect models. Still later, his urge for an ideal begins to find an outlet in his love for national heroes, leader or men who have succeeded in winning the admiration of other. Soon he begins to feel that his love and admiration for such personalities depend upon their qualities of Beauty. Goodness, Truth and Power (e.g. kindness, generosity, sympathy, knowledge, courage, honesty, justice, etc.) and that what he really loves is these qualities and not their owners. His ideal, therefore, shifts from objects and persons to ideas reflecting and embodying these qualities, e.g. Christianity, Democracy, nationalism, Humanism, Socialism, Fascism, Communism, etc.

The sympathies of the individual expend with the evolution of his ideal somewhat in this order his own person, his family, his relatives, his neighbors and friends, his school, his city, the whole nation or the whole group of men loving his ideal. In the beginning an individual has many conflicting ideals existing side by side in his mind and dividing his practical life into several unintegrated compartments conflicting with each other. Slowly, as these ideals come into comparison with each other, the individual takes one of them to be the best and the worthiest of all. This integrates and unifies his personality and creates a system and an order in his practical life. The development of the individual's ideals takes palace from the concrete to the abstract, from the less permanent to the more permanent, from the less perfect to the more perfect, from the diverse to the single, from the sectional to the universal and from the less true, less moral and less beautiful to the more, true, more moral and more beautiful. This is indeed what their evolution in the direction of the Right Ideal ought to imply. But generally the evolution of a person's ideals stops at the ideal of the society of which he is a member. It is very rare that a person's ideal rises above the ideal of the society in which he is born. Such a person, unless he is able to convince other, is often suspected to be a crank, a rebel or a revolutionary, and is suppressed by the society accordingly.

The Evolution of ideals in the Race

7) Man's urge for an ideal has operated in the life of the race too from the very beginning. The ideals of mankind have evolve almost in the same sequence in which they evolve in the life of the individual so that the individual only repeats the history of the race on the psychological level just as he repeats it on the biological level. To the primitive man, nothing was more lovable and admirable than the satisfaction of his own instinctive desires such as feeding, self-asserting, possessing, sex, etc. The sympathies of every individual were confined to his own person except in so far as hi animal instincts forced him to extend them to others. Later on, he developed a regard for the head of the family and began to modify his instinctive desires to serve the larger interests of the family represented by the wishes of its chief. Subsequently, he learnt to sacrifice some of his family interests for the general good of the tribe which, represented by the tribal chief, became his ideal- common with other members of the tribe. The tribes were many and fought with one another till they discovered the truth that tribal warfare was cruel and suicidal and it was more satisfactory to their urge for Beauty and Goodness to combine under a king, who thereby came to have a piece of land to rule. But soon the tyranny of the king drew attention to the fact that no ideal could really satisfy their urge for Beauty and Goodness which neglected the welfare of the people in the country. This shifted the ideal from the king to the country and to the people in the country. It changed from the idea of the divine right of one person to the idea of the sanctity of the nation, or to Nationalism. The good of the nation required that it should rule itself. The idea, therefore, rose higher in the scale of Beauty and came to be expressed by such terms as Democracy, Liberty, Fraternity, Equality and Freedom which were, however, still used in a limited sense because they were applied to and meant to benefit the members of a limited group of people, a nation or a race living within definite geographical limits. After the First World War the ideals of human society took an important step forward. They developed into complete philosophies of life, e.g. Fascism and Communism, each of which has claimed to be a complete explanation of existence. As in the case of the individual, so in the case of the race, the ideals evolve from the concrete to the abstract, from the less permanent to the more permanent, from the less perfect to the more perfect, from the diverse to the single, from the sectional to the universal and from the less true, less moral and less beautiful to the more true, more moral and more beautiful. In other words, they too advance towards the Right Ideal.

The Role of Leaders

8) The realisation of an ideal's beauty is generally obtained by developing an intimate psychological contact with a leader or a man who is thoroughly inspired with the love of the ideal. Such a contact is developed very easily when a person has the chance to live in a social atmosphere which is strongly charged with the love of the ideal. This is how the ideal of one generation of men belonging to an ideal group becomes the ideal of its next generation. Psychological contact with the lover of an ideal is also the method by which the existing energy of love can be reinforced by a fresh influx of its energy. All ideals whether wrong or right have their leaders and their followers.

The Rise and Fall of a Culture Civilization

9) As the wrong ideal of an individual must break up sooner or later, so the wrong ideal of an organized group or a state too must break up sooner or later. it may live for centuries, but its ultimate obliteration is inevitable. The reason is that an ideal is not merely a mental concept. It translates itself every bit into the outward practical life of the society that loves it. It reflects itself in the actual conditions of the society as accurately as a mirror reflects the objects in front of it. This gives the society a chance of knowing its defects thoroughly. If it is wrong, it creates wrong social, national and international conditions which are disgusting to us in our urge for Beauty, Perfection, Goodness, Truth and Power, and make us aware of the defects of the ideal and force us to give it up. The society that loves a wrong ideal attributes to it a few qualities of Beauty and Goodness consciously and all the others unconsciously. The result is that it directs all its efforts to the practical outward expression of those qualities of which it is conscious and ignores all the rest. But the very fact that it ignores most of the qualities of Beauty and Goodness makes it impossible for it to successfully realise and express in outward practical life the qualities which it does not want to ignore. Its disregard for most of the requirements of Beauty and Goodness interferes with a restricts its efforts to satisfy even the few requirements of Beauty that it cares for.

On account of the very nature of a wrong ideal, things must go wrong more and more with the society that adopts it, till they bring about its final ruin, no matter what its lovers may say or do to set them right. The reason is that every wrong ideal demands the realisation of some qualities of Beauty without the support of its other qualities and no quality of Beauty can be realized without the support of all its other qualities. Beauty, which includes Goodness and Truth, is a single whole. It can neither be divided into parts nor realized in parts. But the process by which the disillusionment of a society based on a wrong ideal is reached is generally very long and extends over centuries. In the beginning of love the hopes of lovers are very high. Their love is fresh and ardent. Hence they serve their ideal wholeheartedly and put in every possible effort to actualize and objectify the beauty that they attribute to it. This evolves their love further. The result is that the ideal expands and grows in power and glory continuously till it achieves the highest possible splendor of which it is capable.

Nature allows full opportunities of growth to every ideal, wrong or right, and every ideal grows in all directions as much as it can on account of its nature or its qualities. "And all do We aid-- these as well as those-- out of the bounty of thy Lord, and the bounty of thy Lord is not limited" (xvii. 20) But gradually the hidden defects of the ideal begin to tell upon their love. Thy still cling to it, but their admiration for it begins to wane and their zeal for it begins to cool. Now the ideal ceases to expand in power and lives only on the power and glory that it had earned and amassed in the past. Day by day it becomes weaker and weaker and hence its lovers also begin to lose its love more and more. At this juncture, a crushing defeat from without or a successful revolution from within, throws it out of existence forever and a new ideal arises to take its place. This is how ideologies, cultures or civilizations, each of which develops around an ideal, appear, rise, reach the apex of their glory and then decline and disappear, and new ideals, cultures or civilizations take their place, repeating the same process in history, and this is how the process of history is carrying man every forward to the ideal of his nature, the Ultimate ideal of humanity. "See they not how many a generation We destroyed before them, whom We had established in the earth as We have not established you and We sent the clouds pouring abundant rain over them and We made the rivers flow beneath them. When We destroyed them for their sins and raised up after them another generation" (vi.6)


The War of ideals

10) Since an ideal is the idea of the highest beauty and splendour known to a group wants to actualise the full beauty and splendour of its ideal, it desires unlimited power and expansion for itself. But it can expand without limit only at the cost of all the other ideals. Hence every state is a potential enemy of all the other states and comes into conflict with all of them from the moment of its emergence. This conflict, which may be open or secret, violent or no-violent, war-like or peaceful, may take the form of a battlefield or a peace conference, a treaty or a goodwill mission, is a life- and –death struggle which continues until and ideal has wiped out all the other ideals or is wiped out itself. There may be warm friendships between some states for considerable periods of time for the realisation of common ends but such friendships last only as long as their ideological interests do not come into an actual clash with each other. A potential clash of ideological interests is, however, always there and becomes actual sooner or later in their history. Thus every wrong ideal breaks up sooner or later not only because it is being disrupted from within by the elements of its own contradiction, its internal defects, but also because it is being smashed from outside by other ideals. The realisation of the inner defects of its ideal on the part of an ideal group is hastened by its external defects and discomfitures.